An often asked Question, and I have answered it about a thousand times....... He is a recent Q and A from a personal E-mail ********************************
It is possible to fuse Deuterium and Tritium(from Helium3) AT 600 million K producing He4 and a proton which can therefore be contained by a magnetic field. Do you think or have you been capable of reaching this temperature inside your Fusor.
signed ........ **************************
My answer...
You must remember that all the temperatures quoted are "ion temperatures" based solely on the electron volt energy associated with those ion energies. They are related to this through Boltzman's work in Thermodynamics. 600 million K in rarefied gases is not HOT like "melting steel hot" and you must not believe it is. By physics definition, through Boltzman.............
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If we take ions in a rarefied atmosphere like nomally seen in fusion devices (at about one millionth or one billionth of an atmosphere) and accelerate them to only about the energy found in a TV set (approx 30kev) then the ions are said to be at a temperature of 30,000 X 11,300 or ~330 million degrees K. TV picture tubes have this energy OR TEMPERATURE particles bombarding the powdered phosphor every moment the TV is on!!! NO melting! And, there is little if any heat we can feel on the face of the tube. Therefore, Fusion ion temperatures in rarefied gas in no way relates to what our skin feels as heat.
To answer your original question:
Our fusors, when making neutrons, are colliding, head-on, deuterons at ~30kev which more than doubles their effective energy to >60kev. Thus, by the normal physics definition, we are using ions heated to 60,000 X 11,300 = ~660 million degrees kelvin to do fusion within the normal AMATEUR fusor.
I particularly like Tom Ligon's comments on the first fusor tape. We were chatting on tape about the fusion temperatures and he laughed and note that such temperatures as thrown out by the fusion community "are meaningless numbers". If you were to ask a physicist in the lab what his energies were, he would say "15 kilo electron volts". Why would he say this? Because these are the numbers and units used since the thirties when discussing particle energies by accelerator physicists. Only the more modern fusion gurus convert to temperature to sound impressive.
Richard Hull
Created on Tuesday, June 12, 2001 8:31 PM EDT by Richard Hull Last Modified on Wednesday, June 13, 2001 12:49 PM EDT by Richard Hull