Apologies this is probably a stupid idea but I am curious and my knowledge of physics is limited as I am 14. So I was wondering if we could use particle accelerators to achieve nuclear fusion. I have found a few other posts about this but they seem to be about unnecessarily high energy accelerators when only approximately 1 MeV seems to be necessary to reach the fraction of the speed of light for fusion.
So it seems that there are two forces involved there is the electromagnetic which causes the protons to repel preventing fusion and has an infinite range. Then there is the strong force which is approximately 137 times stronger than electromagnetic but has a limited range of a femtometer and is necessary for fusion. So basically all that is required is to overcome the Coulomb barrier which requires the protons to be travelling at around 0.05-0.07c and requires approximately 1 MeV according to my research and calculation. This means that 18.6 MeV profit per collision (19.6 MeV per fusion reaction) so that means that over 5.1% of the nuclei need to fuse to gain energy. This seems to be a major flaw as this seems unlikely to happen.
However I was wondering if this could be overcome by using a 1 MeV linear accelerator to accelerate the hydrogen ions at a target which is essentially a very long and dense highly pressurised chamber of deuterium gas where it is almost certain for collisons to occur due to the high amount of atoms?