I was reading about boron and it’s use as a candidate in aneutronic fusion. I believe that it said that boron-11 would fuse with a proton with 500KeV. That seemed like a pretty low energy for a proton, but we aren’t doing it so I want to know why. It occurred to me that you aren’t trying to capture the charged particles from the reactions (after all, you started with protons), you are trying to capture the energy released by the reaction. How does one do that? Stick the apparatus in a tank of water?
I don’t think we’ll be fusing boron any time soon.
But the last section of the Wikipedia article suggests you don’t need the heat exchanger found in today’s nuclear plants, that instead the power could be captured directly.