Reply To: Investment risk

[JimmyT]

If you want to stick with aneutronic fusion (a good idea in my opinion) the options are pretty well summarized in this Wiki article: http://en.wiki.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion

If you look at just at the amounts of energy released you would think that Lithium 6 or 7 would be the preferred fuel.

Lithium 6 + Deuterium yields 22.4 Mev

Lithium 7 + Proton yields 17.2 Mev

Boron 11 + Proton yields 8.7 Mev

But Lithium has a very low cross sections, and thus would require higher confinement time to get comparative yields to boron.

Still, before the dust settles, maybe it would be interesting to try.

The Wiki article contains a link to The Focus Fusion Society BTW.

I think these alternate fuels may have been discussed in prior posts a couple of years ago.

It’s also worth noting that Eric fudges his calculations:

He notes increased linear compression of a factor of 4 which yields increased density of a factor of 20. Four cubed is 32 (64)
not 20. He also claims that doubling the current will increase yield by a factor of 20. But this process has reliably scaled to the 5th power. Two to the fifth power is 32 Not 20.

Overall this is good news, as his projections thus have a relatively large “fudge factor” which can be used to decrease the input current, increasing the net output. Or perhaps decreasing the pulse frequency, thereby making heat removal a bit easier to deal with. Or some combination of the two.