Reply To: Stay out of politics

[belbear42]

Lerner wrote: Actually, preliminary calculations indicate the background plasma, the plasma in the whole vacuum chamber, will cool to something like 2,000 to 3,000 C between pulses. It just has to be hot enough to the boron will not precipitate out, which is a very complicated question of chemistry and dynamics. The electrodes propbaly have to be kept below 800 C to prevent rapid erosion.

That looks pretty hot in there. Cooling the vessel wall seems very obvious but how are you gonna protect those flimsy thin X-ray capturing sheets of metal from melting in that kind of environment? Running coolant tubes through them seems to defeat their very purpose.
And what kind of temperature will the X-ray transparent inner electrode get, which does not only gets the heat burden from the plasma sheets but also has to receive the emitted high-energy electron beam?

Maybe one can build that electrode with coolant channels through it, like Rocketdyne does with those rocket engine combustion chambers and exhaust nozzles.

Chris