Reply To: Global Warming

[zapkitty]

asymmetric_implosion wrote: I hope the photovoltaics work as described. Is there test data to support the 80% efficiency or are these theoretical calculations?

The FF onion uses the photoelectric effect, not the photovoltaic effect. Although the effects are related, and it’s an error that I’ve made myself in referring to FF, the photoelectric effect is different from the photovoltaic effect.

In simple terms, the photovoltaic effect encourages conduction of electrons between different bands in an atomic structure while the photoelectric effect knocks electrons loose from the surface of a material. Higher energy photons means more efficient transfer.

The effect is well understood but no one has needed to harvest x-rays for power before… that is, before FF 🙂

asymmetric_implosion wrote: If they do work why aren’t they deployed on every nuclear power plant? Tons of gamma rays are produced and could be converted to useful electrons.

Why did you switch up to gamma rays? That’s not something an FF unit would produce much of.

The FF x-rays are high energy photons but they can be stopped by a few thousand layers of metal foil: the “onion”

The gamma rays that are a copious byproduct of fission reactions are much more penetrating than FF’s x-rays and are thus much, much harder to convert.

And there are currently no commercial or natural x-ray sources worth trying to harvest for energy. Instead, people use electricity to generate x-rays that they need.

And that brings us to one of the FF spinoff techs: use as an efficient, almost self-powering portable x-ray generator. Add a partial “onion” and it becomes self-powering. Great for bridge inspections etc etc etc etc (lots of uses)

asymmetric_implosion wrote: I hadn’t considered using the heat for buildings and such. The loss seems significant but probably better than a turbine. The Russians have some data on this since they used fission plants to heat towns.

I guess the big question is will a power conversion cycle be needed at all?

The FF unit beam conversion is currently estimated to be not quite sufficient to recover the electrical energy needed for the next shot. Thus the “onion.”