Neutrons are a pain to control as a beam because they have no charge, so methods employing electric or magnetic optics are not applicable. Typical pocket sources use the alpha(9Be,12C)n reaction to produce neutrons; if you have a reactor handy, you can moderate (slow) the neutrons produced and use them... this would be by far the most economical option.

As a nuclear chemistry PhD, I am highly skeptical of the practicality of this as an energy source.

You'd just just a neutron reflector to shape an omnidirectional source, right?

Do you see any modification to it being feasible?

When particles come together and form a nucleus, it releases energy. This energy is because the new form is more energetically favorable, that is it requires less energy than the particles had separately. This is what makes it stable - it requires input of energy to undo the release of energy. (It doesn't guarantee that some other state is even more stable, like some kind of fission. But going directly back to the form it was in takes extra energy.) This is called the binding energy and it's the same as any other kind of fusion.

I'm up to speed on the physics behind fusion and fission, what I am missing is this fractional fusion/fission idea with respect to quarks.

The suggestion was (as I understand it) that one could "inject/collide/drop" a neutron onto this matter and the neutron would then fission into it's component quarks, capturing them and releasing the binding energy. So this stable matter is a quark soup held together by the strong force because you've managed to get enough up and down quarks together at a low enough energy?

It isn't a mechanism I'm familiar with and I was interested if there was any experimental results to suggest this stuff would behave the way they hope it would.

I think they don't have any experiment results, only some new (unproven) theoretical ideas.

Moreover, I'm skeptical because a similar idea may apply in neutron starts, but the current model of neutron starts has a crust of about 100m (300ft) that has different kinds of intermediate structures with a lot of neutrons and protons and is called "nuclear pasta" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pasta

I can't find how much experimental support has nuclear pasta, but IIUC there are some measurements of the density of the layers of the neutron stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star#Density_and_press...

Exactly. At best, an inefficient energy storage technology.

Edit: the difference from fusion (which is a primary energy source) is that in fusion your starting reactants are available. In this case, you'd have to spend lots of energy in a heavy ion collide to create the initial reactants from scratch.

Also, this type of matter is experimentally disfavored in the same way as strange matter: if quark matter was stable, all neutron stars should have converted to quark matter already, but measurements appear to be consistent with them being made from ordinary matter.

Uranium isotopes. One of Feynmans safety changes involved changing how uranium was transported (?) in water at the time. Slow neutrons were building up toward criticality in the water. Something like that. I think it’s a standard trick in particle physics to create a particle source by having a radioisotope at the end of a cylinder/magnetic field. Not sure how they’d do it for neutrons but that’s what I think is done.

I would assume it's similar to fusion. The energy would come from the binding energy, but in this case the binding energy between the quarks in QCD?