I was watching a cable television broadcast this morning. Then, all of a sudden something caught my attention. A certain Mr. Martin Fleischmann, an electrochemist with the California-based SRI International, was being interviewed on the boobtube concerning his discovery of cold fusion, sometimes referred to as "low energy nuclear reaction (LENR)."
According to Wikipedia, cold fusion came to the spotlight on March 23, 1989, when two scientists–Fleischmann and Stanley Pons–stumbled on a scientific process that would produce nuclear fusion, involving electrolysis of heavy water on a palladium electrode. The real beauty of it was that it could possibly be used to produce enormous cheap energy that could fuel many industries worldwide through the use of "excess heat."
The world, especially the developing countries, are hard up on how to cope with the impacts of fluctuating oil prices in the international markets. Alone, the high costs of fuel to run industries are exacting a heavy toll on Third World’s economies so that some, if not all, of the basic services are sacrificed just to keep the economy going. The bottom line is without the fuel, manufacturing and transportation activities will grind to a halt.
The world, which has addicted to oil and draining the weak economies’ coffers through heavy importations, was made aware of its existence. For more than six years now, SRI International scientists are trying their best to refine cold fusion experiments in order to help countries that are heavily dependent on imported oil as a means to run their industries. Unless there are other scientists who try to question the integrity and findings of those electrochemists on the proper methods to produce excess heat from the process of cold fusion, the world will be waiting. For how long, nobody knows when cold fusion by-products will be out in the markets.
Let’s take for granted that it will be successful, what will happen to the rich-oil producing countries? Of course, the impacts will be self-explanatory in nature. When the by-products of cold fusion are introduced in the markets, depending on how much the cost will be for the buyers of the latest technology, there will be less importation of oil because "excess heat" from the process of cold fusion is more than enough to run turbines and energize batteries to run vehicles, which could last for many years.
If I remember it right, the Philippines has been reported to have sufficient stock of geuterium, a kind of heavy water that is readily available off the coast of Surigao Deep in Mindanao. This came to light during the Marcos regime, when news broke out that the Philippines has been considered as the only country in the world to have unquantifiable deposit of "geuterium". But further explorations had been called off for unknown reasons. Although, some reports said that extracting geuterium from the Surigao Deep would cost so much resources and manpower. While some geologists claimed that any equipment that could be used to explore geuterium miles underneath the sea will break due to excessive pressure as one goes deeper.
Of course, there are other reasons why they stopped geuterium explorations in the Philippines. Economists said that if geuterium exploration in Surigao Deep is pushed thorugh, it could be one of the richest sources of income for the Philippines, which at the present time is mired in poverty and external debts. It could also mean more money, more than enough to wipe out its billions of debts with the World Bank. But it seems nobody wants the Philippines to be more than a tiger economy in the Far East. At the moment, this is a jigsaw puzzle that keeps haunting me as I write this blog. Well, there’s nothing wrong if the two electrochemists would try to visit Surigao and have a look at the site where geuterium deposits are aplenty. In fact, some foreign oil companies like Exxon and Shell may have been exploring the Philippine seas just to find the elusive "White Gold" called geuterium. As to whether they had found it and are extracting it already, nobody can tell.