I think the single 5 MW units will be more important in developing countries than here. I suspect that something in between single units and huge 200-unit farms will be ideal. I can see the point that it makes sense to have enough together that you have a full-time staff, but that would probably be as low as ten units.

Also, we have been talking about 0.2 cents per kWh–that is not exactly cents per MWh.

I don’t agree that FF will be treated like fission for a generation. If it is, it won’t happen, at least not in the US, where no fission plants have been built in decades. People are not that dumb. They accept the use of radioactive materials in medicine, they know that there’s a difference based on amount, so if we can show that we are talking about billions of times less radioactivity and NO long-term radioactivity above background, they can understand that.

Brian
Hey! Another space elevator fan. Another worthy project, albiet much less advanced and more complex, but also complimentary to this one.

Rematog wrote: Brian….I assume you mean 5 MW. 5 GW would be enough to power a medium sized city.

Placing in individual buildings….maybe in medium to long range future.

I know Mr. Lerner feels this will happen sooner rather than later. I just disagree. It is still a reactor, so will be regulated. And it has a very dangerous chemical for a fuel…not something you can leave un-attended. Maintenance will require trained crafts with engineering/physics and management support. The cost trade-off between transmission system costs vs extra cost to operate the Focus Fusion unit’s distributed will in end drive the decision.

Why would it cost more to operate distributed? Distributed intallation would have travel time and other costs for maintenance personnel to visit for repairs that a central facility would avoid for one. Distrubuted installation would also have added cost for security and monitoring of remote locations. Higher cost to install one here, one there (placing a hundred Focus Fusion block at a central facility would reduce unit cost to install). How would haz-mat response be done for distributed focus fusion units?

Think about the building managers and building maintenance personnel you’ve known. Do you want to work/live in building where they would be running a fission reactor? With neurotoxic fuel?

I assume you mean “running a fusion reactor”. The “running” is kind of the point of disagreement. The running would be remote, local supervision would be nominal, limited to controlling access, I’d think.

I envisage distributed distribution as enabling more flexible decision-making about siting of industrial, commercial and even residential activity. Offsetting travel and maintenance costs would be reduction of transmission and transformer sub-station “layering”, not to mention transmission losses. There are dis-economies of scale, too.

Ther are two issues here. One is the safety of focus fusion reactors. The second is the economies of distributed vs. centralized power supply.

On safety, let’s look at the chemical and the nuclear angels. Being alarmed at the chemotoxicity of decaborane seems to me to be a big distortion of the dangers involved. I think you have to compare the toxicity of a few kg of decaborane with the toxicity of many tanker-fulls of petroleum, which people do use to heat their own homes. Modern society can’t operate without having toxic and flammable materials in close proximity to population concentrations. Would you locate university chemistry departments outside of cities? They do not have 24/7 personnel either.

On the nuclear side , you can not make the equation fusion reactor= fission reactor. The only thing they have in common is nuclear reactions. A fission reactor, even a small one, has a huge inventory of radioactive materials. FF will have a quite tiny one, all shortlived. We can’t calculate exactly how much right now but we are certainly talking about millions-fold less. Quantity does matter. Remember, folks, we all have radioactive materials in our own homes–smoke detectors.

On economics, there are fairly big savings from distributed energy. If we are talking about expanding energy production, the cost of distribution is significant and would be greatly reduced with distributed production, as would the costs of large-scale outages. Will that counter-balance travel time for skilled labor? You would have to look at some realistic numbers. But distribution from remote centralized GW generators is not free.

Rematog wrote: Brian,

My bad on that, fusion/fission thing. I’ve corrected my original post.

…

Actually, it was the comment immediately above mine I was referencing. And it’s still not corrected. 🙂 😉

Actually, as Eric notes, there are lots of ways to skin these cats. I personally fervently hope the point comes ASAP that these are the kinds of worries FF has. The campaign to get it deployed, once proven, will be terrific fun! :coolgrin:

Come to think of it, one of the professions having the most fun will be accountants trying to minimize the damage of having to write off trillions of dollars worth of obsolete plant! 😆