Reply To: Repowering the electric utility industry

[asymmetric_implosion]

Boron fouling might be an issue for the chamber walls, electrodes and insulator. Once the decaborane is converted to a plasma, it will decompose. People observe this in methane PFs. The chemical bonds break in the high temperature, high density plasma. There is no reason for the carbon to grab back four hydrogen atoms. Decaborane will be the same. Boron could coat every surface or form a debris dust. Devices that fire many shots observe dust formation in the vacuum chamber as electrode and insulator material is converted to plasma and then solidifies from the plasma as it cools. Even if the chamber is held at temperature, the boron will still plate out unless there is chemistry that demands for the formation of a gaseous form or boron. I don’t know the answer for sure but I doubt it. If boron readily formed a gas with hydrogen the tokamek guys would already know about it. It was common practice to coat the inside of tokamek with boron for a time.

I find it hard to believe that the fuel will be evacuated between shots if the repetition rate is much greater than 1 Hz. Continuous feed and pump is done for inert gases for high repetition rate PF devices in lithography. I’d imagine a similar strategy would be implemented at the power plant level. Most of the fuel gas could be recycled. It would be interesting to fire a few shots and see how much the gas pressure drops for gases that chemically react and are likely to have solid products. Methane or acetylene seem like good choices as carbon is inert but very messy in terms of vacuum as carbon holds onto everything. Black powder all over the place isn’t very appealing either.

This is a difficult problem. It will take some creative solutions to keep everything working correctly.