Axil-
Anything like that will cause a big utility lots of money and they will not
want to change their existing set up.
With so much hydrogen contained, normal chemical explosion will become a
safety concern.
Large new plants of the old design will cost too much compared to new simple
designs which will make electricity from the heat directly.
The grid will eventually decay and be replaced by distributed small reactors to
produce electricity with much more reliability.
There will not be a good market for replacement parts for the old turbines and
pumps and maintenance costs will go up for the big plants you describe.
Lastly most nuclear plants are not designed for the high temperatures that make
the Hot Cat desirable from an electricity production standpoint. Thermal
electric designs are quite nice when it comes to simplicity and reliability.
That's why NASA likes them for electricity in space. Their major problem with
existing powered supplies is keeping the Pu-238 out of the atmosphere.
What you describe as a multilayer sphere would take lots of R&D to come up with
a working design. Rossi will have a lead in the production of cheap reactors
and likely stay ahead in terms of cost for some time. For example, heating
these spheres as you describe with a "wave of your hand" by doping to make an
electrical conducting layer is not an off the shelf feature that I know of.
The focus of a Rossi competitor should be in the area of making electricity
directly from the heat source. Reliability and cost for this aspect of the
development is where the promise lies for others trying to get into the
business. (The conventional nuclear power industry lost track of this
objective and that is the main reason they are now going out of sight, becoming
a thing of the past, much like hand cranked autos did, IMHO.)
When I have more time I will list more problems with your TRISO cute queue
balls.
Bob
----- Original Message -----
From: Roarty, Francis X
To: [email protected]
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2015 4:31 AM
Subject: RE: EXTERNAL: [Vo]:TRISO LENR pellet
Axil,
That is an elegant idea that makes all the construction
difficulties worthwhile if we could actually use present reactors and
technology to fast track adoption. I hope someone pursues this idea.
Fran
From: Axil Axil [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2015 11:59 PM
To: vortex-l
Subject: EXTERNAL: [Vo]:TRISO LENR pellet
In the long run, Brillouin’s low energy nuclear reaction technology will beat
out Rossi's Hot cat reactor design. But there needs to be some design upgrades
to the Brilouin's current approach. A LENR TRISO fuel pellet design should be
invented. Like the Hot-Cat tube design, this pellet should be a completely
self contained unit including nickel or tunstun micro powder and the fuel
AlLiH4 just like Rossi's alumina reactor core tube.
The multi layered TRISO spherical pellet is a layered design featuring an
inner core of fuel consisting of nickel micro-powder and AlLiH4 surrounded by a
covering of alumina. Next, a thin coating of yttrium stabilized zirconium oxide
covers this core, then follows a thin layer of pyrolytic carbon (PyC) to
confine hydrogen, followed by a ceramic layer of SiC whose function is to
further confine hydrogen at elevated temperatures and to give the TRISO
particle a high degree of structural integrity, This LENR spherical pellet is
about the size of a queue ball where each layer of the composite is doped to be
electrically conductive to provide electrical heating of the alumina core.
As in the current Brillouin design, a very short but powerful electric pulse
heat the pellet pile in their bed where some hundreds of thousands of particles
take advantage of economies of scale the the utilities love so much. This
pellet can operate at 1400C and is used to retrofit existing nuclear and fossil
fuel generating stations using existing pumps and generators to feed the
existing grid using the existing grid interconnect power line network.
Now which design is more cost effective, 600,000 hot cats and there
associated micro processor controls or a nuclear station like 20 gigawatt
centralized LENR power station with a 600,000 pebble bed of dumb high
temperature TRISO pellets.
