Spallation Is Not the Only Fruit: Low Energy Fusion as a Source of Neutrons

Commercially there is a growing interest in applications of neutrons. Currently the majority of neutron sources are based at research institutions from either reactors or spallation sources. Smaller portable sources contain either fissile isotope or sealed fusors are available, although they either use or produce tritium, or other long lived decay products. As an alternative to the large facilities and the radio-toxicology of current portable sources research is being performed with an aim to produce a fusion based neutron source with neither of these concerns. We show that MCNPX is able to accurately reproduce (p, n) reactions for a number of light elements. Simulations of low energy proton reactions with light nuclei simulated with MCNPX and Geant4 are compared with experiment.