Talk-Polywell.org

This is an interesting sales presentation for the BFR. Maybe it should be in "General" ?
http://www.petitionspot.com/forums/128- ... e=threaded
Again, enjoy.

Whoa, Nelly. The 128 Gigawatt idea is unfortunately simplistic and flawed. A significant percentage of the BFR's output will be intercepted as heat on the in-facing coil walls. So you need to cool them. Any thoughts on how you're going to move a dozen gigawatts of heat out of the system?

The 128 Gigawatt idea should NOT be the basis of any petition.

Even if you could handle that problem, then you'd have the not insignificant issue of moving that amount of energy from one location onto the grid. I doubt any part of a grid could handle that.

Better to have 128 1GW reactors IMO.

But we need to get breakeven first.

OneWayTraffic wrote:Even if you could handle that problem, then you'd have the not insignificant issue of moving that amount of energy from one location onto the grid. I doubt any part of a grid could handle that.

Better to have 128 1GW reactors IMO.

But we need to get breakeven first.

Utilities would actually prefer 1,280 100 MW jobs.

Apropos:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/busin ... =permalink

MSimon wrote:Utilities would actually prefer 1,280 100 MW jobs.

With reactors that size, and not belching exhaust gasses, I could see installing a couple at the edge of a city. Downtown would be good except for the real estate prices.

Do these reactors fit the construction model of manufactured homes? If so, we could convert the USA to fusion electric in just a few years. Could BFR's be inventoried and sold from the "show room" floor?
How big would the largest piece be?
As a delivery model, consider that FEMA dumped at least 250 manufactured homes into eastern Iowa in just a few days, little more than a month after the floods. Brought them up from the south somewhere... Georgia maybe. Those are 14 feet wide, probably 11 feet tall and long, up to 84 feet. And there was no "slow" about it, they were dragging those homes down the freeway at 50 to 60 mph, then they set them up on prepared pads in existing trailer parks.
Converting to fusion would go pretty fast if it was "Deliver to the next prepared site."

Maybe this is a question for the design forum?

Aero wrote:Do these reactors fit the construction model of manufactured homes? If so, we could convert the USA to fusion electric in just a few years. Could BFR's be inventoried and sold from the "show room" floor?

Maybe this is a question for the design forum?

I think this is an excellent question. Have an inventory of 100MW BFR's shrink-wrapped and ready to go in one piece. Are things like gas-fired electric plants already available this way, or do they ship out pieces and assemble on site?

The US's total installed generating capacity is 1,089,807 MW according to http://www.eei.org/industry_issues/indu ... /index.htm.

So we'd probably need almost 11,000 100 MW net reactors if we wanted to completely replace everything. If you wanted it done in ten years then we'd need to be building 3 a day, everyday, for a decade!

Multiply that by five or ten times for the rest of the world... and you've got yourself a business.

Especially if you pull a Microsoft and require a very modest license fee of 1/10 of cent per kilowatt-hour. At that rate you're looking at over 4 billion per year, forever increasing, for just the US market. If they were really pretty cheap to manufacture, you could provide the reactors FREE, with a contract to buy fuel from us and pay a small per energy generated fee for the life of the reactor (if cost is $100/Kwe, or 10 million for 100 MW plant, and you charged 1/5 cent, then you would turn a profit in 6 years, and make 1.75 million a year each from thereon).

Would seem like a good deal for the utility (I'll give you a money machine, if you pay me 1 out of every 25 dollars you make); and would encourage fast adoption.

-Alan