Reply To: JPL Employees File Suit to End Background Investigations

[delt0r]

The trick with cap lifetime is to downrate. By getting caps that are rated at 2x the used voltage you get lifetime multipliers on the order of 10000. This is too expensive for a experiment that may only do 5000 shots its whole life, but well within the capitol cost/running cost trade off of a commercial unit. You pay 5-10x more for the caps and get 10000x more lifetime (note that ESL is not a huge problem for DPF). The switching is perhaps the hardest bit, but by no means unprecedented. Thyratron fire many times per sec for radar applications and although there initial life times was measured in 1000 of pules modern units get a million or more (in some cases).

Sometime i think people forget what it costs to buy energy. Replacing 10 thousand dollar switches once a week will still be economic under many circumstances (yes bigger than 1MW–there is a reason power stations are as big as they are). My power and gas last year for just me was 1000EU.

We can even work it out. A 100MW plant produces 1.6 million dollars of energy per week at typical domestic rates (10c kWh). Remember even for traditional nuclear, fuel costs are negligible. Replacing things regularly that can be somewhat recycled can still work fine. Note that at 10Hz there are 315 million cycles in a year.

ps I forgot, you should look up self healing capacitors. Pretty cool. It is what the NIF is using.