bobcook39...@hotmail.com wrote:
Their (AAA) device is immense and expensive, worse than common day fission nuclear plants. IMHO it would suffer the same financial issues associated with the nuclear power plants here and elsewhere. The world needs small, cheap, non-centralized power supplies.
The most attractive feature of the Tri Alpha technology is the fuel. No doubt about that. It would be great if the boron-proton reaction lent itself to a small footprint, but it does not - at least not yet. Perhaps that will happen eventually, but in many cases - engineering for a large scale is actually more expedient for getting a product to market than going small. Off-the-shelf parts are available, for one thing.
There is another option, yet to be mentioned - a hybrid. If dense hydrogen can be manufactured and stored for a short time, perhaps that path will be the way to harness the tri-alpha reaction on a small format.
In the best of all scenarios, we could imagine a Holmlid laser device which produced excess heat and UDH as a by-product. The UDH could then be used immediately in a second step to fission boron. That is not as far out as it sounds and it works because there are no (few) neutrons.
It looks like almost everyone prefers the idea of small power formats, but the large centralized power plant may have a place for centuries to come. The economics of steam conversion favor large formats and that may not change. Therefore, this choice is probably not a case of "either/or" ... and all form factors would find a place in the future - if technology permits. Actually, the intermediate size of about 30-50 megawatts is probably the largest market.
