Re: Fusion chain reaction?

eastmond@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Hi,

I was wondering what would happen if a roughly 10 MeV proton or
neutron was fired into a large dense target consisting of a mixture of
deuterium and tritium - let's say several cubic metres of gas held at
high pressure but low temperature so that it is almost at the density
of liquid water. I imagine that the target is large and dense enough
so that the projectile particle is guaranteed to scatter off a
deuterium or tritium atom rather than pass straight through the
target.

Would the high energy particle transfer enough kinetic energy to a
number of deuterium or tritium atoms so that they scatter with a high
kinetic energy and fuse with other deuterium/tritium atoms and thus
produce tritium, helium-3, helium-4 and further protons and neutrons
with varying kinetic energies?

Could one end up with a self-sustaining chain reaction occurring at a
relatively low temperature?

This would be different from the standard fusion schemes in which the
whole of the fuel is heated up to a temperature high enough to produce
fusion reactions.

Light element fusion requires the product of density, time, and
temperature exceed a critical value. Fusion spontaneously
disassembles without propagation (second order reaction) unless
actively confined - implosion, gravitation, external EM fields,
possibly inertia. Deuterium is nobody's idea of inertial confinement
- including deuterated polyethylene. You only have a few shakes (tens
of nanoseconds) to get the job done before the mass thermally expands,
reaction rate dropping as the inverse square of concentration.

You could dump in muons. That works on paper and nowhere else.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2

.

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