<[email protected]> wrote:
> It will take only a few thousand people to implement. Most of them > >will be researchers, who are seldom paid much money. Cold fusion will wipe > >out an entire sector of the economy. Whether it will add new sectors > >remains to be seen. > > Someone has to work in the factories that build the generators. This is > especially true if the generators are home sized rather than GW plants. > I am afraid that analysis is incorrect. Manufacturing a cold fusion generator will not require more labor or materials than manufacturing something like a gas fired conventional electric generator. Manufacturing a cold fusion automobile engine will require less material and less labor than an internal combustion engine, because you do not need pollution controls and you can trade off Carnot efficiency for a simpler design. Assuming the total demand for generators and motors remains about the same as it is now, the cost and labor of manufacturing these machines will be about the same as it is now. The cost of supplying them with fuel will be zero. It is the fuel production segment of the economy that will vanish. Of course you can say the same thing for wind and solar energy. The fuel cost is zero. However, as it happens, these two technologies require considerably more labor per unit of energy then fossil fuel or nuclear power. The maintenance costs of wind turbines are also higher per megawatt-hour than they are for things like coal and gas turbines. So employment is not reduced. Employment may be somewhat reduced with utility scale solar energy compared to conventional generation or wind. Maintenance costs for cold fusion devices will eventually be lower than they are for any of today's energy sources. Again this is because you can trade off Carnot efficiency for a low maintenance design. There is no use for Carnot efficiency above 5% in a cold fusion device. (5% is roughly the efficiency of automobiles in 1960.) Low efficiency just means you have lots of waste heat going up the chimney. It costs nothing. - Jed
