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Confused to see so much talk of Fleischmann and Pons. The technique described in the linked article appears to be essentially neutron-catalyzed fusion. This is
by scythe 6y ago
Confused to see so much talk of Fleischmann and Pons. The technique described in the linked article appears to be essentially neutron-catalyzed fusion. This is not too different conceptually from muon-catalyzed fusion, except instead of muons lowering the reaction energy barrier, neutrons provide the activation energy. The cold fusion claims from the '80s used an electrical process, which is not believable for quantum reasons (electron density can't get high enough to pull protons together due to Pauli exclusion).
As to whether it works, who knows? It may have been conclusively disproven five years ago for all I know. Or maybe it works. But if they're generating neutrons through X-ray bremsstrahlung, that's horribly inefficient and unlikely to ever come close to net power.
- corty 6y agoHow the hell would you generate neutrons from X-rays? The energy is nowhere close to neutron-antineutron pair production. Higher energy gamma rays can do that, but you need a really big accellerator to produce them. Splitting nuclei by gamma rays is a little easier, but not much. Still far away from the usual bremsstrahlung energy range, except if you have one of the few accellerators that can produce those high-energy electrons for you. Oh, and if you are really going for bremsstrahlung, prepare for lots and lots of noise from secondary reactions and lower-energy bremsstrahlung to filter out. If you want synchrotronstrahlung, good luck building a 1000km one.
- scythe 6y agoWell, I had internalized that you get neutron contamination when you treat with accelerating voltages of 10 MV or higher, and I didn't bother to look it up. It's generated in the X-ray target by the reaction of the 10 MeV electron with a tungsten nucleus: https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/33/050/33050453.pdf https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/... So it's more accurate to say that megavoltage X-ray beams contain neutrons by default. I might need to know this on the ABR... :p
- 100ideas 6y agoThanks for mentioning muon-catalyzed fusion, it’s an interesting phenomena that should come up more often in these discussions.