Reply To: X-ray cooling?

[jamesr]

dash wrote: I just had an idea in the shower, maybe this could be a workable approach?

Take a target of fuel and cool it to very low temperature so its thermal velocity is low. Keep it cold.

Then direct a stream of fuel ions of precise velocity at the target in a vacuum. Some will fuse, releasing heat and X rays.

The heat is waste, it heats up your target and must be eliminated. However the X-ray is your energy you capture, using Eric’s metal foil concentric spheres approach to get an electric current directly. This powers the cooling and ion gun and the pumps needed to recycle the gas that doesn’t fuse.

The whole thing is very stable and completely controllable. Nothing to wear out.

-Dave

Why bother cooling it? it’s not as if you need the collision speed to be an exact value so the sum of beam plus target adds up to a specific number. You want everything as hot as possible so the chance of the collision velocity of two fuel nuclei will be high enough to overcome the coulomb repulsion. If the collision is head on then each only needs to be going half the speed.

The energy required to accelerate ions in a beam will always be many orders of magnitude more than you can get out by having that ion release energy by undergoing fusion.

Accelerator experiments under carefully controlled conditions, like you describe, are useful to determine the precise collision cross sections (reaction probabilities), but useless as a way of getting energy out.