Reply To: Peak Oil from Truth Out

[jamesr]

imflux wrote:

Hmm, What I am saying is, create fission in the plasmid, which would then ignite fusion?

My point what that you would never get a plasmoid form in the first place. If you had a dpf with some heavy, elements in the gas (fissile or not), and then discharged the capacitors through it. The gas would ionise to form a plasma at a few thousand degrees, the plasma would sweep down the electrodes as per normal. But by the end rather than having concentrated lots of energy in the plasma & magnetic field to drive the pinch & compression, all the energy would have already been radiated away as bremsstrahlung x-rays. The plasma would just die out with nothing much happening once the capacitors had discharged.

Even if this didn’t happen the density of a good plasmoid with just deuterium only gets upto the number density (or avg atomic spacing) of that of a normal liquid. To get a volume the size of the plasmoid to go critical with uranium or plutonium would need densities orders of magnitude higher.