Something I don’t like about these concepts is that they are just way too entirely unrealistic. To use earth as raw mass, and using that mass in a perfect anti-matter-like mass-to-energy conversion (which fusion does not get anywhere near), you’d end up using something like 97% of the entire mass of Earth itself just to be able to propel earth to escape velocity, and that’s counting the mass reduction over time.
Secondly, rocks would not make good fusion material. The way both Fission and Fusion both work is that they take Some elements and bombard them in such a way that they fall to a lower energy state, releasing more energy than it took to get them over the ‘hump’ of falling into the lower state. Because of this, the fuels that are best for fission are the exact opposite of the fuels that are best for fusion and vice-versa, with a whole swath of materials in between that in general useless waste mass.
Fission reactors don’t output plasma, they output heat.
Fusion reactors can ‘use’ plasma as a catalyst, but they don’t output it (doing so would lose the reaction process) and their output tends to be either heat, energetic neutrons, or often both.
Both processes are very useful, but they aren’t magical and certainly can’t run on <random-thing/>.
Ehhh, not necessarily. You need to be able to combine things that fall into a lower energetic quantum state, which though yes certain type of hydrogen and so forth is good at, so are some heavier things. Fission does the same, things fall into a lower energetic quantum state, though via a different process.
“Binding Energy” is the lower quantum energy state, I.E. it takes ‘more’ energy to get out of that state the lower the quantum energy state is.
This graph is accurate for what it shows, but there is a LOT of ways to ‘setup’ atoms that would make that chart significantly more jumpy if you actually mapped everything.
Ah! That’s the book he’s referencing, I’ve heard of it, and also how bad the science is in it.
But yes, adding Fission, Fusion, and Antimatter processes would be amazing. Fission and Fusion could be energy positive, though antimatter I don’t think would be energy positive, like at all, but it would be the most dense energy storage that you could really create, so it would make for fantastic single-use Antimatter-Cell Batteries or something (sounds like a ZPM in that way, though I think in the SG universe, ZPM’s store energy in a pocket dimension, so potentially a whole lot more energy storage).