Reply To: Competition from the Thorium reactor

[Brian H]

Rematog wrote: It also points out the effects of economies of scale.

The plant I work at has a total capacity of 1725 MW. We have about 200 full time employees, or over 8 MW per employee. So, if FF is in 5 MW blocks, you could have about 1/2 of an employee per block for the same staffing levels.

This would be challenging for a site with a well set up operations and maintenance staff. If it had to be done with remotely, where a crew has to drive out to check on any problem, O&M;labor may be the limiting factor for power cost.

5 MW is not an FF “block”, it’s one unit. They are intended to be serviced remotely, perhaps 3-10 serviced by about 3 people, say an engineer and 2 technicians. So that would be ~20MW/3 people = 6.7 MW/person, or 8.2 if it’s 5 generators. And 16.7 MW/person if it’s 10 generators. Etc.