Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]> wrote:
> Producing the world's energy consumption with PdD cold fusion would > produce roughly 900 metric tons of helium per year. > In my book, I estimated 1,227 tons of helium per year. I talked to a variety of people and had them check the numbers. That's close enough to 900 tons. As you said, this would be dispersed worldwide in small motors and heaters. It would be impossible to collect. > If we want to make a lot of helium, we want a reaction that does *not* > generate a lot of heat, or we will have serious heat pollution. Many nuclear reactions produce helium (alpha particles). These include fission and fusion reactions. Aren't there some that produce a lot more helium per joule of heat than D+D fusion does? I think there is evidence that cold fusion can increase the reaction rate of some conventional reactions. Maybe we can use it to speed up some alpha-producing conventional reaction? > We may want something that will sit there and transmute stuff with only a > little energy release. Maybe it will be done. (I'm assuming an exothermic > reaction so that the thing, whatever it is, is self-powered. . . . Why should it be self-powered? Suppose it is endothermic and requires input energy. With cold fusion that would cost nothing. It would produce waste heat, of course. Maybe we could have a factory with a megawatt electric cold fusion reactor producing a steady flow of helium. Robert Lynn pointed out that cold fusion will curtail natural gas production, reducing helium production. I did not think of that! Cold fusion will many unexpected impacts. - Jed
