Terry Blanton writes, > Considering the effect of the optical source only, this is a COP of 10.
Or, if looking at an optimized whole system scaled up by factor of 100, if we start with 3 watts of laser-light in and 50 watts heat out for a COP of ~17 and reduce that by the conversion efficiency of a direct converter, using the low end figure of 60%, this will give about 30 watts electrical out. If the 100 Lasers (the "red-light" district?) then drain 5-6 watts from that to produce the 3 watts of coherent light, and there are few other losses we would have a self-powered cell that output 24 watts, perhaps enough to power a laptop computer for a very long time. 10 times more lasers and you have a human-equivalent power supply.100 times more and you can power the house (with some batteries for peak storage). The sticking points would be the continuous damage to the electrodes and other ongoing maintenance issues. Electrodes might last a few days. I could envision a very compact little micro-factory-type arrangement where foil disks are irradiated for power, recycled, reannealed, reloaded with D2, resealed, ad infinitum until the active material was sputtered away, but that too could be recovered from the direct converter and remanufactured. The unit would get radioactive over time, but if you could engineer it to produce 3He as the predominant ash product, selling that ash would probably pay all the operating costs including the used Pd and D2. IOW there is nothing in principle that would keep this from being implemented commercially on a gigantic scale - like the auto industry but more sophisticated... IF... that is, Letts & Cravens are correct in their assessment of reproducibility. Had this experiment come along before LLNL had already wasted the two billion on that ridiculous monster-Laser boondoggle, that sum would have probably been enough to solve the engineering problems, and there would be no present oil-crisis, no body-bags coming back from the mid-East... and no vortex newsgroup. In this alternate universe, the bigger-is-better bureaucrat-boys would all be sitting on the sidelines, cashing their unemployment checks and dreaming up another pet boondoggle. Jones
