Brian Caplan tweeted that the GMU prof was wrong and the MIT prof was right. Is that your personal view? I am not impressed by the futuristic MIT gadgets, as they won’-t necessary correspond to people’-s needs. Hence, I don’-t buy their argument that the real problem is not being capable of “-keeping up”- with the pace of technology. We don’-t care about technology we don’-t need.
The price of nickel is so low (20 euro per kg) that it should have to raise of orders of magnitude to make this tech uncompetitive. Nickel is very common on the Earth, and with a tiny percentage of the yearly extraction of nickel it would be possible to produce all the energy needed in the World.
The powder has reportedly been used for 2.5 months continuously with an output of 10 kW (according to Rossi). It corresponds to a total energy of 18 MWh, with a consumption of up to 100 grams of nickel and two grams of hydrogen. If the production had been done with oil, two tons of oil would have been required.
– Finally, here’-s an index of all papers and articles on cold fusion, cold fusion reactors, low-energy nuclear reactions, chemically-assisted nuclear reactions, etc.: http://www.lenr-canr.org/
The Thiel Foundation is encouraging philanthropists to donate more money to scientific pursuits that could lead to big breakthroughs in medicine, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology, among other fields.
Note that Peter Thiel draws a distinction between “extensive” technologies, which “take things that are working and replicate them”-, and “intensive” technologies, which try to “take the things that are best in the world and make them qualitatively and dramatically better”-.
