ChemE Stewart <[email protected]> wrote: Irregardless of how many birds it cooks or are vaporized and whether they > can be counted or eaten, the technology is an albatross. >
That may be true. The developers seem to agree. But when the project was started, it seemed promising. It is not the fault of the developers that PV solar finally took off and became cost-effective. Suppose there had been no price break in PV solar. In that scenario we would be glad this technology was pushed forward. Suppose solar overtakes wind energy. Most of those billions of dollars put into wind R&D would be wasted. That is a shame, but that's how capitalism works. If cold fusion puts wind, solar, gas and nuclear fission out of business, $1 trillion in R&D will be written off, and several trillion dollars of infrastructure worldwide will overnight be converted to scrap metal. Again, that is a shame, but you cannot recover sunk costs when your technology is obsolete and no one wants to buy it. It would be a greater tragedy to continue using expensive, polluting, obsolete equipment. It would be like running steam locomotives or IBM 360 computers today. It often happens that a promising technology becomes obsolescent even as people try to develop it, because of unexpected progress in a competitive technology. There were many different kinds of computer RAM memory devices being developed in the 1970s. There was clever engineering. Then semiconductors improved so rapidly that all of these approaches were dropped. People were also trying to develop bubble memory to replace hard disks. That never took off, but you cannot blame the bubble memory researchers. Nowadays we finally have solid-state hard disks. They are NAND Flash Memory, which I believe is a lot more like a conventional semiconductor RAM than a bubble memory. (NAND Flash Memory was invented in 1989 and it just starting to take a significant market share of in the hard disk market.) - Jed
