Reply To: turn heat into electricity
The Focus Fusion Society › Forums › Aneutronic Fusion › Cost, Timing for First Clean Fusion Power Plant › Reply To: turn heat into electricity
zapkittyMike Weber Goodenow 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.
But is a generator different than an electric power plant?
With aneutronic fusion the generator would be tied closely to the structure of the reactor so all you’d need is the cooling gear, the electrical distribution gear, a weather housing and a fence to keep people away from the high voltage.
It wouldn’t be like a fission or neutronic fusion plant, which needs to have all the expensive turbine and accessory gear of a coal-fired plant adjacent to the reactor.
Theoretically you could stuff one or two 5 MWe FF units, cooling gear and transformers into a standard 40 foot shipping container for a complete portable genset.
Other aneutronic contenders such as Polywell would be intrinsically larger but would still be far smaller than any fossil, fission or neutronic fusion plant.
Mike Weber Goodenow wrote: If so, would a clean fusion (aneutronic) electric power plant still be $100 to $200 million?
Depends on the device… last estimate I remember for a Focus Fusion 5 MWe unit was $300,000 dollars. Add cooling, power distribution, land and fence and I can’t see it costing any more the $6-700,000. Add another FF unit or three and you’d get a nice equivalent of a self-powered suburban 20 MWe substation for maybe $1.6 million?
A Polywell was estimated to cost about $100 million but they are supposed to start out at 100 MWe and scale up rapidly from there.
Aneutronic means really cheap power plants 🙂
Mike Weber Goodenow wrote: What can you do with the generator?
… add cooling (air-cooled for FF), distribution gear, land and a fence… or a shipping container…
Attached find a rough outline of a 5 MWe FF unit such as you might find powering a neighborhood, a commercial complex or a manufacturing plant.
side note:
For the FF’s moderate heat output the cooling solution shown here is a bit overblown (literally 🙂 ) but it keeps people from freaking themselves out with the notion that heat from the plant is somehow going to turn nearby people into beef jerky…. elsewhere in the forum you’ll find schemes where I take the cooling to ridiculous heights just to show that it isn’t the problem that people can scare themselves into thinking it might be.
This design would have air from the stack carrying ~7 MWt from the plant at 600 degrees C… and the stack parameters are over and above those for a commercial portable 20 MWe gas turbine genset which has a stack exhaust temp of ~900 C. Cooling ain’t a problem for FF plants.