Thoughts on Refueling / Maintence cycle and revenue

[Brian H]

Milemaster wrote: Impaler:

…
If we downsize FF to a 400 kw you would have a power for a modern house located far from the power grids, opening new real states location in today’s waste lands, creating gardens, were we now have deserts, frigid landscapes, or seabeds, chopping off the land value to only a fraction of the housing cost.
But downsize it to half of this and you can power a big SUV or, why not, a small personal flying chopper, cutting of the cost of building and maintaining highways, bridges and roads not to mention the trafic jams. We just let the 3D GPS devices create and negotiate the airways as we need them.
…
Regarding the business model, LPP is not the kind of organization to provide manufacture of any kind (Device or Fuel) and certainly not to provide servicing. A 5-8% license is more than reasonable both as return for the value of the creation of FF power generation and a stimulus to other entrepreneurs to further develop the limitless marketing of such hardware.

The output of an FF is proportional to the cycling rate. 330 Hz produces about 5 MW. The size of the core electrode is a “constant”, integral to its functioning, so “downsizing” is very limited. “Upsizing” would mainly be a matter of clustering, and higher power per unit a matter of increasing the firing rate (necessitating better cooling tech, etc.)

As for “stimulus”, I doubt there’s been another equivalent to what FF will do since the days of Edison, or the earliest days of the transistor and IC.

[Impaler]

Well if you took the cycle time way down you might be able to largely eliminate the cooling system a normal system would need and just make due with passive air cooling. The power to weight ratio would be terrible and the instillation cost would still be quite high but that’s about the only way I can see the system being miniaturized. Radiation shielding is by far the biggest barrier to miniaturization, the reactor is producing weak Neutrons and X-Rays and even Radiation shielding is based on thickness so even a low cycling low powered system needs the same shielding as a normal system. It could NEVER go in something the size of a car or truck as even a reactor the size of a breadbox would need more then a ton of water around it based on the 1 meter of water and an inch of lead figure that Eric has sited.

About the only vehicle application I can see being viable would be a locomotive (typical diesel locomotive is 5MW electric output) and even that would require some work as a trains width is constrained such that after the shielding you have only about a meter across for the reactor to fit in, that might very well be too small but it’s in the realm of possibility.

[Brian H]

I think something the size of an 18-wheeler could accommodate one; it wouldn’t need to be “under the hood”.

[zapkitty]

Brian H wrote: I think something the size of an 18-wheeler could accommodate one; it wouldn’t need to be “under the hood”.

Or a big, big bus 🙂

… unfortunately the issue of potential C11 release in the event of an accident must govern your planning…

[Brian H]

AFAIK, there is unstable C12 briefly in the mix, but no C11. Where’s the ref to that?

[zapkitty]

Brian H wrote: AFAIK, there is unstable C12 briefly in the mix, but no C11. Where’s the ref to that?

Referring to the side reaction that’s the reason for the recommended ~9 hour wait after shutdown before accessing an FF core.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Residual_radiation_from_a_p.E2.80.9311B_reactor

Occasionally a p + B11 reaction could produce a C11 and a neutron instead of an overly excited C12. It’s supposed to be one of the sources of what little neutron radiation boron fusion produces.

And the C11 itself has a half-life of ~20 minutes as it turns back into B11 and thus the ~9 hour wait. This would presumably also apply to impromptu core accesses incurred while on the highway…

[Brian H]

Yeah, well, that would cut it down to 1/2^27, or about 1/130,000,000. Should be enough.

[zapkitty]

Brian H wrote: Yeah, well, that would cut it down to 1/2^27, or about 1/130,000,000. Should be enough.

… except that it won’t be less-than-background in the first hour should an extreme accident vent the core on a road. And the same applies even more so for aircraft applications.

But, annoying as it can be for the prospects of extreme hovercraft sports, that “less-than-background at all times” motif of Lerner-hakase is going to be very good insulation if a justifiably angry public has to be informed that a spent fuel pool in someone’s fission plant has just gone walkies on its own…

[Brian H]

“Less than background” is catchy, but an unnecessary standard. You can handle much higher levels for a while, especially when it’s declining by factor of 8 every hour.

[zapkitty]

Brian H wrote: “Less than background” is catchy, but an unnecessary standard. You can handle much higher levels for a while, especially when it’s declining by factor of 8 every hour.

… or you could sell it as a free PET scan with every core breach…

[Milemaster]

Looking at the post regarding downsizing and its difficulties, I still think that a merging between the Photovoltaic and the ultracapicotrs might solve a couple of the new problems.
Beryllium is a light wheight metal with High thermal and electric conductivity, transparent to most radiations including X-Rays and of course slow neutrons.
Photovoltaic arrays are made with the interface of a metal or electron donor film and must be collected by a conducting media. Recently nanotubes that can be layered and packed on surfaces have been tested as a way of quickly removing the electrons from the donor surface to be carried to the conductive surface.
Now, ultra capacitors are mostly constructed by three layers of conducting surface sandwiching a a high surface area that collect the charges like activated cardon particles or nanotubes.
So tying the knots, we have all the raw ingredients to construct a photovoltaic envelope that stores charges as a capacitor.. But that’s not the whole story.
In this multilayer material there are many layers of thermal conducting material to channel heat outside and the best of this: The nine inches of lead that Eric has calculated as an adequate shielding can be replaced by the one thousand layers of the lightwheigh materials based beryllium, and carbon and hydrogen.
Of course as Impaler mentioned, specialized individual components meet their requirements very efficiently, but adds complexity, bulk and weigh to the reactor as a whole. The challenge is to make the same combined together and shed away some square foots and many pounds the chamber.
LPP does not need to undertake this tasks, Ultracapitors and photovoltaic manufacturers will gladly asign development money to their budgets once that they see the potentials to their markets

References:
NASA STUDY ON LOW ENERGY NEUTRON SHIELDING FOR HIGH ALTITUD AIRCRAFTS: http://es.scribd.com/doc/53707897/Low-Energy-Neutron-Radiation-Shielding

[Brian H]

And the gamma?

BTW, it’s “weight”, not “wheight”.

[Milemaster]

Wow!, I thought the gamma where negligible. Anyway the most weight effective shielding would be a Gradient-Z lamination. This construction requires the less dense and shielding materials in front and the more dense on back usually beginning with polyethylene going through scattering materials like Beryllium, tin, copper ending with Steel (In our case stainless). In our case a precise design would benefit from the Gamma ray fluorescence that makes absorbent materials to fluoresce in x-ray wavelength and contribute to the overall efficiency of the photovoltaic/ultra capacitor assembly. The equivalent of 9 inches of lead that would reduce to 1/1024 the gamma ray would be in a stack made of 4 different materials plus the neutron absorbing carbon would have a total thickness of 2,5 to 3 feet.

[Author]

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