Expert snuggler wrote:The TF had compact fusion plants. What if the Gbaba were tracking neutrino emissions? No matter how well you shield your electrical equipment, it would require theoretical breakthroughs to shield neutrinos.
They'd have to detect it against the background noise of a nearby star, though.
Interestingly enough, the proposed reactions for artificial fusion power don't actually produce neutrinos, so you might not have to worry about this after all.
In fusion, a neutrino is only produced when a proton is transmuted into a neutron (or vice-versa, with all signs reversed) - since charge must be conserved, a positron is emitted, but since lepton number must be conserved you have to also get an neutrino to balance the anti-electron (aka positron). The reason this is relevant is that this depends on the *weak* nuclear force (it's actually a type of radioactive decay), and is thus a very unlikely event.
For example, in stars like the Sun the first step of the proton-proton chain is commonly described as "1 proton + 1 proton -> 1 deuterium + 1 positron + 1 neutrino", where one of the protons has become a neutron in the deuterium nucleus. What this overlooks is that, since it requires the unlikely conversion of a proton into a neutron, most of the time when two protons fuse they just fall right back apart again into two protons and only rarely do you actually get a deuterium nucleus out.
Thus, the first step of the proton-proton chain (and any other reaction requiring this sort of conversion) is actually extremely slow, which is not what you want for artificial fusion. Stars can get away with it because they're enormous, but a fusion reactor needs much faster reactions to actually produce any useful power. Thus you get proposed fusion reactions like D+D -> T+p/3He+n or D+3He -> 4He+p, which do not require the transmutation of protons into neutrons (or vice-versa) and therefore do not emit neutrinos. It's plausible that you might get a few neutrinos in some cases through very rare side reactions, but they're not the main output.