Reply To: Another p11B Fusion Concept: Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion

[Tasmodevil44]

Jolly Roger :

I have often asked the same question about carbon 12. So has belbear……and he got an explanation by Lerner already that the hydrogen – boron 11 reaction produces a type of very shortlived carbon 12 that is highly excited with extra energy and therefore highly unstable……and then fissions into three highly energetic alphas.

However, I have already brought up the suggestion in other posts already that there may be some other as yet undiscovered way to make ordinary common garden variety carbon 12 go unstable and break apart. You would certainly get many millions of times more energy out of a lump of coal this way than with conventional burning at a coal – fired generating plant.

One of my suggestions that I’ve already made somewhere in one of the other posts is that perhaps you could bombard a carbon nucleus with some kind of exotic subatomic particle that would act as a catalyst for the nuclear reaction. I have also suggested the possibility of perhaps anti – matter assisted fusion. What if an a particle such as an anti – proton reacted with the ordinary matter of the carbon atom ? Some of the nucleus would be annhiliated as pure energy. The remainder might be excited and pumped full of enough energy to break apart into energetic fragments.

The only problem with my highly speculative idea is that nobody has yet figured out how to mass produce sufficient quantities of exotic particles such as anti – matter for experimentation. But anti – matter assisted fission to break apart the C 12 nucleus is one possibility.

But I’m not too sure about injecting C 12 into the FF reactor. When it comes to X – ray emission cooling of the plasma, how much a particular atom emits is the square of the number of protons. So with boron it’s only 5 X 5 = 25 times, or the x – ray cooling equivalent of only 25 hydrogen atoms consisting of a single proton. But with carbon, you would have atomic number 6 X 6 = 36 times more X – ray emission losses than a hydrogen atom from the plasma you’re trying to heat.

That’s another reason I gave – up the other preposterous idea I had of trying to have a hybrid fission / fusion reactor like as in an H – Bomb. It works great for a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb, where a plutonium bomb supplies the energy to initiate fusion, but the physics is totally incompatible with focus fusion. Not only is it virtually impossible to get thorium or plutonium or whatever else that is employed to undergo fission in the FF reactor…… as a way to further heat the plasma……the contamination of such high atomic numbers in the plasma would more than likely sap it of energy……rather than supply more of it. Nice open – minded thinking outside the box, but not very easy or probable.