Reply To: FOCUS FUSION REACTOR

[Tulse]

50-100MW may still be too small in terms of maximizing the value of FF — check out Rematog’s amusing example of the importance of labour costs:

https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/139/P30/#3121

The problem is that as the cost of physical plant and fuel goes toward zero, your biggest cost is going to be operations and maintenance. What is needed is to size plants so that they are most efficient in terms of human resources. Presumably as you scale up there is a point of rapidly diminishing returns, but that point may still be larger than 50-100MW.

Of course, that presumes that the goal is only to produce power at the lowest cost. One might also value distributed generation for other reasons (such as making the grid more robust), in which case having the lowest price per KW-hr may not be the only metric.