Reply To: Competition from the Thorium reactor

[Axil]

Heat has been used for 150 years to produce electric power and is well understood and accepted. It supports power production that utilities understand and accept and will buy. Heat based electric generation is commercial off the self (COTS), and is a no risk item. This means heat based electric generation equipment is cheap and will sell. New compact CO2 based turbine generators can now archive power conversion efficiency of up to 50%. Most other fusion approaches will use molten fluoride salt as the coolant to achieve this thermal efficiency by running at temperatures of 700C or more.

The use of heat used at a power station provides massive power production at a centralize location; this is what the electric utilities want. The bigger the power plant, the better the utilities like it; they call this “the economy of scale”. They all love the economy of scale and won’t buy anything else. It reduces their overhead and cost to a minimum. Any other approach is near impossible to sell to the utilities. Small scale nuclear power products have yet to be sold to the big utilities; they just won’t buy them. The NRC won’t even license them for operation since they have no customers.

Small fission and aneutronic fusion would be useful to power a village or small city in the third world where there is a limited or no power grid and could be a cost effective alternative to a solar or wind application.

A Focus Fusion reactor can be configured to produce heat on a very large scale and be a hot product in the electric power market.