With coal mines heavily mechanized (if not quite automated although that's probably not that far off), coal has to sell at a sufficiently high price to pay for the electricity and capital costs ~ and the machinery requires a CREW, not just a miner with a pick and shovel.
It's easy to see virtually every coal mine in America falling out of use as the price of coal drops like a rock.
These price collapses will occur BEFORE there are sufficient numbers of cold fusion units to replace their energy output.
All this concern about job displacement is pointless, really. “Displaced” workers won’t disappear. In the aggregate, they will just move into areas created by the new reality of a world transformed by this device/process. Such as having a world populated by many, many small power plants stationed near where they are needed instead of the relative handful of large nuke, coal and gas-fired generating plants and the inefficient cross-country power grid that we now have.
This is not to say that an oil rig roughneck will not have difficulty adapting, many undoubtably will not be able to find a job that will support his oil-funded life style. Bust most will adapt, just like the people that used to work in domestic steel and textile industries. It can be unfortunate but the reality is that skills that were once prized can rather quickly become in low-demand or not necessary at all. Think of the guy/gal that repaired manual typewriters in the 1980’s. By the 90’s he had better have adaptated to servicing computer and printers. Or the guys that maintained our cold-room mainframe computer, disk drives and complicad CADD workstations that went to zero value in the 90’s. We couldnt even give that stuff away to schools. I personal removed all I could out of the mainframe computer so we could muscle it down the freight elevator to the dumpster at the loading dock. Junk...what originally cost over $1 million was now just worthless junk, replaced by PCs, file servers and HP printers and plotters. The point is that labor requirements are always evolving.
Now the group that I fear for? Our accountants and tax lawyers if we ever move to a flat tax. We would have a few million people with truly nothing to do.
True. So what. There is a full spectrum of "costs of production" over many different oil wells....some of them will shut down, some won't.
"With coal mines heavily mechanized (if not quite automated although that's probably not that far off), coal has to sell at a sufficiently high price to pay for the electricity and capital costs ~ and the machinery requires a CREW, not just a miner with a pick and shovel."
Again, so what. "Capital costs" have already been invested. And the cost of the "crew" is much smaller.
"It's easy to see virtually every coal mine in America falling out of use as the price of coal drops like a rock.
See above point about different mines having different costs of production. Some will shut down, some won't.
"These price collapses will occur BEFORE there are sufficient numbers of cold fusion units to replace their energy output.
And why would that happen?? Demand will still be there for gasoline and coal to drive automobiles and power generating plants, which demand will only disappear as fast as those units are replaced by the fusion units, and no faster.