Absolutely! With the transition to fusion, no one will need uranium at all, which will make the production of atomic weapons more and more difficult.

You raise a good point too, that during the transition to fusion, there would have to be substantial aid from the industrialized countries to developing countries, including the oil producers, to aid the transition. One step could be writing off the international debt. Much of it will be totally unpayable if oil prices drop anyway. Another big source of money could be stopping the production of arms, a huge portion of which flows to the Middle East in one form or another.

The money from arms production, international debt and high oil prices has overwhelmingly benefited an extremly small number of hugely rich people, with only the dregs flowing to the people of oil-rich countries. With sufficient political will, the burden of undoing the petroleum-arms-debt economy could be borne exclusively by those same few ultra-rich.

Hi Gang:

I just sent an email to the United Nations Institute on Disarmament Research – http://www.unidir.org/ – asking them to look into fusion alternatives and directing them to this site. Looking forward to their response!

What is a proliferation risk really ?
In your above scenario, the bad guy needs to get his hands on natural uranium or yellowcake in the first place. This is probably not too difficult given the ongoing uranium mining boom.
Weapons grade material (Highly Enriched Uranium HEU and synthetic Plutonium Pu239) are still state secrets and the books are kept down to the last gram.
Our bad guy could get fast neutrons in a number of ways from other hitech restricted areas, not just from a DPF. Fast neutronics are still a highly sophisticated science requiring huge machinery and megabuck investment.
To make weapons grade materials, he stills needs all the centrifuges.

Getting Deuterium in purified gas form for injection into the DPF might be achievable for our bad guy.
Transforming a pB11 DPF device into a D-D reactor might also be achievable. But how do you collect your neutrons bursting out of your vacuum ?
He risks killing himself handling neutrons. Even suicide bombers would hesitate to get killed before the deed.

All things considered, DPF devices does not add to the present proliferation risk.

Transmute wrote: Ok here is a idea for a weapon system: what if there was a large drone plane fitted with unshielded D-T fusion generator, they fly it over enemy territory like a crop duster and irradiate everyone to death, like a neutron bomb only no blast, better precision and delightfully evil.

Apparently, a Focus Fusion reactor would have to be highly modified to run on D-T. Even then, the neutron density would not be high enough to be an effective weapon. The aircraft would have to patrol a small area for a long time, which would be suspicious. Even if the reactor were clandestinely left on a rooftop, it would soon be detected and destroyed.

An unshielded p-B11 reactor X-ray source may be a concern, however. I would think that it would be easy to remove the shielding from a standard FF reactor. But Time-Distance-Shielding applies to X-rays (and neutrons, for that matter). For maximum radiation damage, exposure time must be maximized and distance from the source and shielding must be minimized. The X-rays would not be immediately lethal, and the aircraft would have to be flown low and slow to deliver a dangerous dose. An outdoor sports event would be a likely target, but intended victims could scatter (distance) and seek shelter (shielding) very quickly (time).

Or how about a fusion bomb, a fusion generator is used to try to start a chain fusion reaction,

According to info on the FF site, FF cannot start a runaway chain reaction, which a bomb requires.

There are easier ways than FF to cause mass destruction. There are a few Soviet nuclear weapons that are unaccounted for. We should be worried about those.

AndyL wrote: Hi Everyone

From finding this site over a year ago, it struck me what an elegant and exciting approach Focus Fusion was to the fusion problem. If the set of experiments underway in Chile are successful in three years time, we can all look back on that day and say “that was the day the world changed” in much the same way as for other great historical events!
However, it is planned to use deuterium as the fuel gas in one phase of these experiments, and this caused me to wonder – is there any possibility that Mr. Weapons Proliferator could use a Focus Fusion device with deuterium as a fast neutron source with which to breed, over a period of time, a quantity of fissile material from fertile isotopes of uranium or thorium?

So far, all the “weapons proliferators” have been Nations or agents of nations. Notice, if you will, that none of these proliferators needed a fusion reactor of any kind to achieve said proliferation. The possibility of this device, or any other device, contributing to “proliferation” is is well below negligible.

By the way, I don’t know how many people have noticed yet, but the NPT is basically dead. Kim Jong-il and the Iranians are demonstrating beyond all shadow of doubt that the treaty is completely unenforceable so long as the rest of the world leadership is as spinelesss as it is now.

I think I may have stated this in another thread: the neutron flux could be used to destroy nuclear waste (as opposed to shoving it in a mountain and hoping it stays there for a million years) so a DPF reactor fusing D+D or D+T could be used to clean up the waste of the nuclear age while producing energy (the induced fission of the waste acts as an energy multiplier) as well as the waste/fuel could be reprocessed to extract plutonium, although the plutonium produced from this process would consist of unwanted isotopes that would make it less then ideal for making bombs it could go backing into fueling existing nuclear reactors (less need for new power plants, reactor powered on what was waste and with their waste recycled don’t make new waste (say that ten times fast))

I’m not talking about the alpha beam, I’m talking about the very high energy neutrons produced by T+D fusion (or the moderately high energy neutrons produced in D+D fusion) the “alpha beam” or beam of non-neutron (charged) nuclei produced by the DPF would in a Fusion Driven Sub-critical Reactor (as opposed to an ADSR) would best be spent hitting a splatation target making more neutrons. Destroy nuclear waste in such a manner would produce huge amounts of heat, in an economy where cheap B11+P DPF reactor have not yet taken over adding steam turbines to the nuclear waste destroyer would add profit to a previously unprofitable task.

look up subcritical reactors.