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> Inertial confinement fusion could generate power right now if we had amazingly efficient lasers. Here's a funny thing: inertial confinement could be used for
by credit_guy 2y ago
> Inertial confinement fusion could generate power right now if we had amazingly efficient lasers.
Here's a funny thing: inertial confinement could be used for fission too. With inertial confinement you essentially create a mini-thermonuclear bomb. A mini-fission bomb would work too, and I think the barrier to achieve that would be much lower.
One could say this is not a big deal. It actually is. Compressing a quantity of a few grams of plutonium to become critical can't be done with conventional explosives, but it can be done via inertial confinement. And that compression could be so high that the fission could be very nearly complete. In contrast, the current state of technology is that fusion by inertial confinement barely achieves ignition, but only a tiny fraction of the fusion fuel (the deuterium-tritium mix) actually burns.
- api 2y agoWait... so if you stuff a few grams of enriched Plutonium into a Z-pinch device you can make it go boom? That is interesting. A near-complete fission burn would be clean. The problem is that you need conventional reactors to get Plutonium, and extracting it and handling it is difficult and expensive. Will it work with enriched Uranium?
- credit_guy 2y agoEnriched uranium would work too. But enriched uranium is roughly speaking the ideal fuel for fission reactors, because it has a large ratio of delayed neutrons vs prompt neutrons. Plutonium has a much lower ratio (about one third of U-235), so plutonium is inherently harder to control. That's why plutonium is not used directly as fuel, but it's used in a mix with uranium (the so-called MOX = mixed oxide fuels). In a design based on mini-fission bombs, you don't care about control, because control is about not letting the reactivity of the core go too high, while here you want it to be as high as possible.