Wednesday, December 24, 2014

In 2015 LPP Fusion will test Tungsten cathode, beryllium electrode and Proton Boron Aneutronic Nuclear Fusion

Next Big Future


If successful with their research and then commercialization they will achieve commercial nuclear fusion at the cost of $400,000-1 million for a 5 megawatt generator that would produce power for about 0.3 cents per kwh instead of 6 cents per kwh for coal and natural gas.

 At the high end, that's 200 bucks per kilowatt installed power at 3/10ths of a cent per kilowatt hr for fuel.

Let's compare that with a little old gas generator that I have.  I got it for less than 200 bucks, but it costs a gallon of gasoline to run it for 5 hours.  That's about 5 kwh potential electricity for about $2.20 at current prices.  You save the money on the fuel, in other words.  The biggest cost for gasoline or fossil fuel generators is the fuel itself.  It looks like it saves about 95% of the cost for the fuel while delivering an installed cost comparable with fossil fuels.  Very impressive if they can pull this off.

But the potential is even greater.  A device like this is sufficiently small that it can power a spacecraft.  Since fusion can give an ISP of close to a million, it can solve the biggest problem that now exists for space flight---the tyranny of the rocket equation.

This should have high priority, but a lot of people don't even know about it.


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