Reply To: Barack Obama on Energy

[asymmetric_implosion]

jamesr wrote: Thanks for the links. I haven’t read them all, but in R. Petr et al’s paper their ‘high power’ is 1.5kJ input yielding 0.08% of X-rays (ie 12J).

Using the figures from Eric’s 2007 Tech Talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4w_dzSvVaM 36m30s in) he had:
Peak I 2.0MA
Gross input: 13.1kJ
X-Ray/Input: 81%
Beam/Input: 98%
(Beam+X-Ray)/Input: 1.79

so 0.81*13.1 = 10.6kJ ie. ~1000x as much X-ray energy as these lithography devices. One or two orders of magnitude more and maybe erosion resistant materials can cope with a reasonable lifetime, But we are talking about 3 orders of magnitude higher fluxes. The end of the anode has got to absorb only a tiny fraction of the X-rays passing through it if it is going to survive. Basically that means Beryllium is the only candidate that comes close.

I refer you to comments made in another thread (https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/973/P15/#9513) about this. I did a little back of the envelope math and it turns out that W is not so bad when one considers a few things.