David L Babcock <[email protected]> wrote:
> Lacking -at this moment- your book, I plunge ahead anyway... > As Terry noted it is here: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf Recommended by Arthur Clarke and many distinguished professors! Actually, most of it is plagiarized from Clarke, as I note in the introduction. I see a twist in your favor: because the heat is SO cheap, a really > wretched, cheap, cheap, kluge of a turbine could be fine. Who needs > efficiency! Exotic metallurgy, ultra-precision machining, all by the > board. Likewise the condenser -where plenty of water is handy. > No, that is not at all what I had in mind, and it is not what experts have described when I discussed this with them. Think of the hard disk. After microcomputer were developed, the market for hard disks exploded. In 1975, as I recall, there were roughly 200,000 computers sold per year, each with 1 to 10 hard disks. (I'll check that number after lunch.) In 1985, they sold roughly that many computers *every day*. Around 1980 screens, hard disks, printers and other peripherals become a gold mine. Enormous amounts of R&D money flooded in, and people soon learned how to make hard disk far more cheaply and more effectively than before. They also shrank them down in size. Sales measure in dollars increased by a factor of hundred or so, I think. The cost per byte between 1979 and the present fell from $1000 per megabyte to $100 per terabyte. That is an improvement by a factor of about a billion (1,073,741,824 to be exact). The newer hard disks are not crude, or kludges. On the contrary, they are much better in quality, and many times more reliable. When cold fusion becomes available, small generators of various different designs will suddenly be developed with hundreds of times more capital than they are now. Technology such as thermoelecricity, which has languished for decades, will get a tremendous boost. Within 5 or 10 years you will see far better generators that cost much less per watt of capacity. Eventually they will have no moving parts -- probably with thermoelectricity -- an they will last for decades with little or no maintenance, like today's hard disks. The cost/performance curve may not increase as much as it has for hard disks, but it will increase dramatically, to a much greater extent than most experts now predict. That is because experts think of a generator as a large object driven by steam, similar to the way hard disk experts in 1975 thought of disk as washing-machine like devices with 20" platters. Most cold fusion generators in the distant future will be 100 W or less, the size of a D-cell battery. Many will be the size of a watch battery. They will be manufactured by the millions every day, and installed in every machine that uses energy, which includes everything except manually operated machines. (Note that all machines use energy, by definition. A machine is device that uses energy to change a physical state. Something like a faucet, a pair of scissors or a needle and thread use manual energy from the person holding them.) The cost per watt will be negligible. Probably about the same as a high quality rechargeable battery today, except they they will never need recharging. I say that because the cost of materials, manufacturing techniques, tolerances and so on for a cold fusion device + thermoelectric chip are roughly the same as for a NiCad battery. In other words, a flashlight may cost a little more than today's model with single-use batteries. It might be $20 with an LED light. If you want, you will be able to turn the thing on and leave it on for 20 years. The light will never grow dimmer the whole time. I doubt that a person would normally leave a light on like that even in the future, but you might want to glue one on to the basement wall by the stairs, or in an emergency exit sign. - Jed
