I was always the kid in the back of the physics class that raised his hand and asked, “Why not – what ever?”
The DOE funded hot fusion projects, at enormous expense, on gigantic international projects attempting to generate energy from fusion. Fusion potentially yields more bang for the buck, but so far it has been the other way around. Giant lasers and plasma containers yield little or no energy. (Tokamak ITER above)
The basic table top hot fusion is a well known reaction, Deuterium + Helium-3 yields normal Helium-4 plus a proton.
There is another reaction that seems to be ignored, wherein a proton striking Boron with enough force triggers a cascade to Carbon then further to Helium plus beau coup MeV.
So why not combine the two so that the spar proton from the first reaction drives the second. Feed the reaction Carbon instead of Boron and you have the helium to, once again, drive the first. Just add heavy water and Carbon. Electricity and Helium come out the other end.
So why not combine the two so that the spar proton from the first reaction drives the second. Feed the reaction Carbon instead of Boron and you have the helium to, once again, drive the first. Just add heavy water and Carbon. Electricity and Helium come out the other end.
The Artemis Project advocates harvesting and utilizing Helium from the Moon, where it is abundant in surface dust; they would utilize the first reaction above.
Robert Bussard proposed the second reaction – at least the Boron part -- before he died. The DOE squelched Bussard’s research – previously funded by the Navy – possibly for political reasons because it threatened the funding of the bigger conventional fusion projects and because other physicists did not think it could work.
The trick for either and certainly for the combination would be to get the concentration of protons hot enough or compressed enough to reach figuratively speaking a critical mass. Bussard’s theory was compression rather than heat, which I guess is about the same thing. His theory was that compression is like the reaction on the Sun, triggered and sustained by the enormous pressure from gravity in the center of the Sun. Bussard advocated mimicking that concentration with a confluent magnetic field that would create a very high negative charge focused on a small point thus accelerating protons to that point sufficient to start the ball rolling.
The laboratory counter top fusion experiment using a radio crystal seems to be based on the same principal.
Bussard seems plausible to me, made the more so by his nay sayers. If Carbon could become a substrate to an fusion energy project we could solve two problems at the same time.
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