Axil Axil wrote:
The text covered by the picture as follows:
,,, metallic hydrogen produces reactions at a distance. This was
shown in the exploding wire experiments where uranium was fissioned in
a separate chamber isolated from the exploding wire by a glass wall.
I missed the citation for this? However, it does sound very much like
what I am suggesting but using thorium instead of uranium as the target
of muon production.
The beauty of muon-induced fusion is that you do not need to be
concerned about critical mass and hunreds of tons of reactant, lots of
moderators and an optimal neutron economy etc - all of which require a
large form factor
In fact, with muon induced fission, the thorium fuel can actually be
mixed with boron to immediately convert free neutrons into energy before
thorium can absorb them. We want to avoid any proliferation risk.
Smaller would be better.
Of course, LENR is preferable since it promises small devices with no
radioactivity at all, but that may not materialize as quickly as a
larger form factor, which is intermediate between grid power and home
power. The requirement for gamma shielding is still there .... with any
kind of fission or hot fusion, but one can imagine many applications for
medium-sized power plants and large vehicles which can accommodate
adequate shielding - locomotives, earth movers and boats. This could
happen years or decades sooner with thorium fission than LENR can be
perfected and introduced.
Let's face it - there is no operational LENR today, nothing even close
thanks to Rossigate -- and yet we had operational thorium reactors in
1965 (the MSRE at Oak Ridge) but that design was doomed from the start
(by needing enough fissile inventory to make a bomb, which is the main
thing that muon-induced fission avoids).
I think there is a place for this technology - assuming of course that
Holmlid is correct.
