Reply To: General thought on old coal mines.

[jamesr]

Lerner wrote: Well, we, the experimental team don’t. We need more data. We need to either see clear evidence of neutrons from D reacting with tritium produced in the plasmoid or we need images to measure the radius of the plasmoid. We don’t have either yet, but we are working on it. Stay tuned!

So given 50% of the D-D reations produce a 2.45MeV neutron and the other 50% produce a triton which can then go on to produce a 14.1MeV neutron. Can you use the flight time data from both reactions to help recover the temperature of the plasmoid more accurately than with just the one peak.

Given D-T’s much higher cross section, would any confined tritium undergo enough scattering collisions to completely thermalise before undergoing fusion, or would a significant proportion fuse after only a few interactions and so the spread of the 14.1MeV peak would be too broad any not representative of the temperature.

If you assume tritium not only has time to thermalise, but also that any that does and remains confined will have a very high probability of fusing, can you use the ratio of D-D neutrons to D-T neutrons to gain some insight into the proportion of tritons (that would be produced with 1.01MeV) remained confined in the plasmoid. Could you then extrapolate the theory forward to get an estimate of how well confined the He produced in the pB11 reaction will be, and so how well the energy is recycled into the plasmoid to achieve ignition?