On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Jones Beene <jone...@pacbell.net> wrote:
> > Anyway the Farnsworth Fusor is a fusion reactor that many high school level > students have built, including Conrad. > > It involves adding electrical energy in order to achieve LENR reactions. > Sound familiar, Joshua? You missed the point. I have no problem adding energy to get energy. The problem I have is when you get back several times more heat than you used to start it, it should be easy to keep it going on its own. It's like combustion. In the Fusor, they haven't done this, plus what they put in is not heat, but real electrical energy to accelerate ions. They don't get that back, so self-sustaining is harder. It's more like trying to close the loop in electrolysis experiments, where you need electricity, but you produce heat. That takes a bigger COP. > The "mainstream" wants to call it "hot" fusion but it is not. The gainful reactions are fusion but technically not hot or cold, and yes they are definitely low energy - warm not hot. Well, you can play with labels hot and cold, but this is ordinary fusion in the sense that the Coulomb barrier is overcome (or tunneled through) by kinetic energy, the branching ratios are perfectly standard, and everything is completely consistent with scientific generalizations (theory) already accumulated and verified. > The published threshold level for D+D fusion is variously listed at around 1.4 MeV up to 2.2 MeV Where are those published? Because from what I've seen (see Bussard's google talk for example, or just wikipedia) the cross-section for D-D fusion peaks around 50 keV, and is still appreciable below 10 keV. The article on fusors says a minimum of about 4 keV is needed to get useful rates. The sun's interior is 15 billion kelvins, corresponding to about 1.3 keV. That makes for a slow fusion rate, and keeps the sun burning. > and yet the Fusor average plasma energy level is lessthan 1 eV But in the fusor, it's not the plasma temperature that gives the ions the energy to fuse. The ions are accelerated into the plasma with a few keV energy. "In the fusor, the ions are accelerated to several keV by the electrodes, so heating as such is not necessary (as long as the ions fuse before losing their energy by any process)." -- Wiki > so it truly is LENR on the input side. No, it truly is not. You don't have a clue.
