Does PB11 produce neutrinos?
Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 3:22 am
Like the title said. One theory I've seen in detecting a fusion reactor running DT is neutrinos. Would a polywell be pumping out anything of the sort?
a discussion forum for Polywell fusion
https://talk-polywell.org/bb/
It sounds like you are confusing neutrinos with neutrons. D-T produces copious neutrons. p-B11, in its simplest form, still produces neutrons, but 1000 times less. Under special conditions, this could be reduced still farther. (The probably insurmountable difficulty with p-B11 is producing net energy.)kunkmiester wrote:Like the title said. One theory I've seen in detecting a fusion reactor running DT is neutrinos. Would a polywell be pumping out anything of the sort?
In a word, no.kunkmiester wrote:Like the title said. One theory I've seen in detecting a fusion reactor running DT is neutrinos. Would a polywell be pumping out anything of the sort?
It is all statistics. Something is statisticlly likely to occur within a certain time frame. An isototope may have a 50% chance of decaying after a certain amount of time. It may also decay at shorter or longer time scales, but these events are less likely. So the distribution of possible decay events is a bell curve with the most likely time the peak of the curve. This works well for predictions when you have a large population, not so well with small populations. If a mass extintion asteroid hits the Earth on average every 100,000,000 years, that tells you that the event is rare, but it does not preclude an asteroid strike next year. Now, if you were talking about a few million planets in the same situation, the repeatable accuracy of the prediction goes up. A proton is predicted to decay at extreamly long time frames (100 billion years?- some of the tests have been running long enough to put pressure on the prediction- if none are detected in the next few years, they may need to rethink the theory, or the experement), Despite this prediction, statistically, there is a not quite infinitly small probability that they could all go off at once.DavidWillard wrote:If the decay rate can be controlled with devices at our disposal, it would very dangerous.. Imagine just fissioning just a gram of natural uranium at a time. Or boil steam from Sr-90 going superluminant with gamma output.
The head hurt I get on how they predict that not all the atoms in a sample decided whether to decay, or not to determine the half life in simulation is horrible. Somehow do the particles know when their neighbor is decaying and influence holding off their own event? Or is it the decay that produces more in the sample at a specified time that we can't determine? Or is it just chance that a 2kg rod of plutonium does just 100% spontaneously fission and we haven't seen the roulette wheel stop on that chance yet?
How about those sub critical cores in the stored nuclear weapons, are they really safe? Is that why they need continued testing and verification against an accident such as that?
Half-Life? Or is it an effect from something outside of the sample encountering? ripples in the fabric of the universe? Who knows.
Yes and no- If you are seeking to detect certain types of fusion like that in the Sun, neutrinos can be a marker. But, the sensitivity of the detector is extreamly tiny. Neutron detectors have a sensitivity such that they pick up ~ 1 neutron out of a thousand that are passing through it (if the background noise can be controlled well). A neutrino detector will catch perhaps 1 neutrino out of the trillions upon trillions of neutrinos passing through it. They work because they are made large (millions of gallons of ultrapure water or dry cleaning fluid) and the noise (mostly cosmic rays) is kept very low by burying the detectors thousands of feet underground. Even then they only detect ~one neutrino per week (?), despite the stupendus numbers of neutrinos passing through the Earth from the Sun, or occasionally a super stupendous amount of neutrinos from a distant event like a supernova.kunkmiester wrote:Interesting to know. I suppose then, a more compact neutrino detector would be quite useless, save for an alternative using a synthetic gravitic field rather than magnetic to contain plasma.