Reply To: Fusion Oil

[Milemaster]

Looking at the post regarding downsizing and its difficulties, I still think that a merging between the Photovoltaic and the ultracapicotrs might solve a couple of the new problems.
Beryllium is a light wheight metal with High thermal and electric conductivity, transparent to most radiations including X-Rays and of course slow neutrons.
Photovoltaic arrays are made with the interface of a metal or electron donor film and must be collected by a conducting media. Recently nanotubes that can be layered and packed on surfaces have been tested as a way of quickly removing the electrons from the donor surface to be carried to the conductive surface.
Now, ultra capacitors are mostly constructed by three layers of conducting surface sandwiching a a high surface area that collect the charges like activated cardon particles or nanotubes.
So tying the knots, we have all the raw ingredients to construct a photovoltaic envelope that stores charges as a capacitor.. But that’s not the whole story.
In this multilayer material there are many layers of thermal conducting material to channel heat outside and the best of this: The nine inches of lead that Eric has calculated as an adequate shielding can be replaced by the one thousand layers of the lightwheigh materials based beryllium, and carbon and hydrogen.
Of course as Impaler mentioned, specialized individual components meet their requirements very efficiently, but adds complexity, bulk and weigh to the reactor as a whole. The challenge is to make the same combined together and shed away some square foots and many pounds the chamber.
LPP does not need to undertake this tasks, Ultracapitors and photovoltaic manufacturers will gladly asign development money to their budgets once that they see the potentials to their markets

References:
NASA STUDY ON LOW ENERGY NEUTRON SHIELDING FOR HIGH ALTITUD AIRCRAFTS: http://es.scribd.com/doc/53707897/Low-Energy-Neutron-Radiation-Shielding