Non-electrical power, near-term applications of fusion energy

A significant departure from the traditional approach of generating electricity from DT fusion power plants is suggested. This different approach recognizes that near-term commercial applications for fusion energy may be needed to sustain long-term public and private funding for fusion research. Fortunately, there are opportunities for using the fusion process to make useful products other than electricity. In the past, these applications were associated with "by-products" from large thermonuclear plasmas such as fissile material, synfuels, hydrogen, process heat, etc. Such uses require the construction of full-scale, multi-GW(th) reactors and therefore have essentially the same timeline as commercial fusion electricity plants. More recent investigations of alternative approaches to fusion with a wide variety of fuels have revealed that there is another class of small (a few watts to < 10 kW) devices which can have immediate commercial applications even when the overall Q value (energy out/energy in) is < 1. If the production of small, sometimes portable sources of high-energy particles (neutrons, protons, and alpha particles) is cheap enough, they then can compete with other more conventional sources of radiation (accelerators and small fission reactors). Possible near-term applications are discussed with a focus on the production of medical isotopes. The use of small devices that can burn advanced fusion fuels such as (DHe)-He-3 also appear to be quite advantageous to this stage of fusion research.