A small scuba tank of this stuff that can power it for years does not seem like a problem, but people often have very wacko threat-assessment and any technology that has “nuclear” anywhere near it will get some peoples heart rates going.

maihem wrote:

A small scuba tank of this stuff that can power it for years does not seem like a problem, but people often have very wacko threat-assessment and any technology that has “nuclear” anywhere near it will get some peoples heart rates going.

MRI scanners (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) would have been called NMR imagers but they had to drop the “nuclear” from the front (not many people wanted to lay in a humming tube for half an hour if it had the word “nuclear” printed on the side 🙂

Point known, and well stated, hence why we call this “Fusion” not “Nuclear Fusion”.

Matt M wrote: But let’s remember the crazies who will be opposing anything nuclear.
They will always take the worst possible scenario.

Example – That swimming pool contains enough liquid water to
drown over 100,000 people!

You know the FF reactors are to be cooled with Dihydrogen Monoxide? I think their is a point were even to the layman that fear mongering becomes moronic and not worth listening too.

Regarding NIMBY and Nuclear.

One thing I’ve not seen mentioned by anyone else. A Focus Fusion power block would be a nuclear device and would, i imagine, be regulated by the NRC.

NRC regulation would greatly impact design, building costs and siting issues. Would they require a concrete containment capable of withstanding the impact of a fully fueled jumbo jet?…. fission plants have one, so……

Hope you enjoyed the good news……..

Rematog

Being under NRC regulation may, or may not, be “regulating it out of existance”.

My opinion is that it will be somewhere in between the extremes. They will require some things that add to the cost, but not so much as to more than double or triple the cost. Not enought to kill by anymeans.

Thinking about the fuel being a neurotoxin. How powerful? Is it a gas at atmospheric temperature and pressure? If it is truely dangerous, that alone is a strong arguement against unattended, distributed deployment. (Not just concerned about accidental release, but preventing theft and mis-use).

As Focus Fusion Power block become more common, and develops a proved safety record, risks become will be more understood and accepted by the public, then it will become more of a caniadate for urban use. But I don’t understand the big need for it to be used completely distributed and unattended, except in possible special cercumstances.

I could see Power Blocks being used as back-up power for hospitals, etc. They would likely then contract out the maintenance. But this kind of urban use would only be accepted by the general public after a large number of years to a safe track record.

Focus Fusion can provide very cheap energy, and the grid can be supplied by multiple “nodes”, beginning by repowering existing sites, progressing to new facalities progressively closer to loads as the technology becomes accepted and proven safe. It can be used for large scale desalination projects, power clean metals production and either directly charge electric vehicle, or be used to produce fuel for vehicles, either H2 or some varity of synthetic liquid fuel, and be used provide the energy needed to make fertilizer and pump irrigating water…none of these uses require unattended distributed use.

With time, costs will come down, and a wider varity of users will emerge. But, even if a power block drops to $250k fully installed cost, how many individuals would have, or spend on a power source, that much money. Remember too, most user do not want to deal with utilities (which is what power is, just like water and sewer). Think about it, almost no one in areas served by city water and sewer opt to install a well and septic system. Simplier, easier and actually cheaper (economies of scale) to let an specialist deal with it.

I agree with Transmute…

While special interests have a loud voice (mostly with the speech of $), the U.S. is at it’s heart a democracy.

Any politician who was publicly perceived as standing between Americans and their standard of living would be road kill at the next election.

So sops to the special interests there will be, but oil and utilities have as much chance of stopping this as the movie industry had of stopping television, or the buggy builders of stopping Henry Ford.

Regulated utilities will likely be seeking recovery of their “prudently invested” capital, per the social contract giving them their monopoly. If you consider a graph with two lines, the higher being “rates” (utility gross income actually), and the other being “cost to produce power” (total utility operating cost & allowed profit actually), then if the “rates” drop at X% per year, and “Costs” drop at X-N% per year, both going down till they reach the new equilibrium and rejoin (Focus Fusion fully deployed), then the area between the to lines needs to be the value of the stranded assets (Obsolete power plants). These will likely not be straight lines, with early cost decreases to fulfill customer expectations, but an extension of higher “rates” after full deployment of Focus Fusion, in order to make the “area between the lines” match the needed capital recovery.

Non-regulated Independent Power Producers (called IPP in the industry) will not have recourse to this and will have to write off tens or hundreds of billions in obsolete plant. Some people will lose their shirts. If fact, I foresee the regulated utilities using the leverage of the new lower prices to attempt to kill off IPP and regain that market for themselves.

Other existing and new industries will deploy as fast as they can get delivery of power blocks and regulatory approval. I hope Mr. Lerner and crew hurry, it will be a wonderful, busy, time to be in this business.

(Despite what you may think, this will cause a massive increase in demand for people like me….in order to deploy FF, if it happens before I retire. I have worked for a regulated utility and currently work for an IPP, so I know both beasts and will likely be one of the initial losers. But, there will be work to do, and I’ve changed jobs before, it’s part of life.)

Rematog

One comment on the possibility of single 5MW units or small clusters: they need not ever be”untended” in the sense that they will always be located, in the industrialized countries, in sites that already have some 24-7 staffing, such as service stations or electrical substations. However, technical monitoring will certainly be done remotely.

In terms of airplane crashes, there is nothing in the facility, certainly not the the decaborane, which has remotely close to the killing power of the crash itself.