Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[zapkitty]

Dr_Barnowl wrote: I think the big win might be desalination, in terms of the developing world.

Conservatively, a 5MW unit could desalinate 350,000 gallons an hour (at a cost of ~ 14kWh per 1,000 gallons [1]) ; maybe more if you were to use the waste heat as well.

It’s as Tulse said. The purpose of these elaborate techniques is to lower the energy costs of the process… but in turn these techniques add to the cost of the process.

BTW there was a thread on exactly that topic…
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/1017/

If you postulate using an FF unit for desalination then you have broken that vicious circle. You have plenty of cheap power so it suddenly makes sense to use the cheapest separation method available: brute force evaporation. Boil the seawater, collect the freshwater steam.

If you have an FF unit available then using any other method would not make sense.

And along the lines of the estimates I used in that other thread: if you dedicate an entire FF unit just to desalination… say 12MWt with a few dozen KWe left over to power pumps, fans etc… then you come out with 400 metric tons per day at a cost of 5 cents.

Not 5 cents per ton… 5 cents per day.