In reply to Jones Beene's message of Thu, 26 Jan 2017 19:19:52 -0800: Hi, [snip] >Eric - A paper can be downloaded here which I am now wading through, >which indicates that a type of internal conversion can occur with muons, >leading to fusion instead of beta decay.
I suspect you meant fission. > >http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v80JaMsbHwUJ:arxiv.org/abs/nucl-th/0403087+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us > >I suppose that a muon orbital within the space of another nucleus would >invariably lead to internal conversion and if that can be kept at beta >decay with no fusion - there could be advantages. > >If a reaction of muons with a heavy nucleus like lead can be limited to >beta decay with no fusion, then the problems of shielding are less and >that advantage could outweigh the low yield. > Just from the abstract I get the impression that the muon primarily ends up with one of the daughter nuclei. This sounds like the same "sticking" problem that plagues muon catalyzed fusion. Only I suspect it would be worse in the case of fission because the positive charge on the daughter nuclei is much higher than it is on Helium. In short it sounds like you are still only going to get about one fission from a captured muon, whereas you could get about 100 fusions from a captured muon. However very energetic muons aren't likely to be captured at all, and would thus simply expend some of their kinetic energy fissioning nuclei directly (or creating a zoo of other particles?). When they finally slow down to the point where they can be captured, they can either be used to fission a single nucleus, or catalyze a hundred fusion reactions. The fission reaction would yield about 200 MeV, the fusion reactions about 1700 MeV, followed by another 20000 MeV from the ensuing fission reactions. If the original muons are slow, then they are best used to catalyze a fusion reaction immediately. If the original muons are fast, then they first need to be slowed down to the point where they can be captured, and the most useful way to do this would be by passing them through an Actinide where they can use their kinetic energy to bring about fission reactions. Solution:- Give the cylindrical reactor I mentioned earlier a thick end cap made of the same actinide as the blanket, and pass the incoming muon stream through the end cap before it reaches the D-T mixture. The thickness of the end cap would be determined by the starting energy of the muons. It should be just thick enough to slow the muons down to the point where they can be captured by D or T and catalyze the fusion reaction. This way, the kinetic energy of the muons is put to good use, as is their ability to catalyze the fusion reactions that provide the neutrons for even more fission reactions. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
