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Reason077 3 days ago

1.9 MWt still seems like a huge amount of energy/heat for something that fits on a truck and is supposedly air-cooled (they claim no water is required).

Where does all that heat go?! They must have some very impressive fans.

colechristensen 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Heat transfer has the lovely property of scaling nonlinearly by temperature difference. You need a lot of big fans to cool your CPU from 75C on the die to a 25C room, instead of a 50C difference these reactors will dump heat at hundreds of degrees C warmer than the local environment.

tralarpa 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, that's crazy. They say up to 1 MW electric which would mean (33% efficiency) 2 MW of heat to get rid of with air cooling. Later they mention facility heating which sounds more realistic, I guess?

KaiserPro 3 days ago | parent [-]

I mean its not that much different from a diesel generator, they are around 30% efficient, so they'd also be kicking out the same amount of heat?

https://www.generatorsindustrial.com/products/1mw-diesel-gen... has a simple radiator.

but then the heat profile is different I suppose, and the efficiency doesn't depend on being able to shed heat.