4 ms·
What made me super skeptical about the project is that I could not find out any numbers regarding economic viability: 1) How much energy per pulse is a commerc
by myrmidon 4y ago
What made me super skeptical about the project is that I could not find out any numbers regarding economic viability:
1) How much energy per pulse is a commercial device expected to achieve?
2) How many pulses per second are realistic?
3) How many tons of copper/steel/capacitors per MW of power capacity are expected?
Because if you're gonna need a warehouse full of capacitors, several big turbogenerators worth of high quality steel and copper PLUS all the vacuum/plasma tech just to hit a few 100MW of continuous electrical power-output, then I frankly do not see how that would EVER be viable/attractive ANYWHERE, and NO amount of scientific progress might be able to change that...
But the concept to me at least looks more attractive than big magnetic-confinement plants, where the problems are even bigger (unaffordable plasmachamber + cryo-infra, super problematic neutron-flux, AND STILL needing all the heat => motion => electricity circus from a conventional plant).
- hinkley 4y agoIn the video they’re trying to transition to 1/s from 1/10s, and targeting 10/s in a future generation. Always hard to tell from publicity shots, but it looked like their existing capacitor bank was around the size of a shipping container. That probably goes up with the frequency though. I’m not sure you can do single or dual banks when aiming to fire every hundred milliseconds. Plus I think you need somewhere to send the produced power for dumping into the power grid. But they’re already trying to produce their own capacitors to deal with that level of cycles per hour. I could see these guys spinning out a couple of companies that supply other designs or even industries. Especially if the money runs out.