Comments on: Lower demand: Nuclear renaissance being pushed aside in favour of refurbs, uprating http://www.cleanbreak.ca/2009/07/27/lower-demand-nuclear-renaissance-being-pushed-aside-in-favour-of-refurbs-uprating/ Trends, happenings and innovations in the clean technology market Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:28:54 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: gopher65 http://www.cleanbreak.ca/2009/07/27/lower-demand-nuclear-renaissance-being-pushed-aside-in-favour-of-refurbs-uprating/comment-page-1/#comment-6186 gopher65 Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:31:25 +0000 http://www.cleanbreak.ca/?p=1747#comment-6186 (Clicked submit before I wrote the conclusion section of my post): If a utility company starts building a new fission plant, and in 18 months the US Navy (and its commercial partners in this venture) reveals that it has a working fusion reactor prototype, that utility will have just wasted a bucketload of money on an outdated power plant design. If they wait a couple years and it turns out that Polywell does indeed not scale up as it's creators hope that it will, then all the utility company has done is postpone a decade long project by a couple of years -- no big loss. The same line of thought applies to several other possibly dud, but possibly revolutionary technologies, such as EEStor's ultra-capacitor. Any one of these (potentially) emerging technologies might be nothing but a load of crap, but if even one of them has a chance to turn out to operate-as-advertised, it would be better off for the utilities to take a wait and see approach to the whole situation. So it's a bit of a no brainer for them. If they wait, then they can be the first companies to take advantage of an interesting new technology, should that technology be developed. If they don't wait, they risk being clobbered by their competition who waited, and has retained enough capital to capitalize (heh) on any one of the new technologies that might be just around the corner. (This is the same - somewhat flawed - line of thought which has led me to keep my GF8500 video card rather than buy a new, better one:P.) (Clicked submit before I wrote the conclusion section of my post):

If a utility company starts building a new fission plant, and in 18 months the US Navy (and its commercial partners in this venture) reveals that it has a working fusion reactor prototype, that utility will have just wasted a bucketload of money on an outdated power plant design. If they wait a couple years and it turns out that Polywell does indeed not scale up as it’s creators hope that it will, then all the utility company has done is postpone a decade long project by a couple of years — no big loss.

The same line of thought applies to several other possibly dud, but possibly revolutionary technologies, such as EEStor’s ultra-capacitor. Any one of these (potentially) emerging technologies might be nothing but a load of crap, but if even one of them has a chance to turn out to operate-as-advertised, it would be better off for the utilities to take a wait and see approach to the whole situation.

So it’s a bit of a no brainer for them. If they wait, then they can be the first companies to take advantage of an interesting new technology, should that technology be developed. If they don’t wait, they risk being clobbered by their competition who waited, and has retained enough capital to capitalize (heh) on any one of the new technologies that might be just around the corner.

(This is the same – somewhat flawed – line of thought which has led me to keep my GF8500 video card rather than buy a new, better one:P.)

]]> By: gopher65 http://www.cleanbreak.ca/2009/07/27/lower-demand-nuclear-renaissance-being-pushed-aside-in-favour-of-refurbs-uprating/comment-page-1/#comment-6185 gopher65 Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:16:49 +0000 http://www.cleanbreak.ca/?p=1747#comment-6185 It's not *just* that, although the drop in energy demand is certainly part of the halting. The Polywell project (funded in part by the US Navy) is estimating that it will take them another 18 months to figure out whether or not their promising prototypes of hybrid inertial/magnetic containment micro-fusion reactor will scale up properly to power-plant size. They and their backers are stating that *if* their reactor turns out to scale up properly, it would take little effort to have a commercial fusion plant *online* (not under construction, but active) by 2020. Course, the Navy doesn't know whether or not the rectors will work yet, or whether this will turn out to be a dead end;). But if it does work, then it will be substantially cheaper than a standard fission plant, or a tokamak fusion plant. (Plus it doesn't produce any substantial amounts of neutron radiation due to the fact that it uses a boron-11/proton fusion process rather than a D-T fusion process... although it would produce a lot more energy using a D-T process.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell It’s not *just* that, although the drop in energy demand is certainly part of the halting. The Polywell project (funded in part by the US Navy) is estimating that it will take them another 18 months to figure out whether or not their promising prototypes of hybrid inertial/magnetic containment micro-fusion reactor will scale up properly to power-plant size. They and their backers are stating that *if* their reactor turns out to scale up properly, it would take little effort to have a commercial fusion plant *online* (not under construction, but active) by 2020.

Course, the Navy doesn’t know whether or not the rectors will work yet, or whether this will turn out to be a dead end;).

But if it does work, then it will be substantially cheaper than a standard fission plant, or a tokamak fusion plant. (Plus it doesn’t produce any substantial amounts of neutron radiation due to the fact that it uses a boron-11/proton fusion process rather than a D-T fusion process… although it would produce a lot more energy using a D-T process.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

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