Reply To: Repowering the electric utility industry

[Tim1]

It can be very complex and cumbersome to turn off the FF device and allow Decaborane to precipitate onto the beryllium electrodes, or costly to keep the device idling to prevent this.

I agree that the first use of a Focus Fusion device would be fore base load power, but I don’t think it would be hard to power cycle the machine. Even the prototype will need to have heaters to start the machine. (If I remember they have already been specified.) Preventing the decaborane from precipitating on electrodes should not be a problem. Just use a cold trap to precipitate the decaborane before you let the electrodes cool down. You probably can operate the Focus Fusion device decaborane lean as you power it down.

It used to be that a significant overpotential was required to generate hydrogen from water. Recent research has lowered the required overpotential quite a bit. Also the cost of the electricity is being lowered by over an order of magnitude. You can’t get much electricity today at $0.05/kwh, if a Focus Fusion device can produce it for $0.005, while selling it a peak prices for a few hours per day, the cost of the electricity used to generate hydrogen would be very low. The Focus Fusion devices could be located at the location that the hydrogen is required. The electricity could be shipped over the existing transmission lines.