Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

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Rematog wrote: Nothing you’ve stated has addressed the fundamental fact that they will require significant security. Killer Robots? This is a great idea for an office building. Janitor killed, $20 million wrongful death settlement. But really. All of this security, remote maintenance (read, crew costing $300-500 an hour spending at least two travel hours per job (shudder), driving in a $50k maint. truck, not having the right part on board….etc.

What’s the response time if there is a security breach? Who responds, local police? The county sheriff? What happens if a fuel gas leak detector alarms (there would have to be one, the stuff is toxic). A radiation detector alarms? Who responds, how fast? I assume the unit would be tripped immediately by it’s control system. And stays off line till a maint. crew gets there to fix the problem.

Also, distributed installations to power, say a building, would also have a grid connection (and not many would be unconnected to grid, for power during shutdown, etc). That means it would need remote switching etc. You can NOT have a power source hooked to the grid that can’t be remotely isolated. Otherwise, you back feed power when not expected and kill linemen. The union frowns on this. ….wait. Just had a thought. How are you thinking your going to control these things. Via Internet. Not a good idea.

Security requirements alone for something like this would make that difficult to impossible. Allowing Internet access to a plant control system is not normally allowed. There are major security concerns just having third part access to plant LAN for equipment maintenance. And the LAN is NOT part of the Plant DCS. You would need to install some very secure (read expensive) means of accessing the Focus Fusion module’s control PLC/DCS, if not installing a dedicated hard wire connection. And it would have to shut-down on losing it’s Internet connection, otherwise, it’s not monitored at all.

I could easily see the installation cost of a single Focus Fusion module being twice that of a “central” location with a hundred (or more) modules.

And they will require any number of permits….for each site. Heck, the permits alone will cost tens of thousands per site. Remember, we are talking about installing 100,000 or more modules in the first 5-10 years. Just think of the effort needed to obtain 100,000 site permits. More job security for lawyers. Like they need it.

I just don’t see this being well thought out. It feels to me like distributed operation is being insisted on based on philosophical reasons, not economic/engineering ones. And deployment of hundreds of billions of dollars of assets will be driven by economic/engineering and political reasons….not philosophy.

1. There is no radiation leak,
2. the fuel on hand is in small amounts, by your argument propane and natural gas substations would need heavy security, which they don’t have anything more then a fence, in some case not even that!
3. Windmills also using call in maintenance, that does stop them from being profitable, windmill also require permits, still not stopping them, people are buying them up like hot cakes!

Yes the Philosophy is that if its safer (compared to natural gas sub-station with it huge tanks of highly flammable gas) and cheaper (then any other form of power) the people will buy it, even if they need to jump through flaming hoops! I don’t see a problem with this philosophy, in places were wind and solar have become cheaper the demand has grow astronomically, no matter the need for maintenance, protocol or permits.