Reply To: Global Warming

[asymmetric_implosion]

More than double or tripe, probably like 10X, but who cares. The onion is described as a low cost, easy to build solution. If you can convert the photons from fission at 80% to electricity you gain another 3-5% efficiency on a fission plant. That is game changing in the power industry and probably worth more than $100M. That would build a nice PF test facility and demo reactor.

Jamesr: thanks for the ref, NIST XCOM is my standard data base for these calculations. For a standard SS304 vacuum wall, you lose sensitivity below 40 keV. For a pinch, mean x-ray energy is near the pinch voltage. For a 2 MA PF, the maximum pinch voltage is around 500 kV so you can expect many x-rays around 500 keV. If you do a better job of pinching as expected from LPP you could get up to 1 MV as the mean energy. Go up in current and the pinch voltage increases along with the mean energy of the x-rays. Consider the anode converts most of the runaway electrons to x-rays in existing PF devices. If the anode is Be, your electron energy is likely lost to heat. If the plasmoid is the dominant converter it will be B doing most of the converting to x-rays. There is a reason bremms x-rays sources use high Z converters. One might argue that less x-rays is a good thing. According to Zapkitty these x-rays are supposed to push you over the top to Q>1. It seems pretty convoluted to me.

As I already stated above, fission produced 700 keV photons nominally. It seems that the two system are in the same ball park. The x-ray spectrum is a bremmsstrahlung spectrum and it favors lower energy but it is not stretch that LPP will be producing x-ray that are already produced on operating systems that would make excellent test beds for the “onion”.