[Axil]

Brian H wrote:

Recently, in a previous post I have suggested a series of focus fusion experiments that use light water and heavy water as the fissile medium in the FF reactor in preference to deuterium or boron gas.

The density of deuterium available in heavy water would be orders of magnitude greater than those availed in gas.

Another type of experiment would include boron nano powder suspended in water to increase the density of boron available for plasmoid fusion. Cavitation chemistry has demonstrated that metal nano-powders will vaporize in plasma.

These experiments would produce collapsing cavitation bubbles whose pressure profile is high as follows:

“Shock wave emission upon the collapse of a cavitation bubble attached to a rigid wall was investigated using high-speed photography with 200 million frames/s and 5 ns exposure time. At a distance of 68 μm from the bubble wall, the shock pressure is 1.3 ± 0.3 GPa. The shock pressure decays proportionally to r exp−1.5 with increasing distance from the bubble. An estimation of the peak pressure at the bubble wall reveals a pressure of about 8 GPa. A major part of the shock wave energy is dissipated within the first 100 μm from the bubble wall.”

It is reasonable to expect that the internal maximum pressure inside a free floating cavitation bubble is somewhat greater than 8 GPa. In comparison, the maximum pressure applied in a diamond anvil is only about 1 or 2 GPa.

If a FF plasmoid can be produced inside a collapsing cavitation bubble, I would be interested in the fusion results at 8 GPa pressure compared to those produced in a gas at ambient pressure.

In all these suggested experiments, fusion based transmutation should be determined through spectroscopy.

AFAIK, the cavitation-fusion experiments have failed because the energy dissipation is so fast that no actual fusion events occur. The Gods of Chaos are interfering.

IMHO, water is a poor cavitation medium. Mercury is about 100,000 times better and molten fluoride salt is even better than that. There are cavitation methods using oil that are reported to result in over unity energy gain. So in summation, it all depends.

[Axil]

Brian H wrote:

…

But then again, like transmute said, these neutrons could also be harnessed to remediate existing stockpiles of the most wicked and nasty legacy of the Cold War and Arms Race.

Focusing neutrons is inherently difficult or impossible, since they are uncharged. They radiate in a statistical sphere. So now you have a shell of nasty-legacy isotopes.

The complications really multiply exponentially, don’t they? 😆

There is a neutron reflector used is many fission reactors called a “neutron reflector”. It is made of graphite whose crystal structure is specially designed and manufactured to reflect neutrons to a high degree of efficiency.

Certain types of fusion/fission combo hybrid reactors(thorium) does not produce any long lived nasty-legacy isotopes. Sorry!

[Axil]

Axil, no offense, but I think you’re being a bit paranoid.

”A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on”.

First off, it is certainly not the case that all “greens” are against nukes (I would count myself among that number), and it is completely unjustified to claim that greens in general would be against a fusion technology that leaves no long-term radioactive waste and has no chance of catastrophic meltdown.

I was lazy and imprecise here. I painted with too broad a brush.

I like you are environmentalists; like most of the other members of this forum. We don’t want to see our deserts paved over with solar panels and mirrors, or our prairies and mountain ridges tainted with the ugliness of the uncounted windmills. These green machines are not evil in themselves, but when their use is taken to extremes pushed by the profit motive characterized by the power industry in the interest of uncaring men they become destructive to the natural world.

Men who assume the green mantel as a path to amazing profit are hypocrites and charlatans. The do not have the interest of mankind at heart.

Here is and example that will expand on this point I am trying to make; A prime example of this kind of guy is T. Boon Pickens.

From a recent interview as follows:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/126/a-mighty-wind.html

You recently announced plans to build the world’s largest wind farm, in the panhandle. Is that about money or the environment?

Money! First thing, it’s about money. Of course, I’m also a good environmentalist. I can pass the saliva test. But I’m not going to go do a 4,000-megawatt wind farm for the environment first and money second. I’d rather go give money someplace else. You’re talking about $10 billion.

What kind of return do you expect?

A minimum of 15%. It’ll probably be closer to 25%.

Tell me about the project.

It’s huge, the size of two nuclear plants in output, enough to power a million homes. More than 2,000 turbines, each between 2 and 3 megawatts. The first 1,000 megawatts will be ready by 2011, and 1,000 each year or two after that.

And you’ll do all this on your beautiful 68,000-acre ranch?

I’m not going to have the windmills on my ranch. They’re ugly. The hub of each turbine is up 280 feet, and then you have a 120-foot radius on the blade. It’s the size of a 40-story building.

So whose land is it going on?

My neighbors’, mainly south of my ranch. They’ll get royalties of 4% to 7% on the energy produced, an average per turbine of $10,000 to $20,000 per year. They still can run cattle or farm on the land with the turbines there too. We’ll put in only five per square mile. And unlike oil, this is not a declining situation. Let’s say a guy has a 3 megawatt turbine, and it does $20,000 per year. It’s going to be out there for, say, 100 years. You’re talking about $2 million. It’s not like having an oil well that’s a real pisser for a few years, and then it starts to decline.

What about when the wind doesn’t blow?

[Pickens purses his lips and starts puffing.] That’s the problem with wind generation. You’ve got to supplement it with a gas-fired or coal-fired source so whoever buys it gets continuous 24-7 generation.

So you’re going to build that?

Either we will or someone else, like TXU.

What happens if Congress doesn’t extend the $20-per-megawatt-hour Production Tax Credit for wind — set to expire December 31? On a project this size, that’s an $80,000 deduction every hour at full capacity.

Then you’ve got a dead duck. It would be hard to go without a subsidy. But they’ll probably pass it.

The frankness and audacity of this guy is so extreme that it is amusing.

[Axil]

Tulse wrote:

If a reactor and/or its fuel is not self protected and its can be subject to proliferation, it must be guarded against any credible threat.

Unless this IAEA security requirement (aka security plan) is met, the NRC will not license the reactor.

[…]

In order for the FF reactor to be licensed by the NRC, if the FF reactor is not buried underground, a security force will be required to repel any credible threat 24/7/365. Most probably, the size of that force will be the same as the guard force that protects the current fleet of light water reactors.

Proliferation of what? Decaborane? The reason the NRC and IAEA worry about fission reactors is that their fuel can be used for bombs, and is highly radioactive. FF devices have extremely low levels of radioactivity, and their fuel isn’t useful for making weapons. I doubt the IAEA would even see a FF device as falling within its mandate (at least no more so than a hospital cyclotron), and similarly the NRC is going to care much less about a FF device than a nuclear battery filled with uranium.

There are plenty of devices in the world that produce X-rays and ion beams and neutrons. Many of those are used for industrial and medical purposes. FF isn’t really doing anything new, and is not a proliferation threat.

Hi Tulse thanks for the reply.

… similarly the NRC is going to care much less about a FF device than a nuclear battery filled with uranium.

It goes deeper than that. There is an economic war underway between nuclear and gas/renewables right now and the greens are winning. The greens are doing their best to undercut nuclear as a replacement for coal. To do this, the greens are well funded by the gas industry.

Recently, I even saw a windmill ad on the TV paid for by the gas industry.

Small fusion is not on the greens target screen yet. But, if small fusion shows promise, it will receive a first class slander campaign equal to its threat to the gas industry.

If FF is as powerful as you say, it will come down to a life and death struggle. You will look back fondly on this time of anonymity.

Facts won’t matter. The NRC will respond to any doubt real or perceived in small fusion, it has always reacted so and this is not likely to change.

Along the same lines, I have always wondered why federal money has always been directed to every big fusion debacle like ITER and LIFE instead of polywell and FF.

It very well might be that a huge monstrosity of a fusion reactor is hard to steal or divert to unapproved and uncontrolled purposes; whereas, a small fusion reactor can be loaded into a pickup and fail below the horizon of authorized control. Control is of upmost importance.

Also, there is a desire for a pure fusion bomb to enable the elimination of the world’s nuclear arsenals and the elimination of all current designs of nuclear weapons by treaty. A small fusion trigger feed by a chemical/electric power source could provide the first stage of a multistage fusion bomb instead of a small fission device trigger.

For example as follows:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/07/darpas-handheld-nuclear-fusion-reactor/

“ …the Chip-Scale High Energy Atomic Beams project had a budget of just $3 million, and rather shorter timescales; the plans for fiscal year 2009 include: “Develop 0.5 MeV [mega electron-volt] proton beams and collide onto microscale B-11 target with a fusion Q (energy ratio) > 20, possibly leading to self-sustained fusion”

I think this project has turned BLACK.

If the Chip-Scale High Energy Atomic Beams project does not work out, FF could also turn black.

[Axil]

Your labor costs/staffing levels for FF are off by about a factor of 30. So the labor costs are similar, while the capital costs for the hybrid are higher than FF ($50-$100/kW) by about a factor of 10-20.
So say again why the hybrid is cheaper?

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has a concept called “self protection”. When a reactor and/or its fuel is self protected, any human that gets to within a meter of the reactor will die in 5 minutes or less.

If a reactor and/or its fuel is not self protected and its can be subject to proliferation, it must be guarded against any credible threat.

Unless this IAEA security requirement (aka security plan) is met, the NRC will not license the reactor.

The new small reactors (nuclear batteries) are buried 30 meters underground sometimes incased in reinforced concrete; but none of these nuclear batteries have been licensed. It is yet to be seen if this protection strategy will be allowed.

If allowed, these nuclear batteries when shipped, installed, or decommission, these processes will be monitored in shipment or on site to assure security.

In order for the FF reactor to be licensed by the NRC, if the FF reactor is not buried underground, a security force will be required to repel any credible threat 24/7/365. Most probably, the size of that force will be the same as the guard force that protects the current fleet of light water reactors.

[Axil]

Brian H wrote: texas;
good posting; thanks for saving me the effort and time! 😉 But there is a change-of-paradigm issue (one of several, actually) Axil and others are responding to here: the sheer numbers of FF modules is overwhelming compared to existing large plant. The utilities and others are used to and comfortable with big. “Proliferation” of small units (though, as I discussed with A. and R. elsewhere, clusters and stacks are quite feasible) will present all kinds of choices and incentives to industrial, civilian, and military users that haven’t been at issue before. So there will certainly be much more distributed generation, often for projects and options that simply never existed previously.

As I said once or twice: once this genie is out of the bottle, there’s no stuffing it back in. By regulation or monopoly muscle or any other way. The dollar slope is just too steep, and expenses will aggressively seek the lower level.

But there is a change-of-paradigm issue…

The utilities and especially the NRC are not comfortable with “change-of-paradigm” issues in any way, sharp, or form. They consider it a threat and a risk. The nuclear industry is conservative in the extreme and the NRC leads the way on this.

…clusters and stacks are quite feasible…

Now this is an excellent idea; an idea I can get behind fully and with enthusiasm. A purpose built data acquisition and control system would need to be developed to get it to work, however.

But, the designers of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) tried to sell the cluster approach to the utilities with no success. Here, 10 PBMRs were to replace one Light Water Reactor (LWR).

The dollar slope is just too steep, and expenses will aggressively seek the lower level.

This is an absolute truth. A low cost/price structure will always rule the day and overcome any resistance. Low cost Conquers All.

But this is only possible is the boron fusion fuel cycle is made to work in a highly productive manner and that is soooo hard to do. A D-D fusion backup plan is prudent to consider.

[Axil]

texaslabrat, thanks for your response. Please allow me to add some detail to my position.

Axil, you want FF to be a Tokamak when it really, really isn’t for a very good reason.

A Tomamak is not what I had in mind. The LIFE inertial confinement laser reactor is closer to my concept but not very close.

You’ve completely missed the point and the elegance of aneutronic fusion.

Everything has a downside even aneutronic fusion. For a commercial fusion reactor the ‘fusion energy gain factor’ (Q) must be at minimum about 30 and ideally at about 50. That will be very hard to achieve if not impossible with aneutronic fusion. But I could be wrong in the end; I hope I am.

Even D-D fusion is hard to achieve but it is ideal for a fission/fusion hybrid.

but it’s not for those who want fusion without the downsides that D-D fusion brings.

D-D fusion does have downsides but they can be overcome. Those downsides are material erosion due to alpha particles, high energy electrons, and neutrons.

A liquid will mitigate all these problems; heavy water. Heavy water will slow the neutrons down through mediation, and turn alpha particles and X-rays, and high energy electrons into heat that can be removed from the fusion core. This heat is removed by a cooling system; after all it is at most only 5 megawatts.

The thing that is important is only thermalized neutrons; slow and gentle neutrons that are very easy on the reactor structure.

Neutrons are not to be feared from an engineering et al perspective? Yeah, I guess if you don’t mind the structure turning brittle and becoming long-lived radioactive waste

There have been thermal reactors in operation for over 50 years and will be licensed to operate to another 20. People maintain them with no ill effects as proved by the history of these reactors.

A pure thorium cycle hybrid reactor will produce wastes that are safe in 300 years. It takes a few centuries to cool the wastes down; they are mostly platinums and rare earths.

Nobody wants a fission reactor in their neighborhood…and a D-D FF reactor would have many of the same negative traits.

I can see a nuclear plant cooling tower from my house and I have a million neighbors. There are no revolts around me.

The ash effluent from grandfathered coal power plants drop radioactivity on the landscape and that must be removed.

Great idea about thermalizing…. Ever priced a gas turbine engine.

The capacity of the plant I had in mind is between 2 and 4 GWe. That can be done using a FF reactor core to drive a thorium fission blanket.

The plasmoid is produced inside the heavy water. The electrodes and first wall are composed of polycrystalline boron doped diamond. The diamond first wall that separates the heavy water from the molten fluoride thorium salt is double walled with a vacuum to thermally isolate the heavy water which operates below 100C from the molten salt that operates at 700C.

Diamond is virtually transparent to neutrons and any neutron damage is annealed at 700C.

Nuclear fission will heat the molten fluoride thorium salt to operating temperature. The thermalize neutrons from the fusion core will take a few months to get the salt up to operating temperature as U233 is gradually built up.

The neutron fluence will be about 10e20 neutrons per second. This is the same as the LIFE laser reactor.

The hybrid will use a primary heat exchanger and a secondary heat exchanger that will drive a CO2 based turboelectric generator at 50% thermal efficiency.

The heat from the fusion core is dumped to the ambient air. Its heat output is too small to economically deal with.

Let’s just assume for a moment that a Brayton-cycle based power generation…

The price of fuel is not a cost driver. What is expensive is the “Return on Investment” on the cost of construction. This is interest on capital. Labor is also expensive.

This construction cost should be about $1000/kw.

The thorium hybrid will require about 150 people to operate. It will be the size of a pebble bed modular reactor and can be built in a factory.

It will produce the power equivalent of 1000 FF reactors that need 5 to 10 men each to operate.

150 men for the hybrid vs. 5,000 to 10,000 men for the FF reactor fleet; at 100,000 per year cost each. This is called the “economy of scale”

[Axil]

Brian H wrote:

Believe me: DPF’s and fission are compatible. It’s a fusion device and fusion is done with light elements. And DPF’s are all about an attempt to “make watts, not rads”

I think you meant “incompatible”. DPFs are vastly more efficient than any possible fission rig.

It all depends on what you mean by the word efficient!

Here is how the fusion/fission hybrid neutron economy breads down.

I will address the thorium fuel cycle since it is highly proliferation resistant (I think proliferation proof) when coupled with fusion in preference to the uranium fuel cycle and its plutonium (a proliferation risk) byproduct.

An aneutronic boron reaction nets about 8 MeV of power and that’s it. On the other hand a d-d fusion reaction that breeds thorium nets about 200 MeV per initial thorium fission and that in turm will breed with 3 other secondary thorium atoms to net 800 MeV per each fusion/fission reaction.

In other words, each D-D fusion produces one neutron that breeds 4 U233 atoms.

An ideal thorium breeder reactor design will have a breeding ratio of 1.07. But due to neutron losses from the accumulation of isotopes of various kinds that poison the fission reaction, a thorium breeder will be lucky to break even. Let us assume a real world worse case breeding ratio in the range between .95 and .99.

So in round numbers, for every fusion neutron produced, about 400 thorium fissions can result. At 200MEv per fission that is (200Mev) (400) = 80000MeV per fusion neutron; as opposed to just 8Mev for boron fusion. That is an increased energy density factor of 10,000.

However, if not supplied with a small number of supplemental fusion produced neutrons, the thorium breeding nuclear reaction will eventually stop because the thorium breeding ratio is just a little less than one.

Without an occasional dose of fusion neutrons, the thorium fuel cycle will wind down to a stop.

It is not an overstatement to say that for the lack of an occasional neutron, the thorium fuel cycle is lost.

Those occasional neutrons can come from U235 and even Pu239 but fusion neutrons are clean and pure. It enables a pure thorium fuel cycle that leaves no long-lived nuclear wastes about.

[Axil]

Here are some of my opinions; all of which are subject to change based on your opinions and discussions thereof:

First, the FF reactor as currently envisioned is too small to effectively control and police world wide and I think such control will be required in this day and age.

To meet the world’s energy needs, a bigger reactor form factor is called for. This is not to say that a 5 Mw form factor has no place in the world power tool kit; on the contrary, it could be very useful.

Flexibility and many form factors and design approaches are optimum.

For example, the US navy needs a new high power dense reactor for their subs and aircraft carriers. About 100Mwe to 200Mwe would fit the bill nicely.

A small 5MWe reactor might be useful to supply power to a small marine base in the desert.

Second, I am not yet convinced that boron fusion is worth the pain and very low power density that goes with it. For me, deuterium fusion is the “Holy Grail”.

For another thing, neutrons are not to be feared from an engineering, operations and maintenance (O&M;), or a proliferation perspective.

Alpha particles damage fusion reactor structural material more than neutrons do because of the electric charge that they carry. On the other hand, material is available that can withstand high energy neutrons for a very long operational period without part replacement especially if these high energy neutrons are thermalized near the plasmoid. Using heavy water as the fissile material is one way to do this.

I think that the multilayer foil electric generator currently envisioned for the FF reactor won’t last very long; but time will tell on this.

Using molten salt as the “heat” exchange medium can provide power conversion efficiency greater than that of the direct conversion shell/ ion tube.

[Axil]

Recently, in a previous post I have suggested a series of focus fusion experiments that use light water and heavy water as the fissile medium in the FF reactor in preference to deuterium or boron gas.

The density of deuterium available in heavy water would be orders of magnitude greater than those availed in gas.

Another type of experiment would include boron nano powder suspended in water to increase the density of boron available for plasmoid fusion. Cavitation chemistry has demonstrated that metal nano-powders will vaporize in plasma.

These experiments would produce collapsing cavitation bubbles whose pressure profile is high as follows:

“Shock wave emission upon the collapse of a cavitation bubble attached to a rigid wall was investigated using high-speed photography with 200 million frames/s and 5 ns exposure time. At a distance of 68 μm from the bubble wall, the shock pressure is 1.3 ± 0.3 GPa. The shock pressure decays proportionally to r exp−1.5 with increasing distance from the bubble. An estimation of the peak pressure at the bubble wall reveals a pressure of about 8 GPa. A major part of the shock wave energy is dissipated within the first 100 μm from the bubble wall.”

It is reasonable to expect that the internal maximum pressure inside a free floating cavitation bubble is somewhat greater than 8 GPa. In comparison, the maximum pressure applied in a diamond anvil is only about 1 or 2 GPa.

If a FF plasmoid can be produced inside a collapsing cavitation bubble, I would be interested in the fusion results at 8 GPa pressure compared to those produced in a gas at ambient pressure.

In all these suggested experiments, fusion based transmutation should be determined through spectroscopy.

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[Author]

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