Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[Brian H]

Tulse wrote:

Well, there are a wide variety of per-capita incomes in the developing world. Some of the super-poor communities may not be able to afford anything other than wood and dung. But we are on our way to 10 billion people by 2080, so I’m sure clean fusion will be used in many, many places in the developing world in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term.

I completely agree, I just think that the benefit won’t be immediate for those using dung heating — the poorest of the poor are not suddenly going to get a shipping-container-sized FF device plopped in their neighbourhood (and if they did, they couldn’t afford the electric heaters needed to benefit from it).

You might be surprised. The time freed up from fuel-gathering is often rapidly turned into micro-enterprise by people (notably the women). Markets spring up, cell phones appear and start co-ordinating things, etc.

And a basic 5 MW unit can drive literally thousands of residential/micro-enterprise establishments in such areas.