Reply To: General Fusion Inc

[zapkitty]

Hello, NortySpock, and you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to the forums!

The 5 MW per Focus Fusion (FF) unit seems pretty firm at this time. But that’s perfectly suitable for a distributed, modern, disaster-resistant power grid.

The current gigawatt-class power plants are a convenience for those that own the plant and/or the fuel supplies… for the rest of us, not so much. Especially when one plant going down puts the whole system under critical stress.

But if a location such as a large factory needs more than 5 MW on hand? The units will stack easily… and cheaply 🙂

As for why 5 MW? The power output is primarily determined by the repetition rate, 200 hz for 5 MW, and is bounded by two limits: cooling and heating.

A. Too much slower than 200 hz and the vaporized boron in the fuel will plate out and coat the interior of the vacuum chamber. Not good as things grind to a halt.

B. Too much faster than 200 hz and the anode, the central electrode, begins to melt. It will be cooled by helium under pressure and while that should be doable for 200 hz it probably couldn’t be pushed too much further.

As for using D-T and other neutronic fuels? While technically it’ll be possible to use such in an FF unit but you’d run into three immediate problems:

1. Fuels such as D-T release their energy primarily as neutrons, which will have to be used heat water to make steam to tutn (very expensive) turbines in order to generate power.

2. The FF unit can only run at a few hundred degrees Celsius, and that’s with the helum cooling. That’s well below what’s needed to run those expensive turbines efficiently… but trying to crank up the power will just melt your electrodes into slag.

3. … and the slag, the vacuum chamber and all the surrounding gear will be highly radioactive for a long time.

The direct conversion made possible by aneutronic fuels skips all that, even if the bar for breakeven is set much higher.