Reply To: Pitching to Arnold

[Lerner]

Ther are two issues here. One is the safety of focus fusion reactors. The second is the economies of distributed vs. centralized power supply.

On safety, let’s look at the chemical and the nuclear angels. Being alarmed at the chemotoxicity of decaborane seems to me to be a big distortion of the dangers involved. I think you have to compare the toxicity of a few kg of decaborane with the toxicity of many tanker-fulls of petroleum, which people do use to heat their own homes. Modern society can’t operate without having toxic and flammable materials in close proximity to population concentrations. Would you locate university chemistry departments outside of cities? They do not have 24/7 personnel either.

On the nuclear side , you can not make the equation fusion reactor= fission reactor. The only thing they have in common is nuclear reactions. A fission reactor, even a small one, has a huge inventory of radioactive materials. FF will have a quite tiny one, all shortlived. We can’t calculate exactly how much right now but we are certainly talking about millions-fold less. Quantity does matter. Remember, folks, we all have radioactive materials in our own homes–smoke detectors.

On economics, there are fairly big savings from distributed energy. If we are talking about expanding energy production, the cost of distribution is significant and would be greatly reduced with distributed production, as would the costs of large-scale outages. Will that counter-balance travel time for skilled labor? You would have to look at some realistic numbers. But distribution from remote centralized GW generators is not free.