[email protected] wrote:
Efficiency does matter for two reasons.
1) Nickel availability.
2) Global warming.
Nope.
1. Even at very low efficiency this would only require a tiny fraction
of the available nickel in the world. That is assuming it does not
rapidly transmit the nickel into other elements. That would be another
story.
2. Global warming is not caused by -- or affected by -- heat releases
from combustion or nuclear power. Heat generated at the Earth's surface
leaves the atmosphere at about 30 min. This is why deserts soon grow
cold at night. Massive local heat releases do cause some problems, such
as urban heat islands.
3. No matter how inefficient cold fusion devices may be, the overall
efficiency of the system is likely to be better than our present system.
Our present system needs 15 to 20% of fuel for energy overhead, that is,
energy required to extract and process fuel. It wastes 62% of what is
left with inefficient machinery and transmission losses. See the last
page here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/NRELenergyover.pdf
This shows 57.8 quads of "rejected energy" (waste), 34.3 quads of
"useful energy." This does not include energy overhead used to run oil
wells, mine coal, transport fuel and so on. It does not include the
energy overhead needed to convert corn into ethanol, which exceeds the
amount of energy you get from the ethanol by a large margin, wasting
several hundred million barrels of oil per year (a gift from the U.S.
taxpayers to OPEC).
No matter how bad cold fusion systems turn out to be, it is unimaginable
that they would be as wasteful and inefficient as our present energy
system. As I said in my book, it would take "a perverse genius" to come
up with something as bad as this. Ordinary incompetence would not suffice.
- Jed
