Plasma trigger

[petrushka.googol]

Can you have a hot ionized plasma trigger for a thermonuclear reaction, as opposed to the conventional fission reaction ?

[pavelcherepan]

Do you mean it like in a bomb? But with "conventional" fission trigger mechanism you do get hot ionised plasma as a result. Plus you get an added bonus of pressure holding your fusion reactants together long enough to produce a lot of energy.

[petrushka.googol]

Do you mean it like in a bomb? But with "conventional" fission trigger mechanism you do get hot ionised plasma as a result. Plus you get an added bonus of pressure holding your fusion reactants together long enough to produce a lot of energy.

Yes. In a thermonuclear bomb. Also can a lightning emulator be used as a trigger?

[swansont]

You need to get the temperature and pressure high enough for fusion to occur. A fission bomb is not a requirement, per se, it's just the way we know of to create those conditions.

 

Lightning is not known to initiate fusion anywhere.

[petrushka.googol]

You need to get the temperature and pressure high enough for fusion to occur. A fission bomb is not a requirement, per se, it's just the way we know of to create those conditions.

 

Lightning is not known to initiate fusion anywhere.

I think lightning is a highly ionized plasma. Then it's use could be a future possibility.

[John Cuthber]

I think lightning is a very inconvenient way to get electricity.

[swansont]

It's a matter of how much energy it has, not just being a plasma. You need to get a system really, really hot if you want fusion to take place.

[Enthalpy]

The inventive people at General Fusion did that, "fusion created by a plasma", but probably not at the scale the OP hopes.

http://www.generalfusion.com/

In early attempts (no more described at their site), they had just strong current pulses at many places in a liquid to let a pressure wave converge to a point where D-T fusion did happen.

It's just that D-T fusion is obtained in many ways, but net energy production is the difficult part.

 

At least according to their website, they seem to be back to the acoustic implosion of rotating liquid metal, for which I had made detail suggestions

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/58924-magnetized-target-fusion/

They had gone away from that method.

 

I vaguely suppose that fission remains the easiest way to trigger a thermonuclear bomb (which, by the way, is mainly a fission bomb, see Teller-Ulam) but some day other methods will exist and proliferation may be worse then.