I wrote:
Suppose you gather up most of the Pd and put it in central generators, with a duty cycle of ~8 hours per day, taking into account peak hours.
One can imagine many other hybrid systems combining the new technology with the old. For example, central electric power generators with Pd that use the existing distribution system, with an ~8 hour duty cycle for most customers. Since most of them would be free at night they could be used to re-charge electric automobiles, or perhaps to synthesize liquid fuel or hydrogen fuel for hybrid electric vehicles. Some of Pd would not be used in the central generators. Instead, it would be used in long-haul trucks, railroad locomotives, ships and other vehicles with stand-alone Pd cold fusion engines, and also for small generators in remote houses, tiny batteries in implanted medical devices, and various other high-priority uses.
I think that because Pd is scarce and expensive, it would call for a hybrid system, whereas Ni would allow a complete, clean break with past, with no need for the central power distribution system or liquid fuel hybrid cars or anything like that. Ti is another possible candidate, which would be as good as Ni.
The Pd hybrid system would reduce energy costs a great deal. Maybe by half in a few years, and eventually by something like a factor of 3 or 10. That is based on the cost of fuel as a fraction of total energy costs, and the fact that cheap fuel will eventually encourage the development of cheaper heat engines. The Ni system would quickly reduce energy costs by a factor of ~1,000 and eventually by ~100,000 or more. It will erase any consideration of the cost of energy or the limits of energy from the minds of product engineers, customers and governments. Institutions such as the DoE and the power companies will be defunct, and will vanish.
Naturally, this is rough back-of-the-envelope estimate. I do not even know what fraction of the metal in catalytic converters is Pd. Other platinum group metals are used. But for that matter, if the average lifetime of a generator or automobile is 20 years, then we can devote a 20-year supply of Pd to the power supplies, which is a lot. In other words, every year we would add only 1/20th to the fleet of generators and vehicles, and when the transition ended it would have ~40 times more Pd than our present fleet of catalytic converters.
All in all, unless the Pd transmutes and vanishes, I do not think the limited supply of the stuff is a show-stopper.
Martin Fleischmann once estimated that Pd-based cold fusion might generate a third of our energy. I went along with that using an earlier rough estimate, but I revised that here taking into account things like the duty cycle. I now think that estimate was too conservative, and too pessimistic.
Bear in mind also that the supply of Pd may be larger than we think. Cold fusion would allow energy intense extraction techniques that would make it worth extracting Pd from low grade ore. (Alas, it would not be worth extracting it from seawater in any scenario I can imagine.) In the more distant future we might well find the stuff in asteroids or other planets. Cold fusion plus a space elevator might accelerate space exploration, and bring about industrial access to space within 30 to 50 years. Mining asteroids is potentially much cheaper and easier than mining the earth. This would expand the availability of Pd and other metals and raw materials by a tremendous factor -- much more than the ratio of mass of the asteroids and other planets to earth, which is about 450. In that case we would have essentially unlimited supplies of Pd and other materials, and the cost of energy would fall about as much as it would with Ni cold fusion.
- Jed
