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KeithPickering wrote:
It’s not easy to fuse nuclei. First, because normal atoms are protected by electron shells, and in order to get at the nucleus, you need to strip away the electrons. When you do that, for any gas light enough to fuse, you have a plasma by definition. Even your protons are a plasma, as they are simply ionized hydrogen gas, i.e., another plasma.

Yes, that I know. 😉

KeithPickering wrote:
So, once you’ve got your plasma — i.e., your bare nuclei — then with no electrons in the way, they can fuse, right?

Wrong.

Nuclei are all positively charged, which means the repel each other by electrical force — and the closer they get, the stronger the repulsion. You need to get those nuclei close enough so that the strong nuclear force overcomes the electrical force, which means they need to get very, very close indeed. And generally the way to do that is to get them very hot, which is to say, get them moving very fast. If their kinetic energy is great enough, occasionally some nuclei will run into other nuclei fast enough to overcome the electrical repulsion, and they fuse.

Well, my reasoning in this case is that the targets would be still – well relatively speaking, they’re not at 0K – and the proton would carry all the kinetic energy required to overcome the strong nuclear force.

KeithPickering wrote:

The crystalline boron shaft (or any shaft made of neutral materials) won’t work, because those positively charged protons will be attracted to the electrons in the shaft material and won’t go down the middle. The proton will simply collide with the wall, pick up an electron, and revert to normal hydrogen again. If the plan is to collide protons together, magnetic confinement is the way to go, like a linear accelerator. And yes, some of them will fuse, but almost certainly not enough to reach break-even.

So the crystal would just get “doped” with hydrogen for the vast majority of the proton shots, with a minuscule number of hits, just as Rutherford got a century ago…
Can anyone make the actual calculation, even if very rough?

It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you. On consideration, I realized that this scattering backward must be the result of a single collision, and when I made calculations I saw that it was impossible to get anything of that order of magnitude unless you took a system in which the greater part of the mass of the atom was concentrated in a minute nucleus. It was then that I had the idea of an atom with a minute massive center, carrying a charge.[2]
—Ernest Rutherford

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I am aware of the “cold fusion” claims. Very interesting stuff, as much as it is controversial.

My proposal was to have one part hot fuel (high speed protons) and one part cold fuel (solid crystalline boron).
If fusion yield is an issue, maybe the protons can be put in a circular path (like a circular accelerator), going round and round until it hits something (hopefully boron!).
Would the protons just scatter in the crystal lattice, eventually running out of the necessary energy for fusion?

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