Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[zapkitty]

Maya wrote:
I can summarize the key 4 issues with fusion power that must be addressed for a _commercially viable_ (at least hundreds of gigawatts) reactor to work:

…?

Could you explain why you think that “at least hundreds of gigawatts” are required for a commercial fusion reactor?

Even the largest current fossil and fission power plants are at most 1-2 gigawatts per unit.

Or did I misunderstand and it’s the fusion concept you mentioned that requires that minimum size to be viable?

Maya wrote:
Only Hydrogen and 11 Boron can be used in any foreseeable design and even that will require enormous thermal management (H-11B still produces flux in power levels of 1 to 10 giga watts in a 21 TW reactor).

… a 21 terawatt pB11 reactor?

Why on Earth (and where on Earth) would you want to build a single reactor that would supply over half again the entire world’s current power needs?

The pB11 reaction is aneutronic in nature and units built along the lines envisioned by Focus Fusion, Tri-Alpha and the Polywell concept would be in the scale of a few megawatts to a gigawatt or so and their neutron flux would be pretty damn small.

It seems that you’ve set impossible-to-meet criteria and I look forward to learning what you envision as the solution to them 🙂

(PACER variant at 3-2)