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Whether fusion is good at peaking will depend on which fusion technologies end up working. Helion for one would be fantastic at peaking. It's likely to be quite
by DennisP 4y ago
Whether fusion is good at peaking will depend on which fusion technologies end up working. Helion for one would be fantastic at peaking. It's likely to be quite cheap, wouldn't use a turbine, and could run fusion pulses at whatever rate we need.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoit's still a pretty bad peaker. it's cheaper than a tomumak but it still needs a ton of capacitors and incredibly precise machining.
- DennisP 4y agoThey claim an electricity price of $0.01/kWh even before mass production kicks in. If they achieve that, the economics will work out fine.
- pfdietz 4y agoI'll believe that when I see it, but that price would be more than good enough to beat renewables. I find it amusing that Helion's approach also strongly depends on the cost of storage, just in a very different part of storage parameter space.
- pfdietz 4y agoHelion's approach is I'd guess still dominated by capital cost, not fuel cost, so it's relatively bad at peaking. Granted, if they split the reactors into DD reactors making 3He, and field reactors burning the 3He (with reduced DD), it might make more sense to turn the latter up and down, if they have a relatively larger part of their cost from their fuel.
- bell-cot 4y agoWith the capital costs of every form of ~continuous-output fusion reactor, the only fusion technology that would be good for peaking would be H-bombs. That has been looked into, in the context of propelling very large spacecraft. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls... )