Display MoreThere is absolutely no need to distribute heavy water with pipes, and it would be impossible to distribute it with any method other than tightly sealed containers with no air in them. Things like pipes are out of the question. There is no need because only a tiny bit is needed, and because it has to be sealed into the device, like battery acid. Otherwise it will be contaminated. It is hydroscopic, so it cannot be exposed to air. An automobile will use roughly 1 g per year. So you need far less than the battery acid in today's automobile. (A car battery has about 1 kg of sulphuric acid.) A kilogram of heavy water in an automobile would last 1000 years in theory, but in actual practice it will probably be contaminated after a few years, and it will have to be replaced.
I expect D2 gas will be needed, rather than D2O. Again, that can only be distributed in air-tight ultra-clean containers. Actually, I expect it will be extracted from ordinary water on site in the factories that manufacture modules for automobile engines, generators, refrigerators and other machines that use cold fusion as the primary source of energy. I expect the cold fusion device to be a sealed module designed to produce heat at a certain temperature and power level, that will be inserted into the heat engine or boiler. It will wear out after some years, and it will have to be replaced. By "wear out" I mean the deuterium will become contaminated with air leaking in. This will happen long before all of the deuterium transmutes into helium.
It would take roughly 15 tons of heavy water to produce all of the energy in the world, but I expect much more will be needed because of contamination, and because most heavy water (or D2 gas) will be left over in scrapped modules. See p. 32:
https://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf
I think the price of heavy water will fall by at least a factor of 10, because most of the cost is for the energy needed to extract it. So I doubt that left-over heavy water will be cleaned up and recycled. It will probably be easier to let it evaporate and extract new heavy water. There is no danger to letting left-over heavy water evaporate. You would not want to toss it into the ground or flush it into a river because it will probably contain nanoparticles or other dangerous materials. If Pd or other precious metals are needed, the NAE metal itself will be rigorously recycled, the way lead from lead-acid batteries is recycled today. Nearly all lead is captured by modern recycling techniques.
With oil, coal, wind and other conventional energy, energy overhead is an issue. That is, the amount of energy it takes to extract and refine the fuel, or to build the dam or wind turbine. With oil, overhead is 10% to 20%. With wind it is around 2%. With cold fusion using current methods of extracting heavy water, it would be ~0.05%. (See p. 46) I expect better methods can be developed that will take less energy per gram of heavy water. You might think there is no point to saving energy in a cold fusion economy, but there would be, because low energy machines are usually smaller, quieter, cooler, more reliable, and longer lasting. For example, people will continue to use LED lights with cold fusion, rather than going back to incandescent ones, because LEDs have so many advantages other than low energy consumption.
Thanks, What about a similar analysis for a hydrino based approach? Quantities and all faithful to the numbers released by Mills and friends.