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by CobaltFire
1 day ago
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I don't disagree but am having a hard time parsing the second half of your comment. In my experience we saw some losses when taken as a system that prevented us from hitting 2:1, but they weren't anywhere near 50%. We also ran closer to 40% than 33% thermal efficiency in the power generating loop, so many of the system thermal costs are baked into that 33% efficiency to the grid. Basically, each reactor install will have it's own minor issues. Overall they should be hitting around 2:1 as an entire system. If they aren't there is something going on that I haven't come into contact with (which is quite a lot, I'm sure). |
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I’ll put it as a spherical cow engineering problem. Let’s suppose the temperature is 30C and you want to dissipate 2GW of heat across a 1kmx1km flat plate, what temperature will it get? That’s a relatively straightforward calculation if you don’t need high precision.
However in the real world it wouldn’t have a single equilibrium temperature. 30C at night the heatsink would be one temperature and in the daytime it would be a different temperature due to sunlight.
Evaporative cooling largely sidesteps this issue, but it’s worth keeping in mind why that’s chosen over other seemingly cheaper options.