OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson <orionwo...@charter.net> wrote:
> [Personal comment: Obviously, if Rossi & related competition claims pan > out in the near future, that would initiate a sustained and permanent drop > in global oil prices, despite rising world demand. Granted, It may not > happen immediately, but perhaps within 5 – 10 years . . . > I have discussed this with some economists, including an old friend who is a professor. They say that the cost of a commodity such as oil is mainly a reflection of future expected supply and demand. They say that if it becomes generally known that cold fusion is real, and everyone agrees it is real and likely to become a practical source of energy, this will trigger an immediate and very large decline in the cost of oil and other fossil fuels. Assuming cold fusion is successfully commercialized, this decline will be permanent. The price will not recover, even if it takes 10 or 20 years for cold fusion to replace most fossil fuel consumption. The time it takes cold fusion to replace the fuel does not affect the price decline much because there is plenty of oil presently accounted for and ready to be extracted. If an oil producer knows that in 20 years there will be no market for oil, it will sell its present supply of oil as soon as possible, even at a drastically lower price. Getting some money for your inventory now is better than getting no money in the future. It is like having a warehouse full of obsolete laptop computers. They lose a few percent in value every week. You sell them now, or never. When everyone accepts cold fusion is real this will also immediately bankrupt wind turbine manufacturers, the solar cell industry, and all other alternative sources of energy that are not yet economically competitive with coal and oil. It may not kill off ethanol immediately because that is not a source of energy. It is an energy sink. It is a political plum. It is a method of ripping off consumers and wasting millions of barrels of fossil fuel to enrich big agriculture and OPEC. Because the Fukushima disaster, cold fusion cause the quick demise of conventional nuclear power, and ITER, obviously. Conventional nuclear power is a dead duck in Japan no matter what happens. I do not think they will ever build another reactor there. With one major accident, it went from being the cheapest source of energy to the most expensive. It may bankrupt TEPCO which is one of the largest power companies on earth. - Jed
