
Fusion power is attracting private-sector interest - sien
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/05/04/fusion-power-is-attracting-private-sector-interest
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ncmncm
Fusion research has always been handicapped by restricting funding to
processes that yield only hot neutrons. The reason is simple: fusion research
is really a jobs program for high-neutron-flux physicists, to provide a pool
to draw upon for weapons programs. There was, and is, no expectation ever to
generate power with it. Indeed, any such reactor would destroy itself, in
short order, with its own neutron flux.

The hydrogen-boron approach mentioned doesn't produce appreciable neutron
flux, so has never had anything like the funding. Besides positive ions, it
would produce lots of hard x-rays. Both can be made to yield electric power
directly, without a detour through heat. It might even work.

The objection that (as it's called) pB fusion requires insanely high
temperatures is a shuck any physicist sees through. What it takes to fuse
nuclei is not heat at all, but collision speed. The LHC routinely produces
beams with "temperatures" that, by the same criteria, exceed 10 million
billion degrees. Bulk heat is just the crudest way to get fast particles.

The remaining difficulties are to get enough particles in one place colliding
to produce enough collisions to be worth the bother, and to keep them from
leaking so much energy before colliding that not enough is left to make them
fuse. Things going very, very fast are hard to keep in one place without
slowing them down.

The pB people have very hard problems to solve, but their project is not
doomed from the get-go by depending on producing neutrons that would destroy
their very expensive gadget.

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airstrike
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