[ExI] cost of SBSP and thorium

[John Clark]

On Sat, Aug 18, 2012  Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Until early this year nobody had an idea of how to get the transportation
> down cheap enough for power satellites to make sense economically.
>

I'm delighted that the long sought goal of getting into space cheaply has
been found at last and eagerly await you actually launching something,
being so cheap I don't expect I will need to wait long.

> > A Thorium reactor has produced 7.4 megawatts of power for several
>> years, and it used technology that was over 40 years old; but even with
>> today's technology a power satellite has not managed to produced one watt
>> for one second.
>>
>
> > And they never will produce one watt for one second.  If they are built
> at all, they have to produce hundreds of GW or there is no reason
> whatsoever to build them.
>

And that's another major disadvantage of power satellites. Huge engineering
projects NEVER go according to plan so you need to start small to work out
the kinks, the difference is that a small demonstration power satellite
would cost on the order of a trillion dollars while a demonstration small
LTFR would cost less than one tenth of one percent of that. I know you will
say I've overestimated the cost because there is a new way to get into
space that is very very cheap, well prove it by launching something,
anything.

> Any thoughts on why even the Chinese think it will take 20 years?
>

Your quotation, if not taken out of context, seems to indicate that we
should wait 20 years before we even start to investigate Thorium, I don't
believe the Chinese are that stupid. And I'd be delighted if it only took
20 years to switch over to a Thorium based economy, but I think it will
probably take longer, and if the irrational prejudices of the last 40 years
continue it will never happen and the environmentalists will get their way
and we'll do the moral thing, freeze to death in the dark.

  John K Clark
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