This is a revival of an earlier thread. From: Russ George * What about a secondary muon target re-emitter… what would the ideal target and emission be?
According to the literature, muons are absorbed in rough linear proportion to the atomic number of the target…. Since Uranium (92) would be among the best targets, and since the secondary reactions would also be useful (and would likely emit secondary muons) there could be the makings of a new type of reactor… Fast forward a few days. That suggestion about muon-boosted fission may not be pure fancy, after all. As fate would have it, an old paper on “Prompt Muon-Induced Fission” appeared magically in my browser… prolly courtesy of the Illuminati. Note: this is very different from muon catalyzed fusion. It turns out that on absorption in actinides - muonic excitation energy is transferred to the nucleus. In U, the muon transitions result in excitation of the nuclear giant dipole and giant quadrupole resonances which act as doorway states for fission. Because the muon lifetime is long compared to the timescale of prompt fission, there could be an opportunity for a strange hybrid reactor which could be small and subcritical. A small reactor which is surrounded by many Holmlid type laser irradiation cells to produce muons which are directed into the reactor for prompt fission - would be the idea. The reactor could be designed to use natural U or thorium or a mix and reach criticality when fed a certain level of muons. Neutrons could be rendered secondary or even superfluous. Holmlid is claiming to see an impressive number of muons from a small laser – something like 10^9/sec. Fission also produces muons, so instead of a chain reaction of neutrons, as in typical fission reactors - we could be talking about a chain reaction of muons (with help from neutrons). It would be interesting to know the conversion rate from muons to prompt fission. I suspect that it is low … or someone would have thought of this before now.
