I wrote:
> Even if we paid Rossi $10 billion today for his discovery, in a few years > you would be paying only a few dollars extra per car or a few dollars per > year for electricity to reimburse him. > That is not to say cold fusion devices will be cheap at first. You will pay a tremendous premium for them. That money will be profit for the companies that made the machines. The R&D will be amortized quickly and the rest will be gravy. It will take a while to make cold fusion into a commodity. The patents will have to expire. The knowledge of how to make them will have to spread. Once it becomes a commodity the price will fall, and fall, and fall until there is practically no profit in making it. Eventually, cold fusion motors will be cheaper than today's gasoline or electric motors. (With robotics and other techniques, today's motors would also get cheaper if we continued to develop them, but we won't.) The fuel, hydrogen, is the cheapest and most abundant substance in the universe, so it will never cost any measurable amount of money, even including the cost of purification. Even if only deuterium works. The technology is high tech but fundamentally simple, like making writable CD disks or NiCad batteries. It is something that any of a thousand industrial companies can learn to do, and hundreds of them will learn to do it. - Jed
