Peter Gluck <[email protected]> wrote: Cold Fusion must become an energy source as all the other, even more > reliable- the longer term task is to function without any energy taken from > outside- . . . >
Cold fusion has often been observed in heat after death, with no input energy. I am sure that with enough research, scientists will learn to produce it with either zero input, or with minimum input. > but now the performance is given by the energy balance- the!MW plant has > proced COP-times more energy than has consumed. > This 1 MW plant is a crude prototype. It was fabricated without deep knowledge of how cold fusion works at the theoretical level. Without such theoretical knowledge, there is no chance cold fusion will ever be controlled or made into a practical source of energy. In the 21st century, the public and the regulators will *never* allow a nuclear reactor to be used. That is out of the question. It is unthinkable. This reactor as it now stands has no future and no practical use except as a testbed in R&D. So it makes no difference whether it produces much less energy than it takes to keep the machine running. It also makes no difference whether this machine produces 100 W, a kilowatt or a megawatt. The machine is utterly impractical, dangerous and useless no matter what the power level is. This is a NUCLEAR FUSION REACTOR, not a damned toy. It will probably take billions of dollars to determine how cold fusion works and to ensure 100% control and safety. By the standards of modern industry this is a small sum of money. It took $1 or $2 billion to develop the Prius automobile. Americans spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics alone. If it becomes generally known that cold fusion is real and that it has produced commercially useful power density and temperatures at IMRA France and elsewhere, every major industrial corporation will research it, frantically spending billions of dollars. I am sure it will soon be fully understood. Before any machine like this can be used, thousands of individual prototype machines will have to be manufactured and tested by regulators, universities, national laboratories, insurance safety laboratories and many others, for many millions of hours. This is a massive undertaking that will require years and billions of dollars to complete. By the time it is finished, cold fusion reactors will be safer than combustion reactors and far safer than fission reactors. > Please have empathy for the customer. > I do not know who the customer is, but if this customer intends to use this for any practical purpose he is insane. > And power/energy size matters decisively. > Only for practical devices. This is several billion dollars and a million man hours away from being a practical device. In this case it is about 1MW.Less is bad. > Nonsense. 100 W would be ideal. Any more than that is worse than useless at this stage in the research. Higher power is dangerous, and it will only delay the necessary research. > The immense airplane has nothing to do with this.In technology useless is > worse than flawed, we are learning from errors. > "We" are not learning anything yet. Thousands of researchers and engineers worldwide will have to work on this technology for many years before "we" know anything about it it, and before anyone knows enough enough to deploy it. The process is not even begun yet. The notion that Rossi and a small group of people can do this by themselves in isolation is preposterous. You might as well expect a 10-man construction crew to build a thousand mile long 4-lane highway, or 2 rocket engineers working at home to build a Saturn-5 Moon Rocket. - Jed
