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Fleischmann to Work on Commercial Fusion Heater
deeptrace writes "California company D2Fusion has announced they are hiring Dr. Martin Fleischmann (of 'Pons and Fleischmann' fame). The company belives that they can produce a commercial fusion based home heating prototype within a year. They are also looking at other applications, such as using it as a heat source for a commercially available Stirling electrical generator."
Lets hope Dr.Martin Fleischmann doesn't embaress himself again. I very much doubt this too be true, but fusion in a year would be great!
...and vapour(ware) in two years ?!?
I'm gonna short-sell and be rich in a year!
Maybe this should be tagged as "what were they thinking?"
A lot of businesses rely on stupidity of people. Usually on stupidity of consumers. This one just relies on stupidity of investors...
One that hath name thou can not otter
like a cell lithium laptop battery?
My first though was "What is it, April 1st?" heat a home with fusion?? Hmm nope, not april 1st. Rent is not due.
Fleishman is delivering the science which everybody rejected until they no longer could ignore their discovery. This guy has balls. Willing to apply the science while the Doubting Thomas's snicker and lift a finger to type diatribes at him.
Since he's the only guy on the planet (or one of the only two, I suppose) who has the skills to make his experiment function as described.
Who would you hire, one of the hundred or so people who couldn't do it, even though they followed the protocols to the letter?
Most of them say that. "Within a year". "Within two years". "Within four years".
But never "now", or "in the stores next week", or "come, see this working!"
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
but cold news.
Where are the investors of D2Fusion when you need them for my own whacky ideas! Hey, check out my shareware commodity server, my blog, a few unfinished next generation C languages.... come on dudes, shower some of those greenbacks over my way and I'll throw in a stupid fusion fraud to boot!
This is my sig.
Perhaps it will fuse hydrogen atoms with oxygen atoms - after all, no one said anything about nuclear fusion, now did they ?-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Does using this fusion-powered home water heater mean I
have to shower with heavy water?
They are talking about using a Sterling engine in their product. Actually, so that there is little vibration from the engine, they are combining 4 of them together, in series, so the vibrations cancel out. However, they claim to have a patent on a "Wobble Yoke" that connects the four pistons together onto a single rotating shaft. This sounds just like a crank shaft on a regular engine. How can that be patented?
Genius. They can't detect any excess neutrons so obviously there's a new, radiation free, type of D-D fusion going on.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
And if you consider intermediary methods of storing energy, fusion power for home heating goes back much further.
I for one welcome our new cold fusion heating overlords!
I don't see any vendors in the Yellow Pages. How much can I expect that to set me back?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
That'd be Fusion Waporware (FSWP).
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Doc would be proud. Beats Plutonium as a power source for your time-travelling DeLorean.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This baloney smells so bad I'm smelling it from the other coast.
Are they getting more out of it than they put in? Does it matter? At the worst it will be as efficient as a normal electric heater. So my guess is that they are going to pitch a super efficient heater. Given that, even producing such a device won't resolve the controversy -- even if they sell them. If they can't prove to scientists they are doing this, I can't believe they will be lowering anybody's heating bill soon.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
...Windows Vista
I agree that this is probably yet another dose of false hope but I'd love it if it were true.
Personal access to cheap energy for everyone can have a very progressive effect on society. Cheap personal transportation means that a highly mobile work force can supply labor at a wide and changing array of locations near or far from their homes. I like this better than the utopia envisioned by some where we are all compelled by force to live in commune like dense housing with access only to 'public' transit. That vision is extremely regressive and a sure way to cement forever the wide gap between rich and poor.
Cheap and private transportation is the great emancipator and I hope that this long shot of personal fusion devices can enable it.
If it worked, the neutron flux would kill you. Well, actually, if Pons and Fleischmann's original experiment had worked, the neutrons would have killed them. Of course they don't feel constrained by the standard model of particle physics, so they get to make up any excuse for that that they like.
Find free books.
As the saying goes extra ordinary clams require extra ordinary proof. I'll have to believe this one when my feet are propped up next to it keeping my feet warm. Maybe it will be small enough that I can toss it under my desk like my old C64 power supply.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
They expect to have the "anti-cockroach flamethrower" ready to go a month after that.
To be called:
Sans Nuclear And Killing Energy Overly Induced Liquid
power unit.
"The avalanche has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." - Kosh
You have to admit, subjecting these claims to the marketplace should prove whether or not there's anything to them. The number of people willing to believe their houses are warm when they are cold is probably a lot smaller than the number of people willing to believe they've been cured by quack medicine.
But... the more things change...
In 1945, The World Publishing Company published a nice little volume, The Atomic Age Opens edited by one Gerald Wendt and helping explain to the public what recent events meant. Along with quotations by military people who had witnessed the Trinity test, tutorials on neutrons and protons "doing their stuff" (as George Orwell once phrased it), and so forth, were some predictions for the future:
"Dr. R. M. Langer, physics research associate at the California Institute of Technology, said five years ago in _Collier's_ magazine that U-235 could create a civilization in which man would dwell underground for better living....
[In the future] 'Light is generated by fluorescence which occurs around U-235 and is piped under the house through transparent plastic sheets along the interiors of rooms,' Langer said. 'The household supply of U-235 is stored and used slowly in the chamber where plants are grown. Appropriate portions are automatically delivered through a tube-distribution system to stations where they are needed to provide heat or power for machinery or cooking....'
Families will travel short distances in automobiles powered by small chunks of U-235 in a water tank inside the car, he said....
Admitting that none of the ideas he envisioned have yet been worked out in practice, Langer declared that the difficulties were those of detail...."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
...from terrestrial sources, but if you take solar thermal and combine it with Stirling technology it will work. The Sun is still our most practical fusion source.
Why is this article posted early?
I was expecting somthing like this next saturday.
Isnt U235 weapons grade?
Will I be able to play it on my Phanton console?
High enrichment uranium (i.e. high in 235 - normally >90%) is weapons grade. So, basically, yes. However 235's also the bit that gives us power in power plants so it's not quite that simple!
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
http://d2fusion.com/images/fuel.jpg
Check it out. It's suddenly eased my mind. For a minute I thought it was a scam, until I saw the milk float.
Seriously, this would be the biggest thing since the invention of the AC dynamo, and as such would have a profound effect on the world's economy and socio-political power structure. And many folks out there hate change.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I've a fusion powered home heating source already.
It's a south facing window.
You could power your house off 235 fission (hey, we do with power plants), possibly even light your house via the glow discharge around a reactor but some people suggest that giving every house a big lump of uranium may not be the most sensible thing to do. So, what prevents us doing this is health, politics and efficiency concerns.
What prevents us using cold fusion is the fact that it doesn't work and has never worked!
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
This sounds just like a crank shaft on a regular engine. How can that be patented?
Oh, you must be new to Slashdot....
Recently I was in a restaurant. As I removed the paper ring holding my napkin & utensils together, I noticed a little inscription:
"Patent No. xxxxxx" [with a real number].
WTF!?!?!? Sure enough, someone patented napkin rings. I don't have the patent doc in front of me, but they made the description very general -- it covers much more than just napkins [but I think it mentioned food/utensils]. I understand the USPTO getting fooled by software patents... But most people understand the concept of napkin rings... even those without a college education. Heck, I would have thought the patent examiner would have remembered seeing them in their childhood/daily lives...
So yes, I bet the "Wobble Yoke" will get patented....
I see this time he's publishing his results through http://home.businesswire.com/ in instead of the New York Times. Ahhh, now there's peer review for you.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
All the smarty pants out there -- read this and help me understand if it's BS: http://www.d2fusion.com/education/essay.htm Still clearing the cobwebs in my chemistry section
Animations are better... a wobble yoke in action.
With such a snazzy website and professional press releases, I am totally confident this product not only exists, but will also be available within the "next two years."
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
Actually, last I heard, two groups were able to reproduce his results using the published protocols. Many groups tried either by NOT following the protocols or tried to make up their own protocol. These groups failed! But, we can safely ignore those groups because that's called BAD SCIENCE; which is what you're basing your statement. One group which did follow the protocol, did reproduce the results but came to a different conclussion of what the results implied. Another successful group was simply unable to conclude exactly what was happening...but did confirm *something* was going on. Thusly, both indepent groups agreed more research and study was required. Both groups agreed that *something* was going on. Even the first group, which came to a different conclussion, were not able to completely explain all of the data the experiement provided.
So clearly saying, "that it doesn't work", is at best premature and at worst, simply ignorant. Either way, you sound of someone who is afraid of science doing science. IMO, the only responsible position to take on this is one of wait-n-see, to let real scientist do their job and come to an actual conclussion. At this point in time, no real scientist has been able to come to a factually supported conclussion based on available data. And those that have, are saying more study is required.
I've got to run out to the bank to take out a second mortgage on my house to invest in this company. not.
>
Do you know what your helium footprint is?
Are you producing excess helium with your basement fusion unit just so you can run your massively overclocked Intel Macintosh on your zero refresh time flat screen monitor at enough frames per second to keep you alive in Duke Nukem Forever?
What about all that helium produced when you're charging up your jet pack or opening the wormhole to your new office in Tokyo?
We're producing so much helium now that that the earth is lighter than its ever been! People are speaking in high pitched voices remote regions of New Jersey, and there are reports of rain falling up! Soon, we could see the earth become light enough that its mass is no longer in balance with its speed and our orbit of the sun increases, causing a new ice age! And its your fault! Stop the madness, burn fossil fuels.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Before jumping all over me you should carefully consider what is being claimed here. Saying "We did this experiment and there seems to be a an anomolous source of heat, which we cannot explain" is very different to saying "We did an experiment which demonstrated a new form of fusion, which has never been seen before and can solve the worlds energy problems!"
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Not that I have much faith in the Federal Trade Commission (after all, Sunday morning TV is still peppered with those infomercials for the handy-dandy Quattro (or whatever they're) called 'healing magnetic bracelets'), but someone is going to be mighty pissed when they find out that they've forked out 5 or 10 grand for what is effectively just a bunch of clever heat exchangers (i.e. Stirling engines) that they could have bought for a less than a thousand bucks. Probably pissed enough that they complain to the feds. Methinks that this unit will be available 'any day now' until Fleischman takes the money and skips off to the Bahamas...
From my understanding this "cold" fusion requires heavy hydrogen just like the traditional "hot" fusion. That means tritium or the more stable deuterium. Where can a person go to buy this stuff? Is the density of heavy hydrogen in normal tap water high enough to make this "Mr. Fusion - Home edition" work? Can the heavy hydrogen be derived from sources other than water? Such as natural gas? Imagine that, a standard house furnace or water heater with a fusion "afterburner" to get the most out of your natural gas bill.
Maybe this is all moot since the heater will have a 30 year supply of heavy hydrogen inside out of the factory. Just bring it home and turn it on. When the fuel runs out send it back for disposal and buy a new one.
Even if this does work many questions are going to have to be answered before people go out and buy it.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
There is no question that Pons and Fleischmann discovered some kind of previous unknown phenomena in their U Utah lab in the late 1980's. The question is what? If Pons and Fleischmann send in their research to scientific journals saying we did this experiment and we regularly got excess heat we can't expalin and we don't know why, Pons and Fleischmann are heroes to the scientific community.
Where Pons and Fleischmann made their mistake was rushing to the press to stick a label "Cold Fusion" to their unexplained phenomena that they even admitted they didn't really understand.
Whatever the phenomenon Pons and Fleischmann discovered is, too many people have repeated similar work and been successful getting similar results.
Mendel did a lot of great work on genetics and heredity without knowing a thing about DNA. I have a feeling the Pons and Fleischmann work will be a similar situation. They found an experiment that proves something in a science we are incapable of analyzing yet.
In me opinion, me conjectures/thinks they announced Fleischmann was hired to encourage people to invest in their company's stock. After all, if Fleischmann is willing to sign on.. they must have something of potential value. They even provided their stock ticker symbol in the article, so if you want to invest
So, to me, this does not mean they have a viable product that is guaranteed to make millions, it just means they want people to invest money in their company.
If you order within the next ten minutes, he'll mail you an anti-grav generator, too.
Iter project anyone?
http://www.iter.org/ Apparently it is good to encourage children to stare into the sun, but only if it's man-made.
Background on Iter: Multi-national project involving many forward thinking nations in the interests of capturing fusion power. I beleive the list was something like France, Germany, Japan, Canada... Zimbabwe. It's also fairly old news, I remember my father speaking about it late 2001, while driving past one of the prospective building sites, alas Canada was outbid.
You can only heat your house once, and it gets REALLY hot.
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
On August 18, 2005, the Company acquired D2Fusion Inc. ("D2Fusion"), as a wholly owned subsidiary in exchange for a five (5) year convertible debenture in the amount of two million dollars ($2,000,000) and an agreement to advance up to two million two hundred thousand ($2,200,000) in the form of loans over the next twelve (12) months to capitalize D2Fusion' initial business plan. The stock purchase agreement further commits the Company to assist D2Fusion to have direct access to public markets within the next six (6) months for the purpose of raising additional funds in excess of those committed by the Company. D2Fusion is a research and development company staffed by scientists and engineers working toward the delivery of proprietary solid-state fusion aimed at entry level heat and energy applications for homes and industry. Solid-state fusion is a technology more widely recognized under the name "cold-fusion." Unlike the reactions in "cold-fusion," D2Fusion technology uses much simpler and more reliable solid state processes more akin to high temperature super-conductor physics to produce and control radiation-free fusion reactions. In this simplest form of fusion two deterium atoms which are contained and constrained under solid state conditions fuse to form a single helium atom. Each new helium atom created is accompanied by an enormous energy release. Under ideal conditions, one gram of hydrogen fuel is equivalent to billions of watts of energy. Russ George and Dr. Tom Passell, who head the Palo Alto based company, have been involved with solid state fusion research since 1989. Successful experimental prototypes have been tested at Stanford Research Institute. The immediate intention of D2Fusion is to produce kilowatt scale thermal prototypes which will be further tested and refined by collaborating research groups in the Silicon Valley, Los Alamos, the US Navy, and Frascati, Italy. D2Fusion's ultimate goal is to produce heat and electricity at a fraction of today's cost with no emissions. The Company is well aware of the controversy surrounding "cold fusion" technology. However, the Company believes that there is sufficient global evidence that the risk/reward ratio merits investment. Should D2Fusion's prototype technology be scaled to commercial size it will help solve much of the world's energy, water, and pollution problems.
That "successful experimental prototypes have been tested at Stanford Research Institute" line looks very suspicious. For one thing, there is no "Stanford Research Institute" today. It's been "SRI International" since 1970.
"A number of assertions in this press release may be considered to be forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including timely development, and market acceptance of products and technologies, competitive market conditions, and the ability to secure additional sources of financing. The actual results Solar Energy Limited may achieve could differ materially from any forward-looking statements due to such risks and uncertainties"
That's one big CYA.
With the foot icon this would have been a good fun Saturday article to let folks have some fun. Posting it as a power dept article is just wrong. Guess we can feel fortunate it wasn't posted with the science icon.
Democrat delenda est
So what you're saying is that in the future we will all sound like Fran Dresher?
a commercially-available dishwasher than anything else.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The government should support this, since it will encourage nuclear families in the United States, and that is good for the children.
Doesn't Fleischmann make mayonnaise?
Is this some kind of April Fusion joke?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Seems like there is a lot of negativity flowing through this thread! While the good Doctor may not have succeeded a few years ago that doesn't mean that success is not impossible. Furhter if we moe just a bit away from the Doctors original approach we will see that there is a lot happening with low temperature fusion much of it peer reviewed and at the very least interesting.
Who knows maybe the good Doctor learned a bit aobut following proper scientific procedure and is resisting the urge to announce anything prior to getting it right. A stretch maybe.
As to the ability to get a home heating appliance together in a year that may be pushing it but we really don't know what technology they wish to exploit. I do wonder how one would sell these anyways as half the population is nuclear adverse. Could you imagine somewone trying to sell one of these in California or the rest of the left coast? I actually think this is the big hurdle to bridge and yes I understand that the technology hurdle is huge and frankly as new as a new born baby.
So in a wrap there is enough evidence of low temperature fusion, much of it recent and from distinctly differrent sources than original fusion in the bottle set. The reality is that it is a process that can happen even if nobody has yet found a way to reliably produce large amounts of heat from the technology. So let him have his day.
thanks
dave
than anybody had previously imagined. they couldn't do the math, they couldn't figure the calorimetry out, they couldn't recognize recombination oxygen/hydrogen explosions when one hit them.
there should have been a patent for something titleable "A New Approach to Stringing Together Balderdash."
they were out of their field, they couldn't figure it out, and now fleischman's large body of published work, much of it rather suspect on examination, has got him another big business sucker with more money than they can apparently invest sensibly.
we shall hear no more of this in a year, guaranteed. unless somebody holds another fusion faire on a weekend the renaissance faire doesn't have the farm field reserved.
around the courthouse, implausible science used to promote money from folks, upon which nobody can duplicate the implausible science is known as fraud. perhaps this time, somebody will whistle up the cops.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
What could possibly go wrong?
[]'s Carlos Cardoso - Becoming a brazilian ProBlogger, typo by typo
...is a working Mr. Fusion! Is that so much to ask?
Wake me when they make an air conditioner using cold fusion.
Reading the explanation at http://www.d2fusion.com/education/essay.htm reminds me of Vladimir Larin's book "Hydridic Earth". His theory was that the earth contains free protons moving within metal bodies. Over time these come to the surface and on their journey combine with oxygen to make water, and carbon to make hydrocarbons. As a layman, I am ignorant, but the parallels are striking. Perhaps cold fusion is an explanation for why Helium is in oil wells.
You have to admit, subjecting these claims to the marketplace should prove whether or not there's anything to them. The number of people willing to believe their houses are warm when they are cold is probably a lot smaller than the number of people willing to believe they've been cured by quack medicine.
Don't these cold fusion devices supposedly require electrical input to initiate fusion? If you run current through a resistor, it will generate heat, and how many people hook their space heaters up to calorimeters and multimeters to see if power out exceeds power in?
"Fleischmann was a good scientist..." AND "...his research was not reproducible..."
Science is all about getting reproducible results, and a scientist who fails to do so is, by definition, not a good one.
Hrm... dark location, surrounded by plastic, no view of the ouside world, lighted by fluorescence... Sounds like a cube farm to me!
You can do nuclear power with non-enriched uranium (see CANDU reactors, among others).
Yes, Magnox too. In these the 0.7% or so of 235 found in natural (un-enriched) uranium is the important bit.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
If you know what's good for you, you'll shut up before our Men in Black grab you and shove you through the nearest Stargate!
After all, I'm not the only one with this concern...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Fusion . . . for home heating?? Bet it heats better than oil.
Isn't this kind of like a nuclear powered light bulb? As in, totally out of whack to scale?
What if he's actually a scheming business genius too?
What if the technology they proposed those years ago actually works perfectly and due to some deliberate obfuscation the instructions were flawed?
Maybe, since the 'Pons Fleischmann' incident, he's been working with some secret business partners on bringing a product to market, comfortable in the knowledge that even if rumours did leak out, nobody's going to believe them anyway as he's a proven crackpot.
<conspiracy>also, the oil cartels will just view him as another free energy loony so he won't need to worry about assasination attempts</conspiracy>
Now, they're 12 months away from release, with a 15 year lead on any competition...
'nuff said
How many slashdotters know of Fleischmann only as a yeast company? I understand that yeast has played a major role in genetic research, but fusion!? What the heck have they been smoking???
...and that is the credibility of scientists everywhere. Anytime some crackpot like this comes along, it embarresses us all. Let's NOT give them the benefit of doubt just so we can cover our bases and say, "oh, well, maybe it might work, accidentally or something...um, yeah...i'm so open minded." we need to call this out for what it is, bullshit. this isn't some controversial research that failed peer review for political or ego reasons, this is flat out crap.
Cold fusion coming from Utah is like $10 million dollars coming from Nigeria.
Everyone, unfortunately the read out is a bit hard to interpret. It comes once a month in the form of a bill.
I wonder what they plan to do with the helium.
...they also have another partner, a prominent lawyer who is well regarded in the Beverly Hills liposuction malpractice suit community. Together, Fleichman's team will initially sell patents for their many ideas at cut rate prices. Using these profits they will then proceed to manufacture and market their products, investing in other industries as well, such as casinos in Indian reservations, yaht rentals, and adult entertainment.
From slotcars to fusion reactors -- wunderbar!
hi all, small scale fusion projects have been being worked on for the last year. Do a google search, here is one article from the BBC from a year ago. MSNBC had an article 2-weeks ago. For some reason the news just isn't being pushed out to the public (most likely exxon and other oil companies are squashing the news). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4489821.stm
Thanks, Phill
Genius. They can't detect any excess neutrons so obviously there's a new, radiation free, type of D-D fusion going on.
Your sarcasm derives from the point of view of hot fusion; but hot fusion is limited strongly by a set of constraints that applies when you do fusion by smashing nuclei together at high temperatures. For cold fusions, we have no reason to believe that those mechanistic constraints apply; the only thing that we expect to be true is overall conservation laws: energy, charge, momentum, etc. That means that mechanisms like pure D+D->T+p, D+p->3He+g, and 4 p -> 4He + 2g + 2e+ might very well be at work if cold fusion is a real phenomenon.
Whether cold fusion occurs or not is an experimental question; we all have our prejudices how likely it is to be true. But although I share your scepticism that P&F cold fusion occurs at all, your specific line of reasoning is bogus--you are extrapolating previous results to a domain where they simply don't apply.
WTF?
He's the principle behind the business and is also behind another business with similarly profound potential: Planktos, which purports to be pursuing the use of iron fertilization to sequester carbon via oceanic autotrophism. I hope he's not a con-artist or kook but the odds are not high he is for real. This will require some serious due diligence for those venture capitalists who are frustrated with the poor returns now poisoning software systems.
Seastead this.
Click at your own risk. Reality bending questions lurk here.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
True, somewhat. Install this, bill goes down -> success. Bill stays the same -> failure. Of course who's bill stays the same every month? I'm sure they're hoping to claim a modest enough reduction that it's within the bounds of the the month-to-month "fudge factor". I think of this as being like those magnetic doo-dads that you clamp around your car's fuel line to "align the fuel molecules for greater combustion efficiency" or whatever techno-babble they use.
It should be obvious to anyone that has been in a university undergraduate lab. In any poorly run experiment you can get impossible results. This does not necessarily mean that the impossible happened - it means you need to track down your sources of error and turn it into a well run experiment. Also, if you can never do it again (like the cold fusion thing) then you have to assume something was wrong with the experiment.
I only know what I've read. Some searched here may provide additoinal information. If you read the various postings by others, you'll find that others are referencing the same articles. Wish I could be more helpful!
Fortunately, for "Cold Fusion" to generate useful heat, doesn't need that it actually be a source of energy. All it needs is to be an efficient means of converting energy into heat.
... that is an improvement that may result in sales.
So this seems a sensible first-application of a technology that was questioned on grounds of 'does it break even or not?'. Presumably if it was close enough to break-even that people thought it may break even, then it was efficient enough to use as an energy->heat conversion process and beat the arms off existing processes...
ie, if it's undergoing some kind of fusion or wierd chemical process that may be mistaken for fusion, but uses more energy than it produces, even so, the released heat may be useful.
I don't know if this is the case, but I'm just trying to point out that all the know-it-alls who have studied fusion from the comfort of their lounge chairs via the telepathic medium and the television and wikipedia may actually be missing some possibilities.
In fact, the benefits may even be something other than heat-conversion efficiency, for example even if the efficiency is the same, but the Fleischmann heater is more portable, or lasts longer, or uses less-harmful materials
no-nothing
Where does it say fusion?
I read this as a gas-powered combined hot-water unit and electricity generator, based on the well-founded Striling engine.
A very very sensible idea, but not fusion.
Who posted the headline???
Good point but looked in wikipedia to check: sievert definition, radiation poisoning
Looks like the Q value will prolly be Q=20. Alpha particles also have Q=20 but those dont really penetrate the skin much and neutrons do. (but very dangerous when they get into you)
A thousandth a a degree sounds a bit little to die of, lets say that a kilo of people is raised 1 C by 10 J (rather high estimate i think) and that a the N value of the tisue is N=0.2 then N*Q*energy=0.2*20*10=40 Sievert/C.
1.0 Sievert corresponds to mild radiation poisoning (according to wiki) that is 1/40=0.025 C quite some more then a thousandth.
In total i still not sure wether if their experiments worked they would have died. I dont think they would, the wikipedia (rather heavily using that) article talks about cold fusion experiments only being in the watt-range, don't think this experiment will have much more power. Also the experimenters will be shielded by equipment round and of the experiment and will not be sitting right next to it that much.