Reply To: NIMBY FUD
The Focus Fusion Society › Forums › Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Experiment (LPPX) › Four Billion Degree Electrons! › Reply To: NIMBY FUD
jamesrwolfram wrote: In most plasmas that I’m familiar with, electrons are consistently much hotter than ions.
That depends on the heating mechanism. For example, resistive heating is only significant for electrons, so they can get to a higher temperature this way. But this heating mechanism is only capable of getting plasmas to a few keV not >100keV (since resistivity falls with temperature).
Alternatively, as in tokamaks, ion cyclotron resonant heating (ICRH) can be used to specifically heat just the ions.
In the case of DPF, I see the 400keV electron temperature as a bad thing since it leads to excessive bremsstrahlung radiation losses. The key will be if the proportion of energy going to raise the electron temperature can be limited enough with the switch to p-B11 fuel.