Terry Blanton wrote:
But magnets will NOT save the world. Consider this:
There are known recoverable reserves of Rare Earth Elements in the
entire world of approximately 6 million metric tons. . . .
There is not much in ocean water, either: 3.3 ng/kg. More than Pd or
Au, but not enough to extract by any practical means. It is about the
same as Ag. See:
http://www.agu.org/eos_elec/97025e-table.html
Martin Fleischmann made the same point about Pd many years ago. As I
recall the estimated that roughly one third of our energy could be
produced from it is a cold fusion. I did a back-of-the-envelope
estimate and came up with roughly the same number. This does not
depend on how much cold fusion energy one might extract theoretically
-- which is not known, in any case. It is clear that you can get
quite a lot of energy from a small amount of thin-film palladium, but
the limiting factor is how much heat that thin-film Pd or other
platinum group metal can withstand. That can be estimated from the
amount used in an automotive catalytic converter. They use as little
as possible, because these metals are expensive. I extrapolated from
the amount of energy produced by automobile engines and the amount of
Pd and Pt they now consume, and came up with roughly the same answer
as Martin did: about a third, or maybe half.
If this Pd limitation applies, and you cannot produce CF using some
common metal such as Ti or Ni, then we would only use Pd for
centralized generators. Or, in the case of the Steorn device, we
would only use the magnetic generators for large, baseline power
generators that run 24 hours a day, like today's uranium fission
generators. We would supplement them with existing hydroelectric,
natural gas, wind and so on.
However, I think there may be another way to overcome this problem.
Assume that CF or the Steorn effect works, and produces very high
power density. To some extent, the "recoverable reserves" of any
element depends upon the cost of energy. As I indicated above, if you
have enough energy to vaporize several cubic square kilometers of
ocean water or ordinary rocks, you can recover Ne or other rare
elements from these low-density sources. For that matter, you can
build rocket engines that are far more efficient than the ones we
have today, plus space elevators. From there, you go to the Moon,
Mars, the asteroids and various other places in the solar system to
prospect for precious metals. 300 GW of Ne-powered rockets is enough
to explore the solar system in depth, and bring back megatons of ore
-- or perhaps better yet, to refine it on site, and bring back the
extracted precious metals only.
There is some debate about how much of these precious metals are
available elsewhere in the solar system, but I do not think this
matters much. Once you leave the Earth's atmosphere and go to the
moon or an asteroid, you can then use raw solar energy to vaporize as
much low-grade or as you like, and to separate out precious elements
using the kind of energy intensive techniques now used to separate
out uranium isotopes.
- Jed
