Rematog wrote: And we have disagreed before as well.

Scary as X-ray machine, to you. To the general public, in my opinion, it will be seen as more like a fission plant, at first.

As dangerous as a transformer. Absolutely disagree. Transformers are not powerful sources of X-ray and less powerful, but still considerable sources of neutrons. They no longer have PCB’s in their oil (and it wasn’t considered a hazard when it was used).

Point to you on value of heat for HVAC and process use. This will drive distributed use to happen somewhat sooner.

Regarding ecomomy of scale, your point about the core size of a focus fusion module neglects all of the supporting infrastructure. Cooling, fuel and waste handling, controls, maintenance etc. All of these are subject to economy of scale.

I agree that the best fit plant size will be smaller then the current 1-3 GW per site. And distributed use will start sooner and grow more and more with time.

But not to any large percentage of installed capacity during the first 5-10 years. Note: I’m assuming distributed to mean less then 10 power blocks and especially, being place in an urban or commercial setting. Large industrial plants will have them early on.

We will see what public opinion will be, as long as the “N” word is not used it will be as acceptable as MRI, if the “N” word is used it could go down like NMRI.

The fusion reactors x-ray and neutron emission are protected against by solid shielding, it would take someone dismantling the thing at which point it would turn off from the drop in coolent and radiation emission would stop anyways.

Coolent is simply distilled water, and a water to water heat transfer system is not very large as for the hot water produced that could either go to really big radiator (or a heat sink of somekind) or to a building. we are talking about 5 megawatts of heat (assuming the claim 50% efficiency) that about as much heat as a diesel electric locomotive gives off. The fuel use is tiny! A hand held tank of the stuff could power a reactor for month or even years! There is no waste to handle except helium gas which could be jettisoned into the air. The controls are automated and the caps used to charge the reactor are already being arrayed so making larger arrays won’t save anything, maintenance is once every couple of months, not worth a full time staff

Now that I think about it though many dense plasma cores could be mounted together and shoot down the same decelerator, the reactor could be scaled in this manner and use less materials then a single core reactor. But a muliple core reactor is probably going to take some research after single core reactors are proven.