Re: Cool Fusion

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Jim Green wrote:

> Under what circumstances can "cool fusion" occur?  Can it occur naturally?
>  I am not sure what I might mean by "cool", but certainly at T<Sun -- maybe
> T=Lab???  I am not thinking about Pons and Fleischmann here.

Hi Jim!  There's "muon catylized fusion", where a muon replaces an
electron in (deuturium?) in a solid, which allows the nucleii to get close
together.  It was offered as a possible explanation for what
Pons/Fleichman were seeing.   But muons I think have a short half-life.

The so-called "Migma" aneutronic fusion reactor was pretty cold, using
high velocity ion beams instead of high temperatures.  Research into that
technique was never funded.  The "fusion" research community favors other
methods, and Migma I suspect was perceived as an intruder coming in from
left field, and so politics killed it.

I recall seeing some "home-built A-bomb" plans where the neutron-emitting
"trigger" was simply a strobe tube filled with deuterium rather than
xenon.  Do electric arcs create a bit of fusion?  Or maybe this more like
neutron spalling caused by colliding ions.

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