Need of beryllium and other rare materials for Focus Fusion

[Luis Ernesto Schmidt]

I have following question: Do the Focus Fusion device require beryllium or other very rare metals to work ?. It would be a cruel irony that a device intended to provide cheap energy relies on very rare minerals to carry out the fusion reactions.

Friendly,

Luis Ernesto Schmidt

[Transmute]

Perhaps for the electrodes and such, but the rare metals would not be lost to the fusion reaction, they would just end up sputtering on to the decelerator, and would need to be clean off and recycled once in a while. Fusion reactions other then p+B11 use rare elements (rare on earth) like deuterium (which is not to rare just expensive to purify) tritium, and He3.

[fenn]

Beryllium is only used as an alloying agent to make the copper electrodes easier to machine. it isn’t necessary at all. The semiconductors used in the switching devices, however, may contain rare elements in trace quantities.

[Matt M]

We have plenty of beryllium mines here in North Carolina. Most have been shut
down because of low demand.

[JimmyT]

Fenn, you are right about the center electrode containing berellium. But the reason is that berellium is transparent to x-rays. Which cromrises about 40% of the energy output of each pulse. We wouldn’t be able to capture the x-rays and convert them to electricty if they are absorbed by the electrode.

[Zara]

Using a gas inside the inner tube and a different inductance could yield a much higher out-put. If you take into consideration most of the research on the market. I can certainly see that you’ll need the beryllium, but the Boron would be the thing I would be least likely to like in the equation. To quote wikipedia:

Boron is never found as a free element in nature.

With this you also have to have enough Boron around in order to make the proper substances to make this gasouse stuff inside the tube as well. With all of this in mind you can just look and see that you are able to see how it can be done though at the same time there are those setbacks that can befall a Defense Contractor in this long process of getting approval for everything. It’s not simple to get clearnce levels and then work on stuff and then acquire materials for small testing and then the actual construction of a larger scale device for “show-and-tell” then you go from there. This is a very long process that just got back underway with senate support in the last few yrs.

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