Gauss's Law and hollow spheres

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DavidWillard:

You cannot get pair production with bremsstrahlung. It's x-radiation, not gamma, and you need gamma radiation with an absolute minimum energy of 1.022 MeV. Bremsstrahlung from a Polywell burning p-11B is simply not energetic enough to do what you want.

If you have a means of converting the bremsstrahlung to useful power, (a) there are better things to do with it than run gamma ray lasers trying to tweak the reactor's operating conditions via pair production, and (b) the only possible advantage I identified (lowering of the virtual anode; note that this is very unlikely to actually happen, for reasons mentioned in my previous post) becomes much less important, because the whole point of lowering the virtual anode is bremsstrahlung suppression.

The annihilation gammas are (obviously) completely useless for pair production, and recovering them would probably be even harder than recovering bremsstrahlung.

These are far from the only reasons why I think this is a spectacularly bad idea. Read my previous post more carefully for more...

As for a solid target in the core, the trouble is that it will rapidly soak up all the plasma energy and just radiate it away, bleeding massive amounts of sputtered neutrals into the bargain. Since most impacts will not result in nuclear reactions, you wouldn't get any sort of catalysis benefit in time to offset the plasma-destroying properties of a solid unshielded chunk of metal right in everything's way. Anything solid in a Polywell core will kill it. Period.

Also, while it would greatly reduce (not eliminate) shine-through, the result would be conversion of the gamma radiation to thermal radiation, and probably a bunch of annihilation gammas from pair production inside the chunk.

Also, catalysis is only really useful for super-low-cross-section reactions like p-p. With p-11B you don't need it (and the bismuth catalysis path is supposedly specific to p-p anyway, so it wouldn't help your main reaction).

[D Tibbets]

Upon further research the above mentioned bismuth accelerator for hydrogen fusion seems to be mostly related to the CNO cycle. I did not see any explaination of how bismuth would fit into this, except vague references to busmuth's hugh binding energy. Does it somehow increase some marginal reactions in the CNO cycle?

I did see mentioned the runaway reactions that that can occur on white dwarf stars once a certain threshold of hydrogen accumulation from a companion star is reached. This is obvously a rapid and energetic hydrogen fusion process (recurrent Nova explosions, not the self destructive Supernova explosions). Is there any possible applications of these process to terrestial fusion efforts?


Dan Tibbets