"Sticking" is a problem with muon catalyzed fusion, but with fission as far as I know, this was not a major issue as there is a great excess of muons from a GeV proton beam.
A lot of that work was done at Brookhaven 3-4 decades ago. I'm sure the details are in old issues of Fusion Technology but I haven't looked into all of the differences so far, which would emerge from substituting UDH in the target and laser irradiation. Here is a citation for the old work, but there are probably better ones out there. https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6991700 In fact, the details of how UDH would differ from fast protons in the equation, are totally speculative at this point. With accelerator driven fission you are accelerating protons and making huge amounts of muons in the target as a bonus. The dynamics would be much different with dense hydrogen instead of fast protons. Also - with the Holmlid effect, presumably the fuel would need to be U-Hydride which fortunately is stable at high temperatures, and muons would catalyze the molecular proton overcoming Coulomb repulsion and into the U nucleus - somewhat like the Oppenheimer-Philips effect, following which one or more neutrons are freed and the non-fissile U238 become fissile Pu. It is a fascinating prospect and hopefully more info will be found, but of course most physicists are not buying into UDH yet and apparently he is not cognizant of this possibility. Jones Gary Steckly wrote: Wasn't there a problem with "sticking"? Each muon wasted to much of its short life hanging around after completing each reaction? Steve Jones was the expert on this. Wonder if he's still around lurking? Best regards Gary Jones Beene wrote: This is not a typo - in fact muons can catalyze fission as well as fusion. Holmlid devotees should take notice of this opportunity. Decades ago, government Labs were looking at accelerator driven fission using massive beam lines and un-enriched fuel, but this turned out to be economically nonviable due to the high cost of the beam line. The big advantage however is that the scheme allows the complete burnup of waste and the breeding of fissile material so that if (BIG IF) one can avoid the massive expense of the beam line (which costs twice as much as the reactor itself) then there could be a huge economic benefit in a new approach. Having a subcritical reactor also cuts that hardware cost by 75% over what we now are stuck with - which is,in effect a "controlled bomb" poised on the edge of catastrophe. Thus - if one can provide a cheap source of muons without the beam line - such as via the Holmlid effect, then this route could be highly preferable to muon catalyzed fusion - both in cost and and in eliminating waste. If this idea has not been patented, then let me now dedicate it to the public domain.
