Micronozzle Proton-Beam for Compact Accelerator-Driven Reactor

[sanman]

Once again, madame has stumbled upon another interesting paper:




So it's about a micro-nozzle for GeV proton beam acceleration.
Very compact, and an improvement over the laser wakefield accelerator which only works for electrons.

Once you can do that in a compact form factor, then you can try Carlos Rubbia's ADS reactor concept, using this compact proton beam as a spallation source.

If you go with thorium fuel, then that's inherently sub-critical, because thorium is just fertile not fissile, due to its nuclear cross-section being marginally too low. So you're inherently safer from that, and can switch off the nuclear reaction instantly by cutting the beam.

So the idea would be to have a lightweight & inherently safe reactor that could be used as a power source in spaceflight applications.

Any comments or thoughts? Anyone?

[sanman]

This is perhaps related

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/plans-to-shrink-particle-accelerators-by-1000x-could-speed-chipmaking-by-15x-inversion-semiconductor-proposes-tabletop-particle-accelerators-with-petawatt-lasers

[Asteroza]

Semiconductor production research reducing the cost of the accelerator portion of an ADSR is intriguing. Moreso with pumpable solid spallation targets like tungsten micropellets.