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if you can come up with a way to produce the nanowire substrate at scale, I didn't see anything saying it wouldn't be good for energy production - did I miss th
by 00N8 9y ago
if you can come up with a way to produce the nanowire substrate at scale, I didn't see anything saying it wouldn't be good for energy production - did I miss that section?
- gpm 9y agoFor 1J of energy it's producing ~ 10^6 neutrons each with ~ 10^-13 joules of energy. I'm not quite sure what fraction of the energy is released as high energy neutrons (it should also release high energy protons and gamma rays sometimes) but I think it's very high, so we are looking at something in the vicinity of a 1 millionth the energy input - output. There do seem to be a few substantial improvements left on the table per the paper (mixing tritium in, scaling up a bit, etc) but getting to break even via this technique in the near future seems unlikely. And even after that you have to capture the energy.
- anfilt 9y agoAfter briefly skimming the paper I don't think this method was even devised for energy production. It mainly just a neutron source.