Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyndaran
I thought how much and what radiation produced by fusion was determined by what is fusing rather than how it was made to fuse.
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It is, entirely.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
The guy who proposed the whole Polywell idea went looking for something safe and practical. Low radiation threat was part of the goal.
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Well, Bussard wanted to use the proton-boron reaction, which produces no neutrons: its output is alpha particles. However, since it requires an operating temperature about ten times that of D-T fusion, it's a lot harder to make it work.
Now, variant laws of physics can help with this, but alterations on this scale make it rather easy to have a universe where stars can't form - they just explode when they've condensed enough to start fusion - or the Big Bang ends in a runaway fusion reaction, producing a very different universe.