Reply To: Focus fusion and transportation

[Aeronaut]

Rezwan wrote:

But, again my point is that INSIDE the FF module, you will have large conductors and big, heavy switchgear, etc. I just want people who havn’t dealt with this kind of thing to get an idea of what it’s like. Your run of the mill residential/commerical electrican could easily kill himself trying to work on this stuff. It take proper training and tools to do so.

Yes, the safety issues need to be made clear. I just read this article about Hybrid safety. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31112317/ If we’re headed into an electrical world, we need to understand how to deal with it. Not take it for granted.

There’s a lot of food for thought in that article, Rezwan. Thanx for the link. Imagine all those 600 volt batteries already on the road. Something the article didn’t point out is what might happen if the wreckage shorted out the actual wiring somewhere downstream of the battery pack.

I did some rough numbers to provide 100 houses with the full 100 amps of 220 volts that the main cutoff breaker is rated at. These numbers are rough because true power (RMS or Root Mean Square value) is 70.7% of that, I assumed steady load at 50% of max, and I used watts instead of Joules. I also rounded down, in favor of safety and headroom. For instance, what if (100) 30A heat pump compressors all kicked in at the same instant? What if (100) 30A clothes dryers also spiked the load at this same instant? Maybe its dinner time and there’s 20 to 50 electric ranges on 50 amp breakers lurking… In short, this is no place for optimistic numbers.

The first level of safety is the circuit’s breaker. Second is each house’s (or pole barn’s) main cutoff breaker. Third safety/fault isolation level is the local pad transformer, which I presume is protected by breaker or fuse. The local FF plant in this neighborhood would supply the 13.2kV highwire to use the pole-mounted transformers as the 4th safety level as well as minimize modifications to the existing electrical system. This just happens to be handy and highly visible on a major artery with plenty of police traffic on any given day, and the land is available in this neighborhood. New safety concerns are now isolated to roughly 1 acre (lots of buffer area inside the fence) housing 2 FF reactors to guarantee power is always on. One could also be tasked to selling power most of the time to pay for the installation, when not needed locally. Four or five of these sites just might be enough to power my township with a total of 6 to 10 FF reactors.

Periodic maintenance and emergency site visits would be sub-contracted to the big utility, who should be glad to have few guinea pigs to observe without committing capital until they determine their network architecture. Who knows- they may decide this is the way of their future. In any case, they already have the licensing and relationships to help make this happen smoothly.

Here’s the numbers:

100 houses @ 24kW peak rated load/house=2.4MW
Round up to 25kW peak load=2.5MW
Double that to allow for pole barns, etc….
===========================
5 MW peak rated load

Every shot puts 5MW profit in the output cap bank
60 hz (shots/second) picked to match line frequency
300 hz pulse rate could power 5 separate DC->AC converters to further isolate 80% of the system from a serious issue within the other 20%.

Conclusion: keep the kids from jumping the fence(s) and you have a reasonably safe local power system. A four site package could maybe cost 5 to 10M$. Primary payback mode would be reduced- or free- electricity. Second mode would be selling surplus electricity to the big utility. Damn! I want one of these packages in my township! How soon do you think we can make FF useful for something other than making heat?