Reply To: Repowering the electric utility industry

[asymmetric_implosion]

The fix is to send out the chamber for cleaning or implementing a cleaning gas mixture involving fluorine or other extremely reactive gas that can volatilize the contaminant. The problem in a reactor environment is the shutdown time to clean. It could take minutes to hours to coat the parts and then hours to clean them. The “on time” for a coal fire plant or nuclear plant is typically rated at more than 90%. That would be hard to accomplish if coating takes hours and the cleaning takes hours. The alternative would be to run parallel fusion “light bulbs” driven by the same pulse power. One bulb is on while the other is cleaned. I don’t know the boron deposition rate but it is probably an important experiment to try in the near term. The reason to try carbon it is more conducting and dealing with it is low risk from a human stand point.

The boron will be a plasma when it is emitted by the pinch. It will plate out onto something before dust forms. No time to nucleate particles when transit times are less than 10 us. That is not to say the coating will not flake off as dust on a longer time scale. Electrostatic collection might be feasible on particles that have fallen off the walls. The real problem is will the insulator get coated. You need a clean insulator for the PF to work correctly.