[Duke Leto]

I disagree, I don’t think there’s time to putz around with a gradual rollout. Global warming has set the deadline for us. I think the DPF reactors have to be manufactured at a rate of at least 20,000 units per year and they have to put out energy at $10-20 per Megawatt hour concurrent with constantly rising Federal emissions taxes to FORCE the utilities to shut down the coal plants by raw economics. The CO2 emissions have got to be stopped before the polar meltdowns become irreversible.

There are probably 20 abandoned subterranean mines for every 1 operational one, and I believe that if the walls are concreted up and laminated, basically a requirement for climate regulation anyway, the metals and coal dust won’t be an environmental problem.

You’re right about the citrus trees, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of other crops that will benefit from a trebled growing season.

[Duke Leto]

What would really be lovely is wine. If you could grow 3 vintages a year in a climate controlled underground vineyard you could take a huge chunk out of the cost of wine and thereby provide a healthier choice in alcohol to the masses.

It would have to be called “Adam Smith’s Scottish Coal Label”. (To get this joke you have to be familiar with Smith’s seminal thought experiment on comparative advantage. Or maybe it was Scottish Oranges. Point is the DPF wipes out the climate comparative advantage.)

[Duke Leto]

So barring some miracle discovery in radiation containment, there’s an asymptotal lower limit on unit size of about a cubic meter.

Ergo no fusion-electric car or propellor airplane, even if the system can be scaled down to about 500 KW. Rail Gun equipped 5 MW M1A1 Tanks, sure, but no way to mass produce the little lovelies and retrofit all the existing oil guzzling cars.

On the brighter side, you can slap one of those babies into an SD40 locomotive without too much trouble, gutting the diesel in the diesel electric locomotive. Can probably just leave the old engine in place and dump the reactor into the empty fuel tank.

The absorbtive capability of water for catching neutrons has to be a function of density as well as depth. (—- remembers distance between nuclei outside neutron stars.) Scratch that thought about increasing the water density. What about cadmium or (gods forgive me) graphite?

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