Fusion of hydrogen and deuterium plasma jets head-on into each other

Workable plasma fusion is desperately needed in this world. The major source of carbon dioxide, the cause of global warming, is electrical energy generation. The major alternative, nuclear power, is not much more attractive.

What is needed is something which will produce plentiful cheap electrical energy without producing carbon dioxide or harmful long-lasting nuclear radiation.

If nuclear fusion is possible, this will fill the bill. Nuclear fusion is the fusion of light nuclei into heavier nuclei, with the release of massive amounts of heat as a tiny amount of the mass is converted into energy. E+mc^2. It produces little long-lasting radiation.

The heat given out by the sun is produced by nuclear fusion. In the sun's case the conversion of hydrogen into helium. Nuclear fusion has been created briefly in laboratories, usually by so-called Tokamacs - torus shaped magmetic compressors of deuterium plasmas.

A plasma is an intensely heated gas (until it glows and has lost electrons) which can be controlled by a magnetic field. A plasma exhibits a magnetic field because its particles are moving.

I have invented a device which will fuse plasma of either hydrogen or deuterium into helium, releasing large quantities of heat.

I have called it a 'Plasma Accellerator' (excuse the spelling). A description of the device can be found on the IP Australia web site http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/patents/search-index.shtml

The plasma accelerator can accelerate plasma to a very high velocity. It is a tube surrounded by individual electric coils. The coils are used to create a strong variable magnetic field inside the tube. The fields are varied so that a magnetic 'pocket' can be produced, which creates a magnetic 'pinch' effect. Into this pocket is inserted the plasma, and the pinch effect of the magnetic pocket holds the plasma.

A 'stripped' moving plasma contains a magnetic field which can be acted upon by the coils' magnetic fields.

The pocket can then be moved, even accelerated, by varying the the current in the electric coils in tandem. The plasma moves with the magnetic pocket, and can thus be accelerated to very high velocities.

If two of these tubes set end-on-end to direct the high velocity plasma head-on into each other; if a high enough velocity is achieved for deuterium or hydrogen plasma, the plasma will fuse into helium releasing a large quantityof heat.

A gas, or water vapour, can be directed at the point of impactof the two plasmas to carry the heat energy away to power electricity generation.

Will this sideways stream interfere with the reaction? Yes, to a certain extent it will. but all that is needed is to increase the velocity of the plasma streams to overcome this.

A continuous stream of plasma can be directed at each other to generate continuous energy through fusion. If the magnetic pockets follow each other fast enough it will look like and behave like a continuous stream.

It can be argued that the particles will pass each other without collision. If the plasma is dense enough, this is improbable. You only have to turn bunsen burners or welding jets on each other (admittedly they are at low velocity) to watch the flames 'splash'. The setting of the length of the distance apart of the ends of the acceleration tubes to obtain complete fusion is an engineering or technical problem.

Thus it is possible that the earth's 'clean' energy problems are solved. But is this solution possible or feasible?

Yes it is. I have calculated the minimum velocity required for two deuterium plasma jets to fuse is about 135,000 kms per hour. (See my post on Physics Forum - plasma jet fusion). If this cannot be achieved, the experimenters are not trying. (These are my own calculations. Others more expert can argue about this figure).

But what about hydrogen? Suprise, suprise. It is even easier to achieve fusion. While this is a really amazing (and welcome) result it will take a little bit of understanding.

At the moment, hydrogen to helium fusion has only been achieved in the core of the sun. Why? Because of the very high density required. High temperatures can be achieved relatively easily. But don't turn off, as all the scientists have. It requires a bit more explanation.

Deuterium fusion has a coulomb barrier of 4 x 10^8 K. (Temperature and energy measures are interchangeable). This is a measure of the repulsive force of two deuterons (deuterium nuclei) before they penetrate the coulomb barrier and fuse into helium. A coulomb barrier is the electrostic repulsion barrier around the atom. (Remember, at least theoretically, this can already be achieved by my plasma accelerator).

However inside the sun, the coulomb barrier of a proton (a hydrogen nucleus) is far less. It is 1.5 x 10^7 K. The reaction in the sun is called the proton-proton reaction.

However there are three steps in the proton-proton reaction. As is generally known the steps towards hydrogen fusing into helium inside the sun is as follows;

1. A pair of protons fuse, forming a deuteron.
2. The deuteron fuses with an additional proton to form Helium-3.
3. Two Helium-3 nuclei fuse to create Beryllium-6, but this is unstable and disintigrates into two protons and Helium-4.
4. The last reaction also releases two neutrons, two positrons, gamma rays and a great deal of heat.

Thus the fusion process takes three steps, and several different particles have to collide with each other, unlike in the deuterium-deuterium reaction, where there is just one step and one particle.

Thus the role of probability steps in. The collisions have to be highly probable for the fusion reaction to be sustainable. For the reaction to be probable, the gas has to be dense as well as hot and energetic.

The plasma accelerator I have designed can compress gas to an extremely dense pressure at the same time it is accelerating it. In fact the process of acceleration will massively increase the density of each pocket of the plasma. This dense pressure will only be need for a very short space of time, until the plasma reaches the end of the tube.

While there are engineering problems, I think the inherent design of the design of the device is making everything fall into place.

Also with hydrogen, a lower velocity would be required for fusion compared to deuterium, as a much lower impact energy is required. Thus a hydrogen fusion device can be called a relatively high compression/high acceleration/low velocity device compared to the deuterium's relatively low compression/low acceleration/high velocity device. What the two processes differ on mainly would be the rate of acceleration.

Thus plasma fusion is technically possible. The engineering problems do not appear to be beyond current technology. It is certainly worth a try.