[Tulse]

This is extremely good news: the Senate has passed the CROWDFUND Act. This should offer LPP a great opportunity for an alternative funding stream.

[Tulse]

Henning wrote: Focus-Fusion-1 has already been published in the “Journal of Fusion Energy”

But I take it that [em]Physics of Plasmas[/em] is more prestigious (or at least has a much higher impact factor).

[Tulse]

Is this the first peer-reviewed publication to come from FF-1?

I really hope this opens the door for more funding — getting a peer-reviewed article on such a fundamental aspect of one’s device really separates this effort from all the tinkering wannabes.

(And on that note, what is the publication record for the other alt.fusion efforts? Polywell? Tri-Alpha? General Fusion?)

[Tulse]

The main cost of an underground evacuated tube maglev train would not be power — the capital costs would be staggering. Even if power were free, such an enterprise would not be cost effective.

[Tulse]

asymmetric_implosion wrote: If LPP makes a breakthrough, the people financing the project own it, not the people that invented it. FF will get absorbed by the 1% as a tool and things will continue.

I mean this as no reflection on the outstanding job the LPP folks are doing, or the technical difficulties they have faced, but it looks like if FF works, the end product will be relatively simple and straightforward to build. I don’t think it will be possible for the technology, once proven, to be kept under wraps — others will re-create the devices, and the research costs necessary to do so are very modest*. You wouldn’t need a General Electric to be able to do the work, a much smaller company or NGO could potentially follow LPP’s lead, especially given how transparent they have been to this point. If it works, FF will be nearly impossible to suppress.

*That’s what I find so frustrating about the resourcing of LPP’s research program — it is absurd that such a promising technology isn’t getting loads of funding, especially since it seems that only a relatively modest amount of money and time would be necessary to demonstrate whether it is possible or not. The LPP folks are doing tremendous work on what is essentially a shoestring, especially compared to far more complex and less promising alternative fusion technologies (not to mention Big Fusion efforts like ITER).

[Tulse]

Just for comparison, it appears that the average price for residential power in the US in 2011 was around 11 cents/kwh, and the cost in most other countries is far higher. These are “plant-to-outlet” costs that consumers pay, and not just generating costs — I don’t know if things like transmission system capital and operating costs are included in the FF estimate, or what percentage of the final consumer price those costs are. It seems like FF-generated electricity will indeed be much cheaper than current power, but “much” may be more like “tens of percent”, and not “orders of magnitude”. Given that, I doubt that we’ll see a lot of new power-hungry technologies enabled by FF, as I doubt that FF will make power cheap enough.

I think it’s also important to note, however, that FF is likely to have far fewer externalities associated with it (e.g., health effects of smokestack emissions, land consumption for plant siting, wear and tear on rail system from coal transportation, costs of fighting wars to protect oil-rich nations, etc .etc. etc.) — these are not factored into the current price of electricity. I think personally that it is in eliminating those externalities that FF really shines.

[Tulse]

Brian H wrote:

zapkitty, how reasonable are your figures for the cost of FF electricity? In the other thread you posit .2 cents/kwh — do you have a source for that number?

That’s from LPP. They have a breakdown of estimated FF costs in the Google talk and Lerner-hakase has used .02 kwh several times.

https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewreply/1060/
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewreply/2369/

More recently, Lerner has quoted about 3¢, but it’s all tied up with mass mfr’g extrapolation, siting, etc. But that’s the ballpark. Really, the capital costs get retired very fast, and then the ongoing maintenance is composed of electrode replacement and staffing costs. These might amount to ~$60K/unit/year, for about 40 million kwh. Which works out to ~0.15¢/kwh.
Add whatever capital cost retirement fraction you consider reasonable.

I’m confused — I see .02 cents, .15 cents, .2 cents, and 3 cents as estimates. Is there really two orders of magnitude uncertainty? (Although even that high end is substantially cheaper than US power.)

[Tulse]

delt0r wrote: Regulation has more to do with perceived safety than anything else. Note that when a FF is on, it is quite a potent source of radiation without proper shielding. So there will be some regulation.

Hospital synchrotrons and cyclotrons used for nuclear medicine also produce significant radiation, and are also regulated, yet these devices are located in standard hospital settings.

[Tulse]

zapkitty wrote: the inherent safety advantages that come with aneutronic power will mitigate even the most improbable worst-case event into something the neighbors can live with.

The other advantage of FF is that is can be done at a very small scale, and thus is likely to feel far less regulation in general. FF devices are more like hospital cyclotrons than fission power plants in scale, and hopefully the regulatory regime they will have will be more similar to the former than latter.

[Tulse]

zapkitty, how reasonable are your figures for the cost of FF electricity? In the other thread you posit .2 cents/kwh — do you have a source for that number?

[Tulse]

benf wrote: Is a body count the sole criterion?

It’s an objective criterion, and the one people most often cite.

The thing about a DPF, as I understand it is that if something goes wrong it just turns off. No meltdown potential. Kind of like the way a lightbulb goes out. There would be no release of radioactive materials that takes years, decades or centuries to abate. Why not try our damnedest to get it to work?

Absolutely! I wasn’t intending to imply at all that FF wasn’t the best option, or that we shouldn’t be pursuing it as vigorously as possible.

My only point was that people tend to focus on the possibilities of fission plant accidents, and fail to account for the accepted negative impacts of other forms of power generation. Regarding coal specificially, more than 100,000 US coal miners have been killed in accidents over the past century, and in modern times roughly 30 die [em]every year[/em]. That’s just deaths from mining, and not the more difficult to quantify impacts of emissions from coal plants (which includes natural radioactivity and other substances such as mercury). When arguing against fission power, I think it is important to compare apples to apples, and overall deaths involved in producing power seems like a reasonable criterion.

[Tulse]

As with many things, the issue isn’t enough energy, but how much that energy costs. In other words, the real question is how much per litre desalination via FF would cost, relative to conventional electrical power.

[Tulse]

Chernobyl and Fukushima were/are terrible events, but far more people have died from routine coal production.

That said, aneutronic fusion is surely the holy grail of energy production.

[Tulse]

Mike Weber Goodenow wrote: Well, there are a wide variety of per-capita incomes in the developing world. Some of the super-poor communities may not be able to afford anything other than wood and dung. But we are on our way to 10 billion people by 2080, so I’m sure clean fusion will be used in many, many places in the developing world in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term.

I completely agree, I just think that the benefit won’t be immediate for those using dung heating — the poorest of the poor are not suddenly going to get a shipping-container-sized FF device plopped in their neighbourhood (and if they did, they couldn’t afford the electric heaters needed to benefit from it).

[Tulse]

Matt M wrote: Sometimes we forget that 1/2 of the people on the planet heat and cook with
wood or dung. Cheap fusion would mean real hope for them.

Unfortunately, I’d guess that folks using those sources of energy are so poor, and/or in areas with such poor infrastructure, and/or are overseen by such corrupt governments, that cheap fusion would not make much of a difference in the short or medium term. These are folks who could not afford a gas generator even if the fuel itself was free (much less the electrical devices it would run), so I can’t imagine that cheap fusion would make more economic sense for them.

I do think that cheap fusion has [em]enormous[/em] potential to drive economic development in the long term and lift huge swathes of people out of poverty, but largely by making economies richer in general, and not in direct help to the profoundly poor with their energy needs.

[Author]

Posts