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Old 12-14-2019, 06:23 AM   #8
malloyd
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Default Re: [Ultra-Tech] HEDM explosive triggers for clean fusion

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
I strongly doubt that any chemical explosive is sufficient to trigger fusion.
Depends somewhat on how much fusion, and how big your reactor is. After all something as weak as gravity manages in stars, at admittedly pathetic rates. But no, you are not going to build a portable fusion bomb with a chemical explosive trigger. Metallic hydrogen or metastable helium, well maybe, but they're still well short of the energy range I'd expect. You really need to concentrate a lot of energy into a small *volume*, and chemical explosives start out big for the contained energy and get bigger as they explode. A chemically pumped laser trigger system that reacts so fast it explodes is maybe more plausible, because you can more easily optically focus light into something smaller than just "inside the explosive". Similarly you might use an explosive to generate an electrical surge that that you compress in a system of conductors into a smaller volume magnetically or electrostatically. But you are not going to manage it without something more complicated than the pile of explosives with a fusion fuel in the middle model we use for fission triggered bombs.
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Last edited by malloyd; 12-14-2019 at 06:31 AM.
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