This is a obscure topic that has come up from time to time. What are the prospects for recycling cold fusion cell materials? The answer is: better than you might think. This is because cold fusion cells will resemble batteries more than they resemble internal combustion engines (ICE) or electric power generators.
When you think of a used ICE, you think of metal that has been worn away and parts that have become dirty. A palladium-based catalytic converter at the end of its lifetime is a dented, filthy object covered with soot. A flow of extremely hot gases has passed through it for thousands of hours, subliming much of the palladium and blowing it out into the environment. You can recycle these things but you have to do a lot of work to free up the materials and clean up the mess. A used-up cold fusion cell, in contrast, is likely to be as clean as the day it shipped. There is no gas or liquid flowing through it. It is sealed throughout its service lifetime. It is not exposed to burning hydrocarbon gases. In short, it resembles a lead acid battery. Few consumer products are recycled as effectively as batteries. See: http://www.batterycouncil.org/LeadAcidBatteries/BatteryRecycling/tabid/71/Default.aspx "Lead-acid batteries are the environmental success story of our time. More than 97 percent of all battery lead is recycled." The only possible problem with cold fusion will be if the host metal transmutes. If this happens to a significant extent, then of course the metal cannot be recycled. This would be a big problem with palladium. However, with nickel it should not be a problem because whatever the nickel transmutes into, the end product is likely to be as valuable as the original nickel was. It may even be more valuable. In a broader sense -- Because commercial cold fusion does not exist, we often make mistaken assumptions when we try to imagine how it will work. We compare it to existing energy systems. An automobile engine today becomes filthy with use mainly because of the burning gasoline. Without thinking about it, we assume that a cold fusion engine will also get filthy. Externally it will get beat up from exposure to air, rain, sand from the road, temperature variations and so on, but internally it should remain pristine. It will not wear out the way a piston engine does because there are no moving parts. The gas may leak out, but the metal and other components will not go anywhere. They will all be sitting there, ready to be recycled when you open the cell at the end of the service life. We make other assumptions based on the fact that today's prototype cold fusion cells are precious objects that produce very little power. Hal Fox used to try to imagine a prototype cold fusion automobile engineered to make the most out of a tiny flow of energy, with lots of clever tricks used in hybrid automobiles. People often assume that only a low C.O.P. will be available, so we will have to find clever ways to make workable heat engines. I assume input will be hundreds of times lower than output and C.O.P. will be effectively infinite. A couple of weeks ago I was talking to someone who supposes that cold fusion cells will only be cost effective if we manage to use one single cell for space heating, hot water heating, cooling, power generation and multiple other uses. In other words, the duty cycle of the cell will have to be close to 100% because cells will be such expensive and rare items. I assume that once we master the technology, cold fusion cells will be dirt-cheap objects which we can manufacture in the millions. If the cold fusion cell turns on quickly, there would be no reason to make the car a hybrid. You could waste most of the energy and have a cheap heat engine transmit mechanical power directly to the wheels, like today's ICE. We can put at 12 kW cell into a water heater, use it for a few hours a day and not worry about the cost or the duty cycle. For that matter, we could put a 100 W cold fusion thermoelectric battery into an emergency exit lighting system. (Like this one: http://www.exitlightco.com/product/COMBORJR2.html). We would hope we never use the emergency sign at all. We would not worry about the fact that 100 W of capacity is going to waste. We can put 60 kW cell into a co-gen (combined heat and power) generator, and not worry that for most of the year most of the heat goes up the chimney and is wasted. We would want to use a co-gen unit because it takes less equipment and less space, not to save on the cost of the cold fusion cell. - Jed
