Dennis wrote:
For example what if some company just says: here is a warehouse, here
is a sewer drain, here is a water hydrant, and here is an electric
utility pole and meter. Now just give us 1MW of heat in the water
flow for 2 weeks. He moves his device(s) into the warehouse and does
it.---Game over, no cries of fake, no problem. If I was a company,
that is how I would proceed.
Right. That is Rossi's approach, and it fulfills his goals. However, it
does not fulfill my goal, which is to convince the world that cold
fusion is real and should be funded.
Rossi intends to work quietly at U. Bologna for another year, while
setting up a 1 MW reactor in some obscure place in Greece. My guess is
that he does not want attention, he does not want mass media exposure. I
do not think he wants competition. My goals are the opposite. I would
love to trigger widespread interest and see thousands of companies
working frantically on cold fusion as soon as possible. So, I am looking
at how this demo will be viewed by the mass media and by skeptics. I
don't like what I see . . . I hope I am wrong. For the sake of his
business plans, Rossi would probably prefer to see the skeptics continue
their attacks, although he sometimes admits that the attack irk him
personally.
Rossi is aware that my goals are not the same as his.
This business strategy might be labeled "obscurity is good for me."
Patterson had an even more extreme version of this. A fat lot of good it
did him!
Some people have speculated that the patent was a considered attempt to
make himself look bad and keep people off his trail. I think it was
inept. I don't get the sense that he is good at mind games or clever
subterfuge.
Some people have the mistaken impression that my goal is to cheat Rossi
out of his intellectual property. Nothing could be further from the
truth. If thousands of companies are soon working feverishly on this
product I hope they would soon be paying him royalties. At the pace he
is developing the thing there will be no significant royalties before
the patent expires. I think my strategy would earn him hundreds of
billions of dollars, whereas his strategy will earn him millions at most
-- and probably zero. He does not agree.
I have described what I assume must happen for cold fusion to be
deployed: "countless government regulatory agencies such as NIST and the
NIH, and industry organizations such as Underwriters Laboratories" all
doing verification tests with prototypes from GE, Mitsubishi and others.
I think the obverse is true. If a gigantic effort is not undertaken, and
billions of dollars are not spent to ensure safety and begin mass
production, cold fusion will not be deployed. There is far too much
political opposition for that to happen. The DoE and fossil fuel
companies will easily stop cold fusion if it is only being deployed by
tiny company such as Rossi's. They will swat it away by filing one
motion in court. The public would never hear about it. The mass media
would not report one word of it. They will tell Congress to pass a law
banning the sale of nickel nanopowder to private individuals to keep
Cravens and others from doing experiments. Cravens wrote:
"It would take a concerted effort and lots of action to prevent
'backwoods use of say 1-5 kW home heaters built by 'good old boys."
I am sure that will not be a problem. The oil companies will see to it
that Uncle Sam makes that concerted effort and the taxpayers pay for it.
Fossil fuel companies don't play fair. The coal companies are trying to
pass laws banning the use of wind turbines in the US and tearing down
all existing wind turbines. They will not get that law passed, because
the wind industry also pays hefty bribes to members of Congress, but
they would if they could!
I do not believer in conspiracy theories but I know damn well how big
corporations and government agencies operate! They are not going to roll
over and play dead while Rossi takes trillions of dollars away from
them. That's ridiculous.
A low-profile garage-scale operation will not work. You need the
powerful allies. You need the public and General Electric on your side.
Stephen Lawrence hit the nail on the head the other day:
"He's acting more like he's invented a nifty new kind of windshield
washing fluid which can be produced in 100 gallon lots in a small
factory, rather than like he's invented something which could
revolutionize everything and which will necessarily be mass produced in
every country on Earth if the potential demand is to be met."
- Jed
