npts2020

Sure. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I had always thought the difference in fragments was in size of mass not charge and that in fission it was mass lost not charge. That is why you don't get a useful electric current directly from fission. I could see a magnetic field, atomic filter or some similar scheme possibly causing an electric current to be produced, as the OP seems be asking, but the catch (as usual) will be in getting more energy out than you put into the process.

Well, in a world where "might makes right" and there always seems to be a military ready to invade a neighbor or even some country far away it seems unlikely in practice before humans become extinct. It seems to me it would require adopting a universal set of rules for all nations and all peoples, something I don't see the ruling class in most places ever allowing to happen.

Why is that? Wouldn't the highly ionized negative particles have just as highly ionized counterparts with positive charge?

Even more unfortunately, it isn't because it couldn't be done. Locally would be harder, IMO. No, even though I have been in some supposedly tough neighborhoods all over the world and been threatened on more than one occasion (although it has been a while). Apparently, I am pretty good at convincing a potential adversary that there will be no benefit for being so.

I feel much safer when no weapons are around.

$$$$$, same as virtually everything supplied to the military. What is the point of having airplanes costing hundreds of millions of dollars to be used in the kind of war we haven't been involved with for longer than most of us have been alive?

Of course they are ionized temporarily. What is the net charge of all the fragments?

One of the problems is that fission occurs much better (in uranium, anyway) with thermal (slow) neutrons but those fissions make fast (high momentum) neutrons. The hydrogen in water is very efficient at slowing those neutrons down by absorbing some of their energy causing the water to heat up enough to make steam for running a turbine to turn a generator for making electricity. If one or more of those steps can be eliminated, you may have something worthwhile. The sticking point comes in channeling exploded atoms with virtually no net charge into an electrical current and finding materials that will hold up to nuclear bombardment, like swansont points out above. It's all about turning atomic kinetic energy, which almost always exhibits itself as heat, into a usable form of energy.

I wasn't aware the OP was for direct conversion from fission to electricity, rather than asking about a novel configuration to do essentially what we now do. My apologies for not understanding that to be the case.

"They" would probably need to raid silos. Producing materiel that is refined enough to make a nuclear explosion is not a trivial undertaking and requires expertise, high tech equipment and a fair amount of time.

Take the stack and put a hole through the middle for a rod of neutron absorbing (but not fissile) material like boron or hafnium to control the reaction and you have essentially the same kind of configuration as reactors commonly in use for power production today.

If it is possible for a computer to solve it but I don't see why a quantum computer would do it any better/differently from another computer of equal power.

Unless that private sector is contracting with the government, check out health care spending and defense contracting in the US. Also, how is the USPS funded? Or is mail delivery not a public service?

You might be interested in "The Invisible Universe" by Matthew Bothwell from 2021. Anything very much older will miss the latest findings and revisions. I don't know of much besides scientific papers about quark stars, theorized but not yet shown to actually exist/have existed.

Actually, (on Earth, anyway) a pendulum does a 360 degree swing because the rotation of the planet will make it swing in an ever widening ellipse beginning with the first movement. This does take quite some time to be noticeable so can be ignored to make the apt analogy valid.

I don't know but this seems pretty innovative. Some guy from Australia built something similar which can be wielded like an AK-47 or other rifle.

Problem is "getting enough external sources of fertilizer" without causing a host of other problems and I don't see hydroponics replacing dirt farming anytime soon for many crops.

Monocrop farming is not recommended. I would think alternating between legumes and grains (depends on the climate where the grower is for types) is the best bet.

It was a smashing success!

What I see is that depopulation is being conflated with what is sustainable for 8,000,000,000 humans in the environment they desire to live. I would not (nor have seen anyone here) argue that depopulation wouldn't be necessary for everyone to live the lifestyle of an average American. Are you telling me you can't see the difference between figuring out a lifestyle for X number of people and how many people can be supported at X type of lifestyle?

Apparently, trying to figure out what is sustainable for the number of humans on Earth is a tangential discussion to climate change. I fail to see how that translates into; Especially when put into the context of what I have actually written on this thread.

Agreed. Mr. Trump has probably had more lawsuits (supposedly 3,500-4,000) filed against him than everyone who ever visited this forum combined.

That is the slippery fish I am trying to get hold of. I defined what "sustainable lifestyle" was in the context in which I am using it but nobody seems able to see any limits the planet's citizens ought to limit themselves to within that context. Obviously! That is why the current threshold would be well below some future one after the ecosystem has gotten back to a more steady state. It's a shame that someone with your intelligence can't imagine any other ways of reducing the population, something I have not advocated. If you take the statement of overpopulation being a problem within the context of everything I have written previously on this thread, you will see that it is only overpopulation in relation to resource use. Hence, the question of what is sustainable for the number of humans in existence?

I can see the issue ending up appealed to the Supreme Court with Mr. Trump claiming he couldn't get a fair trial of his peers because he has no peers. Of course, a frivolous appeal but it would take more time to resolve (along with all of the other appeals) and push final resolution even farther into the future, possibly even beyond "The Donald's" lifetime. His people are experts at delaying and tying things up until something happens like the prosecutor leaves office or plaintiffs lose interest/run out of money.

It seems "history" is beginning to show us what unlimited economic "growth" will do to us. "Fair share" may well be a political issue but it seems to me to be a good place to start for considering what exactly constitutes a sustainable lifestyle And I think it is a great mistake to not consider population to be a large part of the problem. Firstly, zero emissions is not necessarily the goal, we will almost certainly have some amount of them no matter what we do. The real goal IMO should be to keep emissions of all kinds of pollutants (not just greenhouse gases) below the level at which the ecosphere can effectively filter out or neutralize them. With the current rate and style of resource use/waste, overpopulation is certainly a problem and has been for longer than the time anyone commenting here has been around, especially if we are all to aspire to a first world lifestyle.