Michel Jullian wrote: >> If cold fusion increase our total primary energy production by an order of >> magnitude it may start to have a serious effect on the environment. > >That's what I said, "unlimited cheap energy of non solar origin for the masses >will necessarily promote global warming", but I had no idea the effect was >that significant! The tenfold increase in global energy consumption you evoke >would only mean >1.2E14/1E10 W = 12 kW >for each of the ~10 billion humans the planet will bear in a few years, that's >about the consumption per average US citizen _today_ isn't it?
The average U.S. citizen uses about 5 times more energy than the world average. However, about half of this energy is wasted in ways that cold fusion will prevent. For example, as shown in chapter 14 of my book, in the U.S. 27 quads are lost to waste heat in electric power generation. This is 7% of total world energy production. With cold fusion, this will be reduced by a factor of 5 or 10. Present-day energy systems are grotesquely wasteful for two reasons: 1. People do not care about the cost of energy or pollution. We throw away money. Our average automobile gasoline gas mileage, for example, is only 20 mpg. Thirty years ago we knew how to make it 40 mpg and today with plug in hybrids we could make it 250 mpg, but nobody cares enough to do it. 2. We still use stone-age energy sources such as coal. These are dangerous, inflexible and wasteful. Cold fusion will be so much easier to work with, and so much more flexible, it will make it impossible to engineer such crude and wasteful machinery. That would be like trying to make a semiconductor-based desktop computer that consumes as much energy as ENIAC (120 kW). I really do not think you need to worry about waste heat from cold fusion energy. Cold fusion would solve so many problems and improve things in so many ways that even if a mild increase finally did occur, it would not come for decades, and it would be more than counter-balanced by the improvements. To take one example, people in the third world burn a horrendous amount of kerosene for lighting (illumination). This is wasteful, dangerous, expensive and bad for their health. Compared to electric lighting, it is between 120 and 250 times less efficient; it costs about a thousand times more per lumen; and it kills tens of thousands of people with fire and smoke damage to the lungs. We could fix this easily even without cold fusion, with LED windup power or solar-cells+batteries (which sell like hotcakes in Africa). With cold fusion, I cannot imagine how we would NOT fix it, since CF would be so much cheaper than kerosene. The people living in the third-world are not fools, so t! hey will buy it instead of spending a large fraction of their income on kerosene. Regarding illumination, see: http://cee45q.stanford.edu/2003/briefing_book/technical.html - Jed
