Russ George <[email protected]> wrote: It is bothersome how so many in the LENR field offer nothing but disdain > for PdD wet cells. . . . Take for example it the cell nominally occupies > 2cc of volume in a massive array. Each piece of Pd in a common pool of D2O > held under very high pressure and thus higher temperature would contribute > to the sum of heat produced at say 10 watts per unit. Gather 100,000 unit > cells together and the system would produce a million watts. > I think this might work, but it might be limited by the cost and availability of palladium. A reactor of this design might be practical for a central generator, with a high duty cycle, but it might not be economical for small heat engines that are used only an hour a day, such as automobile engines. You would end up with a large supply of palladium sitting idle most hours of the day. I do not think world palladium production can be ramped up enough to support this. With nickel this would not matter because the supply is unlimited and the metal is cheap.
More palladium would become available in a cold fusion economy because it would no longer be needed for automobile catalytic converters. If it turns out the host metal is transmuted in cold fusion reactions, and this cannot be prevented, and I do not think palladium reactors would be practical. The palladium would be "used up" and could not be recycled. Technically, this does not sound more difficult than something like a pressurized uranium fission reactor. It would be a lot safer than a fission reactor, and it would not require shielding. It would probably be complicated and expensive compared to something like a gas loaded nickel powder reactor. - Jed
