Reply To: Peak Oil from Truth Out

[Tulse]

dennisp wrote: Cool. So 5kg of fuel is 4.4 kg boron, divided by .8 for 5.5 kg natural boron. Then divide by 11% for 50 kg Borax, or 110 lbs.

And divide that by 365 for about .14 kg per day, which, given that a 2.15 kg box of 20 Mule Team sells for $6 at Amazon, works out to around 39 cents a day for fuel costs. And at 5MW, that would power about 5000 homes (I believe this is right, no?). Meaning that, if my math is right, the cost in fuel for each home per day is .0018 cents — presuming the cost of fuel is just the cost of borax, which it obviously isn’t since it needs to be made into decaborane. But, that cost is Amazon Prime delivering the box to the door of the fuel processing plant — I’m just guessing there are cheaper sources of borax, or even decaborane.

EDIT: OK, so pricing for actual decaborane can run around $50/g. That would make the actual fuel costs for a single home around 13 cents a day.

Of course, fuel is not the only cost involved in generating the power, but for fossil fuel power plants it is overwhelmingly the majority of the costs. And not only does FF have vastly cheaper fuel, it also has a much smaller physical plant (conventional or nuclear power generating stations also have large machinery and plumbing dedicated to boiling water to make steam to turn a turbine to spin a generator, something FF doesn’t have).