On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 1:14 PM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote:
Are you considering an additional fusion reaction to follow up on the > initial one discussed to use the hydrogen fuel more efficiently? If there > is anyway to end up with helium 4, that problem would vaporize. > That's right -- I'm thinking the proton-proton chain would carry all the way to 4He. It would require passage through the mysterious diproton reaction, and we would have to suffer the 511 keV gammas somehow (perhaps they end up being useful or critical in some way). But the reaction would result in helium at the end of it, just like the sun, although I'm not thinking anywhere near full conversion of the hydrogen would occur. I assume there would also be some proton capture with the surrounding substrate and with impurities. Proton capture is generally pretty clean, I think. An interesting point is that no gammas are given off by the sun. The current explanation is that the fusion occurs in the core and that the gammas will have been dissipated by the time they reach the outer layers, where fusion is understood to not take place. But I wonder how many explanations of this sort go back to a hallway conversation somewhere in 1940, where the people talking decided to follow up with further research, but they never did, and no one came up with a better explanation, so the origins of the existing explanation were forgotten and the understanding took on an air of fact. Eric
