True. But enriching deuterium out of "natural" sources might be a chore. To get 20 kg of it (like "Harry" and "Tom" collected in their one sortie), you'd need to go through about 150 tons of Earth-type seawater with 100% efficiency.
The E-D supposedly runs on about three thousand cubic meters of antideuterium and twenty times that volume of deuterium for her purpoted three-year endurance. We're supposedly speaking of something with the density of liquid hydrogen in both cases, so the big mother needs 200 and 4,000 tons of the stuff, respectively. And that's assuming that the 200 tons are already antideuterium. The gadget described in the TNG Tech Manual can apparently translate deuterium to antideuterium with 10% efficiency (that is, one part of deuterium becomes one part of antideuterium while the other nine are spent in generating the necessary energy for running the process, supposedly in D-D fusion). So to fill up the E-D, one needs 6,000 tons of deuterium.
That's 45 megatons of seawater. Even assuming the Voyager consumes just one-tenth that of the E-D, it will take considerable resources to pump through 4.5 million cubic meters of seawater and filter it (a process that also takes energy, for which more deuterium is needed).
It probably is doable. But whether it is practical... If I were a starship captain, I might go look for sources of pre-refined deuterium whenever I can.
Timo Saloniemi
The E-D supposedly runs on about three thousand cubic meters of antideuterium and twenty times that volume of deuterium for her purpoted three-year endurance. We're supposedly speaking of something with the density of liquid hydrogen in both cases, so the big mother needs 200 and 4,000 tons of the stuff, respectively. And that's assuming that the 200 tons are already antideuterium. The gadget described in the TNG Tech Manual can apparently translate deuterium to antideuterium with 10% efficiency (that is, one part of deuterium becomes one part of antideuterium while the other nine are spent in generating the necessary energy for running the process, supposedly in D-D fusion). So to fill up the E-D, one needs 6,000 tons of deuterium.
That's 45 megatons of seawater. Even assuming the Voyager consumes just one-tenth that of the E-D, it will take considerable resources to pump through 4.5 million cubic meters of seawater and filter it (a process that also takes energy, for which more deuterium is needed).
It probably is doable. But whether it is practical... If I were a starship captain, I might go look for sources of pre-refined deuterium whenever I can.
Timo Saloniemi
