[markrh]

delt0r wrote:

Like most things, one of the larger costs for an FF generating station will be personnel, and the way to minimize that cost is to centrally locate multiple devices, and have those overseen by a small staff, rather to have many distributed small generation stations that each need their own staff.

One or two reactors for a small community would not require a full time staff to maintain. The system can be monitored remotely and maintenance would only require periodic refueling and electrode replacement.

Yes it would. You are not going to get a bunch of highly qualified persoanl to only work part time, or train up for just a part time job. These things need maintenance no matter how idealistically auto-magic you make them. Just a pulse power supply to run these things is something that doesn’t even exist right now, and any currently plausible design is going to need a lot of maintenance. The circulating power is much larger than the output so you have a lot of high power, high voltage electronics. This stuff doesn’t just run like in some movie. It needs maintenance.

It will need maintenance by highly specialized and qualified staff, and they will have plenty to do.

On the other note. I don’t really understand the whole “centralized power is evil corporations and stuff” mindset. We have centralized power because it make a *lot* of economic sense. FF would not change that.

Assuming FF even works of course. And that is still a big IF.

I am am not saying hire part time workers to maintain a few units in a community. Utility companies have a centrally located full time staff that go on the road to maintain the electrical infrastructure. It is no different than that. The need to maintain a large long distance grid would become redundant, thus would incur a large savings. The economics of scale would become a mute point due to the reduced loss in power compared to delivering it over long a distance.

[markrh]

Tulse wrote: Like most things, one of the larger costs for an FF generating station will be personnel, and the way to minimize that cost is to centrally locate multiple devices, and have those overseen by a small staff, rather to have many distributed small generation stations that each need their own staff.

One or two reactors for a small community would not require a full time staff to maintain. The system can be monitored remotely and maintenance would only require periodic refueling and electrode replacement.

[markrh]

Henning wrote: It’s a long and exhausting story but its general function is cited here:

Johnson’s latest JTEC prototype, which looks like a desktop model for a next-generation moonshine still, features two fuel-cell-like stacks, or chambers, filled with hydrogen gas and connected by steel tubes with round pressure gauges. Where a steam engine uses the heat generated by burning coal to create steam pressure and move mechanical elements, the JTEC uses heat (from the sun, for instance) to expand hydrogen atoms in one stack. The expanding atoms, each made up of a proton and an electron, split apart, and the freed electrons travel through an external circuit as electric current, charging a battery or performing some other useful work. Meanwhile the positively charged protons, also known as ions, squeeze through a specially designed proton-exchange membrane (one of the JTEC elements borrowed from fuel cells) and combine with the electrons on the other side, reconstituting the hydrogen, which is compressed and pumped back into the hot stack. As long as heat is supplied, the cycle continues indefinitely.

As he is just using hydrogen gas, this makes a great drop-in for the cooling circuits of the electrodes and onion. Where we’ve intended elsewhere in the forum to use helium. So the gas is not used in a steam/liquid cycle.

Maybe it’s worth contacting him with the intention of introducing him to the idea of focus fusion. An invitation to LPP’s lab? Maybe he’s curious?

I heard that the efficiency of the JTEC system is 60% + efficiency in energy extraction from heat currently. This may help in cooling and produce net gain in energy output. FF could extract more energy by utilizing the waste heat that is produced vs radiant cooling in current plans.

[markrh]

I agree, simple is best. The device’s output is direct current, so will still need to be converted to alternating current. Some equipment will be needed to make the inversion and produce phasing, whether that method is solid state or rotary.

[markrh]

Electric motors don’t like pulsed currents but rather use a smoothed wave form, either an analog wave or a wave like digital form such as pulse width modulation (PWM). AC from the grid is a wave form in both single or three phase. Capacitors can be used to filter out the 200 Hz pulses to create a flat DC current, then be converted to AC by PWM at whatever the local frequency is, 50 or 60Hz.

[markrh]

Thanks Matt. I wasn’t looking at binding energy as the source of mass. I learn something new every day.
931.5 Mev * 0.0100336u = 9.346 Mev

[markrh]

Ivy Matt wrote: Proton-boron fusion begins to occur at an appreciable rate at about 100-150 keV ion energy. Optimum energies for proton-boron fusion are about 100-600 keV. Each reaction produces a total of 8.7 MeV of kinetic energy distributed among the three alpha particles. The extra energy comes from the conversion of mass to energy, as in Einstein’s famous equation.

(H1) 1.00794u + (B11) 11.0099u = 12.01784u
3 * (He4) 4.002602u = 12.0078064
12.01784u – 12.0078064u = 0.0100336u is converted to energy.

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