In reply to Jones Beene's message of Fri, 28 Jan 2011 19:47:37 -0800: Hi, [snip] >What if it gets down to needing a completely new heat reactor every six >months? That could happen.
I think "refurbishment" every 6 months is more likely. That would probably entail swapping out the Ni. However the Ni that is removed is not lost. It can be reprocessed and end up in new reactors, so overall Ni consumption would depend on the amount that is actually converted into Cu, and that would be small. 8% of current world production would meet all our energy needs, even if the reaction only yielded 6 MeV. Note also that the Rossi patent includes copper as a potential fuel, which makes me wonder why the reaction should stop there and not proceed to higher elements, in which case we might expect many 10's of MeV per original nickel atom. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/Project.html
