7.3 Nanofusion generators

A sub-nuclear resolution microscopic accelerator just a few centimeters long and only a few nano-meter wide will initiate individually controlled fusion reactions without requiring thermonuclear temperatures or expensive magnetic confinement. For years, researchers have created precise atomic structures using precise matter beam positioning and\or replication. Conventional fusion reactors are all based on confining the reaction products at a high enough temperature and pressure to achieve a statistical probability of enough high-energy random collisions to induce a sustainable fusion reaction.

In contrast, individual atoms collided with sub nuclear accuracy can be induced to fuse with only 51 KeV of energy. Nuclear fusion with nuclear accuracy atomic scale accelerators does not require extremely high temperatures and confinement required by thermonuclear reactions:

In practice, an ignition temperature of 400M K is needed to compensate for lost energy. For plasmas of low density, this incredibly high temperature equates to particle collisions of a relatively modest 51 KeV. This energy can be imparted using standard electrostatic acceleration or one can add laser or microwave assisted acceleration. Existing 51 KeV accelerators can impart this much energy to colliding ions, but cannot guarantee that many of the ions will actually collide because the beam is wide and atoms are small. If the atoms can individually be accelerated and aimed with sub-nuclear precision, then a high percentage of the ions can collide and fuse. If even only 10% of the ions accelerated actually collided and fused a large net energy gain would be realized. The potential electrostatic repulsive energy of deuteron centers 3 nuclear radii from each other is 2.72*105 eV from a standard handbook. Thus 51 KeV will force deuteron nuclei to overlap closely enough to fuse.

Practical considerations Vacuum Breakdown voltage is 1.25MV/cm in vacuum or 125 KV/mm. Thus a 50 KeV accelerator might be as small as 406 micrometers long. At these small sizes, other factors may strongly influence the practical length required. Glass, for instance can only support 35 KV/cm. Some of the best insulators can withstand 200 KV/cm. Various recent technological achievements indicate that the accuracy for constructing and aligning the accelerator can be high enough. Various atomic structures have been constructed in the laboratory. Several sensing methods are also having resolution in the nuclear range that might facilitate their use for alignment. Capacitance micrometry, for instance, is a very sensitive method for detecting small displacements. This method works by measuring the change in the impedance of a parallel plate capacitor as the spacing or area of the parallel plates changes. Displacements as small as 10 femto-meters (10e-14m) about the diameter of an electron or 10,000 times smaller than an atom can be measured. The Deuteron ion trajectory can be electrostatically deflected. The atoms in the accelerator can be accurately placed on a substrate crystal lattice. The thermally induced vibrations of the accelerator atoms will average out over some 109 atoms. The electrostatic potential on the deflection plates can be adjusted with very high precision including down to the adding and subtracting of individual electrons. The actual frequency of occurrence of fusion events can be used as feedback for the accurate deflection of the accelerated particles.