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Rematog wrote: I disagree with personal experience being irrelevant.

If in a discussion of say, electric car deployment, two people disagree on how they will be operated and maintained. One has had a career in the automotive repair business, the other has not (I know nothing of your background or expertise).

Which ones thoughts on that particular subject would carry more weight with a third party?

If a mathematician says “2+2=5”, and a small child disagrees does that mean the child is wrong? Thus the “weight” of someone’s experience does not make their statements on the subject true, said person still needs to prove its true with evidence.

I’ve made my case based on:

Existing asset reuse, including very importantly, transmission access (we have agreed, most residential and light commercial power needs will be provided by local distribution I believe).

Likely Regulatory issues.

Public Fears.

Security issues.

Added installation cost for distributed siting (economies of scale).

We disagree on how important these thing are, but I don’t think you could make a believable claim any of them are of no account.

As I recall, the only reasons you’ve stated for distributed installation are:

Savings on transmission costs.

People want to own/control their own generators.

I do not consider philosophic reasons of “I like it more” or “I dislike big business” to be valid arguments.

I agree transmission costs will be an important factor. I just do not believe it and the desire to own will out weight the disadvantages/hurdles I’ve mentioned above, at least for the first 10 years of deployment.

I think we both agree that, with time, the Regulatory, Public Fear and Security issues will become less important. And, I’ll also agree that desire to own will increase with time.

We disagree in our evaluation of these factors. You are stating that your reasons are so strong, that they will outweigh the reasons I’ve given for my opinion that Focus Fusion will, in the first phase, be deploy at central facilities and major industrial sites, along with big ships.

Time will tell.

We cover this already:

Public Fear: as scary as an x-ray machine
Security: No more dangerous then a power transformer.
Larger scale: add the cost of high power transmission and problems of centralized grids. Centralization exist because small scale conventional generators are not competitive with large ones, but since focus fusion can’t be scaled up (core size can’t be scaled up in this design) an array of generators in any one spot is not going to cost much less then many single generators all over the place. Distributed generators will reduce energy distribution cost, be improvise to black outs from failures of any single generator and provide energy (and income) in the form of waste heat for heating/cooling water and buildings or powering industrial processes.

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Here a report:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0401015
In the conclusion they specify the advantage of using a D+T or D+D neutron source.

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Rematog wrote: I’ll plead the 5th on the charge of “Appeal to Authority”.

But, my point was that I am speaking from personal experience, not some third hand, unknown authority.

My personal experience is the regulatory agencies can be flustering and arbitrary. My personal experience is that even on attended plants with rent a guards, security issues happen. On these basis, I state that my opinion is that the NRC will be one of the permitting agencies and will require on site security.

I understand you disagree. If I understand correctly, you think that Focus Fusion will be treated like a transformer or air conditioner unit and can be installed anywhere an owner pleases, and believe that remote monitoring and a lock on the door will be the security requirement. You feel that maintenance can be contracted out, just like the building plumping or HVAC maintenance needs. If this is not correct, please explain what I’ve misunderstood and how you think it will happen.

Note: I have limited my discussions to what I’ve referred to as the “first phase” of deployment. This being the 5-10 years needed to switch over, transitioning to more de-centralized nodes out to twenty years after commercial availability. I am not considering the world 50-100 years from now. I’ll be dead.

At this point, I think we will both have to wait and see what actually happens, if it happens at all.

Personal experience means nothing, say a man see a UFO and says it was aliens, you argue against his logic and he claims “you we not their, man, this is what I saw!”

I don’t see why focus fusion can’t be decentralized from the get go, After prototyping, testing and a few pilot facilities of course.

Consider the world 50-100+ years down the line, your child, grand children and any related generation (hopefully) won’t be dead by then. Also considering transhumanism some people might actually live forever eventually, so nothing will be able to be put off for another generation to deal with.

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No, they don’t require security of that nature at water treatment plants (but, they too are centralized facilities, most with a 24/7 staff). Didn’t say it was rational, in fact, said it was not.

But, Focus Fusion plants WILL, for the first period at least, be regulated and licensed by the NRC in the United States. They will, in my opinion, require security.

Just remember, I’m seeing this thru eyes experienced in maintenance, operation and construction of heavy industrial facilities. I would be very poorly equipped to critic the methodology of a laboratory. It may be I’m more concerned than you are, due to having to have dealt with people cutting fences, stealing (usually by employees of either the company or contractors on site doing work) and having the public “intervene”. I’ve personally had some one walk up to me and threaten to “bring friends and guns and dynamite and blow this place up” if it was not shut down (a coal fired plant). He was a crack-pot and local police dealt with him.

But…..this stuff is real.

I’ve had to deal directly with State, and indirectly with federal environmental, OSHA and pressure vessel code inspectors. I’ve seen some real chickenshit. I could fill a couple of posts with stories of just plain stupid stuff they have required. Not something to make the environment cleaner or the work place safer, but to comply with their interpretation of the bureaucratic regulatory system they run.

I seen many automated water treatment plants for small towns.

Yaawn, Appeal to Authority. As we mentioned power sup-stations don’t have security other then a fence, a focus fusion reactor would be the same thing. Any issue of permits are equivalent to systems of similar size and danger, For example a Coal power plant is going to take up much more space, money, produce more harmful byproducts and require more permitting then a 1/10 acre fusion power plant. Even a wind mill of equivalent mega-wattage to a fusion power plant will take up more space (and be a giant “eye sour” to morons that lack aesthetics in clean energy) and require more permitting, The focus fusion reactor would be out of sight out of mind, at the foundation of large buildings (were dangerous machinery like industrial air condition and back-up generators already exist) or attached to existing power substations.

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The public does not fear medical X-ray and NMRIs. A focus fusion reactor potentially has no residue radiation, Its as safe as a medical X-ray (a very very powerful x-ray)

Dedcaborane is as lethal as ammonia, ammonia by the way farmers us on millions of acre of land.

I’ve seen many windmills that aren’t in windfarms, It should be noted that windmill get more and more competive with coal and gas power in wind farms, while focus fusion if it works would be cheaper then coal or gas no matter the configuration.

If you don’t understand the advantages for a decentrilized power grid, then look it up.

Why stop there, why not “remain strictly opinion” until focus fusion actually is proven to work.

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Rematog wrote: Nothing you’ve stated has addressed the fundamental fact that they will require significant security. Killer Robots? This is a great idea for an office building. Janitor killed, $20 million wrongful death settlement. But really. All of this security, remote maintenance (read, crew costing $300-500 an hour spending at least two travel hours per job (shudder), driving in a $50k maint. truck, not having the right part on board….etc.

What’s the response time if there is a security breach? Who responds, local police? The county sheriff? What happens if a fuel gas leak detector alarms (there would have to be one, the stuff is toxic). A radiation detector alarms? Who responds, how fast? I assume the unit would be tripped immediately by it’s control system. And stays off line till a maint. crew gets there to fix the problem.

Also, distributed installations to power, say a building, would also have a grid connection (and not many would be unconnected to grid, for power during shutdown, etc). That means it would need remote switching etc. You can NOT have a power source hooked to the grid that can’t be remotely isolated. Otherwise, you back feed power when not expected and kill linemen. The union frowns on this. ….wait. Just had a thought. How are you thinking your going to control these things. Via Internet. Not a good idea.

Security requirements alone for something like this would make that difficult to impossible. Allowing Internet access to a plant control system is not normally allowed. There are major security concerns just having third part access to plant LAN for equipment maintenance. And the LAN is NOT part of the Plant DCS. You would need to install some very secure (read expensive) means of accessing the Focus Fusion module’s control PLC/DCS, if not installing a dedicated hard wire connection. And it would have to shut-down on losing it’s Internet connection, otherwise, it’s not monitored at all.

I could easily see the installation cost of a single Focus Fusion module being twice that of a “central” location with a hundred (or more) modules.

And they will require any number of permits….for each site. Heck, the permits alone will cost tens of thousands per site. Remember, we are talking about installing 100,000 or more modules in the first 5-10 years. Just think of the effort needed to obtain 100,000 site permits. More job security for lawyers. Like they need it.

I just don’t see this being well thought out. It feels to me like distributed operation is being insisted on based on philosophical reasons, not economic/engineering ones. And deployment of hundreds of billions of dollars of assets will be driven by economic/engineering and political reasons….not philosophy.

1. There is no radiation leak,
2. the fuel on hand is in small amounts, by your argument propane and natural gas substations would need heavy security, which they don’t have anything more then a fence, in some case not even that!
3. Windmills also using call in maintenance, that does stop them from being profitable, windmill also require permits, still not stopping them, people are buying them up like hot cakes!

Yes the Philosophy is that if its safer (compared to natural gas sub-station with it huge tanks of highly flammable gas) and cheaper (then any other form of power) the people will buy it, even if they need to jump through flaming hoops! I don’t see a problem with this philosophy, in places were wind and solar have become cheaper the demand has grow astronomically, no matter the need for maintenance, protocol or permits.

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I would think that with a few camera’s an automated security system could be used that could detect trespassers before they even jump the fence, alert a security station somewhere with the live camera video and than the reactor can be turn off instantly and police can be called to the scene. Or perhaps an automated turret or even a remote controlled kill bot?

http://www.tacticalwarfightergear.com/graphics/military-robot-1.jpg

Just saying, automated security would not be hard, it practically an electric power sub-station, it really does not need much more then a fence and cameras.

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Brian H wrote:

I would love OTEC to do that instead of fusion power and reverse-osmosis plants.
Think about it:
Salted water comes in
Fresh water comes out +
Electricity comes out.
Totally perfect solution. Of course the usual approach of the world is that nobody wants one.
See more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion

Yep, totally perfect. And about only about 40x as expensive as FF. Hmm…. %-P

Yes but it completely feasible with existing technology.

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Lerner wrote: In my opinion, if we suceed in producing a prototype reactor, attempts to regulate it out of existence will be the main way the oil and gas companies fight this. The response will have to be political–educating ultimately millions of people about this technology and fighting to ensure that it is not regulated as fission is. FF can’t be used as a weapon, it is safe enough for urban location, etc. It will be a huge political battle and will encompass the whole question of the political power of oil and gas and their allies.

If FF is regulated the same way radioisotopes are, it will be fine. Remember, there are radioisotopes in every smoke detector, which are required in every US home.

I don’t think it going to be a problem, people will literally be starving for alternative energy in just a handful of years, they will likely do anything no matter the perceived consequences if it will keep their home’s heated, their cars running and their food growing (using ammonia and irrigation).

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If the reactors can pump out waste heat as 120C steam/hot water it could be sold as cogen heat for heating (and cooling through absorption heat pumps) local buildings. Imagine a large city block that gets its electrical power and its hot water from one reactor.

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hate to burst the bubble, but He3 reacts with D not P, and though the fusion of He3+D is aneutriactic the D+D side reaction is not, shielding might actually need to be larger despite the reduced x-ray emissions.

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JimmyT wrote: Keep in mind that the radiation hazard is only one of the reasons for wanting to avoid neutron production. The energy from charged particles in a beam is easy to harvest. Any neutrons produced would carry away energy too. But the only way to harvest it would be by some sort of heat engine. Now if you are wanting to produce neutrons for some transmutation process, fine. But keep in mind you are going to sacrifice harvestable energy in the process.

nuclear reactors run fine on heat engines. Its a matter of energy multiplication: if you put in 1 unit of energy in and out comes only .5 units of energy out from fusion it going to be really hard to make that energy positive no matter how efficient the conversion process, but if the fusion reactions emits neutrons which cause nuclear fission in spend nuclear fuel then you can increase the energy return. Its called a subcritical reactor were the fuel in the reactor can’t maintain a chain reaction anymore from its own neutrons so a outside neutron source is provided, the neutrons produced by the fission help to supplement to neutron source but it never achieves criticality (hence subcritical reactor). Its safer then existing nuclear reactors, can run on more types of fuel and can actually consume nuclear waste, The only problem has been trying to make a reasonable sized high flux neutron source, at present particle accelerators are considered but their so god dam huge and expensive, what if a dense plasma focus the size of a tin can could do what a half mile long particle accelerator does?

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Brian H wrote: Hm. How ’bout we wait a few years till FF is available, use it to help build a Space Fountain, and use that to sling the waste into a parking orbit around the sun or onto a designated Dump Crater on the Moon? 😉 Who knows, maybe some future generation would have some interest in using all those exotic isotopes!

aah why waste it like that, when you can covert it into power and non-radioactive isotopes. It’s not “some future generation” sub-critical reactors are technically feasible NOW!.

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Brian H,

You don’t need break even at the fusion level with energy multiplication from the induced fission. Even with particle accelerators in conventional subcritical designs the multiplication factor is 60to1, to 60 times more energy comes out then put in, a D+D or D+T focus fusion driven reactor could possibly achieve even higher energy multiplying factors.

Subcritical reactor designs are usually very large, but replacing a giant particle accelerator with a much smaller focus fusion device helps.

The point is we have huge stockpiles of nuclear waste and not much we can do with it, but that could change if we achieve even limited D+D or D+T fusion using focus fusion.

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Brian H wrote:

…

I don’t think that actually proves anything, EEStor product could perform a full fold less then what is claimed and it would still be a marketable product, ….

Numbers, TM, numbers! How many-fold would that be? 2? 5? 10? 100? 1000?
Heh. 😉

I doubt that Lockheed’s engineers have been suckered, so there’s presumptive evidence that the fundamentals are there, anyway.

Lockheed has done many projects in its rich history, some of which have been complete failures, they are not new to high risk technologies. Also EEstor is now late by a full 12 month from their original validation release date.

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