| ??? 03/26/10 15:21 Read: times |
#174524 - No continental sized reactors. Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Per Westermark said:
Let's say that fusion power is 30 years away - how much should you NOT do in other areas while waiting?
And if the cost of a fusion power plant is so high that you have to build continental-size reactors, what will then happen with the development countries? Will they also manage to invest and build a $1000 billion reactor? There won't be any continental-sized reactors. Even a fusion reactor will need a heat sink, and there's no way of safely sinking hundreds of gigawatts of excess heat in one place. Instead, a single fusion reactor will be pretty close to todays power plant outputs, i.e. 500 MW to a handful of GW at most. That produces waste heat in quantities that can be absorbed by rivers. Also, with several smaller reactors, it's much, much easier to use the "waste" heat locally, e.g. for heating homes. Third thing - what is non-polluting electricity? If you are producing the electricity from deuterium or tritium, you are still part of the global warming. You want to make good use of the heat that the sun is already radiating (which you are with solar panels, hydropower plants etc). Err ... the waste heat of a reactor is only a local problem. Compared to the total heat input from the sun _anything_ humans can come up with disappears in the noise. Heat retention is the cause of global warming, not heat production. |
