Migma

Migma was a proposed inertial electrostatic confinement fusion reactor designed by Bogdan Maglich in the early 1970s. Migma uses self-intersecting beams of ions from small particle accelerators to force the ions to fuse. It was an area of some research in the 1970s and early 1980s, but lack of funding precluded further development. Similar systems using larger collections of particles were referred to as "macrons".

Conventional fusion

Fusion takes place when atoms come into close proximity and the nuclear strong force pulls their nuclei together. Counteracting this process is the fact that the nuclei are all positively charged, and thus repel each other due to the electrostatic force. In order for fusion to occur, the nuclei must have enough energy to overcome this coulomb barrier. The barrier is lowered for atoms with less positive charge, those with the fewest number of protons, and the strong force is increased with additional nucleons, the total number of protons and neutrons. This means that a combination of deuterium and tritium has the lowest coulomb barrier, at about 100 keV (see requirements for fusion).