On 04/08/2010 06:08 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote: > Terry Blanton wrote: > >> > That's true, but we don't have cold fusion, do we? >> >> Even if we did, I suspect ramp up time to multi-Gigawatt plants will >> render the new plants cost effective. > > I am not sure what this means. I think you mean: The time it takes to > ramp cold fusion up to multi-gigawatt plant scale will be long enough to > make a fission reactor installed now cost effective. > > To which I say: Naaaa. Never happen. Cold fusion will never be ramped up > to a multi-gigawatt scale, except perhaps for something like a very > large spaceship. Even a large steel mill does not require gigawatt > levels of power. I predict that all generators will be co-gens sited at > the houses, shopping malls or factories where they are needed.
I don't quite see this. At this time CF is good for generating low grade heat, not so good for generating electricity. If it ultimately turns out to be good for generating higher grade heat but still can't generate electricity directly, then you've got something very similar to what happens when you burn natural gas in an external combustion mode: You have an external heat source, and you need to power a heat engine from it, and use the heat engine to drive a generator. Lots of homes have natural gas piped in, but almost no homes have their own generators powered by natural gas -- and those that do typically use an ICE, not external combustion with a turbine, because, if I'm not mistaken, the rig needed for external combustion is more expensive than the ICE. Equipment needed to provide adequate capacity to fully power a typical home (with an ICE and generator) runs something like $10,000, which most people aren't going to shell out, and the equipment requires maintenance, attention, and space. Why would it be easier/simpler/cheaper to build CF powered heat engines and generators than it is to build natural gas powered heat engines and generators? And why would the economies of scale, which apparently apply to natural gas electricity generation, not apply to CF electricity generation? In short, what's unique about CF which would cause the world to switch to distributed power generation? It's not obvious, to me, at least. Sticking solar panels on everybody's roofs, rather than trying to keep them all on huge centralized "farms", makes a lot of sense -- that technology clearly works much better in a "distributed" mode. But sticking a Stirling engine and an alternator in everybody's basement, along with the accompanying control electronics, catalysts, and tanks of D2 gas which may be needed (assuming we end up with gas phase CF as the most practical), seems a lot less plausible. > This will > take decades to implement this, of course, but the existing stock of > gigawatt power generators will last long enough to supply our needs > during the transition. In fact, I predict that most of the existing > stock of large power generators will not wear out; they will be scrapped > before they reach the end of their useful lives, because no one will > want the electricity they generate. > > This is what happened to WWII-era steel mills. They were scrapped > starting in the 1960s because more cost-effective mills were developed > that required fewer workers, so even though the old mill would have > lasted another 30 to 50 years with maintenance and upgrades, they were > scrapped. > > The last large-scale generators to be scrapped will be hydroelectric > power at places like Niagara Falls. These were the first modern > generators to be installed and they will be the last to be abandoned. > Perhaps a few will remain in use for something like a high-energy > physics cyclotron, but I expect such gigantic instruments will be moved > to the moon or earth-sun Lagrangian points. The latter is where you want > to put something like a 100,000-km long linear accelerator used to make > miniature black holes for space propulsion applications. (See A. C. > Clarke, "Imperial Earth.") > > - Jed >
