Yes it can be done .. but oh what a cost! The current way to get high volumes of muons is to slam an antiproton into a uranium atom. The muons come in three flavors, positively charged,negatively charged and neutral. The positively charged are repelled by the nucleus and are no good at making fusion. Same with the neutral muon. The negatively charged muon is the good one. The heavy muon is 1600 times more massive than an electron. When a muonic atom is formed, the orbit is much closer to the nucleus than the electron. If the atom is a muonic deuterium atom and a normal tritium approaches , the distance is close enough for the strong force to fuse them together, to unite the two atoms. As rosy as this sounds, the fly in the ointment is the anti protons. They require a billion electron volts to make. When CERN made a nanogram of antimatter if took the power of a day's production from all of the common market countries. Not very cheap. The Air Force has played with this. Recomended reading "Mirror Matter" and Muon Fusion Conference 1-4, The Aerospacial uses of fusion power in space applications. If any one is interested let me know .. can give you isbn numbers.
Larry Leins Ole Miss Rebel larryleins@hotmail.com
Created on Monday, April 30, 2001 1:16 PM EDT by larry l Leins