[belbear]

Tasmodevil44 wrote:
I also mentioned in my post that the heavy fission products (which are positively charged nuclei) may come streaming out in a unidirectional beam just like the alpha particles……and undergo direct inductive conversion to electricity the same way……making it far more efficient than conventional fission reactors (and less waste for the same amount of energy). Most of the energy of heavy atom fission comes from the positively charged heavy fission byproducts……not from the neutrons. Upon fission, they repel away from each other with incredible force. And because they are massive, they equate into considerable energy if they too can be converted by direct induction. Did you read this part? You must not have completely read it all.

I may have missed something but I am sure about one thing: If you shoot protons into Thorium, no fission at all occurs. Even if you do it the conventional way by shooting neutrons into Thorium, no fission occurs because thorium is not a fissionable nucleus. It will become an instable nucleus which eventually transmutes itself into fissionable uranium but this decay takes time, hours at least, far beyond the picoseconds you have inside a DPF plasmoid.

What shoots out of the beam of your hypothetical thorium-burning DPF will be protactinium nuclei (element 91), and the fusion reaction does not yield energy, it costs energy and will cool your plasma instead of heating it.

And after all, there is no need to “burn” thorium. Unlike plutonium, it is not a dangerous product we need to get rid of and the best thing you can do is to leave it where it belongs: In the earth as a natural ore.

As been said before: A neutronic DPF can be used as a source of energetic neutrons to transmute the huge piles of nuclear waste we are sitting on into much shorter living elements, and that without generating new nuclear waste, as conventional high-flux reactors do.

So focus fusion cannot only generate clean and cheap energy, it can also help us to get rid of the heritage from the “age of nuclear madness”

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