Axil Axil wrote:
For a cold fusion reactor like any other reactor type, the guiding design goal is to produce a large, cost effective, passively self-limiting, reactor design that is intrinsically safe rather than a design that has 1000’s of inefficient hard to control and resource intensive units. Electric utilities love economies of scale and high power density.
I agree that a large, integrated unit has some advantages, but it might be made up of many small identical mass-produced components. This is somewhat analogous to the way a computer is made up of chips, or a fission reactor is made up of rods that contain fuel pellets.
I do not think electric power utility companies will last long enough to have much impact on the design of cold fusion reactors. Cold fusion will put them out of business. In the 1950s there were some tests with high speed gas turbine railroad engines for passenger transport in the U.S. This was an attempt to use aeroderivative technology (aircraft jet engines) for an obsolescent mode of transportation that was competing with jet aircraft. It did not work out. Progress in jet aircraft was swifter than progress in using jet aircraft technology in a competing industry. Along the same lines, no matter how quickly the power companies try to adapt the use of cold fusion technology, individual household level reactors will spread even more quickly, which will eliminate the need for more power company equipment at first, and later drive the power companies into bankruptcy. It is inevitable, just as the collapse of the Pennsylvania Railroad was.
In some cases, an obsolescent technology is revived for a few decades by selective use of new technology from a competing industry. My favorite example was the clipper ship. These were sailing ships that employed the latest marine engineering and materials, and that could not have worked without steam power tugboats. (They were too unhandy to sail into port by themselves.)
Arthur Clarke and I predicted a good many new technologies will emerge in the future. Okay -- he predicted most of them, and I just go along. Most of these will come as a natural outgrowth of present-day technology. Most will be the result of incremental changes gradually leading to something quite different from what we now have. Others will be radically different, with no relationship to previous technology.
For example, indoor food factories are now gradually coming into use. These are an incremental improvement to today's greenhouses. Technology developed for the indoor farm such as robot harvesting tractors may also find a place in conventional outdoor farms. The outdoor farm will be obsolescent when indoor food factories are perfected, but things like the robot harvester may even extend the commercial viability of the outdoor farm for a few generations.
The next step after the food factory is the universal replicator. This is a machine that can assemble anything out of raw materials, putting together atoms to form molecules, and molecules to form whatever the template specifies: a tomato; an entire meal including the dishes and cloth napkins; a new left hand for the victim of an accident; or a precise copy of the Mona Lisa. Anything you want, in the blink of an eye. That will make all forms of agriculture and manufacturing unnecessary. No one can say when a a universal replicator will emerge, or even whether such a machine is possible. Clarke was confident that it is possible and we will have one sometime in the next few thousand years. I think so too.
- Jed
