Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion...
by AnthonyMouse on Thursday September 09, 2021 @03:39AM
(#28467281)
> Building a 100m tall sky scraper is not 10 times as expensive as building a 10m tall 3-story house - it is at least a hundred times more.
Most of your cost difference is that a commercial building isn't just taller than a house, it's also wider. Instead of taking up a third of the lot, it uses the whole thing, and then has 30 times more interior space despite being only 10 times taller. They're also built to commercial building standards which are more expensive to meet.
The costs start getting non-linear when you get into extremely tall buildings that pose special engineering challenges, but nobody is talking about building a fusion reactor into a skyscraper.
> I have no idea why you even imagine that it's possible at all to construct a nuclear power plant out in the ocean. There is certainly no precedent for anything even close to that.
Most of your cost difference is that a commercial building isn't just taller than a house, it's also wider. Instead of taking up a third of the lot, it uses the whole thing, and then has 30 times more interior space despite being only 10 times taller. They're also built to commercial building standards which are more expensive to meet.
The costs start getting non-linear when you get into extremely tall buildings that pose special engineering challenges, but nobody is talking about building a fusion reactor into a skyscraper.
> I have no idea why you even imagine that it's possible at all to construct a nuclear power plant out in the ocean. There is certainly no precedent for anything even close to that.
Nuclear submarines survive the ocean just fine.