Axil Axil <janap...@gmail.com> wrote: LENR will kill jobs by the millions. The LENR production factory will be > completely automated. Only robots will populate these places. >
True. > The sales of products will be done on Amazon.com. > I doubt that. I think most cold fusion devices will be built into other products, such as automobiles. Others will be distributed by HVAC installers and electricians. Decades later, when the technology is miniaturized, I predict it will be built into things like laptop computers, washing machines or toasters. I do not think there will be a large market for stand-alone cold fusion devices in the first world. Perhaps in the third world heaters and generators may sell, but in the first world you need to tie a generator into the house wiring, so you need an electrician. In my book, chapter 20, I look at total U.S. employment in the energy sector. It is not as big as you might think. It is mostly people in gas stations. As I point out, many of them are likely to go to other retail employment because gas stations function as convenience stores, which we will still need. There are roughly 250,000 people directly employed in oil extraction and coal mining. There are many others these days employed in the wind and solar energy business. They will all lose their jobs within a few years after cold fusion commercialization begins. The B.L.S. quotes the industry group AWEA saying there are 85,000 people employed in wind power: http://www.bls.gov/green/wind_energy/ This is an interesting essay. I estimate we will need at most few thousand people in the factories that make cold fusion devices, but for the first few decades we will need an army of researchers to develop the technology and rapidly improve it. Possibly 50,000 to 100,000 highly paid people. Billions of dollars. Semiconductor R&D and fabrication plant construction runs around $50 billion a year worldwide. That is a lot of high-paid employment. Cold fusion will require similar levels of R&D starting now, continuing for as long as we use cold fusion as a source of energy. Whether that is hundreds of years or thousands of years, I am sure there will still be plenty of research needed as far into the future as imagination can reach. After all, combustion and other conventional sources still demand billion-dollar levels of R&D. They will until we shut down the last combustion generator and internal combustion engine. Alain Sepeda <alain.sep...@gmail.com> wrote: LENR will not kill jobs by itself, and robots will be even more needed for > more expensive energy sources like wind turbines... that is not specific to > LENR. > There will be no market for wind turbines once cold fusion is developed. It will immediately bankrupt all alternatives sources such as wind and solar. Following that it will bankrupt conventional sources such as coal and oil, and finally hydroelectric (the cheapest present source). > The more expensive it is, the more the automation is needed. > Cold fusion will be orders of magnitude cheaper than any other source of energy. However, it can only be manufactured by high tech, robotic production lines. It resembles a Ni-Cad battery or a solar PV cell in that respect. - Jed
