Reply To: NIMBY FUD

[Joeviocoe]

asymmetric_implosion wrote: The charged particle beam to electricity component of the generator is very well tested already when you have a single charged particle species flying through it. I see two real concerns: can the x-rays be converted efficiently with the onion and does the ions produced by the plasma focus travel alone?

The x-ray issue is largely straightforward to test if the onion design exists on paper. The charged particle beam issue is more complex. Firing an accelerator alone isn’t enough. You need an intense ion current of >100 kA passing through something like 100 Torr of gas for tens of centimeters. There is some evidence in published literature that the ions are not traveling alone; they have electron partners. I don’t mean they are neutral in the sense of an atom but rather the heavy ions are pulling electrons along for the ride. If ions and electrons travel together, the net current is zero. With net zero current, you can’t use the transformer based technique proposed by LPP to convert the ion beam to electrical energy. Even if you get a current, what fraction is neutralized before you reach conversion location? If every He ion drags along one electron, you’ve cut the beam current in half. Breakeven suddenly got harder. A test with a conventional particle accelerator is hard because the currents are typically limited to less than 100A and passing ions into a gas cell for the test is challenging.

It was my understanding the the intense magnetic field of the plasmoid, on the order of GigaGauss… will force electrons in the opposite direction (toward the cent of the anode) while sending the positive ions away from the anode. So before they leave the region of the plasmoid, they are already on opposite trajectories.