Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[zapkitty]

nemmart wrote:

Extremely interesting. $25 to $30 million for a generator, within 5 years of a successful test, which may be 3 months away? That’s fascinating.

Er, I’d say 3 months away is a wee bit on the optimistic side.

My original, if ungrammatical, statement was “… and that test is hoped to happen early 2012.”

Will there be even more chapters added to the ever-growing epic titled “[em]Unexpected Adventures in Fusion Engineering[/em]” along the way? Probably 🙂

But they are now working with the desired voltage and even with o-ring concerns and what else they don’t seem to be all that far away from the next step. And the next step beyond 45kv is the smaller electrodes… and then boron.

There are no guarantees, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are trying to burn boron by March. Not that we’ll hear all that much about it at the time… LPP has made it very clear that after they start working with boron they’ll stay quiet until they have the results nailed down one way or another.

And if that happens then I wouldn’t be surprised if we get an announcement of acceptance for publication in the summer of 2012.

In other words we do seem to be looking at a time scale of months and not years… barring surprises 🙂