Dumb Idea
Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 7:17 pm
Please forgive me because I am really not a very bright guy. I don't understand anything about nuclear physics and I have absolutely no basis for posting an idea of any kind at all. But, if you take the time to shoot down my thought, it might bring me to a higher level of understanding - higher than none that is.
Hopefully the General forum is a good place to post bad ideas. Anyway, here it is...
Beam target fusion is basically shooting a high energy particle at a stationary target, right? I suppose that you could shoot a proton at a pile of boron and, if you could get the proton going fast enough, and you could avoid it losing energy by hitting anything else, there is a chance it will hit a boron nucleus and fuse - right?
Boron is a semi-conductor but at high temperature, it acts like a metal, right?
In a fusor, a high potential is created between an outer grid (anode) and an inner grid (cathode) that causes positively charged particles to fly into the middle at high speed and sometimes run into each other at great enough speeds to fuse. When they miss, they come around for another try - recirculating.
Fusors have a big flaw. They have a cathode. Sometimes the high energy things that are rushing in crash into the cathode and the losses from this can't be overcome.
My simpleton thought is that if you can't miss the cathode enough, make the problem the solution. Why not make the cathode out of boron11? Instead of wanting to miss the cathode, try and hit the cathode using a higher potential and achieving greater speeds. Basically, use a solid boron cathode in a fusor with a much greater potential and inject protons.
Would the protons not recirculate on misses? Would we lose too much energy to electron collisions? Is there a chemical reaction issue that I don't understand? Can boron be used as a cathode? What about boron buckyballs? Does boron have a nanotube equivalent of superconductive carbon nanotubes?
Thanks for entertaining my naiveté
Hopefully the General forum is a good place to post bad ideas. Anyway, here it is...
Beam target fusion is basically shooting a high energy particle at a stationary target, right? I suppose that you could shoot a proton at a pile of boron and, if you could get the proton going fast enough, and you could avoid it losing energy by hitting anything else, there is a chance it will hit a boron nucleus and fuse - right?
Boron is a semi-conductor but at high temperature, it acts like a metal, right?
In a fusor, a high potential is created between an outer grid (anode) and an inner grid (cathode) that causes positively charged particles to fly into the middle at high speed and sometimes run into each other at great enough speeds to fuse. When they miss, they come around for another try - recirculating.
Fusors have a big flaw. They have a cathode. Sometimes the high energy things that are rushing in crash into the cathode and the losses from this can't be overcome.
My simpleton thought is that if you can't miss the cathode enough, make the problem the solution. Why not make the cathode out of boron11? Instead of wanting to miss the cathode, try and hit the cathode using a higher potential and achieving greater speeds. Basically, use a solid boron cathode in a fusor with a much greater potential and inject protons.
Would the protons not recirculate on misses? Would we lose too much energy to electron collisions? Is there a chemical reaction issue that I don't understand? Can boron be used as a cathode? What about boron buckyballs? Does boron have a nanotube equivalent of superconductive carbon nanotubes?
Thanks for entertaining my naiveté