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60 comments on Why oil (and helium) are still underpriced

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Engineer-Poet on December 1, 2005 - 11:44am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
It's going to take roughly the same amount of power to liquefy the helium at a central  plant as it will to run a cryocooler at the point of use.  Plus, you're eliminating all the trips made by the helium tanker.
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vinc on December 1, 2005 - 1:02pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Less power, I think. With a cryocooler you're just maintaining a constant temperature. Whereas when you liquefy it you have to do all the work of bringing helium from room temperature to 4 K, not to mention purifying it...

At any rate, a cryocooler that would have been much more than sufficient for our experiment would have used about 5 kW, which is comparable to central air conditioning for a large home in summer. A fusion plant would be a heck of a lot larger than our experiment, of course, so I'm not sure what their total consumption would be.

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Stuart Staniford on December 1, 2005 - 4:37pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Well, presumably the key issue would be the EROEI of fusion.  The energy for the cryocooler is included in the "EI" part.  So the goal remains the same - to get fusion to the point where it's a (controllable) energy source not a sink.
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