Dear Sir, If you replace the Tokamak hot fusion part of your concept reactor with a muon catalyzed fusion reactor, the whole becomes far more compact and cooler. It takes about 1 GeV on average to create a negative muon. Each such muon can catalyze about 100 D-T reactions, producing 100 14 MeV neutrons, each of which in turn can produce at least one 200 MeV fission reaction (and some neutrons may have enough energy left over to bring about further fission reactions, after inelastic scattering). That means you already have at least 20 GeV of energy out compared to 1 GeV input. In practice careful design can result in more than 100 fusion reactions per muon, and the fission reactions will also produce some fast neutrons which will also increase the output. IOW a 20 fold energy increase is conservative. Even taking into account a 33% conversion efficiency from heat to electricity, there is still at least a 6 fold gain (more if the waste heat can be put to productive use).
The reactor can be cylindrical as in your design, with the D-T mix at the core, and the muons injected down the axis of the cylinder. This completely avoids all the problems of plasma containment, which is why it so much more compact. Not only would such a reactor burn "sludge", it will also burn plutonium (left over from weapons), natural un-enriched uranium, depleted uranium, or even thorium (without conversion to U233). Since it is based on fast neutrons, it is better to use the actual metals rather than the oxides, as the oxygen would just act as an unwanted moderator. The core should be long and thin. The length ensures that all the muons are captured, and the small radius ensures that the neutrons are not appreciably slowed down by the D or T before leaving the core. Such a reactor would extend current Uranium based energy reserves by a factor of several hundred (taking the thorium into account). BTW, somewhere in the blanket you will need to add some Li to create more T for the fusion reactor. Potential problem:- I'm not sure how large the accelerator would need to be to create the muons, however I would suggest a free electron laser combined with a plasma to create a "bench top" accelerator (just guessing here). Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/Project.html
