It looks like they are actually talking about specific energy, and through a series of blunders mislabeled it as specific power: "The specific power of the pro

It looks like they are actually talking about specific energy, and through a series of blunders mislabeled it as specific power: "The specific power of the proton-triggered boron fuel would be so great that a mere mole of it (11 grams) would yield roughly 300 megawatts of power. (According to Chapman, using this aneutronic fusion technique with helium-3 isotopes would yield 493 MW per mole. But boron is a more attractive fuel source because it is abundant on Earth and helium-3 is scarce.)" This looks like nonsense. I think it was supposed to be megawatt-hour -- the quote is essentially correct, after you r/megawatt/megawatt-hour/, r/MW/MWh/, and r/specific power/specific energy/. No idea why they are using this unit outside its native context (electricity generation). ------------------------- I don't know about specific power, but the (theoretical) specific impulse is very good. The exhaust speed of the fusion alphas is sqrt(2 * 2.9 MeV / 3.7 GeV/c^2) = 1.2e7 m/s (or 0.04 c). Since these alphas constitute all the mass of the fuel/propellant (which are the same in this scheme), this is also the effective exhaust velocity. Or a specific impulse of 1.2e8 seconds. This is one of the best specific impulses conceived of, and (I think) is about the theoretical limit for a fusion-powered rocket carrying its own reaction mass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion#Table_of_methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion#Table_of_... For some reason I don't see it represented on this (very big) wiki page. They do have the "fission fragment rocket", which is conceptually the same thing applied to fission reaction products.