Reply To: Focus fusion and transportation

[Aeronaut]

Brian, yours are the numbers I see in larger production as a tinker who’s worked in manufacturing for many years, in many market niches, including aerospace. The basic reactor and solenoid should be a breeze to mass produce. Ditto for capacitor plates, possibly for entire cap banks. I can see every last one of these modules having an aftermarket similar to engine parts and PC components, which would drive the cost of parts WAY down. Now throw in cheap energy…..

The priciest component will be the X-ray harvester, with its thousand or more foils of differing thicknesses. The obvious solution would be to stamp them out on presses and distribute copies of those thousand dies to as many as a thousand stamping plants. (I like this! All these shuttered factories can go back to work again!). Talk about a job from Hell. Just designing the dies, let alone making them, is going to cost dearly in time and capital. Parts this thin are lousy candidates for the molding process because even if the metal flows, it will cool before reaching the end of the mold. Now I’m thinking Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) which the semiconductor industry uses to stack thin layers of metals and semiconductors to make CPUs, GPUs, memories, etc. This eliminates all of the die and press problems and invites somebody to mass produce those machines to “cash in on the lucrative fusion aftermarket”, further reducing that part’s price, in time.

The downside of distributed generation will be the price of the step-up transformer and the high current switching and wave shaping circuitry needed to distribute even the 13.2kV I used in yesterday’s example. High current parts go for mil-spec prices, as do high voltage parts. Compact designs optimizing for high current AND high voltage are where Rematog’s numbers will average up into his pricing ball park. Hopefully that, too, will change with mass production.

The single most important part of Rematog’s guesstimates are not the actual numbers, but the categories that they’re listed in. Labor costs suggest union labor. “Nuke plant” site prep will be priced at government prevailing rate labor, so a simple 25 by 25 foot steel building is no longer priced the way it could be if we could light up a few million high school and college age people with “The Wonder of Fusion”, thus obliterating the Nuclear Mystique and turning these cool little buildings into neighborhood status symbols. Heh, heh, heh.

Rematog’s also pointed out that consumption is inversely proportional to price. An all electric car with a range of even 200 miles would be very appealing to me. I’d either keep my ’05 gas burner for road trips or rent a hybrid for the rare occasions I really would need more than 100 miles in a day. Now we’re talking about charging two or more electric cars most nights. Throw in some light sabers for the road warriors, 30A to 50A “cheap resistance heating” furnaces, water heaters, clothes dryers, and Thanksgiving dinners, and the 15kW average requires a LOT of instantly available reserve capacity.

The utility industry’s problem is how to plan and execute for anticipated growth in demand despite a lag time of something like ten years or more per plant, which is likely to strand capital IF fusion ever leaves the labs. Sucks to burn fossil fuels, but what else is proven (reliable) until thousands of townships, villages, and regions rise up “out of nowhere” and demand new legislation permitting them to partner with the utilities to own their own, extremely reliable, local fusion plants. All it takes is one township to light the fuse…

I therefor believe it is in the utility industry’s best interests to put systems into place that would welcome and fast-track the integration of these local systems. The PR benefits alone would be stupendous, and the transition out of burning fossil fuels could easily be scheduled along a thirty to fifty year plan.