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

[Allan Brewer]

Henning wrote: We will not be able to use even high-Tc superconductors (highest claim to date around 250K), because that’s still pretty chilly in an environment where you want to pump out heat generated. .

1) But if we superconduct the current in and out, then we eliminate the vast majority (maybe 4MW) of the resistive heat by-product i.e. we have much less cooling to achieve.
2) Some copper oxide superconductors can still operate at 50 degrees above liquid nitrogen boiling temperature giving a lot of margin.

There is a discussion on Talk-Polywell with Johan Prins who claims to have obtained a much much higher Tc with his own diamond based process and theory. But still that might be doubtable.

…mmmm??

So there is something called ultraconductors based on polymers which should have several magnitudes more conductivity than copper. Yes, polymers are insulator, but they claim with films that’s different. Maybe overall it’s similar to graphene.

That sounds very promising – let’s hope.

Oh, and anything with high Z gets heated by x-rays anyway. So superconduction with heavy metals (Yb, or whatever) is a bad idea. .

But the superconductor can be extremely thin so it matters less.
Indeed the whole problem arises because the fast-rising current is only conducted in the outer film of the metal anode. Another possible approach to this might be laminating the metal so there are effectively a very large number of separate parallel metal conductors all of which have an outer film and can carry current?

Aeronaut wrote: The fastest way to double current is to halve the electrode length. Eric mentioned what seemed to be a very short anode in the Google Talks presentation.

Absolutely, we are not only talking about heat produced and cooling requirement, but inversely about the capability of the capacitors to deliver current to the plasmoid, which might also be a limiting factor.