I was thinking about future energy sources, and how fission is always considered a dead end, because it involves materials that are radioactive and probably also toxic.
But is this necessarily the case? Could there hypothetically be a material that isn’t very radioactive but when we shoot neutrons at it, say, transitions into something else not very radioactive, and only kicks out lots of energy plus neutrinos?
(Notice: neutrinos out, not neutrons)
I guess, answering my own question, it’s pretty hard to hit the nucleus with anything.
So a non-chain reaction fission reaction would require prohibitive numbers of particles and energy input.
And obviously any chain-reaction based reaction is going to involve kicking out ionizing radiation.
ISTM “lots of energy” = ionising; even gamma rays are bad for you. NB neutrinos may be weakly interacting but the assoicated beta particles are already ionizing, moreso than gamma rays.
But is there an intrinsic reason why a substantial portion of the energy needs to be in the form of gamma rays?
Gamma rays are a byproduct in current reactors, they aren’t the way we get energy out.
Some elements can decay via “electron capture” instead of fission or alpha/beta/gamma/… decay, but then what? The “ionizing” neutrino is not going to be useful for getting energy out (plus you will probably still get some X-rays or high-energy electrons anyway).
Thermal energy. That’s the main way we already get energy out.
I didn’t mean we capture the neutrinos, I just mentioned them because AIUI, pretty much anything that happens to a nucleus kicks out neutrinos, but they’re harmless and we don’t care about them.
Big, heavy fission fragments (which are themselves radioactive…) are also ionizing as they slam into things.
There was an idea to construct a fission-fragment reactor
that extracts energy from fission reactions
apparently it uses a magnetohydrodynamic generator.