3 ms·
If you want to sustain a fusion reaction for generating power through heat, you're not going to do it at room temperature, and there're not many materials that
by Retra 8y ago
If you want to sustain a fusion reaction for generating power through heat, you're not going to do it at room temperature, and there're not many materials that will remain solid at fusion temperatures.
- abecedarius 8y agoI said "shoot pellets at each other at a sizable fraction of c". The point is to hold together before the splat, so that by high density enough nuclei actually hit each other. This is a bang-bang kind of thing, not a continuous reaction.
- Retra 8y agoWe don't have any trouble creating fusion explosions. The whole trouble of fusion is sustaining a reaction. Fusion bombs already exist, and what you're describing isn't that different from an Ulam-Teller device.
- abecedarius 8y agoExisting fusion bombs need a fission bomb for ignition. This lower-bounds both the bang and the unpleasant byproducts. A smaller bang can be used much more practically. For example, 20th-century cars were also powered by explosions. Somehow they outcompeted the previous dominant technology of continuous reactors, steam engines. To dismiss my half-assed idea by pointing to another, I'd bring up something more comparable, like inertial-confinement fusion.