Reply To: would nuclear energy really be accessible to all?

[Allan Brewer]

Aeronaut wrote:
For mass production we’re going to need as simple an anode design as we can get …

Sure, but it has to work before it can be mass-produced, and there are some serious worries about the cooling feasibility (2 kg/s of helium gas would need to be pumped) (~175 atmospheres) (supersonic)….

Can I suggest a helpful experiment for LPP (which they have probably scheduled anyway?) – When the Be anode is mounted, assuming it has the same dimensions as the copper electrode, and other things being equal (gas, pressure etc.), How much extra power is required to get the same current as with the copper electrode? This extra power represents the extra heating in the Be electrode to overcome its extra resistivity over Cu, and by comparing the relative resistivities of Cu and Be it should represent 0.53 of the total power loss in electrode resistance at about room temperature. Applying the temperature coefficient for Be resistivity for the expected running temperature of the electrode (which might triple the power loss) and multiplying by the number of shots per second should give a reasonable estimate of the electrode cooling requirement. Then we can either relax or worry/think with a target.