Clearing up Misconceptions

Posted by Admin on Jul 26, 2006 at 01:40 AM
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Overstatement of Neutron Radioactivity

A few critics of focus fusion have raised the idea that, because a small number of neutrons are produced by side-reactions, this means that dangerous levels of radioactivity will be induced in the reactor, creating problems of radioactive waste as in fission reactors. This simply is not true. While radioactivity is an unavoidable part of nature, there is a difference between tiny levels of radioactivity and levels that cause any concern. For example, our own bodies are slightly radioactive, because we contain small amounts of naturally-occurring radon that we breathe in and radioactive carbon-14 and potassium-40 in our flesh and bones. Every second, more than 10,000 atoms decay radioactively within each of our bodies.

The radioactivity generated by a focus fusion reactor is not much more than this. The only place such radioactivity is produced is in the beryllium anode at the heart of the reactor. After a year of use, an electrode would contain 0.23 milligrams of radioactive beryllium-10. This amount has as much radioactivity as a class-room of twenty children contain in their bodies. Clearly, such tiny amount of radioactivity can’t be considered “radioactive waste”.

By contrast, nuclear fission plants DO produce a real radioactive waste problem. For the same amount of electricity generated, fission reactors produce 40 BILLION times as much radioactivity as a focus fusion reactor would.

Plasmoids Can’t Exist

Another idea that has shown up is that focus fusion can’t work, because plasmoids, dense, magnetically self-continued blobs of plasma, are theoretically impossible. The argument is that the “virial theorem”, a basic relationship about the energy in fields, prohibits all magnetically self-confined plasmas. Since plasmoids have been observed both in the laboratory and in nature for decades, if this logic were true, one would have to conclude something is wrong with the theory. Beginning in the 1970’s, researchers such as Winston Bostick and Victorio Nardi at Stevens Institute of Technology observed plasmoids in the plasma focus with magnetic field as high as 200 million gauss, despite the absence of external magnetic fields. Plasmoids are also observed in the magnetic field of the earth, among many other places.

Given many such observations, if the argument concerning the virial theorem were valid, the theory itself would have to be questioned, not the observations of plasmoids. However, it is not valid. As far back as 1958, S. Chandrasekhar, one of the leading astrophysicists of the 20th century showed that magnetically-self continued, stable plasma configurations could exist in space, and that they were compatible with the virial theorem.

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