Decius wrote:

bucy wrote:
If this really works, can we generate power from it or is it
only useful as a neutron source?

There is an IEEE article links from my second meme on this that covers that topic. If the experiment can be reproduced it will need to be scaled, alot... Right now its not efficient. An efficient version is not going to be something that would run on a tabletop. This is still a big industry scale steam turbine. The advantage is that its easy to control, its waste products degrade quickly, and its fuel is abundant.

I wonder if steam turbines are really the most efficient way of converting reactions like this into usable electric power. It seems like such a 19th century approach...

There are a number of other possibilities:

Stirling engines -- great on paper but its been hard so far to build practical ones.

magnetohydrodynamic generators

Certain fusion reactions can apparently generate electricity more-or-less directly: there are some big electrodes in the reactor and you can pull electricity straight out. See the
Wikipedia article on fusion power.

RE: Table Top Nuclear Fisson