Reply To: Nuplex.

[Brian H]

Rezwan wrote: In depth thread.

In light of this website post, can we come up with a chart comparing the heat and thermal pollution footprint for different energy production processes?

Given that

Almost half of all water withdrawn in the United States each year is for cooling electric power plants.

It would be nice to add a quantification/estimate of how much less thermal pollution will be generated by FF plants. That seems to be one area where we are still polluting.

Perhaps this should be a separate thread.

Thermal pollution is, IMO, a bit of a boogyman — a non-problem. If you’re talking about heating the atmosphere, I think you will find that industrial heat output etc. is insignificant in the Earth’s heat budget to several decimal places. Heat waste, however, is energy waste. Sometimes there’s no convenient way to exploit that energy, so you just have to dump (vent) it.

But if FF isn’t doing p-B fusion, I’m not sure what it IS doing, and where all this heat is going to come from. It MUST be above break-even to be a heat engine of any value, so what, exactly, Sir Aeronaut, do you envisage is happening in a non-electricity-producing over-break-even p-B FF generator used as a heat engine? 😉 :cheese: I find it hard to imagine what could be going on. If you want to use D-T fuel as a fallback or alternative, then you have to deal with the neutron flux: not just stopping it in the water shielding, but periodically replacing the internal hardware because the previous set has been degraded and rendered very “hot” by transmutation of component elements into unfriendly isotopes.