[nakile]

The cycles per second caught my attention. I’ve been assuming that a unit could be throttled by lowering the number of cycles per second, but Eric states after 52:55 into the first video that the cycle rate can’t be too low or else the boron gas would participate onto the electrode, making 200 cycles per second “about right.”

So does this mean a reactor would be more of an “on or off” type of device? What could be done for loads lower than 5 MW?

[nakile]

As much as I agree, economics has its way of making the best idea not happen all the time…

To narrow down and rephrase my original post, is there a good economic case for putting the waste heat to work with residential and commercial applications? Will it be worth building a hydronic pipe network along side a new electric grid (we’re due for a new one soon no matter what) or will economics favor just building a beefy power grid that can do everything with electricity for these customers and the reactor waste heat simply gets thrown out?

Again, if the reactor will be hitting higher efficiencies in decades time, I think the answer is most likely no. Even 38% is borderline. In both scenarios I’m imagining a decentralized municipal level system, that’s how these units would work best. But how will the infrastructure itself come together? I guess the major factor/question here is what is the theoretical maximum direct conversion efficiency and how likely is it to be reached?

[nakile]

This is tough. Whatever all of you end up doing, I think it should be more grounded in science. Outside of the focus fusion social circle people are very skeptical of DPF research (including me).

What I would do is just aim at basic fusion education for now. People still don’t know a lot about basic nuclear physics. The plus here is that some of these facts could bleed over and help other fusion efforts too. Things like density of the fuels, resource use, waste products, pollution, and fuel reserves. One for density and resource use could be:

“[em]Less pollution and mining: The US consumes 19.6m barrels of oil per day. X barrels of decaborane could generate the same amount of energy in a FF reactor[/em].”

I imagine that X number would likely be under 20. I don’t know the math so somebody will have to fill it in. But going from 19,600,000 of something down to under 20 would be a big change in terms of resource use and mining alone.

You can also do this coal, which would actually be a better comparison since coal is almost used exclusively for electrical production like a fusion reactor would.

“[em]Less pollution and mining: The US consumes 21,500 railcars of coal per day. X railcars of decaborane could generate the same amount of energy in a FF reactor.[/em]”

Since a lot of the concern over coal use is global, I imagine the global coal consumption per day numbers would be even more interesting.

[nakile]

Benf, were you able to attend?

[nakile]

Just thought of another one. Would there be any issues with induced radioactivity? Going back to a potential accident where there is a victim that is exposed to a lethal amount of CH4, I would assume that by the time a crew comes to secure the scene that all the radioactive methane would have long sense risen into the atmosphere, but would the crew have to protect themselves from any induced radioactivity from the surrounding structures or from any victims while removing them?

[nakile]

So the force needed to break a reactor open would be, on its own, much more dangerous than what comes out of the reactor itself.

I suppose that for the radioactive methane (the carbon of the compound being 11c), detailed dispersion and dose calculations will probably be needed at some point. I know that in larger cities substations are located underground and next to large, tall buildings. If you have a gas release in a location like this, I could see some issues coming up, but that I all depends on how quick the gas rises and how fast it disperses into a harmless concentration. If the numbers aren’t favorable, something extra will have to be thought up and implemented to mitigate the issue.

[nakile]

Woah, thread reset… I guess I need to explain better.

If the Focus Fusion experiment, or any of the various aneutronic projects for that matter, start to show great progress, public interest will grow. And with that will come a lot of skepticism and people digging deeper trying to uncover the “catch.” I can see carbon-11 becoming that catch. Here you have a very potentially potent (short half-live) beta emitter. When dealing with short half-lives, milligrams are a big deal. Then there will be the “what happens if somebody comes along and blows these up or crashes a car/airplane into them” concerns. These are important questions that need solid answers.

I’ve read many times that in the case of the Focus Fusion, it’s nine hours from shutdown to all the 11c generated decaying to background levels. People are going to want to know what to do, if anything, in those nine hours if there ever is a loss of containment accident.

How much is in each reactor will also determine how many of these you can have in one location before safety regulations get tougher. The higher the 11c in each the reactor, the lower the amount of units people will be confortable having in one area. If it’s high enough, then distributed deployment or mobile applications (ships/aircraft) might be a tough sell or even prohibited.

zapkitty wrote: Very small amounts of 11C are safely used in PET scans…

This is a great starting point. If 11c is used in PET scans, that means there’s a lot of data on direct human exposure, which would be the worse case scenario in a loss of containment accident. Its just a matter of getting the numbers.

[nakile]

Before I make anymore assumptions, what exactly is our current grid capable of? I know that every summer the thing is being pushed to its limit, at least that’s the story. Is this really the case or is the problem being overblown?

If not, is it anything that can be fixed with just new equipment? I know that quite a few transformers are undersized (I see 10-15kva units on 200a services all the time) and I’m going to guess that since those are undersized that substations most likely are too, but what about the conductors themselves? Were they sized with the foresight to accept more load if newer equipment was attached or does the whole grid really just need to be torn down and rebuilt if any major upgrade is needed?

My main worry is that the electric car is shaping up the be clean energy’s first killer app. If the current grid really is on the brink of failing then its simply going to be a disaster for electric car proliferation. Especially with fast/super charging. I can see those who oppose alternative energy will use this as yet another beating point to hold it back. “Your gas lines to your home never failed.” or “When was the last time you couldn’t fill up your old gas car?” These folks are relentless.

Except they’ll partially have a good point, which is the problem. I feel like in the alternative energy world all I tend to see is “developing new energy sources” and too little “how to get it where it needs to go.” I don’t know if that means everything is fine on the distribution/transmission side, or if that will be the easy part to fix/build when the time comes, or if nobody is thinking of that part and the switchover to an all electric world will end up being a disaster because no one did.

[nakile]

Patientman wrote: I was considering suburban systems, because that is were I live. Hypothetically, I have a (coal, gas, or nuclear) 500 MW plant which generates a $1 million a day. The thing is paid for and you come along with a fusion generator. It has a lot of cost saving and money generating advantages….A normal capitalist would say, “screw the extra cost of multiple units in multiple places. I will just gang them up in one place and save the bucks. I also don’t have to worry about them in multiple places.” Remember, they play by their own rules. You can’t assume they will gravitate to a distributive network, just because it is the right thing to do. They also hate it when other people “tell” them how it should be done. (I’m just playing the devil’s advocate.) Thinking though capitalist tendencies requires painful brain mechanisms and sometimes it hurts. 😉

I agree, but I think a distributed system *might* be favored more by capitalism over time. Here’s another few hypothetical situations.

If you have a 500MW plant of any type, that thing is making a lot of power that needs to be sent to a lot of people. Enter step-up transformers, step down transformers, high voltage transmission, thick conductors, substations, and all the other things that need to be done to send a lot of power even a moderate distance. Now, of course, all these are currently paid for, but they’re also old, as is most of the existing grid, and need to be replaced. Our current grid is also designed to, I believe, handle an average household demand of about 5KW.

Enter focus fusion. Electricity is dirt cheap. All of sudden, people want to start heating their homes with electricity. I believe that the common furnace size is around 50,000 btu, which about equals a 15KW furnace. That’s just home heating, electric cars will be another huge demand on the grid, too. And I’m sure many people will come up with other crazy uses for electricity that we can’t even think of.

The energy density of our current grid is low. With this, it will have to go up. The whole things need rebuilt. If you want to stay centralized, this gets really complex because your 500MW plant has become at least 1.5GW now. You’ll have to expand it majorly, build a heftier cooling system because your stuffing a lot of things that make a lot of heat in a tight spot. You also have to start working with much higher voltages to make things efficient. I call it the tragedy of centralization. With centralization, a centralized facility gets increasingly complicated very quick even if all the users surrounding it aren’t trying to do much more.

All of a sudden, buying all those small properties and building all those tiny plants doesn’t sound too bad. With generation capacity spread throughout the area it’s needed in, you can work with moderate voltages, air cooling becomes possible, smaller conductors can be used, even perhaps eliminate most transformers. There’s work being done now to build inverters that directly output at 13.8kv distribution voltages with 2.4kv models already on the market. At this point, the only transformers you need are on the customers site. We’re talking, mechanically, a rather simple system.

Now I’m going to put my capitalism hat on. If there’s anything that I see happening, it’s that, yes, current power companies just retrofit their plants to save money, then to prevent a hugh demand spike that would make their aging network crumble, keep prices that same they are now as a form of demand control. Of course, this will lead to public outcry very quickly as they start collecting billions in cash while providing an old out of date grid that prevents anybody from doing anything new. If their smart, they’ll take those cash pools and start upgrading their network and that’s what I hope they do and think they most likely will. If they don’t somebody else will come along and do it, be it the municipalities or other companies, and put them out of business.

Now I’m going to put my evil capitalism hat on and get a little crazy. The larger power companies that retrofit first will do it to drum up capital to buy the smaller guys who aren’t as flexible and form an oligopoly.

Now we have pretty much the same situation we have with ISPs right now. Charging huge service cost on something that doesn’t cost them much while using the excuse “People seem to be doing fine with 10Mb connections, we see no need to go bigger” with the issue being that because people [em]don’t have[/em] bigger connectons they don’t know the possibilities that one brings.

But electricity is different from Internet. One is 100 years old, the other isn’t. One our older politicians understand, the other not so much. One the general public understands the great things that would come if it became cheaper, the other not so much.

So at this point you have either the current fray of power companies or a small group of oligopolized electric companies absolutely profiting off their customers with a cheap and clean state of the art energy source that would be wonderful to power everything off of, but we can’t. We still have to burn natural gas to heat our homes (and put CO2 into the air) and gasoline to power our cars (and put CO2 into the air).

In a very short period of time the fight for clean energy has gone from being a huge civil engineering and social challenge that would take half a century to becoming a messy political issue. With that, we’ll probably see a huge DOJ antitrust case come along, leading to a huge breakup and restructuring of the electrical supply system. Or like in the other scenario, others will simply come along and build a distributed grid anyway.

Those are some of my best guesses. Though I think it really depends more on how different political and environmental groups will react to aneutronic fusion, since it really is a complete 180 from the direction we’ve been going in with energy policy.

[nakile]

Well, if focus fusion lives up to everything that its promised to be, it more or less takes the current electric grid and flips it on its head instead of integrating with it. There will still be grids, just not the ones we have now.

I think at first power companies will just hook these up at their existing power stations. At this point, everything is the same, minus the pollution and fuel cost taking up most of the power bill. Once they get the thumbs up from government and society, they’ll move to the substation level. When that happens, no more power transmission, only distribution. With transmission becoming depreciated, most renewables, aside from roof top solar and residential wind, will simply be done for. No more long distance transmission to move the renewable energy around. Less grid to support means that now even the distribution cost will start to drop. A total cost at or less than 3 cents per kw/h delivered would make electric heating competitive with the current cost of natural gas.

Over time, things will get even more distributed. Every several blocks will be a reactor station. I imagine at this point that pretty much all the distribution wiring will be underground, too. That’s the current trend at this moment will new grid work and since the current grid is very undersized for the demand that we’ll be seeing with this type of energy source (electric heat, electric cars, and some other unimaginable things) I’m sure the whole thing will end up being rebuilt.

I think for residential and light commercial use there will still be a local sort of grid since you can’t put one of these in your basement for both size and cost reasons. Even if you could get around those issues, it would still have to be maintained and managed and most people don’t have time for that, even if it was done by door to door professionals. Here, it’s a resource best shared.

But large commercial and industrial entities will most likely just have their own units on location. They’ll be able to get the super cheap energy directly from the reactor. When they want to do something new that requires more energy they can just go and do it, their system, their rules. Upgrade as necessary and move forward. It will definitely change how they use energy.

Of course, this all assuming that regulation and environmentalism moves in favor of distributed aneutronic fusion. As much as I like renewable energy, they have their own lobbyist now. And most environmentalist have been thinking that fusion is always 30-50 years away for so long that if comes earlier they simply might now know how to react. [em]All[/em] environmental policy that we have has been written around energy becoming more scarce and expensive.

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