Energy Output – MW & GW

[Rezwan]

From Elling’s Thorium post: –

However, people have a hard time distinguishing the bids for new energy. To distinguish the shorthand media versions on the Th reactor and the FF reactor, I�ve established this list :
FF : 10-100MW, Garage, Non-experts, 0.5 M $, Rural
Th : 1-5GW, Acre, Experts, Experts, 500 M $, Cities, heavy industry

This brings up an interesting point. The FF reactor is supposed to be around 20 MW. So, it would take 50 reactors to compare to a 1GW power plant. Would 50 garages take up an acre? I don’t think the application is only rural. It would be fine in cities as well. One in every neighborhood. Very good for energy security, though. No way a terrorist could shut anything down if he has to go around individually to hundreds of mini power plants.

Still having a hard time visualizing this. Quantifying. How many people does 20MW serve? Amazing. I have no idea. How many MW will I use in my lifetime?

In any case, the graph below is of U.S. Electric Power Industry Net Summer Capacity, 2005, taken from this website: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html and it looks like 979GW is the capacity. So, at 20MW per FF plant, we’d need 48,950 plants to provide the same amount of energy. Yikes. Each plant may be less than a million$ to make, but that’s still $50 billion for the lot of them. Not as cheap as a bag of chips.

And each plant requires a plant operator or more… 2-5 full time workers? 10? And a regional coordinator, and a system in place – actually, this gets pretty complicated. So, all these workers need a salary and benefits, so we’re not displacing that many energy workers (We’ll just retrain the people already employed in the energy industry.) Half a million jobs. How many people does the energy industry employ now? Must be millions. Some info on Energy industry jobs: http://www.mines.edu/Research/PTTC/newsletters/volume 9/v9n1p3.html – looks like over half a million people are employed in the coal mining industry alone.

Obviously, we need a better understanding of just how much energy output can come from the plant, if there are ways to scale up, how many people would need to run and maintain the things, not just running the plants, but buildling and maintaining them…Well, OK, we need to see if the thing works in the first place.

[Sigma]

Most houses run on a few kilowatts. So you could expect a 20 MW to power around 15,000 households.

[Lerner]

Actually, the plants might be as small as 5 MW. But they won

[maihem]

Actually, the plants might be as small as 5 MW. But they won

[Lerner]

Conventional plants cost about $1/W, so a coalfired 2GW plant costs about two billion, not two million dollars.
The $200,000 is based on studies we have done and is pretty conservative.

[Glenn Millam]

Here is a good link to show you what the costs are for coal-fired power plants.

http://www.netl.doe.gov/coal/refshelf/ncp.pdf

If you look on the page with the map, they propose building single 1.2 GW plant in Georgia at a cost of 1.4 billion dollars.

[Glenn Millam]

Using the Georgia coal plant as an example, lets run the numbers.

Coal: 1.2 GW @ $1.4 Billion = $1.17 per W

Focus Fusion:

240 5 MW plants = 1.2 GW

240 x $200,000 = $48 Million

1.2 GW @ $48 Million = .40 per W

And that is just startup costs. Look at fuel costs, upkeep, labor, the lessened need for large power lines…

The ROI of Focus Fusion is outstanding. Perhaps the best ever seen.

[maihem]

Oops, I appear to have got confused between kGBP (Great British Pound) and MGBP, that would put Didcot-A coal fired power station at $4.2 billion in todays money, so technological and process improvements have halved (-ish) the cost of a power station since then. So your cost of a power station is correct and mine wrong.

Still, is there any information on the study for the capital cost of a focus fusion plant available?

[Brian H]

In terms of cost, if each reactor costs say $200,000 ( I think with mass production they will cost less) replacing the whole US generation capacity will cost $40 billion. Sound like a lot, but it

[maihem]

Brian H wrote:

You haven’t paid attention to the actual hardware involved. A focus fusion reactor’s core has elements on the order of a few inches on a side. There just aren’t any big ticket items involved. So the numbers are not “plucked” out of the air.

Your coal plant example is utterly irrelevant.

Dude, I was arguing that $200,000 was too big, not too small. And if you bothered to read instead of deciding you wanted to just argue with somebody and picked just some 5 or 6 words they said sometime to take as the entirety of their current opinion you might not look like such an arse.

[Brian H]

Re: the $100,000 per 10 MW, that’s salary for a highly qualified tech/engineer type, plus support, averaged over a number of reactors.

As for the 20MW = 4 x 5MW , I doubt that clustered reactors would cost as much; the housing could be predesigned to accommodate any particular grouping of the base units. Also, IIRC, the power of an individual reactor is proportional to the pulse rate, and the 5 MW assumption is at 330 cps. Apparently and probably, higher rates are possible; as time goes on, refinements and improvements are likely to multiply capabilities and cut costs.

[JimmyT]

A better initial placement of the power units would be wherever there currently exists an electrical substation. Eventually the power plant feeding the substation, the transmission lines to the substation, and the substation itself could thus be eliminated. These (the substations) are already wired to the customers. It’s not uncommon for long distance transmission lines to loose 50% of the power they transmit. And they are very expensive to maintain as well as being somewhat controversial from a safety standpoint.
Higher cancer rates have been documented for those who live near long distance high voltage power lines. I personally think this is due to the indiscriminate use of herbicides to keep the vegetation down surrounding them, and not due to any electromagnetic effect.

One benefit of having mutiple small power stations as opposed to one mega- power station is that it makes it easier to use the waste heat for some useful purpose.
This is nothing new, I know. Con-Edison already uses waste heat to heat many (most?) of Manhatan’s buildings. Probably much the same is done in all northern US cities. Perhaps someone out there has first hand knowlege of this? I’m talking mostly out of my wrong oraface on this topic.

[Brian H]

JimmyT wrote: …

One benefit of having mutiple small power stations as opposed to one mega- power station is that it makes it easier to use the waste heat for some useful purpose.
…

I don’t think there is much waste heat. The heat is hoarded carefully, because it is needed in the plasma to keep things hopping! In fact, the whole electron beam output is deliberately fed back into the plasma to keep it heated. Of course, an overall operating efficiency of even 85 or 90% does suggest the other 10% is ending up as thermal waste, the famous Laws being what they are … 😉

Keep in mind that this is a SMALL reactor. The actual operating core is measured in inches, not feet, yards, meters.

[Brian H]

Just noticed a major error in the arithmetic being thrown around above:

Focus Fusion:

240 5 MW plants = 1.2 GW

240 x $200,000 = $48 Million

1.2 GW @ $48 Million = .40 per W

And that is just startup costs. Look at fuel costs, upkeep, labor, the lessened need for large power lines

[JimmyT]

With regards to waste heat:

The overall process is estimated to be around 42% efficient. That means that a 10 megawatt power plant will produce 17 megawatts of waste heat. It would be a shame not to make the most of this resource.

The very high efficiency (80% to 90%) are related to converting the x-rays and alpha particle beam to electricity. The conversion efficiency of the input pulse to that plasma ball where the fusion takes place is a bit of a question mark at this point.
Up to now this step in the process has not been very efficient and is where a lot of electricity gets turned into heat. This is why cooling that central electrode is such a big deal.

Hopefully the trick that Aaron Blake proposed of introducing an external magnetic field will make this step very efficient too. We just don’t know. This is precisely why these extensive simulations are being done; in order to optimize this step.

[Author]

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