I recall that the rated power output of a Magnox reactor is 680 MW and they built them in pairs.
Nowadays, we would consider that a small power station. I think you're unambitious...
How much energy could you extract from a portal opening into the deeper levels of a gas giant? Or deep enough that the stream of expanding hydrogen wouldn't shatter the blades of a turbine - and we can keep the pressure gradient and the gas velocity down, with a really *long* sequence of expanding rotors and stators...
...And the 'dead' exhaust is hydrogen. Lots of hydrogen. Feed it, and compressed air, into the ignition chambers of another twenty gas-burning turbines.
Vent the exhaust to atmosphere: it's just water. Or, if the second-stage 'burner' turbines are fixing nitrogen into NOX in the ignition chambers, use the massive cooling effect of the first-stage expansion to liquefy the nitrogen out of air and run the burners on cold oxygen. Or liquid oxygen, if you can build a reasonable air-distillation plant around the first-stage turbine.
Oh, and you've got lots of electricity, nitrogen and hydrogen. Maybe you can fix some ammonia for fertiliser as a sideline.
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Nowadays, we would consider that a small power station. I think you're unambitious...
How much energy could you extract from a portal opening into the deeper levels of a gas giant? Or deep enough that the stream of expanding hydrogen wouldn't shatter the blades of a turbine - and we can keep the pressure gradient and the gas velocity down, with a really *long* sequence of expanding rotors and stators...
...And the 'dead' exhaust is hydrogen. Lots of hydrogen. Feed it, and compressed air, into the ignition chambers of another twenty gas-burning turbines.
Vent the exhaust to atmosphere: it's just water. Or, if the second-stage 'burner' turbines are fixing nitrogen into NOX in the ignition chambers, use the massive cooling effect of the first-stage expansion to liquefy the nitrogen out of air and run the burners on cold oxygen. Or liquid oxygen, if you can build a reasonable air-distillation plant around the first-stage turbine.
Oh, and you've got lots of electricity, nitrogen and hydrogen. Maybe you can fix some ammonia for fertiliser as a sideline.