Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[joachimqui]

I am really interested in this. I work beside a cyclotron, and that is used to produce radioactive isotopes for the treatment of cancers. So I’m wondering if fusion could be used as a better, cheaper source of these isotopes, in the future. It’s a fascinating thought, considering that the production facilities for these isotopes are relatively non abundant! It seems to me, if fusion could be used to produce much more radioactive material, then that could be used instead of the setup we have now, a cyclotron, for these isotopes. This would effectively work around the isotope shortage the world is currently experiencing (at least, the cancer treatment world).

Tasmodevil44 wrote: Here’s a crazy idea. Don’t know if it would work. instead of focus fusion, could it be modified to focus fission if boron was substituted for thorium? It would produce considerably more radioactive material, but still not as much as coventional reactors. In a dense, hot plasma is it possible for the hydrogen proton (or even alpha particles of helium) to be absorbed by a thorium nucleus? And would it cause it to undergo transmutation into something else like U-233 or U-235 and then fission?

It may even be possible to hybridize the dense focus reactor in such a way that you have both boron fuel and thorium fuel used simmultaneously. But it’s probably just another one of those longshot ideas not very likely to work-out.

But then again, the two reactions might even aid each other and enhance reactions. The heavy atom fission reactions might dump more energy into the plasma to aid the boron reactions. Conversely, the boron reactions might supply more energy to aid transmutation of thorium into something that’s more fissinable.

If the energetic fission products of a heavy atom like U-233 also exit the reaction site as a unidirectional beam…… just like alpha particles…… then the conversion of thorium to electric power might also be far more efficient than a conventional fission reactor. The heavy fission products could also be tapped by direct induction the same way. This would equate into far less radioactive material produced for the same amount of electricity generated. But I admit this is just an idea that may not work.