Jones Beene <jone...@pacbell.net> wrote:
> If LENR turns out to be long-term commercial reality, then the initial cost > of the devices will be higher than most of us want to believe, since that > price will be governed by typical supply and demand dynamics - with demand > pushing prices to the limit. The savings will not be passed on to the end > user. > This is like looking at Intel's first microprocessor in 1970, and saying, "these things will never make computers any cheaper than they are today. The saving will never be passed on to the end user." Oh yes they will. As long as there is free market competition, there will be cutthroat price reductions and the cost of energy per joule will plummet, just as the cost of computing fell by a factor of several billion (measured per instruction or per byte of storage). Nothing can stop that from happening. If there is one iron law of business it is that the customers will go for the cheaper alternative. Manufacturers such as DEC and Data General who tried to sell a $30,000 minicomputer in competition with a $2,000 desktop computer in 1980 were doomed. They vanished. IBM nearly vanished for the same reason. A radical price decline can only be staved off -- for a few years -- if one manufacturer gets a lock on the market, and dominates it way IBM dominated mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s. IBM was able to do that because manufacturing mainframe computers was difficult back then. Designing the IBM 360 series cost more than the Manhattan Project. Nothing about cold fusion technology will be remotely as difficult or complicated. Any large industrial company will be able to master the technology. They may have to pay a license to Rossi or Cherokee or some other IP holder. Such license fees are never set at onerous prices. National governments will not allow that. They would not allow Rossi to collect, let us say, $1,000 per cell phone battery replacement, or $50,000 for an automobile engine cold fusion power supply. The patent laws are administered by Uncle Sam with the specific goal of promoting progress and spreading the use of technology -- not just enriching the inventors. They do not allow inventors to choke back innovation or gouge. This has been settled in many cases over the last 200 years. Look at important technology such as the transistor and you see that the government insisted that Bell Labs license at a reasonable rate. The government will also never allow important military technology to be held back by gouging, and cold fusion is the most important military technology in history. Corporations today are only allowed to gouge in the medical business, where they charge $1,000 for 1 liter of salt water. That is a temporary situation. Sooner or later the government will step in and begin enforcing antitrust laws and other laws to prevent such abuses. - Jed
