turn heat into electricity

[Rematog]

Yes, but……Economies of scale apply to maintenance and operations as well as capital cost.

One large coal fired plant generates between 500 to 750 MW (they have been built up to 1000 MW), so to replace a single typical 600 MW unit with 5 MW FF modules would require 120 modules. So, even though each one is low maintenance, you have 120 to work on. You woud need to go to six or seven a day to visit each once per work month for about an hour of actual work.

There are 21-22 work days (21-2/3 avg), without training, holidays or vacation in each work month. Remember, required training takes quite a bit of time, OSHA required training takes between 5 to 10 work days per year, add 10 holidays and 15 days vacation (3 weeks/yr, avg). Added together this is 30-35 work days per year, or 2.5 to 3 days per month, avg., you have say 19 work days/ month available, if no sick time is used. So estimate 18 days working, to visit 120 modules, 6-2/3 modules per day. If they are on a large central site, your crew “works” 8 hr/day, less morning tailboard, morning and afternoon break, and pick-up at end of day, you get 6-7 hours acutal work, at best. So, at best, you get an hour each month per module per person on the crew, which includes travel time between modules.

If they are dispersed, you need more travel time, a crew might need 15-20 minutes to each, so a crew can only get to 4-5 FF modules per day for 1 hr of “wrench time”. You’d need 1.5 to 1-2/3 crews to perform 1 hr of routine monthly maintenance on the 120 FF modules that replace a single 600 MW unit.

This does not include the operators to monitor 120 modules, 24 hrs/day, 356 days per year. (the convential plants operators cover this as well).

[dash]

Rematog wrote: Yes, but……Economies of scale apply to maintenance and operations as well as capital cost.

Seems like in every city I’ve been to there is an endpoint where long distance powerlines enter the city from outside, and there is a big plot of fenced off land where the voltage is stepped down, and from there distributed throughout the city.

Why not locate the FF 5M right there, or however many are needed? The idea of replacing a giant 600MW coal burning plant yet leaving all those powerlines there…seems so wasteful.

All you’d have to do is find a few cities willing to give it a try, so safety and reliability can be demonstrated. Then you wait for the cities to come beg you to install units. The city hires local talent to maintain / monitor the infrastructure, and this keeps money in the local economy. Also distributed power means no nationwide power outages.

The power lines are copper, right? And copper is valuable stuff. Thousands of miles of high voltage power lines can be recycled… The towers can be recylced. And the freed land can be sold off.

[Rematog]

I believe most transmission conductors are aluminum, costs less, better strength to weight ratio.

I’ve advanced the idea that FF deployment would follow the pattern of:

Repower existing plants sites, reusing transmission, cooling towers and buildings.

Add new FF plants near load centers, transmissions hubs, etc, closes to loads, but still outside urban areas.

In urban areas, in controlled plant sites

Distributed use, after 20-30 years, maybe.

Also Heavy industrial use, following same rough outline.

[Axil]

Heat has been used for 150 years to produce electric power and is well understood and accepted. It supports power production that utilities understand and accept and will buy. Heat based electric generation is commercial off the self (COTS), and is a no risk item. This means heat based electric generation equipment is cheap and will sell. New compact CO2 based turbine generators can now archive power conversion efficiency of up to 50%. Most other fusion approaches will use molten fluoride salt as the coolant to achieve this thermal efficiency by running at temperatures of 700C or more.

The use of heat used at a power station provides massive power production at a centralize location; this is what the electric utilities want. The bigger the power plant, the better the utilities like it; they call this “the economy of scale”. They all love the economy of scale and won’t buy anything else. It reduces their overhead and cost to a minimum. Any other approach is near impossible to sell to the utilities. Small scale nuclear power products have yet to be sold to the big utilities; they just won’t buy them. The NRC won’t even license them for operation since they have no customers.

Small fission and aneutronic fusion would be useful to power a village or small city in the third world where there is a limited or no power grid and could be a cost effective alternative to a solar or wind application.

A Focus Fusion reactor can be configured to produce heat on a very large scale and be a hot product in the electric power market.

[Rematog]

We, and I am a career professional in the power industry, use the commerially available technology that can produce power at low cost and low finanical risk.

Thoses reasons are why convention nuclear fission plant’s haven’t been built in the last 25 years, cost and risk.

If FF can produce power directly without a steam cycle T/G, that is better as it costs less. And small scale risks can be taken (but that does not mean we a venture capitialists).

If you think about it, retail utilities are used to distributed operations. They have lines, transformer, substations, all throughout their service territories.

But, they are hard eyed, bottom line, risk adverse, business. Someone has to produce a working piece of hardware they can buy. They will likely buy demonstraton unit’s for (to them) a small cost, to see if it works. If it does, they will buy more.

[Axil]

Exelon would not buy the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) because this reactor type was too small at 600MwT. These small nuclear reactors cannot gain any commercial traction from the users of nuclear power because they are too small.

Recently, the Chinese bought four new Westinghouse Ap1000s instead of PBMRs as their baseload power producers.

The fixed overhead of a reactor in terms of licensing, inspection, and operation will run about 10 million dollars a year even if the reactor equipment only cost less than $500K.

That is the reality of the nuclear industry today. A small 5 megawatt FF reactor will need to be incased in a crash and proliferation proofed containment stature because it is “nuclear” and as such subject to proliferation abuse and must be guarded.

High energy ions can produce plutonium just as readily as neutrons using beryllium and U238!

[Brian H]

Axil wrote: Heat has been used for 150 years to produce electric power and is well understood and accepted. It supports power production that utilities understand and accept and will buy. Heat based electric generation is commercial off the self (COTS), and is a no risk item. This means heat based electric generation equipment is cheap and will sell. New compact CO2 based turbine generators can now archive power conversion efficiency of up to 50%. Most other fusion approaches will use molten fluoride salt as the coolant to achieve this thermal efficiency by running at temperatures of 700C or more.

The use of heat used at a power station provides massive power production at a centralize location; this is what the electric utilities want. The bigger the power plant, the better the utilities like it; they call this “the economy of scale”. They all love the economy of scale and won’t buy anything else. It reduces their overhead and cost to a minimum. Any other approach is near impossible to sell to the utilities. Small scale nuclear power products have yet to be sold to the big utilities; they just won’t buy them. The NRC won’t even license them for operation since they have no customers.

Small fission and aneutronic fusion would be useful to power a village or small city in the third world where there is a limited or no power grid and could be a cost effective alternative to a solar or wind application.

A Focus Fusion reactor can be configured to produce heat on a very large scale and be a hot product in the electric power market.

Yes, and you can use your car to tow an oxcart.

The “well-understood and accepted” paradigm of boiling water is 30% efficient, no matter the heat source. FF’s primo advantage is that it’s completely dry.

[Axil]

Brian H wrote:

Heat has been used for 150 years to produce electric power and is well understood and accepted. It supports power production that utilities understand and accept and will buy. Heat based electric generation is commercial off the self (COTS), and is a no risk item. This means heat based electric generation equipment is cheap and will sell. New compact CO2 based turbine generators can now archive power conversion efficiency of up to 50%. Most other fusion approaches will use molten fluoride salt as the coolant to achieve this thermal efficiency by running at temperatures of 700C or more.

The use of heat used at a power station provides massive power production at a centralize location; this is what the electric utilities want. The bigger the power plant, the better the utilities like it; they call this “the economy of scale”. They all love the economy of scale and won’t buy anything else. It reduces their overhead and cost to a minimum. Any other approach is near impossible to sell to the utilities. Small scale nuclear power products have yet to be sold to the big utilities; they just won’t buy them. The NRC won’t even license them for operation since they have no customers.

Small fission and aneutronic fusion would be useful to power a village or small city in the third world where there is a limited or no power grid and could be a cost effective alternative to a solar or wind application.

A Focus Fusion reactor can be configured to produce heat on a very large scale and be a hot product in the electric power market.

Yes, and you can use your car to tow an oxcart.

The “well-understood and accepted” paradigm of boiling water is 30% efficient, no matter the heat source. FF’s primo advantage is that it’s completely dry.

Take note:

I said as follows:

New compact CO2 based turbine generators can now archive power conversion efficiency of up to 50%. Most other fusion approaches will use molten fluoride salt as the coolant to achieve this thermal efficiency by running at temperatures of 700C or more.

[Tulse]

Utilities are already using wind, solar, geothermal and tidal, so I don’t think they are committed solely to the giant teakettle model of electricity generation. And those boilers, however well understood, come with a lot of overhead, and make the physical plant much more complex relative to the presumed FF design.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, if the price is cheap enough and the modules small enough, there are likely many organizations that would like to produce their own power, and be independent of the grid. This is especially true if they can do so actually cheaper than buying from a major utility. I think this is really the issue, and where the relatively small size of the individual generating units is an advantage — if FF can provide a “right-sized” generator to an office park or hospital or university or skyscraper, and provide power significantly cheaper than from the grid, it really won’t matter what the utilities think. In a way, it is analogous to the sea change in telecommunications, with the rise of small cell providers and ISPs and home phone and long distance companies challenging the monolithic telecoms. Your local telephone company might not want to lower its prices or adopt new technologies, but if the cable company suddenly is offering home phone and long distance service, you bet they will learn to be more nimble. I think the same could apply here.

[Brian H]

Axil wrote: Exelon would not buy the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) because this reactor type was too small at 600MwT. These small nuclear reactors cannot gain any commercial traction from the users of nuclear power because they are too small.

Recently, the Chinese bought four new Westinghouse Ap1000s instead of PBMRs as their baseload power producers.

The fixed overhead of a reactor in terms of licensing, inspection, and operation will run about 10 million dollars a year even if the reactor equipment only cost less than $500K.

That is the reality of the nuclear industry today. A small 5 megawatt FF reactor will need to be incased in a crash and proliferation proofed containment stature because it is “nuclear” and as such subject to proliferation abuse and must be guarded.

High energy ions can produce plutonium just as readily as neutrons using beryllium and U238!

Utter nonsense. Where is the U238 coming from? That’s the only proliferation involved. This model doesn’t use any elements with atomic numbers higher than 5 (6 if you count transient unstable Carbon). The high-speed ions aren’t beryllium, and you’d have a real hard time making it.

And the 10 million/yr is by analogy with equivalent fission plants; the entire housing for an FF generator is about 20’x30’x10′. The approval/inspection etc. would mainly be at the factory level, and that would become routine over time, as at no time are any radioactive materials involved. Even in operation, a foot (meter?) of water plus a centimeter of Boron10 will keep levels around background. And probably less than 20 man-days of work per annum required for servicing and refuelling.

[Henning]

The main reason why utilities like it big, is because they’re big. Any small stuff enables competitors to enter the market.

[texaslabrat]

Axil wrote:

A Focus Fusion reactor can be configured to produce heat on a very large scale and be a hot product in the electric power market.

Holy missing the point, Batman!

[Axil]

Brian H wrote:

Exelon would not buy the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) because this reactor type was too small at 600MwT. These small nuclear reactors cannot gain any commercial traction from the users of nuclear power because they are too small.

Recently, the Chinese bought four new Westinghouse Ap1000s instead of PBMRs as their baseload power producers.

The fixed overhead of a reactor in terms of licensing, inspection, and operation will run about 10 million dollars a year even if the reactor equipment only cost less than $500K.

That is the reality of the nuclear industry today. A small 5 megawatt FF reactor will need to be incased in a crash and proliferation proofed containment stature because it is “nuclear” and as such subject to proliferation abuse and must be guarded.

High energy ions can produce plutonium just as readily as neutrons using beryllium and U238!

Utter nonsense. Where is the U238 coming from? That’s the only proliferation involved. This model doesn’t use any elements with atomic numbers higher than 5 (6 if you count transient unstable Carbon). The high-speed ions aren’t beryllium, and you’d have a real hard time making it.

And the 10 million/yr is by analogy with equivalent fission plants; the entire housing for an FF generator is about 20’x30’x10′. The approval/inspection etc. would mainly be at the factory level, and that would become routine over time, as at no time are any radioactive materials involved. Even in operation, a foot (meter?) of water plus a centimeter of Boron10 will keep levels around background. And probably less than 20 man-days of work per annum required for servicing and refuelling.

Utter nonsense. Where is the U238 coming from?

A proliferator can easily replace the ion power production coil at the focus of the ion beam in a FF reactor with a sphere of beryllium coated U238. This will result in the production of very high quality PU239 is short order.

Proliferators are very resourceful people and much effort is required to make any reactor proliferation proof.

A FF reactor can be made proliferation proof in my opinion.

[Brian H]

Axil wrote: …

A proliferator can easily replace the ion power production coil at the focus of the ion beam in a FF reactor with a sphere of beryllium coated U238. This will result in the production of very high quality PU239 is short order.

Proliferators are very resourceful people and much effort is required to make any reactor proliferation proof.

A FF reactor can be made proliferation proof in my opinion.

What makes you think the FF generator is any better at producing energetic alpha beams than a garden-variety accelerator? The FF’s He4+ ions are not specially energetic in the sense that you’re using; they are not at fusion temperatures once they exit the anode.

[Axil]

I do not intend to offend anyone; this is only a devils advocate argument.

A sub-national group steals an unguarded FF reactor from an unattended site. They then modify it to burn deuterium instead of boron. In this conversion process they replace the multi-layer foil electric generator with a beryillium/U238 blanket. They then operate this reconfigured reactor covertly for three months. They then chemically reprocess the Be/U238 blanket to extract plutonium.

Is this not possible?

What design provisions are necessary to preclude this scenario?

[Author]

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