A preliminary estimate of the economic impact of the energy amplifier

The basic concept and the applicability of the Energy Amplifier (EA) have been exhaustively described elsewhere (Refs. [1] to [4]). The EA is essentially a source of high quality heat, produced by the nuclear cascades induced by a high intensity proton beam inside an appropriate ³beam dump² arrangement. A fraction of such ³heat² has to be transformed into electricity to run the accelerator, the rest being available for a number of different industrial applications, and in particular commercial electricity production. In this paper the economic aspects are further explored and we attempt a first order estimate of the cost of such an energy source, comparing it critically with more conventional sources. In this task we have been greatly helped by a number of people2) who have specific competence in the industrial aspects of the application. We conclude that in agreement to our previous estimates, the practical cost of high quality heat is about US /GJ, namely and times lower than the one of Coal and Natural Gas for the prevailing net interest rate of 5%. The cost of electricity produced with our method is estimated of the order of ‰ 2 ¢/kWh, again highly competitive (about half of the cost) with all other traditional sources. In spite of the significant uncertainties in the evaluation, we evidence a strikingly lower cost for our method, direct consequence of the basic simplicity of the design and of its high level of intrinsic safety. Figures are for a 600 MWe stand alone power station. We recall that the EA is also an environmentally more acceptable form of energy from nuclei of virtually unlimited supply. The integrated collective dose for the same energy has been estimated [3] of the order of ‰ 2 man Sv/[GWe ¥ year], 1/10 of the average dose due to radionuclide emission from Coal burning and comparable to Oil and Geothermal. The radioactive waste reaches the activity of coal ashes after about 500 years of ³cool-down². Environmentally, the EA performance is comparable to the one of Magnetic Fusion [9], which has, no doubt, a higher cost.