Reply To: Repowering the electric utility industry

[markrh]

delt0r wrote:

Like most things, one of the larger costs for an FF generating station will be personnel, and the way to minimize that cost is to centrally locate multiple devices, and have those overseen by a small staff, rather to have many distributed small generation stations that each need their own staff.

One or two reactors for a small community would not require a full time staff to maintain. The system can be monitored remotely and maintenance would only require periodic refueling and electrode replacement.

Yes it would. You are not going to get a bunch of highly qualified persoanl to only work part time, or train up for just a part time job. These things need maintenance no matter how idealistically auto-magic you make them. Just a pulse power supply to run these things is something that doesn’t even exist right now, and any currently plausible design is going to need a lot of maintenance. The circulating power is much larger than the output so you have a lot of high power, high voltage electronics. This stuff doesn’t just run like in some movie. It needs maintenance.

It will need maintenance by highly specialized and qualified staff, and they will have plenty to do.

On the other note. I don’t really understand the whole “centralized power is evil corporations and stuff” mindset. We have centralized power because it make a *lot* of economic sense. FF would not change that.

Assuming FF even works of course. And that is still a big IF.

I am am not saying hire part time workers to maintain a few units in a community. Utility companies have a centrally located full time staff that go on the road to maintain the electrical infrastructure. It is no different than that. The need to maintain a large long distance grid would become redundant, thus would incur a large savings. The economics of scale would become a mute point due to the reduced loss in power compared to delivering it over long a distance.