Sun-In-A-Bottle..

I've just finished reading Charles Seife's entertaining book
"Sun in a Bottle" - about the controversial & so-far-fruitless attempts to harness the power of nuclear fusion in a reactor (as opposed to the Hydrogen Bomb).

There are reviews here, here & here.

The strangest part of the hydrogen (well, Deuterium actually) fusion story is that it IS actually possible to construct a table-top reactor!

These should not to be confused with various spurious claims of cold fusion.
(Yes, as i've said before, i DO use Wikipedia - it's a good jumping-off point)

I kid you not! The problem, of course, is their tiny, tiny yield of neutrons, & the fact that - inescapably it seems - they consume far more energy than ever comes back out of them in any useful form.

Confining a super-hot, high-pressure nuclear fusion plasma is like trying to nail jelly to a tree!

Various enormously energy-hungry (& stupendously expensive) devices, like the Russian tokamak (pics,pics,thingies,moreThingies), gigantic magnetic 'bottles', 'pinch' machines, & the international project ITER, have all run into the same problem - it takes so much energy even to try to stabilize the mercurial & leaky 'heavy' hydrogen plasma at the kind of temperatures & pressures needed to sustain nuclear fusion, that their net output is less than zero!!

The 'table-top' machines (here & here) are ingenious, & (as Seife himself says) could even be an economical source of neutrons for, say, neutron-scanning substitutes for X-ray machines.
I thought they were really clever. And they're astonishingly simple, compared to the high-tech behemoths that were constructed for the 'positive-net-output' outcome which, according to Seife, is as far off as ever.

I'm wondering if a bigger 'flood-of-neutrons' table-top machine could be used to tickle up a less-than-critical-mass nuclear reactor to the point where it would run despite its small size..

That would be interesting..