Reply To: NIMBY FUD

[jamesr]

I don’t mean to put a complete dampener on your plans, I just wanted to highlight the folly of your concept.

It really doesn’t matter where they were ionized. Once the ions have been oscillating back & forth in the well millions of times, scattering off all the others & mixing their energies & velocities, their origin is meaningless. Plasmas need to be understood by their statistical distributions and how they vary in space.

The potential is a macroscopic scalar quantity found by solving Poisson’s equation (ie integrating the charge density over the entire volume, with appropriate boundary conditions, eg the walls of the chamber are set to 0). It is a function of position, not of any particular particle.
The gradient of the potential at each point is then the local electric field.

In a plasma, by definition, macroscopic properties like this should only be used on scales larger than the Debye length: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debye_length

Below the Debye length the closest few dozen ions & electrons have to be accounted for individually rather than just considering the bulk, statistical properties like temperature. But this is still on the scale of nanometres to micrometers.

Fusion happens on a much smaller scale still. As I said before, as two ions become close enough to fuse, they will be essentially be at the same point in space. So they will be at the same potential. The only significant influence on one ion is the other ion.