Posted on 05/10/2011 6:15:05 PM PDT by Free Vulcan
There is a category of inventions called disruptive technology. Funding streams allotted to this sector award designers who innovate based on radical departures from incremental change. A cursory search of disruptive technology will yield many examples, most of which are IT-oriented, such as breakthroughs in social networking, cloud computing, and cyber security.
You will find little to no mention of the most disruptive technology of all, cold fusion, even as the first commercial device is poised to be installed later this year. Defkalion Green Technologies based in Athens, Greece holds the world rights, excepting the Americas, for Andrea A. Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer, or ECat, a new energy reactor based on cold fusion technology, which Mr. Rossi prefers to be called low-energy nuclear reactions. A factory located in Xanthi, Greece plans to use an array of smaller models of the publicly demonstrated 12 Kw ECat, linked together, to generate 1Mw power for the purpose of manufacturing more ECats.
(Excerpt) Read more at coldfusionnow.wordpress.com ...
True, but for that one lost industry there would be an explosion of opportunity across the board. Many things would be radically cheaper to produce and many marginal products and businesses would become possible. The workforce would simply shift to these new and expanded industries.
BTW, one of the main drivers of deflation is productivity improvement. This device has the potential of cutting energycosts well over 90%.
As I said that drives deflation.
Previously you'd buy the raw materials for a dollar; sell the product for two dollars; and walk off with a one dollar profit. Under a deflationary regime you have a product on the shelves that cost you one dollar. The price has fallen to 20 cents. You will take an 80 cent loss on every product you sell ~ which gives you an aggregate loss of expected income of $1.80 per product item.
Imagine what it's doing to the supply chain, and as you go out of business you no longer order the raw materials to make new items.
This happened in the lead in to the Great Depression as well. One of the big drivers in that one was the replacement of belt-driven systems operated from a central coal powered steam plant to on site electric motors hooked up through copper wire to a larger and more efficient power grid or to an on site generator. Half the jobs in factories disappeared in about 2 years (some think as little as 1 year for major industries).
By the 1960s you had operations in automotive plants that had originally required 1,000 men reduced to a couple of dozen men (with one of those guys being the low paid fellow who pulled grates off the steel shavings pits, and then climbed down in there and shoveled them out ~ I know that job well ~ took another 20 years to automate it).
The elimination of jobs in the production of goods is taking place now faster than ever ~ to the point where energy costs are almost as consequental as labor costs. This new device (if it works) will whack energy costs faster than labor costs can drop. In the end all the stuff is Free and you'll get your money for nothin' (courtesy Dire Straits).
The other thing that interests me is that it would decentralize the grid. We lose most of our energy produced to line loss and other inefficiencies in our distribution system. This thing also produces heat, which would mean avoiding heating structures by creating heat, turning to electricity, and then turning it back to heat. It would solve a great many problems if it worked.
The entire history of the Industrial Revolution consists of eliminating jobs by making production more efficient.
This allows the workers who are displaced to shift into producing other things, which then themselves become cheaper.
In 1800, Britain, the wealthiest country on the planet, had per capita income roughly equal to that of many African countries today.
We may hit some tipping point where the system stops working, but it hasn’t happened in over 200 years, other than for brief periods.
True, but costs would also be dropping at the same time for all things. So your sales price will be cut, but so will the cost to produce. Other marginal things that are too energy intensive would be possible, like water purification and desalinization. Things can be located now where they are closest to raw materials, not where they have a sufficient grid to deal with the capacity. Higher quality products and novel processes would now be profitable where they aren’t now. The lesser costs from energy savings. would cascade thru the system.
Yes, wages would be a problem as they are not elastic, especially in unionized industries. Still I think there would be an increase in purchasing power, and make more labor intensive industries far more profitable.
Debt would also be an issue if revenue drops. That would be the biggest factor is the challenge it would present to the financial system. There would be a great many losers but many many winners too.
Debt can become a tremendous drag on any economy undergoing deflation. And I'm sure there are better ways to handle that problem than bankruptcy
Sooooo, lukewarm fusion then?
Yeah, we’re in one.
Your government in DC will be more than happy to ad tax to whatever your new machine creates in energy. Obama was right? It takes government spending and taxing to keep the economy afloat? Yikes..Who would of thought it?
sfl
That would be MW.
“I’ve read their patent. You could build one of these reactors and buy the fuel materials all for under $1k.”
You must have missed this part, then:
“This patent does not include details of the catalyst that allows the powerful nuclear reaction to take place within the E-Cat. Rossi has said that the patent on this catalyzer would be applied for separately.”
You are really missing something that I thought was obvious.
Human beings don’t like to work, they like to play. There is nothing magic about work and jobs. We work by necessity to live but also to provide as much free time as we can afford.
So when a technology comes along that will reduce the amount human work and capital that is necessary for survival it will be embraced by the human race.
Less work, more play.
cold fusion ping list
Their catalyst isn’t magic.
Like I said before, if you know anything about the process by which vegetable oil is converted to margarine through hydrogenation, then you know all you need to know about to obtain the proper catalyst.
Work is play.
You talk like it is a chemical catalyst. You and I don’t really know what it is.
It could be something toxic like Beryllium or lithium or even an ultraheavy metal to modulate neutron flow.
It could even be magic pixie dust since he is claiming the ability to do something that researchers from around the world have been unable to do for the last 20 years.
Sure, the price of coal will drop ~ and what that means is NO COAL AT ALL. You'll have to find some really cheap way to mine it to get that carbon you think new industries will use.
Same with oil.
Some processes change in quantum chunks ~ actually, in this universe, ALL processes change in quantum chunks.
Malarkey. If it takes "decades to effectuate", it will also take decades for those job losses to happen. And in the meantime, new jobs in completely new industries now practical due to lower energy costs will be appearing. Just building and installing new engines in the existing transportation infrastructure will generate new jobs in vast numbers.
"Sure, the price of coal will drop ~ and what that means is NO COAL AT ALL. You'll have to find some really cheap way to mine it to get that carbon you think new industries will use."
You think the existing mines are just going to disappear?? The investment in them has already been made...the only costs to keep them going will be labor and maintenance. Opening up new mines will be problematic, though
? "Same with oil."
Nope. There are plenty of things made from oil that will keep the industry going. Pretty much everything that moves needs lubrication, and oil is still the likely best source for that stuff.
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