I have spent a good deal of time thinking about fission reactor design and I have some opinions as these ideas apply to large scale LENR power stations.
What makes for a competitive and cost effective reactor design is copious power density. When you try to sell a reactor design to an electric utility, they want “economies of scale”. That term implies that the most power should be produced from the least possible volume. One important means that a large scale LENR can be the most economical is to produce the most power from the least material and space. Rossi’s shipping container idea is not a good one because the power density derived from that design is pathetic. One way to get the power density up is to use heat pipes to move heat out of the reaction chamber and into the customer’s application. Have you ever considered using heat pipes in any future LENR reactor designs? Today, heat pipes are used in a good many non-water mediated fission reactor designs. Some of the Indian designs use heat pipes for passive cooling after shutdown. As an example of this point, an interesting product concept was the tub reactor. The heat pipe was the interface between the reactor and the customer. Unfortunately, this reactor design was discontinued because of the great expense of getting it certified by the NRC were only light water reactor designs are considered. But the concept was very attractive as a retrofit for fossil energy based power station replacements such as coal fired power generators and concrete plants. The heat pipe can support high temperature process heat. Such a heat transfer concept has an open ended heat range based on the material used as the transfer fluid. Vapor to/from liquid phase transition used in heat pipes are 1000 times more efficient than liquid coolants. That means that a reactor core element can be 1000 time smaller than it currently is. All things being equal, that means that the cost of the material that the reactor is made of is 1000 times cheaper. The replacement of existing coal and concrete plant heat sources will be a very attractive business opportunity for large scale LENR reactors. This whole cloth heat plant replacement would be made much easier if the power density and heat source size was about the same size as a fission plant or a coal combustion chamber. The ability to replace a heat plant in and existing utility installation is the dream of nuclear reactor designers because its saves about 90% of the plants value. The generators and grid connection are the most expensive part of a power plant. So a plug and play replacement for existing fossil fuel power plants and nuclear plants that can recover most of the existing infrastructure of those existing plants is attractive. This is one direction that LENR reactor provider might go. It will allow for a clean thermal plug and play customer interface where LENR reactor sub-modules can be hot swapped using a vacuum like plug arrangement into a common vacuum bus line supporting a common heat exchanger base unit. I liked the design of the tub reactor shown as follows: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_Moderated_Self-regulating_Nuclear_Power_Module Info on heat pipes can be found at the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe See how a coal plant retrofit with LENR can be done. http://www.coal2nuclear.com/Air%20Capture%20-%20SKYSCRUBBER%20LARGE%20POWER%20PLANT%20TWIN%20REACTOR%20BARGE%20-%202510.jpg
