10 ms·

How far can this premise be pushed? And will I one day be able to get it in a surface mountable package?

• pfdietz 7y ago
  Unfortunately, there is a lower limit set by the need to absorb neutrons. The blanket has to be roughly 1 meter thick. One might be able to evade that if one could have a large number of tiny, or at least thin, reactors sharing a common blanket, much as the fuel rods of fission reactor share a common moderator. However, it's still likely to be inferior to a fission reactor in power density, as these tiny reactors would irradiate each other. Beyond that, there's the need to confine the plasma to these very small reactors. Even in complete absence of plasma instability and turbulence, ions will scatter off each other and diffuse out and be lost. This classic diffusion takes time proportional to the square of the minimum reactor dimension / ion gyroradius.