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Old 10-25-2014, 01:04 PM   #626
johndallman
Night Watchman
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
Default Re: New Reality Seeds

Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
I thought how much and what radiation produced by fusion was determined by what is fusing rather than how it was made to fuse.
It is, entirely.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer View Post
The guy who proposed the whole Polywell idea went looking for something safe and practical. Low radiation threat was part of the goal.
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.
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