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

[jamesr]

I have been thinking any surface layer will need to be much thicker & more robust than a few nm skin.

If you compare with the materials & heat fluxes for tokamak divertors (the area at the bottom of the tokamak where the magnetic field sweeps any plasma that escapes the confinement down to collide with & dissapate its energy). They are either carbon fibre composite (CFC) or tungsten. We would not really want tungsten as it would absorb too much of the X-Rays, but the CFC materials they use could be a possibility, and can cope with ~20MW per m^2, and transient peaks of 500kJ/m^2 in 0.1ms or 5GW/m^2.

Even if we had a 0.1mm surface conductive/protective layer the differential thermal & pinch force stresses between it and the beryllium bulk would probably just make it all crack & fall off.

Another thought is to dope the beryllium to form an alloy with better overall electrical conductivity. After all Beryllium is pretty good anyway from most other aspects so just tweaking the properties slightly to optimize the thermal and electrical properties is probably the easiest option (although still a few years of research).