LENR in architecture

    Jed, I read the document you linked to previously, I think it could be useful for original poster and her research. I disagree that turbine generators will eventually be available for $10/kW, even at manufacturing level, and especially not when baked into a system with all the required ancillaries. However, I don't think that nullifies your overall argument.


    I assume your calculations regarding the average Midwest solar installation and typical Midwest household energy use (911kWh/month), include a big air-conditioning unit somewhere. The figure sound about right, but not everywhere needs aircon units, they are very rare in UK homes, for instance.

    Quote from axil

    Now, 10% of background radiation comes from muons from the sky(see graph below). Muons arrive at sea level with an average flux of about 1 muon per square centimeter per minute. This is about half of the typical total natural radiation background. With a home LENR reactor, multiply the muon flux by 1,000,000 and the radiation load goes up considerably.


    axil: The worst muons are that, which are hitting this forum. But if a priest is telling us, then we have to believe...


    Quote from JedRothwell

    I predict that 15 years after cold fusion becomes a commodity, there will be no grid. The electric power companies will all be bankrupted. See the paper I referenced for details, or my book.


    In the southern part of the US people can go offline (off-grid) with Solar already today. Only the battery (Li..) is still a little bit expensive and might be LENR active...

    • Official Post

    about the cost of turbines, las time I looked at the proces is was 500$/kWe for MWe sized turbines, and at best 2000$/kWe for kW turbines (forgetting much). Anyway discussing with a car engineer he told me the 50kWmech engine in a car is 700$ because produced in mass and engineered to be cost effective. He told me this should be possible, even if he did not yet know how, because cars don't use turbines.


    about waste heat, there can be a problem with waste heat in apparatus, in houses, but not so awful. in fact apparatus lose already much energy in a houses. all the electricity consumed by an apparatus is lost as heat finally... computer, oven, lights, washing machines, fridges, AC...
    you heat the room, or sometime the sewer.
    all LENr energy, formerly electrcity, gas, gas-oil, used for heating will create no additional waste heat from LENR.


    all electricity used for electronic devices or for cooling devices (fridge, A/C) when exploiting LENR will produce waste heat which is simply the inverse of the efficiency of the conversion.
    For example if you convert with 20% efficiency you will waste 5 times more heat than with an electric apparatus (note that the electric company will waste about that, but outside).
    with TEG at 5% efficiency you waste 20x more heat...


    anyway if you work with CHP mode, (warming coffee yout TV waste heat, warming water from washing machine generator used for motors) you can evoid wasting heat.


    One of the few reason to exploit accumulators and supercapacitors is not to save energy... Jed is right it is absurd to used expensive accumulator for LENR energy (it is even absurd with wind generators some found).
    The only usefulness, beside backup energy, is to avoid wasting heat to generate electricity when you produced electricity occasionally because of heat need...


    anyway venting heat in the chimney or in the sewer, eventually through A/C may be more rational than using supercaps or batteries...
    however getting rid of chimneys may be interesting in some contexts.


    Jed in his booklet talk of the development of tunnels for transportation, exploiting smokeless engine, and maybe there can be a new architecture in subterranean context, where waste heat is a severe pollution/cost, provided smokes no more exist.


    Grid of course, nano (building scale) and micro grid (block scale), is of course part of the solution.
    Maybe it makes question about accumulators useless...
    a question of cost and independence.
    having a home device that is fully independent, with moderate waste heat, thus some supercaps, and water recycling, maye be practical, compared to wired/piped apparatus. or not.

    Quote from zeus46

    I mostly agree. But I think a grid will be useful for load sharing, not necessarily centralised power production.


    I do not think so. This would be like installing a large water heater in your neighborhood and running pipes to each house. The pipes would leak or freeze or get dug up with backhoes. They would be a pain in the butt to maintain, and in the end it would cost more than installing small heaters in each house. This is not an imaginary situation, by the way. This is how a large, old fashioned apartment building works. It works because the pipes are indoors, in the walls, but even so, it has a lot of problems. Another real world example is district heating where steam is distributed to buildings for space heating. This works in New York City and on the campus of Cornell U., but it would not work in a neighborhood with low population density.


    The problems with pipes leaking or getting dug up with backhoes is exactly what happens with natural gas and buried power lines. Much of the cost of electricity goes to maintaining and repairing the distribution grid. At any given moment, thousands of people are without power, and trucks are out with crews repairing them. This is a higher failure rate than, say, the failure rate of refrigerator or home heating furnaces. After storms, tens of thousands of people lose power. That will never happen with cold fusion.


    Here is a map of power outages in Georgia at this moment:


    http://outagemap.georgiapower.com/external/default.html


    The weather is good and there have been no storms, but 189 houses and buildings are without power as of 11/14/2016 14:23. Look at it after a storm hits and you will see tens or hundreds of thousands of outages.


    The point is, the incremental cost of increasing generator capacity will be so small, it will not justify the expense of sharing generator capacity. If you need 30 kW peak, it will be cheaper to buy it than it would be to buy 20 kW and then share capacity with others in your neighborhood. We can predict this by looking at the size of natural gas fired backup generators, such as the one I showed in the paper. The cost of these is not a good indication, because it is artificial. With more competition incremental costs would be smaller.


    The other problem with this is that people tend to need peak power at about the same time of day. Peak demand varies from one place to another, and it varies with climate. For example, in Atlanta in summer, everyone needs air conditioning from 3 to 7 pm. Just at the time you need to borrow capacity, everyone else will also need to borrow it, so there will be not be enough.


    I described another issue in my book. The demand for electricity will fall, because cold fusion heat will be used directly for some applications such as space heating, clothes drying, air conditioning and refrigeration. These applications use the most electric power today. So peak demand will be reduced, and demand will be smoothed. This makes it easier to select a generator that will always meet your needs.

    Quote from zeus46

    I disagree that turbine generators will eventually be available for $10/kW, even at manufacturing level, and especially not when baked into a system with all the required ancillaries.


    The required ancillaries for power company generators cost as much as the generators themselves. That is to say, the distribution grid costs as much as the generator. Or more, where population density is low. The ancillaries needed to make a heat engine into a home generator add about 30% to the total cost. The heat engine itself is the biggest expense. So, actually, the comparison is better than I showed on p. 4. It is more than 130 ~ 660 times cheaper. (130 to 660 depending on the type of power company generator you compare it to.)


    The ancillaries for a cold fusion generator will be mass produced in the same numbers as the heat engines. That is, 170 million per year. So the ancillaries will also be cheap, just as automobile tires, lights and transmissions are cheap, along with the automobile engine.


    The heat engines should be roughly $10/kW, so the generator as whole should be roughly $13/kW. Today, 3 kW gasoline generators cost $429 at Lowe's, quantity 1 retail. That's $143/kW. Compare that to the cheapest power company generator, $1,376/kW, plus another ~$1,000 at least for the distribution grid that you need for this kind of generator. Ignoring fuel cost and ignoring duty cycle and longevity, the gasoline generator is already 17 times cheaper. Small gasoline generators are specialty items, manufactured in small quantities. When you manufacture 170 million per year the price will be far cheaper. Eventually, it should approach $10 or $20/kW.


    Quote from zeus46

    I assume your calculations regarding the average Midwest solar installation and typical Midwest household energy use (911kWh/month), include a big air-conditioning unit somewhere.


    That was from Ref. 14 last year. Latest version here:


    https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/end_use.cfm

    Quote from JedRothwell

    The demand for electricity will fall, because cold fusion heat will be used directly for some applications such as space heating, clothes drying, air conditioning and refrigeration. These applications use the most electric power today.


    I mean in a "fully electric" house. Most U.S. houses use gas heating rather than resistance electric heating or heat pumps. There are gas-fired clothes drying machines. As I noted there are gas-fired refrigerators, but they are rare. I think they used to be more common. Amish people who do not want to use centrally generated electricity use them nowadays. They manufacture them too. The "Diamond" and "Crystal Cold" brands are advertised as "crafted by Amish people" and the company says it is owned by Amish people:


    https://gasrefrigerator.com/about-us


    http://www.gas-refrigerators.com/


    Thermal and solar powered air conditioners are sold but I think they are quite rare. See:


    http://chromasun.com/CHW.html


    http://www.airconditioning-sys…ion-air-conditioning.html

    If anyone could sketch out what they mean by generators or grids or any other heating devices that would be a great help!


    Also 'After storms, tens of thousands of people lose power. That will never happen with cold fusion.' - how is this possible? Would all the infrastructure be underground?


    I will be going on a field trip on Friday until late November, but I will keep checking the forum and will arrange a meeting on my return. It's amazing to see so much input, and to read everyone's ideas thank you!

    Quote from agroszek

    If anyone could sketch out what they mean by generators or grids or any other heating devices that would be a great help!


    Generator: in this context, a device for converting one form of energy to another. Generators here have involved converting heat energy from a low-energy nuclear reaction to electricity. (and a LENR device itself generates heat from nuclear potential energy). Other generators mention convert gasoline or other fuel to rotary motion to electricity.


    A grid is a distribution network for electric power, such as the power company grid that serves most homes and businesses. Microgrids may have been mentioned, which would be an electric grid serving a building or building complex or a neighborhood.


    Quote

    Also 'After storms, tens of thousands of people lose power. That will never happen with cold fusion.' - how is this possible? Would all the infrastructure be underground?


    It would never happen with cold fusion if electric power is not centrally generated, but is generated locally, small-scale. In this idea, there is no grid -- i.e., distribution infrastructure -- to be disrupted in a storm. If a house's local generator is damaged, yes, that house would lose power, but ... a long extension cord to another house could at least provide some power, and it would be a single generator to repair.


    Right now, every house could have a gasoline-powered or gas-fired generator, but these are extra cost, and expensive for electricity generation because of fuel cost, and they are noisy and sometimes dangerous as to carbon monoxide. So some houses do have them. With cold fusion, the idea is that fuel costs may be very low, so the economics shift. Right now, major power company generators are very expensive, but they are designed to reduce fuel costs and that is easier to do with very large generators. With cold fusion, Jed thinks -- and he might be right -- that fuel costs will be so low that there would be no significant advantage to large central power generators, plus the grid is expensive to build and maintain.

    Quote from agroszek

    Also 'After storms, tens of thousands of people lose power. That will never happen with cold fusion.' - how is this possible? Would all the infrastructure be underground?


    As Abd described, I meant there would be no distribution infrastructure. Individual cold fusion generators will have a lifetime supply of fuel built in. It takes only a few grams of heavy water to run one for 15 or 20 years, the life of the equipment.


    When a winter storm strikes, ice and falling trees cut power lines, cutting electricity. In Atlanta this has happened many times. It has taken up to a week to restore power to our house. A powerful hurricane can destroy high voltage power lines. See the photo on p. 110 of my book, and read the chapter starting there for details.


    http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf

    Quote from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax

    With cold fusion, the idea is that fuel costs may be very low, so the economics shift.


    Correcto-mudo. But the key thing is with cold fusion PLUS mass produced small and medium sized generators. Mass production is the key to reducing equipment costs.


    It would be possible to mass produce generators that use natural gas. Keystone and others have been trying to do this for years, without much success. The efficiency is still low, so fuel costs are high. Meanwhile, the efficiency of the giant power company generators has improved remarkably.


    Power company generators are not "mass produced" in the same sense that automobile engines are. I do not know how many they make, but I expect it is few thousand per year, whereas 60 million automobile engines are manufactured per year. A large generator resembles a Boeing airplane more than, say, a truck. It is a specialty product.


    In recent decades, mid-sized gas fired co-generators have become popular. I think these are typically hundreds of kilowatts or a few megawatts. They are used in large buildings in Japan, and in building complexes. In some cases the owners sell excess electricity to the power company. This is a step in the direction I predict cold fusion will follow. It has begun because natural gas generation is cleaner than coal, and it can be set up anywhere, unlike hydroelectricity, wind or nuclear power.


    In the U.S. privately owned on-site generation produces 3% of electricity:


    http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=8550


    See also "independent power producers" here, for example:


    http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/pdf/epm.pdf

    The number one impact LENR will have on architecture is decentralization.


    Once the world recognizes the reality of high powered LENR/CF like the "Rossi Effect" the technology will develop at a rapid rate. Soon, there will be LENR power cells of a wide range of sizes and outputs that will be incorporated into every light fixture, appliance, legacy wall socket, central air conditioning unit, alarm system, and vehicle. This will result in homes, businesses, schools, hospitals, and other structures becoming independent of the power grid. With dirt cheap power for use by atmospheric humidity collection devices, some homes may even disconnect from city water supplies. Without the need to be hooked up to these services, I think communities will spring up in very rural or even currently inhospitable environments. For example, if a group of any kind felt ostricized or threatened by their government, they could start their own community in a desert or frigid environment: providing their own power, growing their own food, extracting their own water from the atmosphere, and combining LENR with new manufacturing techniques like 3D printing to produce whatever items they need.


    Basically, LENR -- unless it is hijacked by those who wish to impose a powerful socialistic government on the whole world -- will give tremendous power to the INDIVIDUAL.

    • Official Post

    Abd and Jed gave good definition.
    there is emerging terms used todays :

    • Microgrid : an electric grid of small scale, like in a city, a block... It is fashion to think of microgrid with renewable energie sproduced in building and shared
    • Nanogrid : a less common term taling of a smallr scale grid line in a single building, a house, an apparatus...


    There was a discussion about building insulation.
    Jed is right that insulated building are more comfortable even with cheap energy.
    However too much insulated building today are cause of some diseases and pollution because of lack of airflow, with acarian and wetness.


    The perfect housing will be insulated BUT also vented strongly.
    Noise is also a problem, and the airflow should be very discrete (for French people, US houses with A/C are very noisy).


    Note also that modern houses should integrate usage of bot-maids, bot-hoovers, and limit human work for cleaning (too expensive, future of human work is to be very expensive, especially compared to energy).
    Pipes or bots to drive dirty clothes to the washing machine, dirty dishes to the machine, post-washing ironing, pst-washing move of dishes to storage, are to be considered.


    American kitchen is a great outlook (kitchen in the livingroom) why not helped with bots, while good cooking with bots (like rice-cookers, bread-machine, slow cookers, but much improved)...
    this is a societal trend, that will accelerate with energy cost decrease, increasing relative cost of work, decreasing relative cost of manufacturing and bot usage.


    why not considering a mix of cloth-storage-distribution with washing and ironing in a single apparatus, like the kitchen block I was considering.


    why not considering a mix of dish-washing with dish distribution and storage by bots?


    why not considering a mix of fridge, food storage and provisioning, food distribution to cooking robots and cooking table (people will love cooking sometime if there is a botmaid to do the boring job)...


    It remind me similar ideas with automatic parking for cars, that you send to the park tower wher it is stored like a drink can in a distributor.


    consider all the stupid jobs you do in a family that could be done by bots, and all that you could do if you got back this time : playing with kids, cooking, tinkering, doing massages, enjoying saturday night fever or gardening....

    • Official Post

    I spotted this on 'Ego Out' - a very relevant report on the Frauenhoefer Institute's research into future patterns of energy distribution, storage and use.


    As the article says:- "What will intelligent, decentralized energy management look like in the future? A research team is exploring how to efficiently coordinate energy producers, storage systems, and consumers as well as how to test the innovative technologies required. The research parking garage houses 30 charging spots for electric vehicles, Europe’s fastest high-speed charging station, as well as Europe’s first hydrogen storage system based on LOHC technology."




    https://www.sciencedaily.com/r…/2016/11/161117082455.htm

    The hydrogen technology has no great advantage - partially because of low energetic efficiency of hydrogen production and low volume density of hydrogen in storage and transportation.
    I don't understand, why carbon hydrides, i.e. the classical gasoline cannot be utilized for hydrogen technology as before.

    Hi! I am in Sicily where we've been visiting the sites available for our project, and there are 3 to choose from, 1 is an amazing former pomice mine on the island of Lipari (see attached images), the second is the port of Milazzo, where we have the opportunity to design a mixed use ferry terminal and where there are existing oil refineries, and the third is a key point in Messina, linking the harbour with the city, a site which is currently begging transformation with lack of parking, derelict buildings covered in artists graffiti referring to the refugee crisis and imigration.


    I imagine the pomice mine would be an exciting place, but it is very steep and eroding, so I'm not sure if ideal for LENR! Every site has potential.


    If you have any thoughts on the site choice please let me know! More photos to follow

    • Official Post

    Hi. I envy you Sicily- the weather in the UK has been horrid!


    As you say, the Pumice mine is an exciting site, but there are many problems with such a young landscape- it contains many faults and can be subject to slippage, severe settlement and so on. Also it will always be very arid and grow little unless terraced and back-filled with topsoil. I have a friend who has a house on similar geology and I have seen the problems that can occur first hand. The best use for such a site might be a number of more flexible lightweight structures - think of the EDEN project on the old china-clay mines in the south west of the UK. Whatever you plan, a serious geo-physical survey is the first step.


    The oil-refinery site will suffer with severe soil contamination problems - they always do. The usual 'basic' remediation method is to clear the site (watching out for underground tanks) and dig down at least 2 meters all over the site, line the hole with heavy plastic and back-fill with soil -often with building rubble mixed in the bottom meter. Sites like this have broken a few hearts, and quite a few building companies.


    The Messina site sounds like a plum job to me.


    Thanks for your update!

    Perhaps you can renovate the Messina site by turning the old buildings into a tourist destination for the cruise ships that dock for the day. Perhaps make an Italian arts and cultural center, local handmade crafts, street food bazzar, street musicians...etc


    So many unknowns regarding the location issues, financing, permitting and so on.


    Please send us more detailed information on this location.

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