Reply To: Peak Oil from Truth Out

[zapkitty]

Tulse wrote: I believe the tungsten is just for the current round of tests. The intent is to make the production electrodes out of beryllium, as it is relatively transparent to x-rays and thus won’t heat up as much and absorb energy that would be captured by the “onion” and produce power.

Yep, but the more immediate concern would be the x-rays adding even more heat to an already serious, but solvable, electrode cooling problem.

So using tungsten or any other high-z material for the electrodes in a [em]production[/em] machine would be a recipe for deep-fried fofu.

Tungsten is needed for the intermediate stages of testing, though, as it can take quite a bit more abuse from the researchers as they figure out how to build one of these things 🙂