In reply to H Veeder's message of Wed, 24 Sep 2014 21:46:11 -0400: Hi, [snip] >I suspect both endothermic and exothermic reactions occur even inside the >tokamak, but on balance more exothermic reactions occur. > >Harry
Endothermic reactions only happen when ingoing particles have enough kinetic energy to make the reaction happen. IOW they are not really endothermic when all energy sources are taken into account. However most nuclear reactions where a neutron transfers to an external proton to create deuterium would be genuinely endothermic, and thus would not occur, unless of course the proton had high kinetic energy to start with. Of course it's possible that this happens, but the reactions going the other way are going to outnumber them by many thousands to 1, because very few of the energetic protons created are immediately going to encounter another heavy nucleus before losing some energy to ionization, and of those that do immediately encounter another heavy nucleus, only a small percentage are going to produce D. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
