[Aeronaut]

Somewhat deeper research led to buying a new county plat book/atlas yesterday and snagging Michigan’s energy stats from the EIA Saturday. This showed me that my initial siting (by map) would be only 15 miles from the major regional transmission line. On a trip to the big city yesterday I had a chance to scout that line for nearly 20 miles towards the next major city. (This is one of the cool things about living halfway between 4 major cities). The last leg gave me a chance to eyeball my first site choice, which is heavily wooded with some wetlands. EPA and tree-hugger lobbies would be an endless pain, which I’m trying to avoid. Secondary political ramifications would surely include FUD/NIMBY lobbies. I also found a tributary(?) transmission line only 7 miles from that site. This would have given us 3 wires to tee-splice into so the plant could send and receive grid power.

The jackpot was re-discovering a GM stamping plant with a 6 wire stretch of the transmission line already going over the edge of the parking lot and a local distribution transformer yard a block away. The last of GM’s maintenance people are scheduled to be re-assigned about the time Eric physically completes Baby. This site occupies nearly one square mile, and GM’s leaving has already put one heckuva lot of hurt on that city’s tax rolls. In Grand Rapids, this site is called GM Plant 1. Plant 2, on the north side, is another single-purchase tract with similar characteristics. While Plant 2 would definitely need to be bulldozed, Plant 1’s ceilings are at least 30 feet, high enough to double-stack FF modules using the existing cranes.

Here’s the module dimensions I sketched out yesterday, which are so roomy that they could probably end up being built at 2/3 of each dimension- i.e.- stacked 3 high:
Core swap/service apron: 20 feet.
Module: 40′ long, 20′ wide, 15′ high.
Services Alley: 20′ joins 2 stacks.

Here’s how it could look in a 1.3 million square foot building with 30 foot ceilings: (this building may actually be larger and higher- your mileage may vary)

50 modules wide=1,000 feet
16 modules arranged in 8 banks= 1,200 feet.
1,600 FF modules @ 5MW ea. =8GW (on the south side of town)

Combined with a new building on Plant 2’s site could maybe- just maybe- power the entire county, which is built around moderately heavy industry, machine builders, tool and die shops, etc. That concept should be fairly easy to sell politically. The luster of mothballing 28 coal-fired boilers just might turn this into the eco-status symbol needed to overcome the NIMBY/FUD, which is due to not knowing anything about FF’s inherent safety and other benefits.

Now, let’s assume that Eric’s testing and calibrating using only D-T fuel this year, and the pB-11 salsa delivers 3 or more verifications between August and November 2010, so the press release that rewrites energy history goes out during a major election cycle. Most of Michigan’s elected officials are up for re-election this year. I’m currently compiling an initial contact log for all candidates. What I intend to do is place as many as 1,000 calls to staffers on the first round, which will sort out who the Players are. The second round would hopefully be 1,000 calls or less. Both rounds will be selling the need to protect their political credibility by making Alternative Energy THE hot topic, and having a plan in place showing that they seen FF coming at least a year before the headlines and are ready to integrate it due to concerted public/private planning and and alignment of pooled resources.

Multiplying this strategy by 50 states could make Alternative Energy THE hot topic of the 2012 Presidential and Congressional races. Leveraging the existing political pressures should raise public awareness of FF’s benefits while short-circuiting the NIMBY/FUD votes (but not the rhetoric) with no budget and very little effort compared to a paid advertising PR blitz. As Spock said in the original series, “Chance favors the prepared mind”.

[Aeronaut]

We scratched our heads (briefly) wondering how they get the protons together.

[Aeronaut]

You can’t please all the people all the time, so why not focus on reducing fossil fuel consumption, which automatically equates to reduced CO2? Cheap electricity is just icing on the cake, and we don’t have to lead with that potential benefit.

[Aeronaut]

Thanx, Breakable. Should be required reading, imho. Paul was on the cover of INC magazine this month with a track record of 145 startups- each on only 10k$ !

[Aeronaut]

10 miles from an 80 pound battery! I’m impressed. I think the prospect was saying is “I need a 20 mile range”.

Thanx for the breakdown on your numbers Brian. While a 15 minute sample is enough to miss entire A/C and furnace cycles, I’m sure the university was reading the power meter every month, too, so your numbers of 15kW expected load yielding 100% headroom make my numbers look a lot brighter. What really made my day, though, is the idea of selling FF to the utilities as an energy conservation plan. The real trick is going to be how to accurately forecast how much headroom is needed to cover growth during the permitting/financing cycle as it stands (or is perceived by the utility’s Board) at that moment. Remember, they’re working on a 50 year planning cycle.

Another number that needs to be more precisely defined imo is that my load calcs were based on 240V * 30A=720W max clothes dryer (not the more meaningful RMS value of 509W). Not really sure what the meter would actually record, but it’s easy to see a 30A breaker as 120 volts. (ask me how I know 😉

Eric, thanx for pointing up my decimal slip- I’m so used to interpreting .55 as 55 cents that I’d gritted my teeth and figured it as the cost of pioneering- throw in a few more reactors, especially if the feds are buying the peak load units.

The township model that I’ve been looking at may not be the best approach in my rural county, although it could improve Grid reliability at a verrry granular level. The six adjoining counties, however, have around 40 to 45% of Michigan’s population, and a lot of these farmers are getting way up in age. But still, one thousand acres for a GW plant boggles my mind’s eye. Yes, we have the isolation, but acquiring that much land without the hard feelings of eminent domain could take 50 years. It would also eliminate large chunks of several roads.

On the plus side, “snipping” a high voltage transmission line out there would let this plant feed two cities, and it would only take maybe 50 miles total transmission line construction to bring most of this 7 county region’s transmission lines into this plant…. and the posts feeding these farms and houses are almost certainly already there, permitted, and amortized.

Rematog, how difficult would it be to sell your management the design concept of 3 or 4 modules high, 25 to 50 modules wide, per bank, with the option of designing the building to function (or retrofit) as a containment building? Thanx.

edit- Just looked at my 1993 plat book for the county. These large blocks average 200 to 300 acres each, and few are adjoining. This looks like Rematog’s plant needs roughly 2 square miles, and the only way to do that without a LOT of negotiating is to talk the State out of a relatively small part of the public hunting/rec area beginning on the west edge of my township. Next township over has a large lake that’s a HUGE camping and boating draw, so even out here it’s going to be a huge challenge just to acquire a large block of land.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:
Good analysis and comments! As for the load, I was suggesting that 15kW would be a peak, not an average. Heating would be significant in the northern winters, cooling significant in the summers, but even so 15kW is pretty big. And that’s STILL only 1.5GW demand / 100 homes.

Note that the housing/building is part of the factory unit. I assume that various shell alternatives would be offered over time, and prettification is always a local option, I suppose. As for the foils, I suspect the difficulty is less than you describe; I’d like to see what analysis Eric has on hand about this. Perhaps the patent filing would provide some clues.

The 200 mi BEV exists, if you want a $100K roadster soon, or a $50K sports sedan in 2 years or so: http://www.teslamotors.com/ , http://tinyurl.com/TeslaConvoy . The 200 miles costs about $4 recharge at current prices, a fraction of that with FF. The $50,000 sports sedan would cost the same to lease and run as a $30,000 ICE gas-burner.

Your lead-time comment points out another contrast: it would be slashed by about 90% for FF when the factories are up and running. This will almost make power grid planning a JIT operation, or at least far more responsive.

Oh, yeah, I drooled on my keyboard the first time I visited those links, lol. Now to get a FF license so I can afford one of them.

15kW in my opinion is only on the low end of first shift hours. I think it would be higher after 5:00 local time. My range, furnace, and hot water are all gas-fired, which would change if the township eliminated or even reversed at least my electric and gas bill.

Yep, grid expansion will come down to the time required to finance and permit each installation. That’s a very cool thing because once somebody breaks the ice all bets are off regarding how fast the demand for FF installations and electricity is going to take off.

[Aeronaut]

Lerner wrote: Duke, no name-calling is allowed on this forum.

Also, you are wrong. All units of weight–kg, metric tons, pounds, grams, etc. are also used as units of mass. Objects have mass and thus inertia, no matter where they are. An object that weighs one ton on Earth has a mass of one ton wherever it is, including in space.

Eric, Brian, and Duke, thank you for clearing this up. After I reread the last 3 posts several times I finally saw how that works. As you’ve probably guessed, I passed on high school physics. I also passed on trig and calculus, while we’re at it. A 4,000 pound (more or less) FF power block makes a lot of my calculations a lot brighter. Thanx for persisting.

[Aeronaut]

Brian, yours are the numbers I see in larger production as a tinker who’s worked in manufacturing for many years, in many market niches, including aerospace. The basic reactor and solenoid should be a breeze to mass produce. Ditto for capacitor plates, possibly for entire cap banks. I can see every last one of these modules having an aftermarket similar to engine parts and PC components, which would drive the cost of parts WAY down. Now throw in cheap energy…..

The priciest component will be the X-ray harvester, with its thousand or more foils of differing thicknesses. The obvious solution would be to stamp them out on presses and distribute copies of those thousand dies to as many as a thousand stamping plants. (I like this! All these shuttered factories can go back to work again!). Talk about a job from Hell. Just designing the dies, let alone making them, is going to cost dearly in time and capital. Parts this thin are lousy candidates for the molding process because even if the metal flows, it will cool before reaching the end of the mold. Now I’m thinking Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) which the semiconductor industry uses to stack thin layers of metals and semiconductors to make CPUs, GPUs, memories, etc. This eliminates all of the die and press problems and invites somebody to mass produce those machines to “cash in on the lucrative fusion aftermarket”, further reducing that part’s price, in time.

The downside of distributed generation will be the price of the step-up transformer and the high current switching and wave shaping circuitry needed to distribute even the 13.2kV I used in yesterday’s example. High current parts go for mil-spec prices, as do high voltage parts. Compact designs optimizing for high current AND high voltage are where Rematog’s numbers will average up into his pricing ball park. Hopefully that, too, will change with mass production.

The single most important part of Rematog’s guesstimates are not the actual numbers, but the categories that they’re listed in. Labor costs suggest union labor. “Nuke plant” site prep will be priced at government prevailing rate labor, so a simple 25 by 25 foot steel building is no longer priced the way it could be if we could light up a few million high school and college age people with “The Wonder of Fusion”, thus obliterating the Nuclear Mystique and turning these cool little buildings into neighborhood status symbols. Heh, heh, heh.

Rematog’s also pointed out that consumption is inversely proportional to price. An all electric car with a range of even 200 miles would be very appealing to me. I’d either keep my ’05 gas burner for road trips or rent a hybrid for the rare occasions I really would need more than 100 miles in a day. Now we’re talking about charging two or more electric cars most nights. Throw in some light sabers for the road warriors, 30A to 50A “cheap resistance heating” furnaces, water heaters, clothes dryers, and Thanksgiving dinners, and the 15kW average requires a LOT of instantly available reserve capacity.

The utility industry’s problem is how to plan and execute for anticipated growth in demand despite a lag time of something like ten years or more per plant, which is likely to strand capital IF fusion ever leaves the labs. Sucks to burn fossil fuels, but what else is proven (reliable) until thousands of townships, villages, and regions rise up “out of nowhere” and demand new legislation permitting them to partner with the utilities to own their own, extremely reliable, local fusion plants. All it takes is one township to light the fuse…

I therefor believe it is in the utility industry’s best interests to put systems into place that would welcome and fast-track the integration of these local systems. The PR benefits alone would be stupendous, and the transition out of burning fossil fuels could easily be scheduled along a thirty to fifty year plan.

[Aeronaut]

Rematog wrote: Aeronaut,

You may be right that I’m on the high side on duration, but again, I could be on the low side of parts costs…..? I cetainly don’t have hard data. But, we’re nit picking the numbers, and the point was the order of magnitude. For exampe, if maintenance is only 60% of what I guesstimated, then cost per household would go from $200/month to $150/month. A nice savings, but not revolutionary.

And, I can see FF as revolutionary… but that it does not REQUIRE distributed installation to acheive this revolution. Which is good, as I think the regulators and/or public would be NIMBY to any nuclear reactor….and fusion is a nuclear reaction.

On another note, I don’t see utilites as providing core rebuilds. If this was done in a shop (nice thought there Aeronaut!), I’d guess it to be more likely factory offered or specialy technical companies. Utilites are regulated public business’s, with very high barriers to doing work in the un-regulated arena.

Rematog

Rematog,

I, too see FF as a revolutionary nuclear technology that could easily inspire NIMBY and/or dismissal as pie-in-the-sky utopians if improperly presented. That’s why I described my system in the order I did in today’s first post. I wanted a safe pastoral undertone, lol. None of us can accurately guess the numbers, but we’ve accomplished a lot today and yesterday examining how both business models can evolve simultaneously. Neither is right for all situations, nor does either preclude the other. Factory service just might work with all parties concerned, but I’d sure like to see the existing credibility of the utility ease the negotiations and transition.

[Aeronaut]

Rematog wrote: Brian,

I’d be glad to know from someone (Dr. Lerner?) what the expected maintenance cycle is, but in my posts from May, 08, no one challanged this. In that post (for a central station repowering, I also used 10 shifts for duration of annual overhaul. In that analysis, I assume day & night shifts. In this case, I assumed only day, as having night shifts in a remote location might even yield negative productivity. Note the costs above are for well paid ($25-$40/hr) skill craftsman. These costs also include money for estimated parts and materials. My judgements on the costs, wage rates, durations, are based on >25 years in heavy industrial maintenace and engineering experience. Yes, I know, “appeal to authority”….. but jeez, I have been doing this work since Reagan’s first term…

Cost. The 300K to 500K figure put out by the FF developers, is for a module, FOB the factory dock. It does not include foundations, cooling, controls, fences, etc. So I’ve consistantly used $1,000K. This is dirt cheap. FF at $200/kw capital and no fuel cost, vs new coal plant at about $1,600/kw to $1,800/kw, with large fuel cost. Fission now has construction cost of $2,358/kw, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office in May 2008. My personal belief is that that is low and would be more in the range of $3,000 to $5,000/kw. So, $1,000,000 for 5 MW ($200/kw) is cheap!

Rematog, the only numbers I’d whittle away at are how long (and the assumed where) of the annual overhaul. I’d like to think that 9 hours or more after taking the reactor off-line the crew could do a core swap in only a few hours on-site. That would be a function of how the shielding, core, and access are designed into the reactors, along with task-specific jigs, dollies, etc. The core would be rebuilt on a properly instrumented rebuild bench and very likely verified on a burn-in rig, similar to aerospace procedures. This goes almost without saying that the utility provides these services in their overall service contract. Who else can all parties trust?

[Aeronaut]

Duke, I’ve had the distinct impression that nobody’s reading Eric’s slide, just responding. It clearly states 2 tons of mass. I wish Jimmy hadn’t linked to the slug- its purpose has something to do with continuity between units in the English system. Not needing the slug is another powerful reason for using Metric, in addition to round number gravity and continuity of units.

Here’s 2 familiar formulae that demonstrate mass as I understand it- Weight =mass * gravity, and Momentum=mass * velocity. Weight is not a constant, but mass is. That’s why Eric gave the “weight” in terms of mass. Aboard a spaceship, nothing would have any weight, but try to compute length of burn to achieve specified delta-vee without knowing the mass of everything from the contents of your propellant tanks on down to what’s in the galley and holding tank.

If that doesn’t make it clear, we had best agree to disagree, and simply move on, in my opinion.

[Aeronaut]

Pay up, my dear Watson. The slide I cited in Eric’s video clearly states 2 tons of MASS . Weight and mass are not the same thing, but I’ll look it up in my copy of the 23rd edition of Machinery’s Handbook and quote it if you like.

[Aeronaut]

I was hoping we’d all agreed to disagree on this issue, and I thought the waters had just about cleared. Following Jimmy’s link leads to a discussion of how weight is mass times the force of acceleration. Had I used metric units my multiplier would be 10 or 9.8, depending on the degree of precision I was after.

Clicking the “weight” link in that section goes here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/mass.html#wgt , which says the same thing. I don’t write this stuff, I just report it, lol.

What it says is that a 2 ton I beam will crush you in space, as on Earth, even though it has no weight in space. Its weight is 64,000 pounds on Earth, 0 pounds in space, and 10,666 pounds on the moon.

[Aeronaut]

Rematog wrote: 10 million @6%

30 yr amortization = $719K/yr
20 yr = $860K/yr
10 yr = $1,332K/yr

10 million @8%
30 yr = $881K/yr
20 yr = $1,004K/yr
10 yr = $1,456K/yr

The above does not take into account taxes, depreciation, profits(?).

I’d also point out that the quick cost of power I did earlier today did’nt include any overhead for administration, insurance, profit, etc.

Rematog

Thanx for the numbers, Rematog.

From the bottom up, the utility partner would bill admin, insurance, profit, and other reasonable service amounts and deduct them from my township’s power bill. Like the way I reversed a common term that everybody thinks they know the meaning of? As this unfolds, I’m thinking of this more and more as one of those fabled Public/Private Partnerships which is coming into style for funding and managing large projects. In this case we would have 3 parties- the township voters, township government, and the utility company. I don’t think we’d have to look very hard to locate energy grants from the feds and possibly the state. Who knows- maybe they could provide enough loans to do this without, or with a much smaller bond issue.

Something to keep in is that Michigan’s entire economy is too closely tied to Detroit’s fortunes. Governor Granholm’s recovery strategy has centered around turning Michigan into the world’s renewable energy capitol by luring solar panel and windmill factories to locate here. She’s a lame duck, so a FF plant could give her the triumphant exit she’s got to be looking for. Not just a feather in her cap, but a full war bonnet when she goes to Washington.

Local politics aside, how many reactors do I need to reverse my $1,500/yr property taxes after all bills are paid? Not eliminate my property taxes, reverse the cash flow, please.

[Aeronaut]

Jimmy- I didn’t mention reactor safety since each was assumed to be shielded to below background radiation level. Now I’ve stated that design point. Physical and electrical safety were the main thrust of my last post. Should the site encounter trespassers, I’d bet on them being kids 9.9 times out of 10, so I believe that illustration is perfectly valid.

Rematog, I hadn’t figured the cost of capital at all, as you pointed out. Could I get you to calculate a 10M$ construction and initial operating bond over 10, 20, and 30 years, please?

The 6 to 10 reactor figure I mentioned provides at least one reactor to cover the local network’s scheduled maintenance requirements. Planning for 10 reactors on 5 sites allows for 5 of them operating at as much as 98% rated load availability to pay the system’s way, as I noted in the previous post, albeit not quite as plainly. Given the potential load variations that I noted above, the main dedicated local reactor could also run at 9x% full rated available power and sell most of its output to said futility.

My previous post was designed to leverage the existing infrastructure to the fullest possible extent, including electrical and safety considerations. Michigan is one of something like 28 states that is required by law to buy a certain percentage of its power from wind farmers and fart burners. The big utilities are obligated to shadow every kW of this power with a fossil fuel-fired plant to fill in the gaps. FF provides the most predictable way to do that without building new plants, which will begin operation grossly underloaded.

The plan I’ve laid out offers the utility industry a graceful way out of burning fossil fuels without stranding partially depreciated assets, while expanding in 5 to 10 MW distributed chunks, on somebody else’s dime.

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