Reply To: Fusion X-prize petition started!

[Glenn Millam]

Jolly Roger wrote: Nuplex uses waste heat to boil salt water, and the vapor is condensed into fresh water. Focus Fusion creates electricity almost directly. Electricity is notoriously inefficient for heating. Perhaps a better method would be to pass electricity through the salt water and dissociate it into hydrogen and oxygen (electrolysis). The hydrogen could be used for vehicle fuel, or recombined with the oxygen to make fresh water. The heat from that reaction could boil additional salt water to fresh.

So is electrolysis. The key thing is that FF itself is so cheap and efficient that it lends its economics to things that would otherwise be too expensive. Desalinization is going to be one of the key changes in a fusion-based world. Saudi Arabia will go from pumping sludge to eat to growing its own food, maybe exporting it. Sounds crazy now, but it can happen.