Re: Fusion chain reaction?


"J. J. Lodder" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1i4fjql.kjluji1gjo4yxN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Joseph Warner <Joseph.D.Warner@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Uncle Al" <UncleAl0@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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eastmond@xxxxxxxxx wrote:


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

As I remember that doesn't work on paper. The muon's half-life is too
short.

It's long enough for producing many muon-catalyzed fusion events.
The problem is producing muons cheaply enough.
When some clever soul invents a way to produce muons
for a few hundred MeV apiece the proces
will become quite practical.

I may be wrong and my information was based on my knowledge from 1977 when I
did a literature search on "exotic" atoms where a muon would replace an
electron in a D-T or D-D molecule that would draw the two nuclei closer
together so that the wavefunctions of the nuclei would overlap and cause
fusion. I knew at that time "hot" muons could induce the fusion because the
of time dilation. But I don't think thermallized muons have a lifetime long
even to cause many fusion events. If there has been more data since 1975 on
the topic, it would be interesting to see what it is and how it impacted the
prior conclusions.



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