Still doesn't seem to help with radiation emission because the rate of energy loss by a body is still the fourth power of it's temperature. And even at a such a

Still doesn't seem to help with radiation emission because the rate of energy loss by a body is still the fourth power of it's temperature. And even at a such a fantastic sounding advantage, it only gets approaches competitive results in respect to air cooling at a surface temperature beyond 2000 C. The Russians were the only ones to achieve a megawatt range continuous reactor in space by dealing with waste heat transmission on a surface that was above 1500 C. The way they did it was by using a thermionic converter which is a heat engine that uses electrons as a working fluid. No one has matched the specs of their thermonic converters and interest in the technology is very small. It is also extremely hard to pull off because 1500 C is just the "cold" end! The hot end must be significantly hotter and this temperature is even hotter than some of our best refractory ceramics can withstand under the physical stress they undergo. Not only that, but these temperatures cause evaporation of the electrodes. The heat regime causes many hard problems that have no easy solutions. I'll tell you I went down this rabbit hole for nearly a year after watching a simple demonstration of a torch powering a fan using a thimble sized converter. Even if you are at the top of the field in materials science research, there is little that has not been tried to make it more practical. But in case you are interested, the work function is the key property that could enable easier designs.