(11-03-2013, 01:33 AM)iancampbell Wrote: Tachyon - Is that actually so? The reason I'm asking the question is that a high proportion of the released energy is in the form of neutrinos, which are fairly useless at low tech levels.
I don't really know what question you're asking here.
Monopoles are topological solitons. Q-balls are non-topological solitons. Both catalyze proton decay, for example, via baryon number violation.
The typical decay products for a proton is an electron and a neutral pion, which promptly decays into 2 gammas. Charged particles and gammas are easy to harness (e.g. surround the reactor with water).
There are less likely decay chains involving neutral pions and muons, where the pions again produce gammas and the muons produce electrons, neutrinos, and antineutrinos. You can still recover energy from the gammas and electrons easily.
So the fraction of usable energy from a Q-ball is exactly the same as that from a non-intermediate mass GUT monopole, since they are the same mechanism.
However, it is easier to get a non-topological soliton than a topological soliton, and in turn it's easier to get a topological soliton from the conditions in the core of the non-topological one.