Socioeconomical Consequences of the LENR Technology - Group Analysis and Discussion

1st Official Post
    • Official Post

    Dear all,


    The consequences of an LEN reactor based global energy infrastructure have of course been analysed before in one or the other way in this forum.
    Still, as far as I know, there is no thread in which a thorough and coherent analysis has been made but there is rather a large number of "rags" of analysis spread everywhere.


    I would like to start this thread with the purpose of letting all forum members form an analysis of the socioeconomical consequences of a working LERN devices-based global energy infrastructure.


    This thread shall not be used to discuss, whether LENR are real or not. So please use the dozens of already existing threads for all discussions of such kind.
    Real, [lexicon]low energy nuclear reactions[/lexicon] shall be the working hypothesis of this analysis.


    If external source, quotations, longer calculations or other material is quoted please use the spoiler function to reduce the length of posts, This way, the quoted information you want to refer to can be displayed by the reader upon demand.



    I start now with a calculation to compare the cost for energy at the current state (fossils, fission nuclear, renewables as sources) with a hypthetical global energy infrastructure based on devices that harness the Ni-LiAlH4-reactions.


    • Official Post

    Lithium consumption is new data, but since 2012 I've done similar computations.
    My quick numbers was
    - negligible cost of fuel (nickel, hydrogen, lithium probably as you say)
    - 6month of GDP to build the reactors and around at todays cost. (today 1$=1W installed...)



    Most economists say energy is 10% of GdP, so making energy much cheaper save 9-10% of GdP.
    A french economist propose reanalysis that energy availability (by price) is the cause of 60% of growth... (I have made a post on that: a French economist explain GdP growth is mostly energy... ).


    Impact of energy "liberation", autonomy, localisation, geostrategic independence, is much more important that just the price and availability...
    For example the fact that you can have electricity in a school for 5 years without having to pay a truck that have to pay bribes all along the road every week, have a huge impact in some place where governance is terrible. Add the freedom to install 5G Telco tower for 5years long without maintenance not refueling, coupled with uber-like applications, and car drones...


    unpredictable. priceless.

    • Official Post
    Quote from AlainCo


    [...] Most economists say energy is 10% of GdP, so making energy much cheaper save 9-10% of GdP.
    A french economist propose reanalysis that energy availability (by price) is the cause of 60% of growth... (I have made a post on that: a French economist explain GdP growth is mostly energy... ). [...]


    unpredictable. priceless.


    Yes, the effect on GdP has been severely underestimated. I have read your translation of the thread about the work of Gaël Giraud you refer to.
    I would like to refine and concretize his statements further:



    Before doing so, let us consider the direct influences that also orthodox economists recognize first:
    First of all refering to the calculation in post no. 1
    The calculation is conservative since the real energy gain per isotope transmutation is rather 3.2 MeV and of course the transmutation 61Ni -> 62Ni
    also contributes a little bit.


    So on the one hand we have the cost for the hypothetical lenr-device based energy infrastructure which is 500.000.000 $


    The current direct costsfor the primary energy demand, so the 500 Exajoule is approx. 2 Trillion $


    It is a number that is quite hard to grasp (at least for me) but you can image that it corresponds to giving each person on the world
    280 $ each year. Just like that.



    Now what could be indirect consequences?


    I would like to start with one point.


    1. What is about agricultural economics / food industry?


    How much can the cost of crops, vegetables etc. depend on the energy cost? How cheap can you make it, when energy is virtually for free?


    If you build green houses that have amortized. The costs for heating and running solar spectrum lamps will be zero except exchanging the light bulbs etc. You will have to buy fertilizers of course.


    Now my question is how large is the share of energy on the cost of biochemical fertilizer synthetization and how large is the cost of elemental ingredients?


    If energy cost is dominant, then we can say that food will also become incredibly cheap.


    Can you think of other indirect influences?

    • Official Post

    My first estimated impact, after price, is independence as I said before. It may free communities from their corrupt elite.


    Drone, bots, with huge autonomy will create new possibilities, and as Jed Explains in a pamphlet , it will free the engineer of energy anxiety, allowing better intelligence.
    http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf
    http://coldfusionnow.org/wp-co…ll_FQXI_submission_es.pdf



    More than desalination, I see great possibilities of water cleaning.
    This will push also energy intensive mechanical farming by opposition to fuel intensive chemical farming.
    I think of technology like Naturagriff
    http://www.naturagriff.com/


    One great thing is also the cheap good transport (cargo), that will alllow every producer on the planet, without any need of big electric grid, to participate global market.
    I support the vision of De Soto that the problem of globalization is that poor people cannot benefit to a direct access to the international markets and it's rich clients.
    If LENR allows LENr cargo to be managed "uber-like", transporting the goods of African, south american , farmers or manufacturers, without too many intermediates, sold to richer EU/US/China citizen, then it will accelerate the enrichment of those population, and avoid parasites to steal added-value to the workers.

    • Official Post

    Uberization, as you call it, is probably the big share of the indirect consequences.



    The conservative calculations take into account current energy demand and assume that this will stay the same as now, even when LENR infrastructure is given.


    But of course this is complete nonsense. As can be seen by the calculation, LENR devices will make extremely energy intensive applications economically feasible.


    Water cleaning and desalination, heating and cooling at inhospitable places like northern canada, siberia, africa, south america, central australia/outback.


    The transportation costs for the current(!) global logistics are of course taken into account within the 2 Trillion $ BUT as you already stated
    (almost) free energy will allow for much more transportation which will increase general availability of goods.


    One thing that, I am quite sure, will not become cheaper but more expensive are rents. Cheaper transportation makes living outside of larger cities more attractive and also the world population growth will increase prices of course.

    • Official Post

    Next Big Future is publishing an interesting article about impact of technology.
    http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/…chnology-is-unlocked.html





    The idea that those who will get most of the value is not the inventors but the adopters is what I've heard from LENR-Cities.
    This is why it is smarter for inventors to share future income with the "would-be adopters", who today are the one with the money. The problems is that usual method to partner with big guys typically does not share income fairly, and even sometime kill the innovators potential to innovate.

    I think we will see technology leapfrogging based on LENR development. Many countries went from no phones directly to cell phones leapfrogging land based communication. Instead of expensive timely infrastructure like highways and railroads to undeveloped countries perhaps we will see transportation of people and supplies from planes and aerial blimps.
    Regardless the biggest change will come from decentralized energy systems and the slow gradual abandonment of interconnected centralized power production. Soon those high voltage transmission towers will be coming down for building and perhaps neighborhood sized power plants. Im hoping with this trend we will move away from GMO agriculture and back to local grown organic vegetables and livestock, perhaps cheap energy will help encourage this trend.

    • Official Post

    Integrating NBF article LENR is a very sane revolution for the socioeconomic fabric.
    It seems from what we know that LENR is not demanding new competences, except for physicists, on the opposite.


    The technology is simpler than Fracking, fission. It will probably exploit existing nano-tech competence, semiconductors technology, but most of the job will be good old plumbing, turbines.
    It will require less competence, not more, not different.


    However it will destroy many ORGANIZATIONs that were build to manage the complexity of current energy sources.
    First there is the nation-state, the utilities, some multinational corporation linked to big energy, centralized academic funding requited for big science , big physics, fission, prospection...


    all will not disappear, but the pressure will be reduced to their existence.


    There will be however new technology, but for LENR usage.
    exploiting LENR long autonomy, high density, in drones, in military devices, managing counter-measure to drones, exploiting distributed manufacturing, distributed communities, en,joying accelerated cheaper commerce, all that will create new opportunities of business, and new competences.


    Finally maybe it will be a disruption for next generation as said in the article, but not because of LENR technology, but because of LENR "new possibilities of business and engineering".

    • Official Post

    Michel Vandenberghe often insist that the biggest revolution from LENR, the biggest generated value, will be the "innovation of usage".
    Internet is the typical example.
    The revolution of Internet is not of allowing people to exchange mails, or download files faster and cheaper than on X25 Telco's networks, or downloading with your phone.
    It is e-tickets, amazon, uber, youtube, facebook, bitcoins, and also PRISM, Snowden, Manning, ISIS.


    Steam engine, and printing are the core of the industrial revolution.
    It created nation-state, the big corporation, tourism,...

    Hi all

    One impact will be that it will allow large scale vertical farming. Walmart, Tesco, Lidl et al will simply drive a shaft down into the ground from the car park of their supermarket and put in an LENR powered Hydroponics farm for all their vegetables particularly lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, courgettes and other salads, raise the CO2 level in the enclosed environment, 23 Hour lighting, to promote higher growth, continuous conveyor racks to reduce labour. Near zero logistic costs, fresh picked in the last hour, organic, disease free, perfect produce, at a controlled price and way below the price of any farm produced product.


    Kind Regards walker

    Walker
    Agriculture just like energy production will become more distributed and hopefully people will grow food inside their own greenhouses 365 days a year. High value organic vegetables should be grown in your back yard just like mine and spend money at the store on grains, corn and potatoes.

    Hi all


    In reply to Jon Soderberg


    Not disputed Jon :) Once we have finished renovating this house we have a massive garden to renovate, Victorian Town Houses are well endowed in that respect.


    We have just had so much to do to make it proof against the elements, so far we have: put on new roof, new windows, cavity membrane drainage for the basement to damp proof it, new central heating and hot water boiler, two kitchens built, ground floor room floors all sanded and varnished, did you know Victorians put pitch on their floors? They did, no chemical will remove it, all they do is spread it round and soak into the wood, while gassing you. A function that using heat gun will also do. So one is left with 2 weeks of 24 Grit sand paper on floor drum sanders that grab on to pitch as it liquefies under the heat of friction then suddenly solidifies when it gets cold enough, to either explode the sandpaper roll or teach you what the rack did to prisoners, meanwhile the edging sander shows you how it was done by horse power by the Mongolians, having an edging sander run off with your arms is no fun. all while wearing overalls, ear protectors, and safety glasses, and breathing mask, you can sweat in the middle of winter with windows open. Eventually you get down to wood and drop through 40, 80 120 and 160 grit left with tinnitus to accompany the sound of vacuuming, followed by steam mopping and several layers of varnish all have to be hand sanded before application on you knees at 2am in the morning, to result in wonderful honey gold floors, which the bastard double glazing workmen and plasterers scrape to crap and your sweet 3 year old nephew scrawls all over with biro, so that one year after you did it you have to redo the front room, (that was my job last week :( )


    Electrics and plumbing redone. One new bathroom built, two renovated, a third on suite still to build, still got to decorate and carpet the first and second floor, ground floor is more or less decorated, though we have still got to paper the hall, basement still needs decorating and doors, my recording studio will not be finished for another six months at least, was doing the porch light electrics today.


    We have taken several boxes of apples and pears from the more than a dozen fruit trees this year, as well as plums, green gauges, and cherries already and have had some herbs and spring onions but we not spent any real time on it yet. I do not have green fingers but my sister in law does.


    Will LENR cut our power bill and allow us to build an Orangery maybe :) But most people do not grow there own veggies, any one deep in a city is unlikely to have a garden, I only had a garden in two flats in London. So supermarket or market veg it was. I do not think LENR home grown will cut in to Tesco Lidl or Walmart's market share. Most people are too lazy to dig, or plant seed.


    Kind Regards walker

    At lenr-cities we have a focus on this topic. Which 'market' business model and solution architecture are required to enable a massive and fast adoption of lenr? We think at LENR-Cities that even the concept of reactor will not make sense (old way of thinking) and that the transition will not even be driven by the energy sector. But it is also a unique opportunity for the energy sector to smoothly manage their own transition. Only a massive trasition can save them...

    The transition from large power plants and transmission systems to decentralized home based power systems will be long and painful. The electric grid costs a lot to maintain so at what point do we switch it off? 25% of peak capacity? less? Will cities be the last to maintain a central power network while more rural properties switch over first? Critical systems should be upgraded immediately such as hospitals, schools, water systems, wastewater, large building etc. Oversize the first systems and start selling excess electricity in off peak hours back to the grid, this may prolong the grid but is smart in the short term. Transportation switch over to LENR should happen quickly in the maritime industry due to the cost of fuel and scarcity in remote areas of the world.

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