On 31.12.2012, at 23.27, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > Cold fusion will be orders of magnitude cheaper than jet fuel.
That is not true. On board cold fusion generator might be slightly cheaper than current heavily taxed fossil jet fuel, but with cold fusion it is cheap to produce synthetic jet fuel. Producing synthetic jet fuel is mostly an energy issue and that is why it is so expensive and only Qatar can produce it nowadays commercially. In Qatar electricity is already free (of charge). I cannot imagine that in any foreseeable cold fusion jet engine technology could have favorable power to weight ratio, not to mentioning that there is not ever demonstrated a practical or even potential cold fusion reactor that is anything else but curious scientific anomaly. I do not see that current laboratory work of cold fusion could be scaled up for real practical reactor. It does not help that the hydrogen loading takes several months. Even then there might be some issues with calorimetry that the erratic power production with high error bars is not good idea when you are 30 km above the surface of Earth. Aviation is lot more than high fuel cost or bunch of thermodynamic equations. With cold fusion engine you would practically replace fuel costs into higher maintenance costs. —Jouni
