Axil Axil <janap...@gmail.com> wrote: LENR is similar to the pharmaceutical industry were the value of the > material that comprises the product is very small, but the worth of the its > intellectual capital is very large. >
I do not think it will cost much to develop cold fusion into a practical source of energy. Perhaps $300 million to $1 billion. $1 billion is what it cost to develop the Prius, but you do not see a huge premium (extra cost) on that car. $1 billion is about what it costs to build 200 miles of rural highway. We do not have to charge a gigantic tax per gallon of gas to pay for the thousands of miles of highway we have constructed. The cost of development of cold fusion will be amortized soon after commercial sales begin. When Jed says that the cost of the power derived from LENR is almost zero, > he is inferring that the people who research and develop LENR work for > almost nothing. > That is nonsense. The engineers who developed the Prius were well paid. Their R&D effort (the $1 billion) did raise the cost of the car slightly at first, but it was paid for long ago. The premium is now charged only because the car is so popular. It is all profit. The people who build highways for $5 to $10 million per mile are well paid, but that does not mean we have to pay $10 per gallon highway tax on gasoline to pay them. Many people drive cars, so the cost is spread out over many consumers. Everyone on earth will use cold fusion, so billions of people will contribute to amortizing the cost of the R&D. The individual cost will be negligible. Even if we paid Rossi $10 billion today for his discovery, in a few years you would be paying only a few dollars extra per car or a few dollars per year for electricity to reimburse him. Within a decade the whole $10 billion would be paid off. Even if only first-world people use cold fusion, there are roughly 1.5 billion of them, so that's about $7 per person. - Jed
