Since each conversion process introduces more inefficiency during the production of electricity, wouldn't it be really beneficial to obtain the output of the fusion reaction particles as ionized atoms and use them directly to create a potential difference as if they are a power source?
Yes.
Surround your fusing plasma with photovoltaic or Peltier-Seebeck elements - with suitably sized heatsinks on them.
Since your plasma is neutral, there's no flux of charge carriers that you can directly employ.
But the photons liberated from the plasma are admirably able to carry away heat.
No. In a controlled thermonuclear fusion reaction using magnetic confinement of plasma in a Tokamak, actually before heat exchanging with a liquid such as water, there will be intermediate heat exchangers that will extract heat from the fusion reaction that will heat a lithium blanket around the entire vacuum chamber of the Tokamak. The heat of the reaction will be contained in lithium and it will be removed from it to turn into steam and be used in turbines coupled to electric generators and obtain electricity.
Tokamaks are great expensive machines to justify researcher's jobs. Since they will not in any foreseable future become energy production plants, they can enable and sustain research careers. Many more fusion machine architectures exist which imho have much better prospects of achieving unity gain (more electricity produced than consumed) with little or no radioactivity. Think of Tokamak as the Steam Engine of the 19th century, at some point it was rendered obsolete by the internal combustion (intermitent explosions) engine. Most of these architectures can use direct electricity conversion schemes.
For direct energy conversion from fission reaction with up to 90% conversion efficiency, fission fragment reactor is proposed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_fragment_reactor
Another study for Direct Fusion Energy Conversion:
https://www.nifs.ac.jp/report/NIFS-101.pdf
- Badges
- Science topic