Reply To: Fusion Oil

[KeithPickering]

The more I think about it … the less and less enamored I am of photovoltaics for x-ray capture. Huge cost, and yet-another untried technology are the barriers. Semiconductors for x-ray PV? Seriously? At ~$1 per Watt, haven’t we lost all cost advantage? And that’s not even accounting for the fact that nobody’s ever actually built an x-ray PV cell, as far as I’m aware, not even in the lab.

Meanwhile, as vansig’s equation shows, a nice source of HOT can make a fabulously efficient heat engine. Old, proven technology, and pretty cheap too. That’s where we need to be looking. And what we need to look FOR is a liquid (possibly a salt, possibly liquid only at high temps) that absorbs well in the FF’s Brehmstrellung band. Regarding materials for high temps, the actual temp of the absorbing liquid is easily controlled by engineering. You could build it for a lot of absorbing liquid at a lower temp, or less absorbing liquid at a higher temp. The temp of the liquid is also dependent on the distance from the x-ray source, which is another way of saying the same thing. These problems look a lot more solvable than x-ray PV’s, at least from where I sit.