pca <pierre.carbonne...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Deploying one, let alone millions, of Hyperion units in unsecured places > gives plenty of opportunity for competitors to acquire the device and > reverse engineer its secret. Defkalion's attempts to add security within > the Hyperions are not credible. It's much better for Rossi to have > licencee(s) build a few large electricity-generating units in well-garded > places, and sell the electricity to resellers. > The strategy would not work, and it would not be allowed. It would not work because "security by obscurity" for such a momentous discovery would never last. Someone would reveal the secret, or steal a sample of material and reverse engineer it. It would not be allowed because no first-world nation will permit people to build a nuclear reactor without first fully explaining how it works, and without having hundreds of experts at national laboratories, universities and elsewhere examine the devices to make certain the are safe. The accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima make that unthinkable. The public would not stand for it. Nor should the public stand for it. This is not 1948, when governments and corporations could do whatever they please in secrecy. As much as I support cold fusion, I think it would be insane to have anything other than kilowatt-scale research reactors in laboratories until all of the experts agree they know how the reaction works and they are sure it cannot produce harm. This will take many years, and billions of dollars. Defkalion believes they will be allowed to distribute these things in Europe before the devices have been vetted by nuclear experts worldwide and before there is complete understanding the the reaction. I think there is no chance this will be allowed, even if the Greek Min. of Energy tests are completed an a license is granted. As soon it becomes generally known that these are nuclear reactors (as I am certain they are) the public and governments worldwide will demand that sales be put on hold while experts worldwide test thousands of units for thousands of hours. Details will be published in leading journals of physics and engineering, just as they are for semiconductor or combustion technology. There will be conferences with hundreds of attendees at which the technology is discussed in great detail, where universities and corporations reveal their latest findings and new versions of the reactors. Textbooks on the technology will be published. There will be no fundamental technical secrets at all, any more than there are for the fundamentals of semiconductors. All this will happen -- and must happen -- before a single reactor is sold to the general public. That is how the modern world works. In the modern world we do not allow automobile companies to sell a new type of car until they first spend a hundred million dollars on crash tests and other safety verification. We know more about automobiles than practically any other technology, so computer simulations of crash-tests would probably produce the information we need. But the public still insists that manufacturers start over from zero and crash physical prototype cars into barriers. The public is right to demand this. The extra cost of this testing spread over the cost of each automobile later sold is small, and the benefits -- lives and money saved -- far outweigh the cost. Since we make such demands on automobile manufacturers for a well-understood, well-known conventional technology, I am sure we will make much greater demands for a new, unknown type of nuclear reactor. It would be irresponsible not to. This will add only a few dollars to the cost of each reactor. - Jed
