If it's a true 'fusion' power plant, then definitely YES!
BTW, the guys at Lockheed have been talking about this in public for better than a year and a half so it's not really new news. Here's a 'Popular Science' article from February 2013:
I had a good skim through the news feeds. Most showed the same basic info (good news, but no specifics). There is a tunnel. It looks like it might have a light at the end of it. And I think we are heading in the right direction. (Metaphores I use to report my progress in development meetings sometimes)
What saddened/annoyed me was the immediate price angle that appeared everywhere. Expected price compared with price of current power generation methods. None of the reports even thought about sustainability.
It seems that utilization of the Rayleigh cycle is envisioned by Lockheed to harvest the heat generated.
This is, of course, the cycle utilized by the standard combustion turbine that has been in use for the past 100 years.
I assume that air will be the working fluid......
Some observations:
- Perhaps the fusion heat generation module will fit on a small truck and inside a 10 foot cube.... The rest of the 100 megawatt power plant certainly will not..!
- Large amounts of heat in tiny volumes means to me that exotic ceramic materials may be required. These may be impossible or take decades to develop. The current crop of combustion gas turbines use some of the most exotic metallic alloys ever developed, and yet these can only be run to 2200-2300F !
- With air as the working fluid in these new Fusion Gas Generators (FGDs ???)the rest of the heat available can be harvested in a Combined Cycle Configuration with plenty left over for the standard HRSGs, steam turbines etc. We should be able to heat a city or two with all of the extra heat !
I am not a wet blanket, but there still seems to be a steep road ahead....
