Man, forget the problems with the Coulomb barrier, I want to know how they expect 3 to 5 protons to magically fuse into the nucleus at the same time…
Correct me if I’m wrong, but basically every proposed fusion reaction has 2 reactants. Anything else doesn’t make sense unless we’re talking about a basic decay. Well, it makes sense, based on physical principles, but it’s the most obviously useless reaction possible b/c the probability of it happening will be laughably small.
Yes there have been particle accelerator experiments for proton reaction for many materials. It is interesting for nucleoli-synthesis theory’s even if not for fusion.
Right, it’s not that there’s anything crazy about proton + nucleus reactions, quite the contrary. The activation energy for the reaction is very very well established, the only problem is engineering a device that produces that activation energy efficiently enough to gain net energy, which comes down to a problem of engineering scaling. For the pB reaction, the highest reaction rate is at 600 keV, so it’s true that:
energy in: 600 keV
energy out: 8.7 MeV
And for this reaction, it proceeds at a sufficiently fast rate. The idea of the plasmoid in FF is that almost all of the fuel within the microscopic pinch gets used up. Everybody knows that the reaction would work for energy production is sufficient compression could be accomplished.
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