Reply To: p-Li7 fusion

[texaslabrat]

dash wrote:

That’s why I suggested doing the math. Get the cost of the “add-on”, and you will discover that the price per kwh is HUGE compared to ¼¢.

Wouldn’t waste heat be a problem at some point? If 20% of the energy comes out as useful work, and 80% is lost as heat (I’m just making up numbers), as civilization expands, won’t that waste heat become a serious issue?

Nobody (including the Gore camp) has made any noise about all the ‘thermal pollution’ that our current power production (and transportation) technology creates. And for good reason…it really doesn’t matter given the amount of solar thermal input we receive by comparison. The only time that such thermal pollution seems to make any impact is when it is being dumped into a localized and heat sensitive area such as a river where temperature changes can cause fish kills or contribute to algae blooms.

But yeah, if you had a couple of gigawatts of waste heat flux concentrated in the area of a city block…that might get a little uncomfortable to live in said city block in the middle of summer when there was no cool breeze to help out 😉 Fortunately, such corner-case scenarios are easily avoided through just a tiny amount of planning by spreading things out a tad…that’s just one of many reasons you don’t find multi-gigawatt power plants in the middle of commerce and residential areas.