He uses two words and he means two things. Obviously he's not going to be able to destroy the hydrogen, nickel and lithium, but he can slag out the chip and the switches with a swish of acid contained in a packet that breaks when you pull the housing apart. His secret is the "operating temperature", not the materials this thing is made out of.
Al-Qaeda should purchase a few and set them up along convoy routes with signs reading “Don’t open this you filthy American pig dogs”.
I know nothing about the engineering of this sort of device, however, he is speaking about a commercial power plant, is that correct? How does one *send* something that must be large and heavy, not to mention complex, and likely fixed in place, “back to the factory” to be serviced or recharged? Is there some small, manageable module that can be removed and then replaced? Then, why not just provide replacement modules that are newly charged? Like batteries, the profit would be in the continuous need to replace the part. But it would be more convenient and affordable to just buy a recharged module and swap it out, with some method for disposing of the used one.
If the real secret is the operating temperature, can’t that be detected or deduced with modern sensing devices from outside the housing? If he is so worried about something being discovered, how will he protect the secret by limiting sales to large scale power production? Will each plant come with a mandatory security crew?
This simply sounds cumbersome and expensive, if not impossible and, frankly, suspicious. He could simply sell the entire process for a huge amount of money up front, allow it to be hacked and let the eventual buyer worry about the subsequent profit flow. Why maintain a repair chain that demands sending the thing back to a factory?
All inventions are eventually improved upon. The more difficult it is to maintain, the fewer will be sold and that will be an incentive, eventually, for someone to figure out the *secret* and find a way to produce the item cheaper with more utility to the end user. Wouldn’t there be more eventual profit in supplying billions of home units than in even tens of thousands of fixed power plants?
Alternatively, if the initial price of a home unit is very high or it is complicated to run, why not lease it and provide a maintenance crew on contract to service it?