Reply To: A Big Prick in the Balloon of the Big Bang

[Brian H]

Aeronaut wrote: Brian has yet to specify the nature and expense of his version of a dedicated cooling system. My approach is opportunistic- look for existing heat loads (like the JTEC in this case) to use as the FF’s heat-sink. Thus the accounting equations may not be the ones Brian was planning to use to justify resistance heaters. BTW, how would those be powered in a FF gen-1?

Ah, now we’re talking accounting! Since the cooling mechanisms must be there anyway, if they could be tweaked to make some worthwhile use of the heat they extract without adding more cost/kwh than the replacement with output from another FF would be, then it could make sense. But here the onus, in reality (i.e., $$ expended) as opposed to wishful thinking, is on those advocating such tweaking.

I don’t have to specify anything whatsoever about a “dedicated cooling system”, since it is inherent and necessary to any FF installation to keep it from melting down. That’s a given, the start point. Now justify making KW out of that extracted heat — and note that your added costs MUST BE less than ¼¢/kwh. (Even using the extracted heat for simple passive warming of buildings etc. must meet this test. And it’s a very difficult, severe, test indeed!) ,