Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]> wrote:
> Investigational devices, sold with appropriate warnings, etc., would not > need to meet those requirements. > That's true. For that matter, devices provided to UL and to the safety agencies will not need to meet the requirements, but you cannot charge for them. If these companies are serious about licensing the technology, the first > step would be to sell investigational devices. They could immediately > become profitable. > Probably. The topic of licensing and safety came up in the last day of ICCF17, during the "commercialization" session. As often happens, someone suggested comments may use regulation as an excuse to suppress the technology. I responded as I always do with two points: 1. The public will put enormous pressure on governments to allow this technology because it will save the average family of four ~$8000 a year. corporations will put pressure on the government because they will want to sell this as quickly as possible, to earn billions and put their competition out of business. The political pressure generated by such enormous amounts of money are powerful enough to disturb the orbit of Mars. 2. This is the 21st century. No government and no consumer will allow nuclear fusion reactors in houses and automobiles without first exhaustively testing them to be certain they cause no harm. I would add that it is an Ayn Rand fantasy to imagine that stalwart individuals will build these things secretly for their own use. Cold fusion reactors will always be high-tech devices that require precision manufacturing, similar to NiCad batteries or Prius hybrid engines. Some people have objected to the cost and the delay imposed by testing. That is silly. Cold fusion will save roughly $1 billion per day. The total cost of every safety test by every agency on Earth for the rest of history will be paid for the first day this technology is deployed. Kvetching about this cost would be like winning $100 million in the lottery and complaining because you had to pay a buck for the lottery ticket. This resembles automobile crash safety testing, which requires companies to smash up hundreds of test vehicles. No sane person complains about the cost. Yes, this adds a few dollars to the cost of the automobile. But it saves thousands of lives in accidents; it prevents hundreds of thousands of severe injuries, and it saves billions of dollars in insurance costs. As for delays, I'm sure there will be many others for various reasons, mainly poor business decisions. Rossi himself has probably managed to delay progress for longer than all future regulators combined. He is well on his way to destroying his own business prospects. Apparently his strategy is to dither and keep changing his plans until Celani and others surpass him, and render his technology obsolete. This was the same plan the Wright brothers followed from 1905 to 1908. Another year or two of that and no one would have recognized their achievements, or paid them a dime in royalties. Fortunately, some venture capitalists took them in hand and persuaded them to act like sane businessmen. These were the same V.C.s who set up IBM and sold battleships to sovereign nations worldwide, so they knew a thing or two about making money. I wish Rossi would listen to such people, but I doubt he will. - Jed
