Talk-Polywell.org

I thought it might be worthwhile to try to determine what sort of cost and useful life we need from Polywell reactors for them to be competitive with current electric producers.

Here's a rough guide of electricity prices over the past 40 years.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/brochure/el ... icity.html

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricit ... .html#tab6

It looks like we'd want to be at 1 cent per Kwh or less, or at worst within an order of magnitude of that.

Let's do some rough calcs:

Bussard says $200M for what would be a 100MW reactor. 100MW over a useful active life (this is only the uptime) of ten years would be 10*365*24*100000 = 8.76E+9 kw hours. At $200M, I get $.022831 per kwh.

Presumably, later plants would cost less, but I'm very unsure by how much. I am ignoring fuel as immaterial. I am also ignoring maintenance costs and TVM/NPV considerations, because the active life and construction costs are such a wild guess.

Anyone care to hazard better guesstimates on eventual costs or active life? Simon, I know you've had some discussions in that vein.

A little out of date, but might be useful: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/issues/power_plant.html

Let us think about what he main costs of a 100 MWe Polywell reactor are.

You have a steel vessel 10 ft in dia. You have vacuum pumps. You have magnetic grid power supplies. You have cooling water pumps.

Once the design is done and you go into production these costs are insignificant. Say $10 mil to $20 mil per plant . Maybe less. Maybe much less.

Then you have the power conversion eqpt. That is probably the big driver. Figure around $.5/w (goes down with increasing production). The power conversion eqpt will have a useful life of 40 years. We know that because we already have had such eqpt in operation (with somewhat inferior technology) since the mid 80s.

I think $1/w capital costs is a good estimate for production.

Wind gets 33% up time at about the same capital cost and produces power at about $.03 per KWH. This is for an intermittent source that produces electricity at the least desired times (night - winter). Since Polywell can be scheduled its output will be more valuable.

Let us say we get nuke plant type up times (90%). That gets us to $.01 per KWH. About half the "at the bus bar" cost of competing generating schemes. Since wind plants are rated to have a 20 yr. lifetime and we are looking at 40 years that would mean around another 20 to 30% improvement in ROI. (in the noise level at this stage of calculation).

So a good bet would be 1/2 current electrical power costs. Declining to 1/4 over time as we get more experience.

Which puts it in the range of what Dr. B estimated in his Google talk.

If you consider Polywewll as a replacement for gas and oil powered plants and the fact that because of their low reqmts for fuel deliveries vs coal and low danger vs fission plants - that means you can put the plants closer to the loads reducing transmission costs - the cost balance gets better. Esp considering that new transmission corridors are hard to come by in the developed world.

In places where there is insufficient power (3rd world) it might eliminate the need for distance transmission all together.

BTW drmike - very nice link.

You have a steel vessel 10 ft in dia. You have vacuum pumps. You have magnetic grid power supplies. You have cooling water pumps.

Once the design is done and you go into production these costs are insignificant. Say $10 mil to $20 mil per plant . Maybe less. Maybe much less.

That seems reasonable, but I wonder how durable the core components will be given their extreme environment, esp at p-b11 conditions. I am guessing the first generation of Polywell plants will have significant maintenance issues, probably ameliorated by materials science/engineering advances in future generations.

MSimon wrote: that means you can put the plants closer to the loads reducing transmission costs .

Thats a very important point. Polywell looks to be a real good fit in that regard.

Roger wrote:

MSimon wrote: that means you can put the plants closer to the loads reducing transmission costs .

Thats a very important point. Polywell looks to be a real good fit in that regard.

Yes. Decentralized generation is going to yield benefits.