Axil Axil <janap...@gmail.com> wrote: Having been faced with this clear and growing resistance to cold fusion, > early on, Rossi decided that a logical scientific argument was not the best > way to present cold fusion to the world. >
Yes, that is what he said. > Rossi instinctively recognized that the most powerful motivator of human > nature whether that nature is being expressed in terms of business, > government or simply the guy on the street is competition. > I agree that is probably what he thinks. I agree that competition is good motivation. The only part I do not get is: Why 1 MW? 10 kW is just as persuasive. There is probably a ~$500 billion marketplace for small reactors, say from 1 to 50 kW. This market in the aggregate will probably be larger than the market for reactors 1 MW and above. I believe this is true for today's fossil fuel heat engines. I believe the market for automobile motors is larger than the market for megawatt-scale motors. Worldwide light automobile sales are 78 million per year. The motors range from $600 to $2000 each. Just for the motor assembly I mean, not the whole car. That's $47 billion to $156 billion. I do not know know what the market value for big heat engines is but I doubt it is on that scale. The worldwide market for power plants is $164 billion, but that includes a lot more than just the turbines (the functional equivalent to the motor assembly in a car). Granted, Rossi would be selling the functional equivalent of the boiler in a power plant. Or an external combustion chamber. It is not a turbine or other heat engine. Still, I think it is fair to compare his market to that of the automobile engine or turbine. Mainly because it supplants most engine components. With his device, the energy costs nothing, the fuel weighs essentially nothing, and there is no pollution or exhaust. That has a huge impact on the design of the heat engine and other components in an automobile or a power plant. It greatly reduces cost and it simplifies everything. Many major components are not needed, such as the fuel delivery system, pollution controls, and complex mechanisms to improve efficiency. This design simplification is one of the reasons I say cold fusion will radically reduce energy costs, far below the level you get merely by eliminating the cost of fuel. That's only the first step. Fifty years later the hardware itself will be ten times cheaper per watt of capacity than what we have now. Later it will be 100 times cheaper. That has the been the trend with other big ticket mass produced technology such as automobile tires, shoes and food. That can only happen when the core technology cost is radically reduced. In agriculture, for example, cost was lowered by eliminating human labor and horses. We went from 41% of U.S. laborers working in agriculture circa 1900 to 0.7% now, approximately a 100-fold reduction. That kind of reduction in cost will surely happen in heat engines and energy overall. (By the way, 0.7% in agriculture is still way too many people. Watch people working on a farm and you will see that robots or a food factory will eliminate most of the remaining labor.) - Jed
