Italian Scientists Demonstrate Cold Fusion?

Haffner quotes physorg which says "Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna announced that they developed a cold fusion device capable of producing 12,400 W of heat power with an input of just 400 W....when the atomic nuclei of nickel and hydrogen are fused in their reactor, the reaction produces copper and a large amount of energy. The reactor uses less than 1 gram of hydrogen and starts with about 1,000 W of electricity, which is reduced to 400 W after a few minutes. Every minute, the reaction can convert 292 grams of 20C water into dry steam at about 101C. Since raising the temperature of water by 80C and converting it to steam requires about 12,400 W of power, the experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31."

Comments

Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

More out than in = no

Re:Uh, no

[TheLink]

Heh it's from Bologna. Where are the baloney jokes?

Re:Uh, no

[Monkeedude1212]

More like, "Cold Fusion? Another overpriced Adobe Product!" Jokes.

No really, just reading the full summary, what they're doing could totally be done with 1/3rd the specs but its all due to some sloppy programming practices, I'm sure.

Re:Uh, no

[Kagura]

More out than in = no

Use a lighter for a split second on a piece of paper, then turn it off. Bam. More out than you put in.

Re:Uh, no

[by (1706743)]

More out than in = no

It's called rest energy...and they're certainly not getting out more than they put in.

That said, I'm more than a wee bit skeptical that this works. But if it does...well, I'm gonna go long in nickel and short the copper market ;)

Re:Uh, no

[M. Baranczak]

More out than in = no

If they're really starting a fusion reaction, then it's totally plausible. For a practical demonstration, go outside right now and look at that bright thing in the sky.

All the other cold fusion schemes turned out to be bogus, and this one probably will, too, but that doesn't mean it'll never happen.

Re:Uh, no

[Kagura]

It's easy to get more out than humans put in. OP is wrong.

Re:Uh, no

[Tim C]

"More out than in" is actually not a bad definition of an exothermic reaction. Of course, you're ignoring the whole "converting energy from one form to another" aspect.

Re:Uh, no

[thewils]

Er, I live in Vancouver, BC you insensitive clod. What is this strange bright thing in the sky you are talking about?

Re:Uh, no

[cbope]

What about the energy that was stored in the fibers of the paper? It certainly took a lot more energy to grow the trees used in making the paper, hence you are not getting more energy out that you put in.

Re:Uh, no

[leonardluen]

but if they are getting more power out than they are putting in, does it really matter if it is truly a fusion reaction or just a complex chemical one? especially if the byproducts of the reaction are not hazardous.

Re:Uh, no

[Quiet_Desperation]

Where are the baloney jokes?

In your pants.

(rimshot)

Thank you!

Re:Uh, no

[TheRaven64]

That's his point. You're getting out more energy than you're putting in electricity in this reaction, but it's combining nuclei into ones at a lower energy level, so it's not magic energy from nothing any more than setting fire to paper is.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying that the energy involved in creating a star is known to be less than the total amount of energy radiated by a star during its lifetime?

Re:Uh, no

[ZipK]

For a practical demonstration, go outside right now and look at that bright thing in the sky.

DO NOT STARE AT THAT "BRIGHT THING IN THE SKY"!!!11!!1!

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Er I live in a basement, parents' home, you insensitive clod. What is this sky thing you are talking about ?

Re:Uh, no

[arth1]

I thought people in Vancouver wanted to believe? :-)

Anyhow, this smells far too much like Stanley Meyer and similar over-unity scammers. Heck, one of the "inventors" has even been convicted for fraud.
That probably won't stop investors, though. There's one born every minute, who thinks that TISATAAFL

Re:Uh, no

[nospam007]

Bologna invented universities before sausages.

From WP:
"The word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, roughly meaning "community of teachers and scholars" in Latin countries such as France. The term was coined by the Italian University of Bologna, which, with a traditional founding date of 1088, is considered the first university."

Re:Uh, no

[Toy G]

The University of Bologna is the oldest university in the world, founded in 1088, and one of the few good universities left in Italy, specializing in engineering, history and medicine.

However, from what I understand these people are not part of any research group at the University; one of them, Focardi, is just a (now often absent) professor of physics there. He was also a member of a research group in Siena which also claimed they had had a "breakthrough" 15 years ago; and they claimed then that commercial exploitation was 6 months away...

The other "businessman" involved was previously convicted for (unrelated) fraud. To me, it sounds like yet another scam.

Re:Uh, no

[plopez]

Correct. Though we are not counting the energy required to create the paper, from growing a tree to processing the paper. But for cold fusion the energy bound up in the atoms being turned into a form humans can use is the point. In creating the atoms, the Universe has done the "heavy lifting" for us. So you are correct in your example, but I just want to point out that the scaled up industrial process must work as well. Getting a full sized reactor running is as important as solving a problem in the lab.

Re:Uh, no

[fishexe]

What about the energy that was stored in the fibers of the paper? It certainly took a lot more energy to grow the trees used in making the paper, hence you are not getting more energy out that you put in.

Um, yeah, you are getting more any than you put in, unless you personally spent the energy to grow the trees instead of, oh I don't know, letting the sun do it!

Re:Uh, no

[JulianDraak]

If you throw a match into the powder room of a pirate ship, the energy output is far more than your energy input. That's because there's a secondary energy input- the powder. The match works as a catalyst to a reaction, much as I assume the 400 W here would (if it works, which I'm guessing it doesn't, but more because it's simply too good to be true, and the guys have been rejected by publications.)

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a clod you insensitive clod. And you are not allowed to say that word, only we can say that word

Re:Uh, no

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

It's not more out than in. The fusion reaction produces the big out.

A cold-fusion breakthrough is one where you generate more from the reaction, than it takes to maintain the furnace.

The problem with fusion is that it has taken more power to get to reacting temperatures, than can be produced, and the Italians are claiming that this can be achieved.

I suspect that this is done by siphoning heat from the flames that erupt from Silvio Berlusconi.

Re:Uh, no

[zygotic mitosis]

Your logic is bad and you should feel bad!

Re:Uh, no

[asr_man]

the one hazardous byproduct: incredulity

Re:Uh, no

[Magic5Ball]

...I just want to point out that the scaled up industrial process must work as well. Getting a full sized reactor running is as important as solving a problem in the lab.

Please get out of the trap of thinking of power as necessarily a multi-billion-dollar centralized utility. For many of the world's current and potential electricity users, a closet-sized user-serviceable generation plant with 3-4 kWh output (whether by solar, hydrogen, fission, or fusion) would be "full sized" for their needs, and also a step up in sustainability and reliability. To be fair, even the regulators, finance, and insurance people fall into this trap as industrial giants like Babcock & Wilcox and Toshiba keep getting railroaded on their advanced micro fission reactors.

Re:Uh, no

[weirdcrashingnoises]

im having trouble reading parents post as i was just outside staring at the bright thing in the sky. could someone type it in all caps to make it easier for me to read?

Re:Uh, no

[Cryolithic]

This winter has at least been better than most...I think I saw the sun 4 times!

Re:Uh, no

[hesaigo999ca]

can you site references for your claim that the xxx person is a fraud, usually we do not post defamation statements, unless we can back them up.

Re:Uh, no

[deep-deep-blue]

Cold fusion is a _BIG_ orgasm. Just look at it: billions of tiny protons trying to break that electrostatic barrier that surrounds one big Ni nucleus and fecundate it into a cooper that after it's infancy will grow into another Ni nucleus. And the cycle repeats ad infinitum. (primera demonstrandum) So in other words if it is Bologna then it is University then it is sex. (seconda demonstrandum) This is not a coincidence.

Re:Uh, no

[hardburn]

Not so much logic as "I learned just enough about thermodynamics to prove that the sun can't work".

Re:Uh, no

[GreyLurk]

Maybe.... It depends on what the efficiency of the process is, and whether it's more efficient than current power-generation reactions. And, as you said, whether there are hazardous by-products.

Re:Uh, no

[Ossifer]

Southerners!

Head up to the Nordic countries...

Re:Uh, no

[Ossifer]

I don't know of any chemical reactions that yield copper from nickel...

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Bologna sausage is a purely US invention, thank you very much. When combined with toast and mustard, it also creates a tasty fusion of cold meat and warm bread.

Re:Uh, no

[leonardluen]

it is important to try to understand what is going on, but once again, what difference is it if it is fusion or some chemical reaction, as long as more power comes out of it than is put in?

if it is chemical we call it a battery, and if it can last 6 months like they mention and would be able to cheaply power my house or car then i say "wahoo!"

if it is indeed some sort of nuclear reaction, then great.

if however they are frauds and faking the whole then then they really should be flogged.

Re:Uh, no

[c]

> Bologna invented universities before sausages.

I always had a sneaking suspicion that sausage making somehow evolved from university administration...

Re:Uh, no

[EvilBudMan]

It's called baloney.

Re:Uh, no

[H0p313ss]

Southerners!

Head up to the Nordic countries...

He's complaining about the rain, not the length of the day.

Re:Uh, no

[leonardluen]

neither do i, but i don't think we have enough info to determine if it is chemical, nuclear, or a fake. (maybe their paper which i haven't read would give some information) maybe there is a fitting somewhere that could be the source of copper and they neglected to account for it...

the problem is their paper was rejected because they themselves didn't have a proper theory as to how it worked, which is a bit troubling. and so we won't really know what is going on or if it is real until someone else can repeat their experiment and then people start analyzing what is going on.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Just seem to have found an older university. Fez in Morocco - Founded 859

Re:Uh, no

[Hegh]

I'm curious how they can get more energy out than they put in, at the same time as getting more MASS out than they put in. Copper is more than just a proton heavier than Nickel (63au vs 56au, I think). Conservation of energy/mass, anyone? Hydrogen+hydrogen fusion produces energy because the resulting helium is lighter than the inputs, and E=mc^2.

Re:Uh, no

[DrgnDancer]

Seems to me this is the entire point of all modern power systems, getting access to the stored potential energy in various stuff. Whether that "stuff" is dead organic matter (coal, wood, oil), light, atoms, or chemicals. In all cases we are getting more out of it than we put into it. There's no such thing as a free lunch, the energy comes from somewhere, but we don't have to produce it, just get at it. The problem we're having is that there's a limited quantity of most of the easiest and most popular "stuff" that contains a lot of potential energy. We're running out (whatever your opinion on *when* we'll run out I don't think anyone is delusional enough to think there is infinite oil in the ground). Things like nuclear (fusion or fission), solar, geothermal, wind... All of them are harder, and some much less efficient than burning stuff, but they have the advantage of being effectively infinite (yes, they are finite too, but for practical purposes we could never use all of them up).

Re:Uh, no

[orzetto]

However, the usage of bologna/baloney for nonsense derives from the university, not the sausage (which is known in Italy as mortadella, BTW). Bologna university used to be known mostly as a law university in the modern era, and as always through times lawyers have always been full of crap.

Re:Uh, no

[SirGarlon]

usually we do not post defamation statements, unless we can back them up.

Umm... you must be confused. This is Slashdot.

Re:Uh, no

[Raffaello]

TFA mentions an accusation of tax fraud.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

"However, from what I understand these people are not part of any research group at the University; one of them, Focardi, is just a (now often absent) professor of physics there. He was also a member of a research group in Siena which also claimed they had had a "breakthrough" 15 years ago; and they claimed then that commercial exploitation was 6 months away..."

Interesting. Do you have a link?

Re:Uh, no

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Bright thing? Balderdash! Rumor and hearsay only, my good man. Some call it "the sun" - some sort of fusion device that generates "free energy." Pay it no mind.

Re:Uh, no

[skids]

neither do i, but i don't think we have enough info to determine if it is chemical, nuclear, or a fake. ...or a heat pump. If it's running on directed energy rather than heat as a source, gotta make sure it isn't drawing that heat from the ground underneath it or something. Though if the stated figures were correct, I think 31x is outside the thermodynamic limit for a 20C to 101C heat push.

Re:Uh, no

[phyrexianshaw.ca]

This is no different then coal, lumber, hydro, or any other form of power generation. you're saying that if you take a material that has a huge amount of potential energy and cause it to undergo a reaction that consumes that fuel, it can perform work.

in your lighter example, give me a functional use of the process. in any long term reaction, you'll eventually run out of fuel and have to start using the energy you released to bind new fuel at a net loss.

thus, you can only release as much energy as you put into a system, but likely you only get a portion of that energy while your process itself consumes a portion.

Re:Uh, no

[Rei]

How do you arrive at that conclusion? The extra proton comes from the hydrogen. One less water proton -> one proton heavier isotope. Although that does raise the question as to what source nickel isotope(s) they're using, since the most abundant nickel isotope is Ni-58, and Cu-59 only has a half-life of 81.5 seconds. The only persistent copper would come from Ni-62 (3.5%) and Ni-64 (0.9%). Most of the nickel would form transient copper isotopes which would then spawn decay chains (I seem to have lost my nucleonica account at the moment, or I'd check to see the net result).

In general: I'm not about to declare "Cold Fusion Is Impossible!", but I think these people are a long way from passing the burden of proof.

Re:Uh, no

[Rei]

Copper would be one of the easiest contaminants to get in such a system, since copper wiring, heat exchangers, and so forth are so common. Copper is also a common contaminant in impure metals, and even tap water (due to copper pipes).

And has any third party actually evaluated their copper-generation claims? We know that they haven't passed peer review.

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the strange lighted ball that appears for much of the first week of August almost always coinciding with the Abbotsford Air Show.

Re:Uh, no

[Greyfox]

They probably beat you to it. I suspect that's how this thing actually makes energy:

* Buy a bunch of nickle
* Short a bunch of copper
* Announce you have a device that makes electricity and copper from Nickle
* Sell your shares
* Make energy by burning stacks of $100 bills

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Keeping in mind University means 'degree-mill' - literally, the main definition between the University of Bologna and the academies of higher learning that existed for over 1000 years before that, is the UoB handed out degrees at the end.

Re:Uh, no

[dykmoby]

Heh it's from Bologna. Where are the baloney jokes?

Cold-Cut Fusion?

Re:Uh, no

[garyebickford]

I looked him up as well, a couple of days ago (when I saw TFA), and 'tis true. Google him.

Re:Uh, no

[Plekto]

You're also forgetting whatever they are using for a medium to suspend it (ie - it's not in a vacuum?) That means there's also air, maybe water, and by the look of it, glass for the container, in the mix, which can possibly help to contribute. The real issue is, though, how fast does it use up the nickel (this appears to be a simple reaction instead of actual cold fusion) and is it cheaper than other power methods? If we're talking about hundreds of watt-hours for a pound of nickel, maybe it's viable. If it's, as I suspect, going to cost several dollars per KWH, then you might as well really be just burning wood as others have suggested.

The lack of industrial grade shielding in the lab suggests a simple reaction versus actual fusion, which would likely irradiate the entire room to certainly lethal levels. I know I wouldn't attempt to make such a machine without preparing a safe and radiation-resistant vessel.

Still, converting one element into another is a neat trick, even if it's not necessarily what they claim it to be. That's potentially more interesting in fact than the OP's article, it it is true.(and if it actually produces a stable isotope)

Re:Uh, no

[twakar]

As a fellow lower mainlander, I think I got very lucky on December 26, at 10:12 am. I saw very bright light from the above me, that looked eerily similar to what's being described. However, since it only lasted a minute, I was unable to confirm.

On a positive note, others have told me that this bright light does in fact happen once a year, there's just no way to predict when.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go outside and take a shower before I swim to work.

Re:Uh, no

[garyebickford]

It's the strange lighted ball that appears for much of the first week of August almost always coinciding with the Abbotsford Air Show.

Not when I went there! :) Probably 1970-71 or thereabouts. It rained most of the time, overcast 1000 feet all the time. A good part of the crowd huddled under the wings of a C-5A during much of the show, to watch the proceedings while keeping more-or-less dry. Many of the flight demos were curtailed in various ways, since the crowd couldn't see anything above 1000 ft.

The big event was supposed to be low-speed and 'high-speed' fly-by's of the SR-71 Blackbird. It did in fact show up. They announced it was leaving San Francisco, and it arrived something like 40 minutes later - not bad for 800 miles or so. The low speed fly-by was slow enough that the thing had to go by at a fairly steep angle of attack. It was thunderous. The 'high-speed' fly-by (still at parking lot speed compared to its actual capability) culminated by going vertical in front of the stand. This was extremely loud and really impressive, except that it disappeared into the clouds almost immediately.

Re:Uh, no

[garyebickford]

From my reading about this last weekend, the copper isotope issue is the biggest red flag, according to 'folks who seem to know something about this'.

Re:Uh, no

[jamesh]

That said, I'm more than a wee bit skeptical that this works. But if it does...well, I'm gonna go long in nickel and short the copper market ;)

I haven't RTFA, but what are the chances that the copper coming out is a stable isotope?

Maybe hang on to your copper shares until you find out :)

Re:Uh, no

[by (1706743)]

Oh that's not a problem -- I'm into ultra high frequency trading ;)

Re:Uh, no

[Tjp($)pjT]

If this is real, don't worry about shorting copper. The radiation involved in this reaction (not to mention the small amounts of copper being produced) will irradiate the copper and as a product of nuclear fusion itself, may well be the extremely long lived radioactive isotope of copper. I know one university had a cyclotron accident that caused them to brick up a wall of the office portion of the building for a _long_ time while the radiation from the various copper alloys (brass) coinage, etc. cooled down. I am not sure of the nuclear chemistry going on in this particular reaction, but don't expect the output is benign and harmless. This could be a methodology to crank out really messy waste products (in very very small quantities, but even so the average cobalt 60 source that is very deadly if encountered unshielded is a really small amount of material.

Fission - dirty by products - heads to iron
Fusion - in general just as dirty - heads to iron
Hydrogen Fusion - Pretty clean and useful by products - ...

Just 'cuz its fusion doesn't make it clean ...

Re:Uh, no

[rjstanford]

Solar powered wood stoves FTW!

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this strange bright thing in the sky you are talking about?

It's the sun. Perhaps you didn't go far enough outside. You were probably in a shadow and couldn't see it.

Re:Uh, no

[digitalunity]

I'm immediately skeptical because he says no hydrogen is consumed in the process. Is the hydrogen a catalyst only? And if he found a way to produce fusion with no secondary radiation production, this would be all over the news all over the world.

The equation must balance and this just doesn't seem plausible.

Re:Uh, no

[Hegh]

I was basing it on the average atomic weight of each element, in the first periodic table that came up on Google. It's been a while since my last chemistry class (11 years, I think), so I may have gotten it wrong.

But it looked like, since they said there were no radioactive byproducts of the reaction, that they were talking about the most stable (and therefore common) isotopes of each. Therefore, Ni-58 and Cu-63, resulting in an atomic weight difference of 5, which means they need to create 4 neutrons out of thin air.

But, like I said, high-school chemistry was a while ago.

Re:Uh, no

[Evil Pete]

Huh? The correct process is for independent reproduction of the experiment. If that doesn't happen then "so what". If it confirms it then I would be interested. However, nickel is not a substance I would like as a fuel. Even in the unlikely event that this process is valid then it seems a very impractical technology. As it stands that is. But at the moment it doesn't stand, it is just a claim. Wake me when there are multiple confirmations.

Re:Uh, no

[TapeCutter]

"lawyers have always been full of crap"

So have sausages, coincidence?

Re:Uh, no

[TapeCutter]

" To me, it sounds like yet another scam."

I don't know about that, when it fails to materialise it can be used to fuel NWO conspiracy theories.

Re:Uh, no

[sumdumass]

But isn't fusion and fission basically just that? I mean except that one is in use and considered dirty while the other is considered cost prohibitive because of the amount of energy investment we have to throw at it to maintain it safely.

The magic here isn't the same as setting paper on fire, it's that we can now do it for about the same costs of setting the paper on fire.

Re:Uh, no

[baegucb]

Can you lend me some sunblock?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle#Climate

Re:Uh, no

[Max Littlemore]

Funnily enough, when I read TFA, there was an ad at the bottom for these.

Needless to say I was instantly dubious.

Re:Uh, no

[budgenator]

No actually they said,

Giuseppe Levi, a nuclear physicist from INFN (Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics), helped organize last Friday’s demonstration in Bologna. Levi confirmed that the reactor produced about 12 kW and noted that the energy was not of chemical origin since there was no measurable hydrogen consumption. Levi and other scientists plan to produce a technical report on the design and execution of their evaluation of the reactor.

which considering E=mc^2, and the "thingy" is putting only putting out 12.4 Kw thermal, you would expect the hydrogen consumption to be minuscule if it was indeed nuclear. A chemical reaction putting out 12.4 Kw thermal would definitely consume measurable amounts of hydrogen.
I'm not sure what they are actually doing but it's interesting, if nothing else it's like watch a stage magician and trying to figure out how he fooled you into seeing something impossible.

Re:Uh, no

[budgenator]

FTA "They note that no radiation escapes due to lead shielding, and no radioactivity is left in the cell after it is turned off, so there is no nuclear waste."
Yeah right that alone set off my Hookey-meter,

For example, hydrogen rich materials are often used to shield against neutrons, since ordinary hydrogen both scatters and slows neutrons. This often means that simple concrete blocks or even paraffin-loaded plastic blocks afford better protection from neutrons than do far more dense materials. After slowing, neutrons may then be absorbed with an isotope which has high affinity for slow neutrons without causing secondary capture-radiation, such as lithium-6. Neutron

If these guys are really using lead shielding and have had "one reactor has been running continuously for two years, providing heat for a factory", their kids are going to look like Blinky the three eyed fish swimming in the lake behind the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.

Re:Uh, no

[youn]

Obviously, they had to do experiments in academic way before they invented the sausage... experimental method, repeatable results... the university had to come before the sausage... though I am not sure what came first the chicken, the egg, or the university ;)... maybe the university was invented by a chicken who crossed the road... mmm, very deep questions, I'll have to ponder a little on that :)

Re:Uh, no

[s_p_oneil]

Neither does anyone else. Nuclear fusion is not a chemical reaction. It fuses two atoms together to create a different type of atom.

Re:Uh, no

[LongearedBat]

The university developed the technology for making sausages. ;)

Re:Uh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

However, scientists from University of Bologna have been independent observers of the demonstration, which is the main tie-in.

The breakthrough 15 years ago is the key here. These folks have been working on this for 15 years. What we know about the current process appears similar to the previous one. This is partly because the other one of them, Rossi, is keeping what he has apparently figured out in the last couple years secret. What they had back then did not reliably work, they did not claim it did, but that they would somehow figure it out in 6 months. Right. But now they claim it does reliably work. The scientist back then was also very secretive, and eventually left the project for another project involving radiation cancer treatments that he considered more important.

All this secrecy may have set back the world decades because so few people have been working on this. Or it may be the sign of yet another scan. Who knows.

Well now....

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't we hear a claim like this every few years, just have to it turn out to be false?

Re:Well now....

[Suki I]

Don't we hear a claim like this every few years, just have to it turn out to be false?

The truth is out there! I saw them do this in Russia in an old Val Kilmer/Elisabeth Shue movie about how the cold fusion problem was solved.

It was romantic^n.

Re:Well now....

[Pojut]

Are you talking about The Saint? Such an awesome 90's movie.

Re:Well now....

[MightyMartian]

It would be nice if it was real, but considering the... um... somewhat storied record of cold fusion experiments, I'll retain some skepticism.

Re:Well now....

[Suki I]

Are you talking about The Saint? Such an awesome 90's movie.

Yes! That is the one.

Re:Well now....

[somersault]

I can't help but think that the "storied" in this case must be a common mishearing of "sordid".

At least "storied" still makes a little logical sense. It's a lot better than some of the misheard/misunderstood phrases I've seen..

Re:Well now....

[SuricouRaven]

Correct. Cold fusion isn't a theoretical impossibility, like perpetual motion - it can, in princible, be done. So far though, no scientist or engineer has worked out how to do it. The field is plagued with both deliberate frauds and overeager misinterpretations of results, and so far very little in the way of success.

Re:Well now....

[Anonymous Coward]

The movie was awesome. The main plot was one of the worst I've yet seen. Even Uwe Boll's movies had better.

Re:Well now....

[TheRaven64]

They make some pretty extraordinary claims, if you RTFA. One is that they've had a working reactor going non-stop for two years providing heat to a factory. If this is true, it means that they've effectively kept an almost-free energy producer secret during a period when oil prices shot up by a huge amount. If I'd had such a reactor, I'd have had it connected to a generator and been providing power to the grid.

Fortunately, they say that they'll be shipping commercial devices within three months, making it pretty easy to test their claims: If you don't have a Mr Fusion powering your house next Christmas, their claims were probably bogus.

Re:Well now....

[ribuck]

Fortunately, they say that they'll be shipping commercial devices within three months

Yep. The first delivery is already booked for April 1st.

Re:Well now....

[Nadaka]

Uwe Boll doesn't have to create plot, only to butcher it.

Re:Well now....

[mlts]

If one really wanted to keep the technology secret, but still make a profit from it, one could just create an oil "refinery" that makes and sells gasoline. Yes, it might have incoming pipes from an upstream source, but those pipes never have been turned on. The oil is paid for but the upstream seller has never bothered to deliver on it. In reality, the gasoline being sold from the "refinery" would be CO2 pulled out of the air, dumped through a ton of energy expensive chemical processes, and then dumped in the semis ready to haul to the local 7-11 pump. It doesn't matter how expensive energy-wise the reactions would be.

Result: A decent profit, nobody ever the wiser (except the oil seller upstream who has to keep it secret why they sell oil to someone, but in reality they have not even opened the pipeline to deliver a gallon), and definitely nobody would suspect a cheap energy source. Combine it with the energy source powering up the reactor, and one has a carbon-negative business.

Re:Well now....

[SuricouRaven]

My sentence was ambiguous. I intended to say that perpetual motion is a theoretical impossibility, while cold fusion is merely something that has yet to be achieved but one day may be.

Re:Well now....

[spauldo]

He said that cold fusion wasn't an impossibility like perpetual motion, and that, unlike perpetual motion, cold fusion can be done.

It was just an awkward sentence.

Re:Well now....

[smallfries]

Methinks, perhaps, you misunderstand the principles of grammar... and the meaning that the GP had. In programmers terms the comma binds more tightly than the dash...

Re:Well now....

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't think of it as cold fusion.. think of it as lukewarm fusion.

Re:Well now....

[smallfries]

Dude. Seriously. How can you be so close to a working fiendish scheme and yet so far? It's like Dr Evil has resurfaced on the web...

While your scheme is feasible won't it be more straightforward to open a power station, import gas/coal/whatever, sell your free power and then resell the fuel through a subsidiary?

Re:Well now....

[fishexe]

I see your old Val Kilmer/Elisabeth Shue movie and raise you an older Keanu Reeves/Morgan Freeman movie!

Your move.

Re:Well now....

[Suki I]

I see your old Val Kilmer/Elisabeth Shue movie and raise you an older Keanu Reeves/Morgan Freeman movie!

Your move.

Val Kilmer is the more romantic one. I would rather be "saved" from the single lab goddess life by him than Reeves.

Re:Well now....

[ErroneousBee]

no scientist or engineer has worked out how to do it.

I have, you get a chip with small channels and voids through which you pass hydrogen. On that chip are pulsed semiconductor lasers that create 'hot' fusion, on a very small scale. Doing it on a microscopic scale makes the energies manageable.

I am currently working on the funding to build a lab and hire some eggheads to implement the trivial details of my genius idea. I have already identified an ideal site for the laboratory inside an extinct volcano.

Its a great investment opportunity. Want to be on board with the first round of funding?

Re:Well now....

[mlts]

True, a power station would be more straightforward. However, fewer people would consider that a fuel refinery would actually be running a cheap energy source in the basement than a power station. The trick is to use a pipeline as opposed to actual freight shipping, so nobody is the wiser that the pipeline has not has anything run through it. Easier on the books that way.

There are plenty of other places where people wouldn't be looking for a man behind the curtain: Even a data center which sits in the middle of nowhere with several 120VAC connections to the grid (need that redundancy) might be plausible, assuming someone who isn't versed in electricity doesn't show up and wonder how a few 480VAC transformers (that have not been touched since a mobile home park necessitated their installation in the 1970s) are handling the complete load of a facility using 20-30 megawatts.

Re:Well now....

[arth1]

This one is suspiciously similar to the Blacklight Power claims.

Re:Well now....

[damnfuct]

Better take some lessons in maniacal laughing, so your volcanic lair doesn't seem out-of-place.

Re:Well now....

[damnfuct]

..unlike perpetual motion, cold fusion can be done.

It's probably a bit more accurate to say that cold fusion has not been proven to be impossible

Re:Well now....

[wealthychef]

Actually, to my knowledge, there is no reason to think that cold fusion has or every will work. It's a claim without solid theory behind it, no?

Re:Well now....

[Anonymous Coward]

in what programming language do commas and dashes bind with some varying degree of tightness?

Re:Well now....

[GreyLurk]

There's certainly theory behind it... Two atoms (generally hydrogen) combine into a heavier element, and in the process some minute portion of their mass is converted directly into energy. We've even accomplished that part in limited circumstances (i.e. Hydrogen Bombs). The fiendishly tricky part is balancing the inputs and the outputs to the reaction to keep it going while keeping the whole thing cool enough that the reaction doesn't go out of control (i.e. "Cold Fusion")

Re:Well now....

[wealthychef]

You are just describing "hot fusion." The concept of "cold fusion" is a fairy tale. I didn't say there is no theory behind it, I said there is no solid theory behind it, by which I meant a framework for understanding how it could occur in reality.

Re:Well now....

[lurcher]

C for example

#include

main()
{
        int i;
        int part_the_first = 42;
        int part_the_second = 99;
        int part_the_third = 100;

        i = part_the_first, part_the_second - part_the_third;

        printf( "the answer to (etc) is: %d\n", i );
}

Re:Well now....

[EvilBudMan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics

Wrong, perpetual motion wont work.

Re:Well now....

[tompaulco]

Be sure and read the directions carefully. The mirrors need to be polished daily. Smoke modules need to be replaced every three months, and the snake oil should not be allowed to fall below 3/4 full.
And never, ever, feed it after midnight.

Re:Well now....

[Anonymous Coward]

Perpetual motion is against the laws of Thermodynamics. At least perpetual motion as in the sense of "producing power". Cold fusion simply means "colder than the sun" fusion.

Re:Well now....

[geckipede]

Cold fusion can be done, easily and reliably: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

What we don't have is any way to do it that isn't ludicrously expensive, burning through catalyst almost as fast as fuel.

Re:Well now....

[Anonymous Coward]

wow I had no idea that there was a comma operator in C. It must exist solely for the purpose of obfuscation competitions.
a = b, c; // a is set to b
a = (b, c); // a is set to c

what practical purpose does this have?!

Re:Well now....

[lgw]

"Cold" fusion means using a low-energy input to make the fusion happen - of course the result of the fusion is output heat. Muon-catalyzed cold fusion is quite straightforward, but takes more input power (to make the muons) than you get output power. If you had some trick to prevent muon decay, cold fusion would be pretty easy (of course, there would be far more cool things you could do if you knew the trick of altering subatomic particle decay rates).

Re:Well now....

[Rei]

Plus, unlike Reeves, if Val Kilmer is trapped in a cardboard box, he can at least act his way out of it.

Re:Well now....

[DangerousDana]

I'm no physicist, but isn't there a sort of "energy from nothing" in every single automobile on the planet in the form of an alternator? If you overlook the engine turning the alternator around for a moment, where does the energy that the alternator generates to keep your battery charged come from? And, more importantly, why doesn't it get used up? If you could convince a monkey to turn your alternator for ya, you'd have some free energy...

Re:Well now....

[Anonymous Coward]

She kept her notes in her bra. I'm convinced the two of use could have created more heat energy than than we started with.

Re:Well now....

[Rei]

No, they're describing fusion, period. Traditional hot fusion is a particular subset of that, in which the method to combine the nuclei (not atoms) involves heating them up to great temperatures in a maxwellian plasma, so that the nuclei with the highest energies (far higher than the average energy of the plasma) can fuse. There are also some less pursued hot fusion methods involving non-maxwellian plasmas.

Cold fusion is fusion in which there is no bulk plasma at all (although in some approaches it is theorized to exist at extremely small scales). More often, the idea is that you use an alternative method to overcome or reduce the coulomb barrier. For example, one hypothesized method of cold fusion is that under certain conditions, electrons are "dressed" with extra mass by quasiparticles (such as phonons), leading them to act like muons and catalyze fusion events by dramatically reducing the covalent bond length.

Just because there is no definitive explanation for a phenomenon doesn't mean that it does not exist. We still don't have a complete, definitive explanation for high temperature superconductivity, but there's no doubt that it exists -- and there are a number of competing theories. There are lots of competing theories for how cold fusion would work which cannot be ruled out at this time -- many of them no more exotic than our theories of high temperature superconductivity (or even the accepted mechanism behind low-temperature superconductivity). At the same time, the evidence is subject to many different interpretations. The DOE's viewpoint on the subject is that research should continue to explain the anomalies, but no major projects should be launched.

Re:Well now....

[garyebickford]

Researching this weekend, I found that there are fusion processes that do not require zillions of degrees. For example, 'Muon-catalyzed fusion', which might actually be a good power source if some way to create muons cheaply could be found. See here.

Re:Well now....

[garyebickford]

Check out the Navy's experiments, and the article in Wired. Wired paid a skeptical physicist to go and investigate. He came back saying, "There's something going on." He went from 1% confidence to 99% confidence that excess heat was being generated - sometimes. The Navy found that for unknown reasons batches of Palladium from some sources worked (produced an excess of heat, plus other signs such as fusion products) as much as 70% of the time, others 30% of the time, and others never.

Re:Well now....

[wealthychef]

Thanks for the clarification -- the OP was right!

Re:Well now....

[damnfuct]

This comment has been deleted

Re:Well now....

[disambiguated]

it's useful in for loops:

for(int i = 0, j = 20; i < j; i++, j--)
{
  ///...
}

Re:Well now....

[Anonymous Coward]

almost free? How much powdered nickel per kw/h are we talking about?

Re:Well now....

[Tjp($)pjT]

Take delivery from the upstream supplier but have a yield higher than is possible from the upstream supplier. File patents on the foo-process used to increase yield and then hold the oil companies hostage financially. One by one as they license your technology, which you through the terms of the licensing own the refinery apparatus used, your organization services, and your staff operates. Call me. We can do lunch.

-- Hank Scorpio, CEO, Globex Corporation

Re:Well now....

[Unordained]

I've seen the following, to avoid adding curly braces around the body of an existing one-liner condition/loop (especially for temporary debugging code):

if (1)
  x(), y();

The comma also applies in constructors, specifying the order(?) and parameters with which member variable initializations will be called, before the constructor body.

Re:Well now....

[joe_frisch]

There isn't any known physics to exploit to allow cold fusion, with the exception of muon catalyzed fusion (more on that later). This isn't the same as saying its impossible, but it makes it very unlikely. There is just no known way to overcome the Columb barrier except with kinetic energy or extreme pressure. The kinetic energy would either require high temperatures (hot fusion), or some sort of particle beam. The fusion cross sections are so low that particle beam fusion doesn't generate net energy - the incident particles lose too much energy in random collisions for each time fusion happens. Fusion induced by high pressure would require near neutron-star conditions, much more difficult to achieve than hot fusion.

There is no reason to think that chemistry should affect fusion - the electron density close to the nucleus just isn't affected that much by external chemistry.

Muon catalyzed fusion does work (you can use negative muons to cause the fusion of low temperature hydrogen atoms), but the energy released by the fusion is less than what is required to create the muons (counting the number of fusions catalyzed in a muon lifetime, and the probability of the muons getting "stuck" to the helium nuclei). Its really tantalizing because the numbers aren't that far from break even, but people have been looking at this since 1957 and there just doesn't seem to be any way to make this work.

For the original article here - they provided no claim of what physics is going on, and no diagram of their apparatus. The apparatus is large enough to have a hidden energy source to fool the tests. I am also made suspicious by the very careful description of the measurement of the heat released (not required when the output is >10X the input) which looks like a distraction from the other huge unknowns in the problem. (for example a flowmeter is a much more accurate method than a scale to measure the hydrogen use).

I'd love to believe there is a simple practical clean energy source, but this looks a lot like a fraud to me.

Re:Well now....

[schklerg]

No fair!!! If I wanted something accurate, insightful, and relevant I wouldn't be on the internet now would I!!! Please leave me alone so I can go back to my bistromathmatics.

Re:Well now....

[budgenator]

you know it just occurred to me that if mixing nickel, hydrogen and electricity generates fusion then the NIH batteries in the Energizer bunny should go thermonuclear!

Re:Well now....

[Black Parrot]

Correct. Cold fusion isn't a theoretical impossibility, like perpetual motion - it can, in princible, be done.

IANAPhysicist, but I'm pretty sure PM can't be done even in principle.

Re:Well now....

[smallfries]

In natural language there is not a formal description of "binding". The term "binds more tightly" is something from programming.

I'm as surprised as you were that there is a comma operator in C. Hadn't seen that one before...

Re:Well now....

[Urkki]

Actually, to my knowledge, there is no reason to think that cold fusion has or every will work. It's a claim without solid theory behind it, no?

That's still better than having an established and apparently very accurate theory, that says it's impossible. So cold fusion isn't quite like perpetual motion.

Re:Well now....

[Anonymous Coward]

Can somebody tell why the following article doesn't describe cold fusion? There was a little bit longer summary in SciAm, something about pyroelectric reactions.
They are not claiming anything that could scale up here, but still fusion which produces neutrons.

http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v293/n1/full/scientificamerican0705-26b.html

Fusion ordinarily requires multimillion-degree heat, but a bucket-sized device fuses nuclei below freezing. The core of the machine is a lithium tantalate crystal, which generates an electric field when heated.

Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me when it's repeatable in more than 2 other labs please.

Re:Riiight

[DavidTC]

Call me when they can attach a generator to it, hook the output up to the input, and keep it running by just putting in cold water and getting steam.

Re:Riiight

[goose-incarnated]

Yeah? Call me when mythbusters does this :-)

Re:Riiight

[FooAtWFU]

Call me when they've built a commercial-scale reactor and are giving out free electricity.

Re:Riiight

[MightyYar]

Call me when they've built a commercial-scale reactor and are giving out free electricity.

Oh yeah, well, call me when they've built a commercial-scale reactor and are giving out free electricity... ON THE MOON!

Re:Riiight

[xero314]

Call me when they can attach a generator to it, hook the output up to the input, and keep it running by just putting in cold water and getting steam.

I think you mean by putting in Nickle and Hydrogen and getting out Copper and heat. The water itself should not have to be replaced as it just converts back from vapor after it cools and can be reprocessed. The nickle and the hydrogen on the other hand are replaced by the generated Copper.

Some times it's like people don't even read the summary.

Re:Riiight

[xero314]

Call me when they've built a commercial-scale reactor and are giving out free electricity.

Why would it be free? It still consumes Nickle and Hydrogen, while producing less mass in Copper. Please they still need to maintain the plant and distribution system. So sure the price of the copper might counter the cost of the Nickle and Hydrogen, until copper prices plummet, but over all there is a net cost in generating the final electricity.

Re:Riiight

[TheRaven64]

They claim that they've had a reactor providing heat to a factory for two years and that they'll be shipping commercial reactors within three months. Still in the 'I'll believe it when I see it' category, but it's a much stronger claim than any other cold fusion announcements.

There's no real point in selling or giving away the electricity from such a reactor - given the size of the equipment, it's the sort of thing that could be installed in a house and used to power it without any kind of grid connection (with some batteries for starting it). It would be a bit embarrassing for ITER if it turned out to be true...

Re:Riiight

[cmiller173]

Oh yeah, well call me when they've built a consumer-scale reactor and are installing them in our electric moon buggies for free.

Re:Riiight

[arth1]

Call me when they've made it smaller, so I can get my Sonic Screwdriver.

Re:Riiight

[ikkonoishi]

Nickle costs about four times as much per pound as copper.
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/nickelalloy/nickelalloy.asp
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu/cu.asp

Re:Riiight

[alta]

The way I understand it, they produce steam, which turns turbines, which can then be condensed back into water, recycled like your car radiator.

Fuel in this experiment is Hydrogen (H-1) and Nickel (Ni 28)... output is copper (Cu-29).

The problem I see though is all the dope-heads raiding the thing for the copper to take to the recyclers for quick cash.

Re:Riiight

[xero314]

Nickle costs about four times as much per pound as copper.

Sorry I didn't take the time to look it up. That does further back up my statement that this processes is anything but free.

Re:Riiight

[MikeBabcock]

Its too bad Nickel is more valuable than Copper by weight, as they're losing money on the actual materials value through the process of fusion.

Re:Riiight

[bill_mcgonigle]

They claim that they've had a reactor providing heat to a factory for two years and that they'll be shipping commercial reactors within three months. Still in the 'I'll believe it when I see it' category, but it's a much stronger claim than any other cold fusion announcements.

Yeah, it's a pretty ballsy pair of claims to make if you don't think you can produce. Three months isn't enough time to bilk investors on a scam either. They're setting up several items which could be readily falsified. Perhaps they will be, but there's either something here or it's the most bold fraud to date.

Re:Riiight

[fishexe]

Call me when they can attach a generator to it, hook the output up to the input, and keep it running by just putting in cold water and getting steam.

I could say the same about Slashdot.

Re:Riiight

[fishexe]

Oh yeah, well call me when they've built a consumer-scale reactor and are installing them in our electric moon buggies for free.

Call me when all energy everywhere in the universe is free. Until then, BO-RING...

Re:Riiight

[eepok]

Call me (call me) on the line
Call me, call me any, anytime
Call me (call me) oh my love
When you're ready we can share the wine
Call me

Re:Riiight

[MarcQuadra]

Call me when they scale it up by a factor of five, so it can actually warm my house, and we find an infinite supply of Nickel.

Call me crazy, but consuming metals for energy seems just a little foolish in the long run.

Re:Riiight

[idontgno]

"We've perfected the transmutation of the elements! Heavy, lustrous gold can now be alchemically tranformed into LEAD!"

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

*wipes tear from the corner of the eye*

What's your number?

Re:Riiight

[TheCRAIGGERS]

I don't know how any of you people are hoping to receive phone calls when you're not posting your number.

Re:Riiight

[hardburn]

ITER still makes sense on theoretical grounds; you push the boundaries of Science and something good is bound to come out of it.

The stated reason why these guys were rejected from peer reviewed journals was that they hadn't come up with a viable theory of how it works. Their data shows that it has positive energy output, but they have no idea why. If it does actually work (a big "if"), then some of the data from ITER may end up showing why this thing would work.

But it's probably all nonsense, anyway.

Re:Riiight

[whiteboy86]

Quick "red flag" checklist:

1) 'inventors' run their own journal site
2) it is a .com website
3) the site has ads plastered all over
4) upon visiting you browser stalls and you notice huge background activity

(somebody please verify this -- if you dare)

Re:Riiight

[TrailerTrash]

They are obviously doing this wrong.

You don't use water, you put in beer. Then when it's turned into steam you remove the distallate and add small amounts of beer back in.

Imagine Mr. Fusion now improved as Mr. Whisky!

Re:Riiight

[amn108]

Call me Mr. Raider, call me Mr. Wrong
Call me insane, call me Mr. Vain
Call me what you like
As long as you call me time and again

Re:Riiight

[hardburn]

Meh. Nuclear reactors of any kind use tiny amounts of fuel for the amount of energy they give out. Transmuting tiny amounts of one element will only give you tiny amounts of another element.

Some fission reactors can produce usable amounts of fuel for other fission reactors, but only because we can't find significant amounts of the output elements in nature.

Re:Riiight

[Actually, I do RTFA]

People are missing half the point; sure free energy is nice, but the price of copper is way too high. Bonus points for achieving a viable form of alchemy.

Re:Riiight

[Muad'Dave]

867-5309, of course. Her name is Jenny, and she's a Blondie. Her father was Tommy Tutone.

Re:Riiight

[Talderas]

The is true, but at least the copper can be sold on the market (I hope). So it's not about $12 per pound of fuel. It's probably closer to $8 per pound of fuel once you consider that copper is about $4 per pound. I'm assuming that you get roughly equal poundage of copper as you put in of nickel.

Re:Riiight

[HeLLFiRe1151]

It's 867-5309

Re:Riiight

[Unequivocal]

First off: this is 99.999% likely to be BS.

But if it isn't BS, there's new physics here, so consuming metals for energy is most definitely worth it.

Re:Riiight

[wagnerrp]

Nuclear reactions give off energy based off the change in binding energy. Nickel and copper isotopes are already about as high binding energy as you can get, meaning there will be negligible energy released, if any is released at all. They're going to have to consume large amounts of fuel for any significant energy output.

They're claiming no radioactive waste, which means they're going straight from one stable isotope of nickel to one stable isotope of copper. That means they're going from Ni62 to Cu63. Nickel-62 has the highest binding energy of any known isotope of any known element. You cannot extract any energy from any nuclear reaction involving that isotope, fission or fusion.

Re:Riiight

[bhcompy]

Sure, but copper does have industrial uses, so they will be able to recoup some costs, particularly if the copper is as pure as they state

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the real test is when other people say 'yep, it works'. If their story goes 'we sell you a unit that has X power in, and Y power out', then thats what it has to do. Sell ONE UNIT to an outside agency, they don't even have to examine the contents of the black box, the just have to use the device for a year as advertised. One year, at the given price, with X energy in and 31 X energy out. Then I would say 'ok'. Otherwise, I wait and see.

Re:Riiight

[TheRaven64]

If it's working, then it's probably got more in common with a radiothermal generator than a fusion reaction. My guess (as someone whose particle physics only goes up to undergrad level, and is therefore probably wrong) is that they've got a combination of neutron capture and decay.

This would mean that it's really working by encouraging nuclear decay, rather than by true fusion or even fission. There's no theoretical reason why this kind of reaction couldn't happen at the energy levels that they're discussing, but the exact mechanism could be quite interesting.

Re:Riiight

[nschubach]

While both Slashdot and Steam have achievements, Steam has better voice support and "cloud" storage for some game saves... so one could say it was a step up. The unfortunate part is that you have to buy your content from Steam where Slashdot spills it on the screen for free. ;)

Re:Riiight

[MiniMike]

Call me when all energy everywhere in the universe is free. Until then, BO-RING...

It is, and it's heading towards you. You just have to wait for it. Might take a while.

Re:Riiight

[tompaulco]

If this does work, how long before Al Gore starts berating us for our Hydrogen Footprint?

Actually, copper is probably the more evil of the two. It, like most heavy metals, is poisonous in relatively small doses.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Bologna Eh? where do people think we derived the term Bologna ?

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean by putting in Nickle and Hydrogen .

It's coin-operated?

Re:Riiight

[kimvette]

Call me when we have mastered a sustained, controllable hydrogen and/or helium fusion reaction and harnessed the output as usable heat - I mean, for something besides removing cities from existence.

I find it highly unlikely that anyone could master sustained fusion of heavy metals which requires far more input energy to ignite than hydrogen or helium fusion, which we still haven't achieved. Hydrogen fusion is great because hydrogen is cheap and plentiful, and the product is helium, and a two-stage system where the second stage of helium fusion would be even better because the product is either carbon or oxygen depending on reaction pressure and temperature - both of which would be "desirable" waste.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

they did an ROi on the web site. The cost of the raw material is well less than coal overall.
the "rods" would be replenished very 6 months, and its a drip feed system too so you dont have to shut it down to load up new rods.

Re:Riiight

[mordenkhai]

So.... are you saying you have started the "The Copper Is Too Damn High" party?

Re:Riiight

[Surt]

Poisonous, poisonous lead!

Re:Riiight

[Red Flayer]

They're claiming no radioactive waste, which means they're going straight from one stable isotope of nickel to one stable isotope of copper. That means they're going from Ni62 to Cu63. Nickel-62 has the highest binding energy of any known isotope of any known element.

That makes no sense. If Ni-62 is your starting fuel (very high binding energy) and you convert it to Cu-63 (lower binding energy), then you will get some of that binding energy out.

You're moving from a high-energy state to a low-energy state... thus giving off energy.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me when they can attach a generator to it, hook the output up to the input, and keep it running by just putting in cold water and getting steam.

I think you mean by putting in Nickle and Hydrogen and getting out Copper and heat. The water itself should not have to be replaced as it just converts back from vapor after it cools and can be reprocessed. The nickle and the hydrogen on the other hand are replaced by the generated Copper.

Some times it's like people don't even read the summary.

Actually the hydrogen will get used up when the Nickel is converted to Copper, so you wont be able to reprocess it.

Some times it's like people don't even read the summary

Re:Riiight

[Surt]

Since this isn't hydrogen-hydrogen cold fusion, ITER would still be valuable, as hydrogen is the most abundant source fuel in the universe.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Please excuse him. He's probably a free software zealot who takes things too far.

Re:Riiight

[alta]

So are you saying that if they were going to make some shit up, they should have picked some better elements to do it with?

If all it takes to get this right is a little math and some pressure to FUSE the elements...

Stay tuned for my forthcoming fusion announcement. I'm going to be combining Tantalum(73) with Scandium(21) to make Plutonium (94) with a hammer. And when I'm done, I'm going to show you split again so we can get some fission energy as well. The split will be to get some Tellurium(52) and Molybdenum (42)

Wow, this energy stuff is easy and fun!

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

And if/when it is, you'll be back on here complaining that it's "old news" and "why isn't slashdot on the edge of this".

In other words: go away, complainer.

Re:Riiight

[Iron Condor]

"We've perfected the transmutation of the elements! Heavy, lustrous gold can now be alchemically tranformed into LEAD!"

Given that there's more gold than lead in the Earth's crust, that's actually not a bad thing.

The only reason gold costs more than lead is the crazed speculators.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

(Ring ring)....London calling

Re:Riiight

[wagnerrp]

Actually, its the opposite. Nuclear binding energy is a measurement of the amount of mass lost to energy during the nucleon binding. In order to go from higher binding energy to lower, you need to input energy to replace that mass.

Re:Riiight

[xero314]

Actually the hydrogen will get used up when the Nickel is converted to Copper, so you wont be able to reprocess it.

I don't recall stating that the Hydrogen would be reusable. Unless you are inferring from the summary or article that the hydrogen used in the process is the hydrogen contained in the the Water that is being converted to Steam. I didn't see anything implying this and made the assumption that this process uses the standard heat transfer process to produce the resulting steam.

But hey if I missed something in the summary or article I'd appreciate it if you could highlight that oversight.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me when they've built a commercial-scale reactor and are giving out free electricity.

Oh yeah, well, call me when they've built a commercial-scale reactor and are giving out free electricity... ON THE MOON!

Oh yeah, well, call me when they've built a commercial-scale reactor and are giving out free gold... HERE!

Re:Riiight

[Red Flayer]

That still doesn't make sense to me.

Nuclear binding energy is a measurement of the amount of mass lost to energy during the nucleon binding

OK, so nuclear binding energy is a measurement of energy, the source of which is matter. If you have a strongly bound nucleus, a lot of energy (matter) was required to "build" that nucleus.

In order to go from higher binding energy to lower, you need to input energy to replace that mass.

I can't wrap my head around this at all -- what happens to the nucleon binding energy you go from high- to low- energy states? Surely it is either (1) given off or (2) converted to mass.

Can you explain why you would need to input energy (via conversion of mass) in order to go from low- to high-energy state, and you'd also need to input energy to go from high- to low-energy state? We're not ending up with the same amount of mass at the end... so there is no need to input energy to "replace" that mass.

Re:Riiight

[Surt]

The wikipedia entries for copper and nickel seem to suggest that nickel is the more dangerous of the two.

And as for Al Gore ... well the good news is that hydrogen fusion as a power source will both necessitate and make easier all of us leaving earth in the comparatively short-run. Hydrogen fusion will make the earth unlivable in maybe 100K years, which will force us all off our asses in plenty of time for the sun's red-giant phase.

Re:Riiight

[hjf]

99,99999999% pure copper? There's only ONE market for that: HIGH END SPEAKER WIRES!

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh!

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

And stage a steampunk revival to promote the use of copper and bronze un fashion :-)
And after all they are near milan !

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope once they get the output properly attached to the input and reduce the requirements to cold water it will be perpetual energy for nothing. It will provide free energy from hear to the moon using fairy magic for transmission. This is all assuming the higgs boson doesn't travel back in time to terminate the project.

Re:Riiight

[jonniesmokes]

OK. I will bite even though I will most likely regret it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elemental_abundances.svg

Shows that lead (Pb) is roughly 10000 times more abundant than gold (Au) in the earth's crust.

What reference were you using? Trollpedia?

Re:Riiight

[PTBarnum]

I can't wait to see if using man-made copper in my CAT-5 cables will give my MP3 files a warmer sound. Of course, it would be important to make sure that the electricity used for the fusion reaction was DC, not AC, to avoid harshness around 50Hz.

Re:Riiight

[operagost]

And the fact that gold is non-toxic, resists corrosion, attractive, and useful in electronics (lead not so much since RoHS) is totally irrelevant, of course.

Re:Riiight

[MaskedSlacker]

You do know that alcohol boils off before water, right? That's how distillation works in the real world. You don't boil off water and have alcohol left over.

Re:Riiight

[tyrione]

Nickle costs about four times as much per pound as copper.

Sorry I didn't take the time to look it up. That does further back up my statement that this processes is anything but free.

Nothing in life is free. Get over it.

Re:Riiight

[AmaDaden]

Parent is most valuable post here. If parent is accurate either 1) this project and results are total bullshit or 2) This experiment will end up being mentioned in high school chemistry text books in about a decade because it was the first clue that we royally fucked up nuclear bonding energy calculations or something else really fundamental. I'm guessing 1 but hoping for 2.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest looking up the tactic called "The Big Lie"

Re:Riiight

[Rei]

Even weak nuclear reactions generally dwarf chemical reactions. Weak nuclear reactions are usually measured in keV (such as tritium's decay, 18.5keV), while strong nuclear reactions can be hundreds of MeV (uranium fission = ~200MeV). Chemical reactions are generally measured in eV (burning H2 + O2 yields 5.7 eV).

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? I did it this morning on my desktop. I got the hydrogen from water and the deuterium I found at the bottom of my hydrogen tank (it's heavier, ya know). Then I used really precise tweezers and stuck two deuterium atoms close together and boom: blew my hands off.... I am typing this with my ear because my nose was blown off too.

Re:Riiight

[wagnerrp]

No. The mistake was my own, with a slight misunderstanding of binding energy. Binding energy is plotted per nucleon, and while nickel does have a higher binding energy per nucleon than copper, copper has one more proton to more than offset the difference. Since they're fusing with a single proton, with no lost mass, there are still small gains to be had through fusion.

The problem still remains that there are only two stable isotopes of copper, which produced through fusion with hydrogen, would account for around 4.5% of naturally occuring nickel. After reading their paper, their energy measurements assumed reaction of all nickel, meaning they had not refined it. Their paper claims these isotopes spontaneously decay, transmuting a proton to a neutron, and releasing a positron and neutrino, and restarting the process until the nickel gets stepped up to copper-63, when the fuel is finally spent. That doesn't seem right to me, but I have no experience to refute it.

Re:Riiight

[WalksOnDirt]

Nickel-62 has the highest binding energy of any known isotope of any known element. You cannot extract any energy from any nuclear reaction involving that isotope, fission or fusion.

A proton has the lowest binding energy, though. If you do the math you'll find that Ni+p weighs more than the resulting Cu, so you do get energy.

Mind you, the whole thing is nonsense. There's no way they are getting Ni to fuse with a proton.

Re:Riiight

[LaRainette]

Really not any more foolish than consuming petrol for energy.
Not that Nickel is even possible to synthetize, let alone easy or affordable, but all the plastic we use, we get it from petrol and we have little to no alternative right now. Burning petrol to move cars, bus, or even worse to power electrical plants is the stupidest move ever, and the only reason why we keep at it is because big Oil company put the money in the right pockets.
It's a matter of available stock and global consumption but I'm 99% sure we're better off without Nickel than without petrol (at least until we find and satisfactory replacement for it in the plastic industry)

Re:Riiight

[garyebickford]

Nickel has many uses, perhaps as many different uses as copper. For example, the vats and plumbing of a corn syrup factory are made of pure nickel, about 2 inches thick. An old friend of mine used to build these (he's a retired welder, specializing in exotic metals welding.) It turns out that hot corn syrup is very corrosive to most metals - or at least metals that would be allowed in trace amounts in food. I don't know the details but the piping was about two feet in diameter.

Nickel is also an ingredient in certain types of steel, particularly various types of stainless steel.

Re:Riiight

[Nefarious Wheel]

It would be a bit embarrassing for ITER if it turned out to be true...

No more embarrassing than gen 2 mainframes were "embarrassed" by the PC. Evolution must have its dinosaurs.

Re:Riiight

[garyebickford]

Call me when they can attach a generator to it, hook the output up to the input, and keep it running by just putting in cold water and getting steam.

I could say the same about Slashdot.

And Washington DC! :D

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

The quantity of copper being produced is probably tiny; barely detectable. It'd be a lot more reliable to test this device by making sure that it keeps producing heat (or converting water to steam), long after any power source other than fusion would have been exhausted.

Re:Riiight

[damnfuct]

Using metals as nuclear fuel wouldn't be as bad as you'd think, mostly because the iron-containing asteroids comprise some nickel (5-25%), which is a bit too convenient if you ask me. Who knows, maybe the whole thing is legit, but time will tell.

Re:Riiight

[lennier]

Rikki, don't lose that number! You don't wanna call nobody else. Send it off in a letter to yourself.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, YOU are doing it wrong. You want to put in water, and get back Beer and Gold and loads of heat. Then you have COOL fusion.
Windbourne

Re:Riiight

[EdIII]

Call me when they've built a commercial-scale reactor and are giving out free electricity.

I hardly think they are going to be giving out free anything. The appeal of Cold Fusion has always been huge amounts of energy relatively cheaply, and safely.

They require Nickle and Hydrogen and produce Copper and electricity. They could sell the Copper and the electricity, but Nickle is not cheaper than Copper. Checking the prices today, Nickel is nearly three times the cost of Copper. So they have to sell the electricity no matter what.

Of course for their idea to work on a large scale we going to require large amounts of Nickle that we don't need anymore for anything, since it is going to become Copper. Hardly sounds like a good idea. In fact, it is likely to drive the price of Nickle up, not down, making their electricity more expensive.

Not exactly proven, but even in theory I don't see how it is either profitable or sustainable.

P.S - It's not like hydrogen is just everywhere either. They are going to need to produce large amounts of it too, which is a whole other challenge with its own costs. If you can produce that much hydrogen, why not burn it directly for the electricity instead of using Nickel to get a little bit more? Granted, they may get more than a "little bit" more electricity than just burning the Hydrogen, but we are going to have a glut of copper when we are transitioning away from copper to fiber optic and wireless based technologies in the next coming decades. If Nickle costs nearly 3 times more than Copper... hardly seems wise to be throwing away the Nickle.

Re:Riiight

[wertarbyte]

Sure, but they forgot to mention that a miniature version of the reactor also keeps the CEOs heart safe from shrapnel.

Re:Riiight

[wertarbyte]

Sure, and a miniature version of the reactor is protecting the CEOs heart from shrapnel.

Re:Riiight

[fishexe]

Call me when they can attach a generator to it, hook the output up to the input, and keep it running by just putting in cold water and getting steam.

I could say the same about Slashdot.

And Washington DC! :D

No, when it comes to Congress at least, you pour in cold water and get out steam all day long...

Re:Riiight

[ConceptJunkie]

And going back several posts, nobody looked up how to spell "nickel".

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

ring, ring.

Re:Riiight

[ScrewMaster]

Oh yeah, well call me when they've built a consumer-scale reactor and are installing them in our electric moon buggies for free.

Call me when all energy everywhere in the universe is free. Until then, BO-RING...

Most of it is there for the taking. We just don't know how to take most of it yet.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

1000 W to 400W .... isn't this roughly the power a quick boil kettle uses?

Re:Riiight

[Xaositecte]

360-867-5309

Call me anytime.

Re:Riiight

[Iron Condor]

Oh, a pretty plot on wikipedia says something. It must be true.
Never mind that the link given as a source for the graph doesn't actually have any numbers at all. Odd. It does have a graph, which itself doesn't give any sources either.

Let me try something revolutionary and enter "abundance of elements in the earths crust" into google and see what happens. Just for the sake of the argument let's skip wikipedia and its copies and the first link that I get is
http://www.science.co.il/Ptelements.asp?s=Earth
Which is the first link I looked at before submitting the previous post. Check it out: Gold more abundant than Lead. Odd, eh? No source given.

Second link is
http://periodictable.com/Properties/A/CrustAbundance.html
which appears to agree with the picture in wikipedia. And it's the only one I can find that actually cites a source: Mathematica's "ElementData[]" function. Makes me wonder what program was used to make the plot in the USGS article that was then apparently copied (uh, "vectorized") for wikipedia...

The next link that I get is
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/abund.htm
which doesn't have crust abundances. The closest thing they have is abundance in the ocean with Pb:Au ~3.

I'm skipping answers.com links, as they are about as useful as asking some guy at the bus stop.

Britannica.com gives me the wild run-around without ever presenting me with a table with actual numbers (or even sources). I'm guessing I need to pay for it to get that service.

Next I find
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/elemental-abundance-in-earths-crust.html
which merely copies the plot from Wikipedia. It does give a table with numbers (unsourced) which does not appear to contain Lead at all. Stranger and stranger.

My next link is
http://www.experiencefestival.com/abundance_of_the_chemical_elements_-_abundance_of_elements_in_earths_crust
but not only do I not see a table or anything similarly useful, a quick glance down the side-bar at the left makes me doubt this as a reference.

I admit to being baffled - there's wildy varying numbers out there and the only references I find are to mathematica (which, in turn, doesn't give me a reference at all on their web-page). nndc, lbl, iupac.org - none of my standard sources appears to have that data.

At this point I'm not willing to accept ANY of the above as valid numbers (including the one that I happened to see on my first quick check) until someone points me to a credible source: who determined which number how?

Re:Riiight

[angel'o'sphere]

But if it isn't BS, there's new physics here, so consuming metals for energy is most definitely worth it.

No, there is no new physics here.
Low energy nuclear reactions are very well known since 1900. They only got "forgotten". And the reaction "Ni + H1 -> Cu + energy" is a very well known standard reaction as well. The question is: how to make a controlled reaction with simple hardware.

angel'o'sphere

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

"Some times it's like people don't even read the summary."

Slashdot is evolving...

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

No deal, McCutcheon, that moon money is mine!

Re:Riiight

[hjf]

Don't forget to burn-in for about 3 days.

Re:Riiight

[DJRumpy]

Actually, from the posted video's, this would be a consumer scale reactor. Apparently they claim that they are stringing 125 of these devices together to produce a Megawatt power plant. This whole article reeks of scam though. They published their results in the "Journal of Nuclear Physics", which they also happen to own and operate. They also cannot explain 'how' the device works, but rather just claim the output speaks for itself. Their patent claims have also been rejected because it did not provide 'experimental evidence' or even a theoretical basis as to how it operates. One of the scientists has also been accused of tax fraud and illegally importing gold.

None of these things would seem to encourage anyone to take this seriously.

Re:Riiight

[exomondo]

Possibly:
Gold
Lead
In any case you made the claim:

Given that there's more gold than lead in the Earth's crust

So it's up to you to back that up and interestingly enough the link you used doesn't even give a value in the column 'Earth's crust %' for these elements so sorting by that is not going to make any sense in this case. So the blindingly obvious thing to do is work out what it issorted by in that case. Which is *VERY* easy, and if you'd actually bothered to look at it and you'll see it's sorted by 'Earth's Crust %', then by 'Atomic Weight'. Not sure how you come to the conclusion that you did when the data you sorted by isn't even available for the specified elements.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Chart reading FAIL

Re:Riiight

[exomondo]

Try not to be so condescending in your reply when it's obvious you can't even read a simple chart.

Re:Riiight

[Iron Condor]

Eh - I didn't "sort by" anything - I followed a link from google.

Meanwhile, the links you provided look credible at first look, until you try to follow the links to the sources. For the Gold one, one of the sources doesn't exist. Two are simple PSEs with atomic numbers but no obvious information on abundance in the crust. The last one (http://environmentalchemistry.com/) has an entry for abundance in the crust. The value is "p.p.m.: 0.0011". This would appear to be 1.1e-3 mg/kg, but the link you gave cites it as 4e-3 mg/kg. (and just in case there's something going on with molar vs "by weight", the entry for Lead at Enironmentalchemistry.com states 14 ppm and is listed at eoearth as 1.4e-1 mg/kg). There's something fishy going on here somewhere .

So it's up to you to back that up [...]

Absolutely. Of course. If I had had the slightest idea that the abundance of lead and gold are apparently either under dispute or otherwise apparently not known better than to within about two orders of magnitude each, I would have done some kind of research job trying to find something I consider defensible (and then presented the defense). It didn't occur to me that such a simple set of numbers could be in any way disputed or otherwise unclear - I did the exact same thing you did: hit up google and go with the first result I find.

This has made me curious, however, whether there even actually is a central authority in geophysics that would collect factual information about the Earth's composition and would have the citations into the peer-reviewed literature how this kind of thing is actually measured and what the error bar on it really is.

Weird.

Re:Riiight

[macpacheco]

You need to consider E=mc2.
One mere gram of matter transformed into energy produces 90 TJ (90000000000000 joules).
That's the energy contained in an explosion of 21500 tons of TNT, roughly the blast from each nuclear bomb dropped into Japan in the end of WWII.
That's also 25GWh, in the order of magnitude of the power generated by the largest hydroelectric power plants in the world in a single day !
It wouldn't be absurd to guesstimate that for each pound of nickle, one gram of matter transforms into energy. I'm 100% guessing on the actual proportion of input matter for energy output. But for the sake of argument, lets go with this.
One pound of nickle costs today about one half dollar.
Even US$ 1 of nickle to produce 25GWh would make the cost of the nickle absolutely irrelevant. It could be a far more expensive metal like paladium or silver instead that still the cost would still be irrelevant. 25 KWh costs me about US$ 10, that's one millionth of 25GWh.
Even if the resulting copper is completely wasted for whatever reason, it would still be huge. Copper isn't toxic.
Full scale production in the end of 2011, I will wait and see. That's soon enough.
Either those scientists are scammers, or they just discovered something they can't explain. And the scientific community can't accept something they can't understand.
Of course if this works, those scientists would be billionaires in a few years, so it wouldn't surprise me if they are in no hurry to get recognition. What they care is their patents on this discovery.
Fusion is huge. Even if it's not the traditional pure hydrogen fusion, it's still huge.
If this works, it will more than redouble investment on pure hydrogen fusion plants that will only use abundant water !

Re:Riiight

[ceoyoyo]

I'm not sure how you get a heavier element from two lighter ones by encouraging nuclear decay.

Re:Riiight

[exomondo]

Eh - I didn't "sort by" anything - I followed a link from google.

Whether it was sorted already or you sorted it makes no difference, the fact is you were unable to read a very basic chart and drew a conclusion from NO data whatsoever then used that as the basis for a condescending response about how there were no sources provided. You couldn't even comprehend the material *you* provided.

Meanwhile, the links you provided look credible at first look, until you try to follow the links to the sources. For the Gold one, one of the sources doesn't exist. Two are simple PSEs with atomic numbers but no obvious information on abundance in the crust. The last one (http://environmentalchemistry.com/) has an entry for abundance in the crust. The value is "p.p.m.: 0.0011". This would appear to be 1.1e-3 mg/kg, but the link you gave cites it as 4e-3 mg/kg. (and just in case there's something going on with molar vs "by weight", the entry for Lead at Enironmentalchemistry.com states 14 ppm and is listed at eoearth as 1.4e-1 mg/kg). There's something fishy going on here somewhere .

Regardless of what the actual numbers are, reading any of the links (and actually comprehending what was written) would bring you to the conclusion that lead is more abundant in the earth's crust than gold.

I did the exact same thing you did: hit up google and go with the first result I find.

Except i actually *read* and *understood* what i found, so i didn't end up writing some condescending post based on a table that wasn't even the slightest bit relevant.

Re:Riiight

[shaitand]

"Call me when they scale it up by a factor of five, so it can actually warm my house"

Their prototype generates 12KW of energy in the form of heat. You must have one hell of a house to need five times that!

"Call me crazy, but consuming metals for energy seems just a little foolish in the long run."

You could be right. Of course how long a run depends on how much nickel we are talking about and how much we have. I mean, it seems foolish to me in the long run for the sun to do its thing using up the hydrogen its composed of and I'm right... if we are talking about a suitably long run.

Re:Riiight

[shaitand]

"2) it is a .com website"

And you think that means something? Holy shit, I've contacted someone from the internet back in the early 90's where suffixes were supposed to indicate something about the content...

I think I'll submit this evidence of internet time travel to their journal. If its still around... you saw the journal so it must be pretty old.

Re:Riiight

[shaitand]

"I find it highly unlikely that anyone could master sustained fusion of heavy metals which requires far more input energy to ignite than hydrogen or helium fusion"

This process DOES utilize hydrogen fusion. The fuel is BOTH nickel and hydrogen.

As for the benefits of hydrogen-hydrogen process outputs vs this. Like you said, call me when it works and we can talk about why its better. In the meantime, someone is claiming this is already working and that they were able to scale it up to a production prototype actually being used to heat a factory.

Besides, copper is desirable waste. We aren't running out yet but we are certainly going to. As a plus, most of the things that will use the energy this produces make use of copper interconnects. As we grow our infrastructure, we output more of the copper we need to utilize it.

Re:Riiight

[MikeBabcock]

Very slightly more ... considering the supposed bonding of a neutron.

Re:Riiight

[Kjellander]

They're claiming no radioactive waste, which means they're going straight from one stable isotope of nickel to one stable isotope of copper. That means they're going from Ni62 to Cu63. Nickel-62 has the highest binding energy of any known isotope of any known element.

That makes no sense. If Ni-62 is your starting fuel (very high binding energy) and you convert it to Cu-63 (lower binding energy), then you will get some of that binding energy out.

You're moving from a high-energy state to a low-energy state... thus giving off energy.

Actually it makes perfect sense if you know physics and understand binding energy. Binding energy is how much energy you have to use to separate nucleons. So high binding energy actually means it is a lower energy state for Ni-62 than Cu-63, thus this reaction needs energy to work, not give off it.

Think it as how deep a well is. The deeper, the higher the binding energy.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

A simple demonstration exhausts the steam to the outside as the current one does, otherwise how does one easily measure the heat generated? The nickel and hydrogen in the current demonstration should last a long time (over a year) if what they report is true. If they run this little demonstration and generate over 10kW continuously for over a year without putting in anything but cold water.....

Re:Riiight

[Neil Boekend]

Fusion adds the protons of two atoms. Since Ni(28 protons) + H(1 proton) add up to Cu (29 protons) the reaction product copper is a strong indication of fusion.
If it were a radiothermal generator it would work on fission. This would decrease the proton count in the reaction product. IE: Ni (28) splits to 2 atoms of Si (14), or launch a He (2) core and decrease to Fe (26) depending on things I have no knowledge of.
In each case of fusion the reaction products would have a lower number of protons and in neither case the reaction would consume hydrogen
The radiation generated could also indicate whether it was fusion or fission.
To conclude: the scientists can probably see whether it is fusion or fission as easily as you can determine whether something running down the street is a cat or a dog.
Disclaimer: IANANS

Re:Riiight

[emeade]

Call me call me
Let me know you are there
Call me call me
I wanna know you still care

Re:Riiight

[Unequivocal]

Wait - isn't the question "how to make a cool nuclear reaction that is net energy positive?"

That seems like new physics to me.. Maybe you'd call it new engineering, but since no one thinks this is possible within the current physics framework, I think it would involve new fundamentals, at least on par with high-temp superconduction.

Re:Riiight

[ikkonoishi]

Oddly I got it right when google searching as it didn't correct my spelling there.

Re:Riiight

[tehcyder]

OK. I will bite even though I will most likely regret it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elemental_abundances.svg

Shows that lead (Pb) is roughly 10000 times more abundant than gold (Au) in the earth's crust.

What reference were you using? Trollpedia?

You'd think that the subtle clues around us (i.e. gold is fucking expensive, you stick lead on roofs) would have caused GP to realise this before penning his ill-advised post.

Re:Riiight

[hohokus]

I don't know how any of you people are hoping to receive phone calls when you're not posting your number.

Sorry about that. My name's Jenny. You can reach me at 867-5309.

Re:Riiight

[MarcQuadra]

I was basing that on my current (small) home's boiler capacity, which is 210,000 BTU/hr. That's for two units, but on a night like we had on Monday, they're running a fair amount of the time. A BTU/hr -> watts converter shows that I'd need the ability to push 60KWh.

And again, this is a small house (2100sqft) in the northeast. Doesn't help that it's a balloon frame and it's 112 years old.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the real discovery here is a use for pennies.

Re:Riiight

[jace_d]

The following is based on hunch feelings and no scientific background.I highly doubt that this is just a chance discovery,im no physicist, but as advanced as physics is today,the discovery of such a phenomenon is something that should have followed intuitively. was some new process discovered recently that is only now being applied? is their reactor THAT revolutionary ? the paranoid voice in me even goes as far as saying that they were just sitting on this while waiting for something, or something came up that forced them to reveal this. in any case,it's a promising development,and i'll give them a thumbs up for their hard work.

Re:Riiight

[TheRaven64]

I said a combination of neutron capture and decay. Neutron capture by the nickel would give a heavier isotope of nickel, which would then beta-decay by into copper (they don't give the isotope of copper formed, so I can't tell if this is actually what's happening).

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me when it's repeatable in more than 2 other labs please.

You can see Spectrograph verified producion of Helium From the fusion of Common Hydrogen at www.fusionpeery.com, Nearly everyone is working on the Hydrogen fusion problem, but heat does not equate to fusion!
Hydrogen fusion is realy here as proven by spectrographs that show helium and even heavier nuclei have be formed from the fusion of just common Hydrogen in a totally repeatable fusion experiment.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

MANY people ... ... especially wealthy little old ladies will GIVE GIVE to something that sounds good to them, if they are wined and dined or tee totaled now and then -- they are lonely, they like the attention and getting out now and then and will pay big time if you have a good story.

If promise BIG and then deliver excuses to these people then they LOVE YOU ALL THE MORE because they you have become dependent on their sympathy and generosity.

Re:Riiight

[ckaminski]

We are never going to run out of copper.

Cheap copper, maybe, but there's more copper in this planet than the entire mass of the human race. I fear not for running out of copper.

Re:Riiight

[macpacheco]

Read up on more technical sites about the nuts and bolts of their work.
You should find (I did):

Their results were replicated somewhere else in Italy and in a lab in NH-USA (in the latter with witnesses from the US Department of Energy).

Even though there still is some controversy around their methods, there are ways to explain this with existing theories. The main explanation is the fusion only happens with a heavier Ni isotope, which explains why their machine uses only a tiny portion of the supplied Nickle powder. Those isotopes are present in small concentrations in ordinary Nickle. Radiation is present. The way they've invited the press in, already makes this very difficult to be a hoax.

Chance discovery ? Like most fusion scientists, they've been working on this for more than 10 years. That's not chance, that's hard work, and not rejecting facts just because you can't explain it.

Besides being a lot more confident now about their technology and methods than I were when I first read this submission to slashdot, it's now clear their solution is a lot less powerful than pure deuterium (heavy hydrogen isotope - hydrogen from heavy water) fusion, it's about halfway in an exponential power scale between the best chemical reactions and pure deuterium fusion potential.

Still, 1000 times the energy output from chemical reactions is huge. Fusion should generate a million times more power than chemical reactions.

Like they said in their statements, paraphrasing with my own words, "this stuff is working right now, we don't really care if you believe in it or not, because it DOES work and we're in the process of preparing for mass production of our machine. The market will judge us, not our fellow skeptical peers"

Somewhat cold fusion has been observed for more than 50 years now. Since industrial methods that use Hydrogen and Palladium at high temperatures showed Helium production (hydrogen fusion results in helium). But in such small scale, people didn't find a viable means to harness it since.

Think about this. What is the result on the Oil/Coal industry if fusion created power becomes available in one year 100 times cheaper than burning coal ? The result will be far cheaper electric power, removing the "dirty coal" electricity argument against the electric car, making producing hydrogen for fuel cell cars using electrolisis cheap. Coal usage for electricity and heat generation = 100% obsolete by 2015, Petrol usage for gasoline and diesel generation = 100% obsolete by 2020. This will affect large coal and petrol producing companies and countries.

Notice that the first announcement of cold fusion in 1986 resulted in fusion quickly labeled as taboo science, blocking any public funding for further studies. Was this labeling truly a scientific issue, or was it the result of powerful energy company lobbies influencing the US Dept of Energy and other funding sources not to fund further studies ?

Enough said. I don't need to convince you or anybody else. I'll be anxiously waiting for 2012 when those machines should become commercially available. Hopefully by then other methods will be discovered fostering multiple fusion methods for better competition.

Earth can't tolerate any more of this indiscriminate Coal burning. Extreme floods and serious fires happening at an alarming rate. Respiratory disease around Coal power plants and other heavy coal using business. Thanks god wind power is already here. While wind really wasn't that much competitive even 5 years ago, the very latest huge 10MW wind turbines are already competitive with coal burning in wind abundant areas if you just add the health hazards of coal to the immediate vicinity population.

I just hope big energy business won't buy the patent out and shut this down. That's my main concern right now. Hopefully there will be enough press in the next few months. Once this news pops up at 8 o'clock news and newspapers worldwide, the people will demand it.

Re:Riiight

[Anonymous Coward]

When you call I feel so good
Wish you were livin' in my neighborhood
So you can hang up the phone and rush on over
Take up where we left, telephone in the cover

Telephone love, you sound so sweet on the line
Telephone love, you make my day every time
Telephone love, you sound so sweet on the line, yeah
Telephone love, you make my day every time

Re:Riiight

[Neil Boekend]

I stand corrected. Beta decay increases the proton count.
And hydrogen is a slippery bitch, so they may have lost it through the side of the container.

All you need to know, from TFA

[gambit3]

Rossi and Focardi’s paper on the nuclear reactor has been rejected by peer-reviewed journals, but the scientists aren’t discouraged. They published their paper in the Journal of Nuclear Physics, an online journal founded and run by themselves, which is obviously cause for a great deal of skepticism. They say their paper was rejected because they lack a theory for how the reaction works. According to a press release in Google translate, the scientists say they cannot explain how the cold fusion is triggered, “but the presence of copper and the release of energy are witnesses.”

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[killdashnine]

Good find. As always, being a Cold Fusion Physicist generally qualifies you as a crank scientist. Not having a theory for how something works is cause for concern unless it was, of course, serendipity.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Junta]

There is a chance that they stumbled upon something useful without having a clue how it works, therefore unable to produce a good paper on it. Notably 'cold fusion' appears likely to have nothing to do with it.

Someone writing it up along those lines:
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/19/rossi-and-focardi-lenr-device-probably-real-with-credit-to-piantelli/

Hard to tell.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Fibe-Piper]

This sounds like any number of hoaxes that have been perpetrated; be they related to cold fusion or perpetual motion machines.

The "inventor"/"discoverer" are the only ones who can repeat the process and always under their own conditions or in their own lab. On further inspection the man behind the curtain is always found instead of any real magic.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[MoonBuggy]

That's not an absolute mark against them - if they really were trying to do something different and the thing just started kicking out power inexplicably then their paper may well look like crap. Not to say I believe them - extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all that - I won't be satisfied until (as the article heading says) I see one powering my toaster, but I have more respect for guys saying "Shit, we haven't got a clue, it just happened" than ones spouting demonstrably false pseudoscience like so many before have.

Of course, the better way to go about this would perhaps have been to send detailed plans and experimental records to colleagues at other universities and ask that they try to replicate it. Maybe steer clear of mentioning 'cold fusion' at all and simply ask if they get unusual excess energy readings.

It's probably junk, but hey, I'm holding on to the glimmer of hope that this could be a game-changer, just for a little longer!

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Suki I]

There is a chance that they stumbled upon something useful without having a clue how it works, therefore unable to produce a good paper on it. Notably 'cold fusion' appears likely to have nothing to do with it.

Someone writing it up along those lines:
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/19/rossi-and-focardi-lenr-device-probably-real-with-credit-to-piantelli/

Hard to tell.

If it really works they could create a business out of it and retire.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Suki I]

This sounds like any number of hoaxes that have been perpetrated; be they related to cold fusion or perpetual motion machines.

The "inventor"/"discoverer" are the only ones who can repeat the process and always under their own conditions or in their own lab. On further inspection the man behind the curtain is always found instead of any real magic.

On the other hand, if it is a hoax they could write books about it, sell videos online, claim to be suppressed and silenced, then retire.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[mcgrew]

It sounds to me like Pons and Fleishman all over again, except they were chemists and these guys are physicists. Now, if they're not only physicists but good enough to do what was formerly thought impossible, why is it that they can't explain it?

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[openfrog]

They are already commercializing a small reactor. From TFA:

The reactors need to be refueled every 6 months, which the scientists say is done by their dealers.

Also from TFA, in the "responses" section:

Steven B. Krivit, publisher of the New Energy Times, noted that Rossi has been accused of a few crimes, including tax fraud and illegally importing gold, which are unrelated to his research.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Culture20]

If it really works they could create a business out of it and retire.

But if it really is nuclear something, I doubt they want to try to scale it up until they know what's really going on.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[CODiNE]

It's most likely not a success but I just want to touch on the logical fallacy there.

Simply being unable to explain a phenomenon doesn't mean a scientist hasn't discovered something new.

Perhaps they simply gave them one of the first few common eliminators they use to reject amateur submissions.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Dunbal]

They are already commercializing a small reactor.

      And let me guess - they are looking for "investors" too?

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[CraftyJack]

That was almost my favorite part of the article. It ran a close third to this:

Rossi and Focardi have applied for a patent that has been partially rejected in a preliminary report. According to the report, “As the invention seems, at least at first, to offend against the generally accepted laws of physics and established theories, the disclosure should be detailed enough to prove to a skilled person conversant with mainstream science and technology that the invention is indeed feasible. In the present case, the invention does not provide experimental evidence (nor any firm theoretical basis) which would enable the skilled person to assess the viability of the invention. The description is essentially based on general statement and speculations which are not apt to provide a clear and exhaustive technical teaching.” The report also noted that not all of the patent claims were novel.

But neither holds a candle to this:

Further, the scientists say that the reactor is well beyond the research phase; they plan to start shipping commercial devices within the next three months and start mass production by the end of 2011.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

If it really works they could create a business out of it and retire.

From their webiste
http://pesn.com/2011/01/17/9501746_Focardi-Rossi_10_kW_cold_fusion_prepping_for_market/

"This recent public demonstration alone is is a huge development, but what's more, they also claim to be going into production, expecting to have these available for purchase commercially within a year. This would become the world's first commercially-ready "cold fusion" device. The first units are supposed to ship in three months, with mass production commencing by the end of 2011."

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Cwix]

Just because there is no current explanation, it does not mean they are lying.

Now, the fact that they cant explain it doesn't exactly lend any credibility to the story. If I invented cold fusion, irregardless if I could explain it or not, I would have every scientist I could find come look at it.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Suki I]

If it really works they could create a business out of it and retire.

But if it really is nuclear something, I doubt they want to try to scale it up until they know what's really going on.

Just have the lawyers write up a really long caution label and start selling it. Need a pretty box too.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

There is precedent. The "Father of Radio", Lee De Forrest, did not have a CLUE on how his creation of the audion (a device that allowed for what we think of as modern radio) worked. He would just pour over patents and mix up combinations of components. It took Edwin Armstrong, who came along and improved the device to explain how it actually worked.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Suki I]

If it really works they could create a business out of it and retire.

From their webiste
http://pesn.com/2011/01/17/9501746_Focardi-Rossi_10_kW_cold_fusion_prepping_for_market/

"This recent public demonstration alone is is a huge development, but what's more, they also claim to be going into production, expecting to have these available for purchase commercially within a year. This would become the world's first commercially-ready "cold fusion" device. The first units are supposed to ship in three months, with mass production commencing by the end of 2011."

They ripped off my business model! I have another waiting for events like this:

1. See invention
2. Claim business model included an invention
3. Hire lawyers
4. Profit!

No question.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[vlm]

If it really works they could create a business out of it and retire.

But if it really is nuclear something, I doubt they want to try to scale it up until they know what's really going on.

The problem is the nickel metal hydride battery manufacturers have been screwing around with nickel and hydrogen for a long time on a very large scale without vaporizing the planet, so regardless of what is going on, scaling it up will probably be as harmless as a nearby battery plant.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Antisyzygy]

Thanks for the read. That was at least informative. I wonder about the credentials a bit however.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Geoffrey.landis]

It's most likely not a success but I just want to touch on the logical fallacy there.

Simply being unable to explain a phenomenon doesn't mean a scientist hasn't discovered something new.

It's most likely not a success but I just want to touch on the logical fallacy there.

Simply being unable to explain a phenomenon doesn't mean a scientist hasn't discovered something new.

True.

However, it should also be noted that simply because they say that their work was only rejected because they didn't have a theory doesn't mean that their work was not, also, rejected because the work was not credible.

Perhaps they simply gave them one of the first few common eliminators they use to reject amateur submissions.

Perhaps. And perhaps they selectively quoted one item from a longer negative review, saying something akin to "does not provide experimental evidence (nor any firm theoretical basis)."

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Idarubicin]

Notably 'cold fusion' appears likely to have nothing to do with it.

The New Energy Times blog is what might be deemed a rather credulous source on this topic. I note that a rather substantial part of the linked blog post is consumed with keeping track of who knows the 'secrets' of this invention, and how they will protect their work from 'industrial espionage', their 'right to...withhold their intellectual property from the public', and how the blog post is 'likely [to] bring predators'.

While their (the Times blog's) preferred nomenclature is 'LENR' (low energy nuclear reaction) rather than 'cold fusion', there's an awful lot of overlap between those two umbrellas, and the distinction between the two seems to be more semantic and marketing than real. A reaction which takes protons and nickel as inputs and generates copper and free energy as an output is fusion by any commonsense definition of the word.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Gilmoure]

For some reason, I hear them complaining in Prof. Farnsworth's voice.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Gilmoure]

Get Jonny Ives and Apple on it, STAT!

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

I looked at their "paper" at http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/files/Rossi-Focardi_paper.pdf and it has no information on the device itself, but does include some theory of how it works, but with no experiments supporting why they think it works this way.

Their only experimental result is their input/output energies. No measurements of copper, gamma rays, or anything else. It was reported elsewhere that when one of the people attending their demo tried to measure the spectrum of the gamma rays,he was stopped by the scientist.

So their papers have no supporting evidence for their theory and are not reproducible in any way since they don't describe their device. I call bullshit.

Supposedly this device is being patented. Can someone find the patent application to see if they include anything concrete about the device?

Personally, I expect they included something that reacts with water in the device (or some argolic fuel, termite, etc), heating it up for long enough to handle this demo. Longer demos require more fuel. Add something to produce intermittent gamma rays and you're done.

Either way, there's no point wondering whether this is true or not just yet (unless you invest in energy companies). Just wait a year. If their technology takes over the world then it was true. If they're still looking for investors next year, coming up with press releases and demos, then it wasn't.

Also worth mentioning that it's not exactly a fusion device. Supposedly the copper exist only briefly, decaying to a heavier nickel plus energy plus positron, (which annihilates with an electron producing gamma rays).

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Gilmoure]

Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor, not an invisible wavescist!

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Tridus]

Ars Technica actually just did a great story on placeholders in scientific discovery, or why sometimes we wind up observing things that we can't yet explain: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/01/this-space-left-blank-the-role-of-placeholders-in-science.ars

Not saying that is what is happening here or that these guys are credible (because I have no idea), but the idea that you have to be able to explain something before you can observe it isn't true.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[fast turtle]

At least they admit they don't have a clue as to what in hell is happening. In this case, they're asking others to duplicate their research, which is properly following the scientific method, so we can get more data and hopefully someone can come up with a hypothesis.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[radtea]

There is a chance that they stumbled upon something useful without having a clue how it works, therefore unable to produce a good paper on it.

False.

The history of science is full of unexplained phenomenology. Sargent's Rule is one that comes to mind: the observation that beta decay lifetimes scale as the fifth power of the decay energy. Sargent simply noticed this, and published a paper saying, "Hm... this is odd..." That kind of thing is the foundation of science.

If these guys were legit they could easily publish a paper that says, "We do this, this and this. The result is that. We don't know why." Inexplicable results are bread and butter in science. Irreproducible results... not so much.

Although even irreproducible results can find a place: the 17 keV neutrino was ultimately irreprodicible (it not existing and all) but that didn't stop Simpson and Hime from publishing multiple, meticulous papers on it documenting what they had done. Everyone else took them seriously because we couldn't see what they'd done wrong, even though most people found the idea of a neutrino that heavy with that weak a mixing angle implausible.

Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by controlled experiment and systematic observation. There is no impediment to "doing science" on these claims unless the write-up is too poor to know what idea to test. Yet they claim reliability in their own results, and commercial shipping of devices in the next year or so, so they either can reliably reproduce--and therefore accurately describe--working devices that others can build and test, or they are not telling the truth about something.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on what evidence?

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Nethemas the Great]

We shall see soon enough. They're claiming that they are "presently" manufacturing commercial units with plans to go into mass production inside of a year IIRC.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[jopsen]

There is a chance that they stumbled upon something useful without having a clue how it works, therefore unable to produce a good paper on it. Notably 'cold fusion' appears likely to have nothing to do with it.

Yes, and if they didn't claim "cold fusion" others might actually believe that they stumbled upon something useful...

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

It is supposed to depend on beta decay. No fusion involved.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Suki I]

Get Jonny Ives and Apple on it, STAT!

I forgot about "look and feel"! How could I forget about "look and feel"? That increases profit a bunch.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[DragonWriter]

It's most likely not a success but I just want to touch on the logical fallacy there.

Simply being unable to explain a phenomenon doesn't mean a scientist hasn't discovered something new.

That depends what you mean by "something".

An accurately-reported observation stands on its own without an explanation, but doesn't serve much purpose except spurring efforts to explain it and test the explanation.

So, an observation without an explanation may be "something new", but its what people are generally talking about when they talk about a scientific discovery, which is an testable -- and, actually, tested -- explanation for a set of observed phenomena which can serve as a useful basis for predictions of future behavior.

Furthermore, when you've got a bunch of instruments and other intermediaries that are being relied on for an observation, its an interpretation not an observation, so to even have faith that it is an accurately-reported (interpretation of an) observation, you need a explanation for the direct observations (the instrument readings, etc.) which is more plausible than an error in the instruments given the circumstances.
 

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely being unable to trivially explain a phenomena would be a pretty dam good sign said scientist had infact discovered something new.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[ikkonoishi]

So far their claims are the equivalent of saying that I've seen an increase of 0 to 500% percent in my penis size since taking these pills which I will be selling shortly. I don't know how they work, but I assure you they really work. No I won't tell you what is in them you would steal them, and sell them.

Not very assuring.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[jank1887]

a nice statement from that blog:

"Whatever the LENRs that are responsible for the device’s heat output, nickel-hydrogen reactions are not fusion, so this has nothing to do with the idea of “cold fusion.”"

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[GameMaster]

Apparently, these are the records for the patent application:

http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?WO=2009125444

https://register.epoline.org/espacenet/application;jsessionid=EED869F8493242AA63BE71A09EA781FC.RegisterPlus_prod_0?number=EP08873805&tab=main

I can't tell if the first one is actually a patent office or just a company that helps people apply for patents. Either way, it doesn't look like they're past even the beginning stages of the patent process.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[theshowmecanuck]

How much of the science we do today is based on experiments done by people from the 17th century to the early 20th century who had no formal training, and had no clue what really caused the results. I can't remember the name of the French fellow (I believe he was a tax collector) who gave us the conservation of mass rule. He concluded that burning things did not make them disappear but just changed the material into gases and ash etc. However he and no-one had any idea what an atom was/is so couldn't tell you what exactly was happening. Did that make his experimental results any less valid? No.

I really hate academic snobbery. Just because you have a degree or masters or doctorate, doesn't make you smarter than others. I just means you had time and money that some others may not have had. Granted you need to have some intelligence to get these, but it doesn't mean others aren't intelligent too. I think sometimes that having a degree limits some people with their arrogance. I admit that I see this far more in Canada than in the United States (one of the things I like about the U.S.A.). One thing about software I kind of like is how many created this industry we have now, who never received a degree. Four people on this Time Magazine list have backgrounds or worked in some form of science related activity. They were college dropouts.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[fishexe]

Rossi and Focardi’s paper on the nuclear reactor has been rejected by peer-reviewed journals, but the scientists aren’t discouraged. They published their paper in the Journal of Nuclear Physics, an online journal founded and run by themselves, which is obviously cause for a great deal of skepticism.

In other words, they're real-life versions of this guy.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[fishexe]

They are already commercializing a small reactor.

And let me guess - they are looking for "investors" too?

Just Nigerian Princes. They heard a rumor that they're out there looking to invest tons of money.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[bluefoxlucid]

That's pretty key science there. The scientific community has too little framework for "I don't know, it just works, stfu." I mean you can take one home with you and go, wow, holy shit, this works. YOU figure out why, I'LL just build the god damn things.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[number6x]

It sounds to me like Pons and Fleishman all over again, except they were chemists and these guys are physicists.

You are correct. However, from the reaction and results this looks like chemistry as well. They have built a very expensive and not very practical chemical battery.

Reducing the layer of oxidized nickel in the presence of oxygen and hydrogen is an exothermic reaction that produces heat at about the levels shown in this experiment. This is chemistry they are doing. The hydrogen is combining with oxygen and producing steam. There are about 50ppm of copper in nickel and they are merely extracting it.

Now, if they're not only physicists but good enough to do what was formerly thought impossible, why is it that they can't explain it?

They should call up a mining engineer or just google the 'Sherritt-Gordon process' to learn more about what they are actually doing. What they are doing is seperating the nickel and the copper that occurs naturally.

Move along folks, nothing to see here. (I hang my head in shame as a physicist. But I will tell my parents that paying for a physics degree from a school of mining finally came in handy!)

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[bluefoxlucid]

Here's a hint: Nickel-Hydride, chemical. Something elemental and heavier than nickel, fusion. Something elemental and lighter than nickel, fission. A nickel-hydrogen reaction that results in less of both nickel and hydrogen is definitely some sort of fusion; if it results in something lighter than copper, it's probably fission (of nickel) and fusion (of hydrogen with whatever else).

Sometimes I'm surprised scientists are so stupid, really. They have that whole mass-energy conservation bullshit, but both fission and fusion apparently produce tons of energy. So if you can get the energy to cause the reaction in one direction, it's exothermic; if you can do it in the other direction, it's also exothermic. If you can make it oscillate, it produces a run-away exothermic process that self-feeds and turns the universe into a ball of molten liquefied thermal radiation expanding at the speed of light.

Do you see it?

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[ShakaUVM]

If these guys were legit they could easily publish a paper that says, "We do this, this and this. The result is that. We don't know why." Inexplicable results are bread and butter in science. Irreproducible results... not so much.

Although even irreproducible results can find a place: the 17 keV neutrino was ultimately irreprodicible (it not existing and all) but that didn't stop Simpson and Hime from publishing multiple, meticulous papers on it documenting what they had done. Everyone else took them seriously because we couldn't see what they'd done wrong, even though most people found the idea of a neutrino that heavy with that weak a mixing angle implausible.

Exactly. Science doesn't deal very well with irrepreducible events. If your cosmic ray detector detects a proton moving with the kinetic energy of a softball (above the theoretical limit, and no explanation how it got there), as with the OMG Particle, you have to balance the fact that you could have gotten a sensor error against the possible detection. If you don't get another one, then you're sort of SOL on the issue. The Fly's Eye detected several dozen such particles, but the debate remains if the instruments were accurate, and/or if there are problems with calculating the theoretical limit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GZK_cutoff

As always, more empirical data is a good thing, and new instruments should help clear the issue up. But this only works because they'll (probably) be able to find more ultra high energy cosmic rays. If they never found any more than the original OMG Particle, then science doesn't tell us very much.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Well until this commercial device starts selling and people actually get a value out of it, I will remain skeptical. But theoretically speaking, there is hope that we will eventually find a loophole for tapping vast amounts of energy captured in local QCD potential energy minimums - nuclei other than iron.

And while the fundamental theory of baryon matter, QCD, is understood at the symmetry level, it's infeasible for perturbative calculation (and other methods aren't sufficiently developed), so we have nuclear physics which is more a book of approximations and less a fundamental science (in some way analogously to chemistry). Electroweak fares better, but it still isn't complete - Higgs might be a confirmed story soon, but neutrino physics, dark matter or baryon asymmetry are still in the speculative domain, just like all the gravity and/or GUT stuff. Quite an incomplete picture - low hanging fruit has obviously been picked up.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

They are already commercializing a small reactor.

      And let me guess - they are looking for "investors" too?

By all rights they shouldn't be. They have a factory and multiple working reactors ready to sell - whether they already had investment or bootstrapped they should be capable of going as they are and producing a sustainable profit if it holds up.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

In short, Cold Fusion today == CH34P V14GR4 spam; and that's pretty accurate. Both are scams, and neither have any kind of serious studies to back them up.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[emt377]

Yet they claim reliability in their own results, and commercial shipping of devices in the next year or so, so they either can reliably reproduce--and therefore accurately describe--working devices that others can build and test, or they are not telling the truth about something.

Just because they haven't published a paper detailing their setup and results doesn't mean it's automatically bogus. Ask yourself: if you have the choice between owning the rights to a revolutionary energy production system that could make you a multibillionaire overnight, or the choice of putting your name on a scientific paper outlining the details so others can get filthy rich while you get a pat on the back - what would you pick? So, yeah, it may be all a scam, but the absence of a paper isn't much of a reliable indicator. They're already stated themselves that they're far beyond publishing papers on this. Again, words are cheap and demos easily rigged.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this a troll, or are you really this dumb? I can't tell.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[toddles666]

What'll they call it, though? iFusion? iPower? iWatt?

This is one small step towards commuting to iWork (conveniently featuring iPads and iMacs) in our iCars while listening to iPods while the iWife stays at iHome taking care of the iKids and iDog.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[idontgno]

OTOH, any iDevice with in built-in sealed nuclear reactor cell may finally justify pentalobular security screws on a more reasonable basis than propietarial dickishness.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[emt377]

At least they admit they don't have a clue as to what in hell is happening. In this case, they're asking others to duplicate their research, which is properly following the scientific method, so we can get more data and hopefully someone can come up with a hypothesis.

Actually, they're not even suggesting that - in fact, they seem perfectly happy being the only ones capable of building the devices. Which makes good sense if you want to make money selling them. Or scam investors. Your guess is as good as mine...

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[tibit]

If it really works they could retire? LOL. They can buy the Playboy mansion, and all the other mansions of similar um, nature, and probably choose a small college town with lots of chicks and buy all that outright, too. Chicks, teachers, the dean's office, everything ;)

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[ArsonSmith]

I'll believe that when Duke Nukem Forever has a release date. IE never...

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Raffaello]

False dichotomy. They could publish a paper detailing everything and simultaneously file a patent for it. Other researchers could verify the phenomenon (if there is one) and they would still hold the patent.

Remember, the word "patent" means "public." There is no contradiction between a money making patent and scientific publication.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[GreyLurk]

This would actually be one of the places where a Patent is perfectly appropriate. Patent the technology, and publish the paper describing the equipment. I understand that the practice is pretty common in corporate-style labs.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Raffaello]

Not so. Unexplained phenomena are the evidentiary basis of science.

What science abhors are unrepeatable phenomena.

It is not required that an experiment have a complete theoretical explanation for it to be worthy of publication. It is required that an experiment be repeatable for it to be worthy of publication.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Chris Mattern]

Just because they haven't published a paper detailing their setup and results doesn't mean it's automatically bogus.

Just that that's the way the smart money bets. They've got no theory and they've got no reproducible results (since they won't give anybody the necessary information to reproduce it). That means they got a whole lot of nothing.

Ask yourself: if you have the choice between owning the rights to a revolutionary energy production system that could make you a multibillionaire overnight, or the choice of putting your name on a scientific paper outlining the details so others can get filthy rich while you get a pat on the back - what would you pick?

The first option does sound tempting. So, if they chose it, why are they telling the world at large *anything*? Keep it quiet and shop for selected (and secretive) investors if you need money.

So, yeah, it may be all a scam,

0.99999 it's a scam. Call back when they have independently reproduced results *or* they've revolutionized the energy sector.

but the absence of a paper isn't much of a reliable indicator.

But there isn't an absence of a paper. There's a presence of a paper that desperately tries to convince you they have something while refusing to give any solid evidence. That's generally a *very* reliable indicator.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[hardburn]

They have that whole mass-energy conservation bullshit, but both fission and fusion apparently produce tons of energy.

You can always "break" thermodynamics when you limit the scale in either space or time. We consider oil and coal to be energy-positive because we're not counting the energy put into the process to make the stuff in the first place (limiting the time scale). We consider solar photovoltaics to be energy-positive because we're not counting the energy that came out of the sun (limiting the space scale).

Fission/fusion work the same way. They're just releasing many times more energy than you could get from breaking a chemical bond.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Alef]

I have more respect for guys saying "Shit, we haven't got a clue, it just happened"

For me, that is actually one of the first signs of BS. If they don't have a clue what is going on, but still claim that the reason must be something extraordinary, like cold fusion, it is very hard to take it seriously until it has been verified by several independent researchers. When you encounter unexpected results, a much more probable albeit mundane explanation for what is going on, is that you have made some error or are misinterpreting your results. Any serious scientist would get a clue before publishing such claims (or provide some really strong and independently repeated empirical evidence).

... than ones spouting demonstrably false pseudoscience like so many before have.

Well, fair enough. Those are even less credible. ;-)

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Raffaello]

How much of the science we do today is based on experiments that are so ill specified that no other researcher can even attempt to repeat them, much less actually repeat them?

That's right - none.

These guys aren't just claiming a novel observation - they're claiming a novel observation and they're not telling anyone else what they're doing. This failure to provide a clear, repeatable description of their experimental work makes their "discovery" scientifically meaningless.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[psydeshow]

Nice writeup, thanks for that!

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[toddles666]

It will be completely proprietary. You'll need the iDriver to remove the iScrew so you can top off your iWatt with iNickel and iDrogen.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[wierd_w]

You need to make it sound "Green", since PR shenanigans are what apple PR is all about.

"iPlant" (Needs to have two pretty green ivy leaves silkscreened on the casing, which you would never see anyway, due to the pentalobular screws keeping the iDevice's cover firmly sealed.)

"Introducing, the new iPhone 5, powered by the environmentally friendly iPlant power system. The new iPhone 5 has over 6 months of continual talk-time, and is the thinnest iPhone ever!"

(show comparison. iPhone 5 is 1/3 thickness of iPhone 4.)

"All this powered by the nations largest 5G network."
(Show wireless partner logo and marketing speak.)

"Yours for only 59.99 with 10 year contract!"

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[theshowmecanuck]

You cannot prove the absence of something. Also, if there is relatively little science being done by laymen, it is because of academic snobs such as yourself. I wonder how many discoveries have been missed because people are discouraged from experimenting. BTW, I'm not saying what these guys did actually works or does not work until it is independently verified. However I am not willing to discredit them until the work is independently verified. Go back inside your closed mind now, I'm not interested in hearing from limited, narrow viewpoints. Especially ones that are self imposed.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[bhcompy]

Most science starts with finding out something that someone thought was impossible, unknowable, or simply unknown and reverse engineering the process to create a theory as to why it was happening. What's the big deal?

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[theshowmecanuck]

Oh, and obviously they are showing people what they are doing. They are just saying they don't know the physics/physical mechanism(s) that makes it happen... from critical reading, I believe that means at the atomic level.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[tompaulco]

So send your money now to invest in this ground floor opportunity! The stock has nowhere to go but up, up up!

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[damnfuct]

Someone posted this link above where it talks about a similar reaction starting to get out of control. They said they were able to stop the reaction before it got out-of-hand, which is good news if this turns out to not be a scam.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[haruchai]

Okay, the joke must be flying way over my head but,......

http://www.dukenukemforever.com/ - release date has been set to May 3rd, 2011

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Whatever is going on, don't call it cold fusion.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[damnfuct]

They are already commercializing a small reactor.

And let me guess - they are looking for "investors" too?

Yes! Put in $400 and get back $12,400 in the future!

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

*cue eerie music* May 3rd!


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/8279133/Duke-Nukem-Forever-gets-release-date.html

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

The presence of copper and the release of energy are not witnesses of a fusion reaction, neutrons from the experiment are. The previous cold fusion experiments failed for this very point as well.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[kevinNCSU]

And since the entire world has a deep and profound respect for patent laws this would never have any downside ;)

Not saying this is the real reason here, just that it's not implausible

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[iusty]

They have that whole mass-energy conservation bullshit, but both fission and fusion apparently produce tons of energy.

Wrong. Fission of elements heavier than iron produces energy, but their fusion would consume it. Fission of elements lighter than iron consumes energy, but their fusion produces energy.

Really, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion describes it pretty clearly, no need to speculate.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Look to a Common Hydrogen fusion, Not so Cold, melts Aluminum Oxide containment vessle at www.fusionpeery.com It has the proof in spectrographs of Helium produced.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[xanthos]

Thank you for the true explanation of what is going on here. While I would personally welcome a new clean energy source, my guess is that if it truly existed, the alchmists would have discovered it long ago.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[mcgrew]

True, you don't have to be able to explain a thing to observe it, but you have to understand how a device works before you can build one.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Prof Baker, are you there? Or should I call you Urban?

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Irregardless, I could care less what you think he should of said.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[DCFusor]

Sure would be nice if they did stumble onto something, for example, see my user name and what I do myself as a hobby...

Here's the main reason I doubt it and it's real simple. They didn't get a patent because they were so vague the patent examiner couldn't figure out what they were doing, and they haven't released ANY details so I could go for duping their process.

Real scientists almost always encourage duplication -- even Pons et all did. I've run into some idiots who want to patent everything first, but in this case I don't see that being real wise, or effective - for one thing, there's so much money involved in a success that there's really not much to sweat, the speaking tour alone would make one quite rich, and I'm sure any big outfit would love to give a nice lab to a goose who lays golden eggs. Second, patent or not, the guys with the good lawyers will get it from you anyway, they can eat your lunch anytime. You have to be in this because you love it, and want to improve the planet, not for the bucks. Both risk and payoff are just too large for a few mortals to handle.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

They call it "weak nuclear reactions energy" and not cold fusion.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

False?

So http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming didn't accidentally discover Penicillin?

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[BlueMonk]

Or maybe these are the guys *to whom* someone sent their results asking "can you reproduce this?" They did, and so they stole the idea and announced it as their own. Then when faced with the prospect of explaining it, they can't? I imagine a person could be slightly nervous about sharing the idea with someone else before protecting it via some sort of publication or announcement that helps to ensure people remember where it came from.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[tbischel]

On the other hand, if it is a hoax they could write books about it, sell videos online, claim to be suppressed and silenced, then retire.

soon to be released: What "They" don't want you to know about Cold Fusion by Kevin Trudeau

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

You cannot prove the absence of something.

Who is asking anybody to do that?

Also, if there is relatively little science being done by laymen, it is because of academic snobs such as yourself.

Or maybe it's because science is pretty f'ing difficult these days. You invoked the memories of centuries-old progress which originated from people with little or no education. Well guess what, that kind of low hanging fruit has, for the most part, been plucked! It's not impossible for a layman to add something these days, but when hundreds of years worth of inventive genius level minds have thought of and done probably 99% of the simple experiments likely to shed light on anything, and the advances in knowledge are largely coming from very sophisticated experiments, it becomes damned difficult to contribute in a significant way as an outsider without formal training or resources.

But we're not even talking about laymen here. The Italian scientists are described as... scientists. Not these noble, oppressed layman researchers you're apparently obsessed with defending.

I wonder how many discoveries have been missed because people are discouraged from experimenting.

Few if any. There is no such thing as an idea that only one person can have.

BTW, I'm not saying what these guys did actually works or does not work until it is independently verified. However I am not willing to discredit them until the work is independently verified. Go back inside your closed mind now, I'm not interested in hearing from limited, narrow viewpoints. Especially ones that are self imposed.

Get over yourself. The post you're responding to did not even try to invoke snobbery. It just pointed to some giant warning flags.

Paper got rejected by a journal so they started their own online only journal to publish it? Yeah, odds are it's pseudoscience. They didn't even try for one of the journals known to publish lots of questionable yet possibly interesting stuff, they went straight for the "we are adequate judges of our own competence" option. Which is flat out bad science. And no, before you work yourself up into another rant about how the scientific establishment is the Man, that's not snobbery in any way. It's just a reflection of the most important element of science there is: the realization that you can't trust yourself. Not only do you have to take extreme care to avoid bias, you need to be willing to have everything you do scrutinized in minute detail by others. It's okay to keep things to yourself before you're ready to publish, but when you publish you're making a commitment to having anything and everything questioned.

And that's what these guys aren't doing. That's why it's so suspicious. For example, apparently they won't tell anybody how to make their machine. I don't care how much or how little formal academic training you have, if you do that, you aren't doing science.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[bluefoxlucid]

That would make iron the lowest energy state element in existence, which would suggest it would have to be the most common thing in the universe.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[jthill]

When I read TFA's

The reactors need to be refueled every 6 months, which the scientists say is done by their dealers.

it tripped my bs meter, but I thought, ok, this is how they're going to make a living. Fine. But adding that to your

It was reported elsewhere that when one of the people attending their demo tried to measure the spectrum of the gamma rays,he was stopped by the scientist.

redlined the meters. A no-touchie, no-lookie demo and there's something about the fuel we're not telling you.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[nosferatu1001]

And if the government decides it is important enough, they can claim the patent from you.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[chelberg]

Many times the reason for a rejection of a paper like this is failure to properly control for possible anomalous conditions. If you don't have an explanation, the minimum you should do is to control for every possible other explanation. If you haven't fully tested whether the phenomenon you observe might be due to something else, then a reviewer must reject the paper.

It is equivalent to the famous Sherlock Holmes quote, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

If you haven't eliminated the impossible, you can't conclude you have found improbable physics.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

You make an excellent point. I seem to recall two bicycle mechanics from Ohio who gave the theorists a finger in the eye once, under similar circumstances.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[marcosdumay]

They say the machines produce cupper and zinc. Also, they hint about the nuclear reactions happening, and say they have evidence that those reactions are indeed happening. What they don't present is any kind of actual data (and somehow they say they didn't get gamma radiation, while their reactions imply they should).

Now, fusion of heavy elements and fission of light elements are endothermic, as fission of heavy elements and fusion of light ones are endothermic. You can't make it oscilate, so the universe is safe.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Schadrach]

It's entirely possible that they discovered...something...but can't explain it. It's also entirely possible that in the understanding it, we might discover something new and useful, maybe even a game changer, like the result of "that moldy bread seems to have killed off my bacteria culture" eventually became.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but if you assumed that those were the only processes that produce elements, then at a long enough time frame you might have a universe where the most common element was iron.

The question becomes, 'What limits the production of iron in stellar nucleosynthesis?' which should have a fairly obvious answer.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[psmears]

What'll they call it, though? iFusion? iPower? iWatt?

iSotope, clearly :-)

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[marcosdumay]

They said they'll ship the machine soon. Ok, I'm not holding my breath, but they didn't ask for money, they made an ad.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[marcosdumay]

The paper was rejected because they didn't explain the how the machine is made nor showed the data they adquided from running it. In short, the paper had no information at all.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[UnknownSoldier]

> This sounds like any number of hoaxes that have been perpetrated; be they related to cold fusion or perpetual motion machines.

Dumb question, so tell me, how "long" does an electron (pick any atom) orbit the atomic nucleus?

Where does it "get" the energy from?

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[rjstanford]

There is a chance that they stumbled upon something useful without having a clue how it works, therefore unable to produce a good paper on it. Notably 'cold fusion' appears likely to have nothing to do with it.

Yes, and if they didn't claim "cold fusion" others might actually believe that they stumbled upon something useful...

While its probably a scam, please note that if you dig into any of the interviews with them directly that they specifically disclaim the term "cold fusion." Others continue to use it, however.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[damnfuct]

... If you can make it oscillate, it produces a run-away exothermic process that self-feeds and turns the universe into a ball of molten liquefied thermal radiation expanding at the speed of light.

The only problem is that if the universe was prone to becoming "a big ball of molten liquefied thermal radiation expanding at the speed of light," it probably would have happened before humans got involved; we're pretty late arrivals to the whole universe scene.

The reason why fission and fusion can both "produce tons of energy" is this: binding energy. Look it up somewhere, and you'll see that nuclear binding energy reaches a peak around iron (could also be seen as a trough, depending on how the graph interprets the situation). What this means is that fusion produces a net energy gain for nuclei "smaller" than iron, and fusion produces a net energy loss for nuclei "larger" than iron (smaller and larger refer to the mass of the nucleus). Conversely, fission of nuclei smaller than iron requires energy, and fission of nuclei larger than iron releases energy. Basically, the net-positive-energy fissionable isotopes we are all familiar with (e.g. U-235) were probably created in supernova events; when we fission uranium to make electricity, we're really running the lights on some indirect supernova power.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[damnfuct]

Part of being a wavecist is studying the nucular affects of radiomination [sic, if there was any question]

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you are agreeing with the comment you are replying to, yet call it false? You don't need to disagree to comment, you know.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anne Honime]

That depends what you mean by "something".
An accurately-reported observation stands on its own without an explanation, but doesn't serve much purpose except spurring efforts to explain it and test the explanation.

Right. Let's talk about gravity, now, shall we ? A little, easily reproduced experiment involving an apple, without much purpose except launching rockets in outer space and missiles on terrorists.

I'd really wish to hear your opinion on the physical cause of that little phenomenon.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anne Honime]

I can't remember the name of the French fellow (I believe he was a tax collector) who gave us the conservation of mass rule. He concluded that burning things did not make them disappear but just changed the material into gases and ash etc.

You're thinking of Lavoisier ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier ). To paint him as a mere "tax collector" is mild understatement. He was one of the 26 shareholders of the french (partially private) "IRS", making him one of the wealthiest noble in France before the Revolution. This lead him to his tragic fate after the fall of the monarchy.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes I'm surprised scientists are so stupid, really. They have that whole mass-energy conservation bullshit, but both fission and fusion apparently produce tons of energy. So if you can get the energy to cause the reaction in one direction, it's exothermic; if you can do it in the other direction, it's also exothermic. If you can make it oscillate, it produces a run-away exothermic process that self-feeds and turns the universe into a ball of molten liquefied thermal radiation expanding at the speed of light.

You can’t get *the same* reaction to be exothermic in both directions.

There are *some* fusion reactions that are exothermic (e.g., fusion of two hydrogen nuclei into one of helium) and other fusion reactions that are endothermic (e.g., fusion of uranium with hydrogen into plutonium).

There are *some* fission reactions that are exothermic (e.g., fission of plutonium into, say, uranium and hydrogen) and other fission reactions that are endothermic (e.g., fission of helium into hydrogen).

If you noticed that the examples I gave have a relationship, know that it’s not accidental.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[ScrewMaster]

And if the government decides it is important enough, they can claim the patent from you.

If it even gets that far. All they have to do is classify it, and you're done. They can take it to anyone else they want to have it researched and manufactured, and there's not squat you can do about it, and you can be barred from having anything to do with your own work. Well, that's the way it is in the U.S.: it happened to my father back in the sixties when his company was manufacturing electronics for the Navy: they liked his designs so much that they literally stole them from him (not for security reasons, but so that they could find somebody cheaper to manufacture the equipment after Dad and his people did all the design and testing.) I would presume that most governments would maintain similar ability to commandeer any technology that could be considered of national security interest, and limitless, virtually free energy would certainly come under that heading.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Nefarious Wheel]

I'll disbelieve it when i don't see it.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[klkblake]

So if you can get the energy to cause the reaction in one direction, it's exothermic; if you can do it in the other direction, it's also exothermic.

Not quite correct. Fusion is only exothermic for elements below iron, fission is only exothermic for elements above iron.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you get your degree? Michigan Tech? Colorado School of Mining?

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anubis IV]

Wait three months. They're still inking the contracts with the publishers and distributors while making some anonymous calls that will ensure they are raided and shut down for "unsafe practices" before anyone has a chance to disprove them.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

On further inspection the man behind the curtain is always found instead of any real magic.

Don't like to spoil it for you, but a man behind the curtain is real magic.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[shaitand]

"Personally, I expect they included something that reacts with water in the device (or some argolic fuel, termite, etc), heating it up for long enough to handle this demo. Longer demos require more fuel. Add something to produce intermittent gamma rays and you're done."

As I understand it they claim to have built and installed a prototype for production use in heating a factory and it has been operating for 2yrs.

If that can be proven it would defeat your theory of how the hoax works but I don't know if they can actually back up that claim. It would almost seem that the party running the factory is going to be associated with them in some fashion or they wouldn't have given them the opportunity even if the claim is true.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[shaitand]

That is true in theory but the practice is another thing altogether.

Given the claim is successful cold fusion, I doubt there are more than a handful of people in the world who could get a paper published by a credible journal regardless of the content.

That said, the massive commercial potential of the finding could make most anyone reluctant to reveal too much. In science you want others to build on your discovery so that you can gain the advantage of their input. In commercial practice giving someone else everything you know is just asking for them to understand what you don't and patent it. Unfortunately, having a patent doesn't stop people from patenting advancements to your discovery and leveraging those patents against you.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[shaitand]

"Other researchers could verify the phenomenon (if there is one) and they would still hold the patent."

True but said other researchers might understand from their description the mechanism which they do not. As such those researchers would be able to see potential advances both in the implementation and uses not understood by those who originally published the discovery. A patent only covers what the filer could think of. Uses of this technology they didn't think of and the use of this technology combined with specific improvements even used for the purposes they did think of can be patented by third parties.

I wouldn't publish anything until I felt I had a solid understanding of how and why this was working and had patent applications in covering anything I, a patent attorney, and a pack of hired experts under NDA could think of in terms of potential applications and theoretical improvements on the technology. Then and only then would I publish. There is still a risk but at least third party patents aren't likely to be something obvious. It's one thing to pay someone for discovering something that genuinely improves your product in a way you didn't see. It's quite another to have someone snipe an obvious application and strong arm you into paying for it.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[shaitand]

"0.99999 it's a scam. Call back when they have independently reproduced results *or* they've revolutionized the energy sector."

Your odds might be right. But all the reproducing they need is a production line and people who are paying them instead of the other way around with homes and/or vehicles powered the units they are selling. If those people are getting the claimed results (or as close to the claims as any commercial product ever gets) and if the company can show that the revenue from those customers is more than that fuel will cost at a scale they can reasonably achieve in the near future then that is all that is needed. They don't need to go through peer review, they don't need to publish, they don't even need to be profitable yet.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[shaitand]

No kidding. There are people so well respected they could wipe their arse and get the result published in most any journal in their field who might not be able to get a paper on cold fusion published. You could make a recording of the paper and submit on a cold fusion powered mp3 player and still get rejected.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[shaitand]

There isn't much chance these claims are valid and there isn't much chance of a crackpot ever making it work but that has nothing to do with whether cold fusion is viable or not. Look at the resources dedicated to hot fusion and the lack of results. Some people will tell you even hot fusion can't be viable while shielding their eyes from the sun.

I'm not saying cold fusion is viable. But from what I've read there haven't really been serious efforts or resources dedicated to determining if it is viable. The lack of results isn't particularly telling when the only people trying to get them are crackpots and when there are no resources for anyone who might have the education and inclination.

None of that depends on the crackpot conspiracy theory that says if you mention wanting to work on cold fusion it is tantamount to career suicide.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[aiht]

What?
Different elements are exothermic in different directions.
Nobody* says you get energy by fissioning helium back into hydrogen.
Even I know that, and I don't even really know what exothermic means.


* Nobody sane, that is.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

A hydrogen oxygen reaction was considered by the reviewers of this demonstration and rejected. The measured hydrogen used was less than 0.1g. If all of this reacted with oxygen, it would produce less than 15 kJ. The demonstration produced over 20,000 kJ of energy, more than 1000 times to much to be caused by this reaction.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Neil Boekend]

Here's a hint: Nickel-Hydride, chemical. Something elemental and heavier than nickel, fusion. Something elemental and lighter than nickel, fission. A nickel-hydrogen reaction that results in less of both nickel and hydrogen is definitely some sort of fusion; if it results in something lighter than copper, it's probably fission (of nickel) and fusion (of hydrogen with whatever else).

Up to now you had a good roll. From here it declines to below 0 Kelvin.

Sometimes I'm surprised scientists are so stupid, really. They have that whole mass-energy conservation bullshit, but both fission and fusion apparently produce tons of energy. So if you can get the energy to cause the reaction in one direction, it's exothermic; if you can do it in the other direction, it's also exothermic. If you can make it oscillate, it produces a run-away exothermic process that self-feeds and turns the universe into a ball of molten liquefied thermal radiation expanding at the speed of light.

Do you see it?

I see it.
You don't, but I will try to help:
Both fusion and fission products are lighter than the fuel. There is real mass converted to energy. The Hiroshima bomb had 0.6 grams more uranium in it than the reaction products combined. The conversion of weight goes by the E=MC2 formula, so you can calculate the resulting energy: E=0.6*300,000,000^2= 54,000,000,000,000,000 joules. That's what destroyed an entire city and irradiated the surroundings: 0.6 grams of mass converted to energy.
Fusion and fission work so well because a little bit of mass represents a hell of a lot of energy. This caused you not to understand what happens.

The elements that can have a chain fission reaction (exothermic) are different elements than the elements that can fuse. To get the same elements again you'd have to blast them with at least as much energy as you got out of it in the first place. Fusion chain reactions work on different elements, you can't fuse 92Kr and 141Ba to 236U (reversing the uranium fission reaction) again without putting in a shitload of energy.
You can fuse 2H and 3H to 4He and a spare neutron and gain energy of it, but to split the 4He to 2H and 3H you need not only a neutron, but also a shitload of energy.

There is a reason some hospitals have their own cyclotrons. They need to speed up the ions to get them to fuse to the isotopes they want. It costs a lot of energy, but they can't put just anything radioactive in your body (see radiocontrast).

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Eunuchswear]

All civilized men should study the game of Go; Geometry; and Philosophy.

Add some physics to that list, please.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Eunuchswear]

The scientific community has too little framework for "I don't know, it just works, stfu."

Well, obviously science and scientists have a teeny little problem with the "stfu" part of that.

No problem with "this happens, I have no clue why". A huge problem with "Turn that gamma ray detector off! This is our experiment!"

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Chris Mattern]

That would come under Column B: "When they've revolutionized the energy sector." Let me know when that happens, 'kay?

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[number6x]

New Mexico Tech

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[bluefoxlucid]

* Nobody sane, that is.

I took chemistry in public school in the USA. We discussed nuclear physics in high school. I built a (non-nuclear) thermal reactor as a term project in 10th grade using a thermite reaction (not thermite) between magnesium and iron oxide by mixing iron, salt water, and magnesium. This is trivial; but I worked it out based on the electron configurations of magnesium and iron, figuring out which would have better bonding energy (whatever it is, it's been 10 years) etc etc.

See here's the thing: they taught us about nuclear forces, about elecron orbitals, about organic and inorganic chemistry. This wasn't 5th grade chemistry where they teach you how acids and bases work, dissociating in water just like any other ionic compound. I took chemistry in college and it was lame; high school chemistry was much more in-depth and information dense. It would have taken me 4 years of chemistry study to catch up to what I learned in high school in 9 months.

They also went into deep discussion about isotopes, radioactive decay, the release of neutrons, they even mentioned that neptunium will follow beta decay and emit an electron, gaining a proton by magic (they didn't explain neutron decay). They talked about how fusion releases tons of energy, and so does fission.

They covered fusion and fission in as little depth as possible in high school.

Basically they explained the concept. Hydrogen, hydrogen, fuse into helium, and tons of energy released. Heavy element (uranium) breaks down, tons of energy released.

So we'll say "public school system," and you can decide if they're sane.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[tehcyder]

Plus battery life may exceed six hours.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[bluefoxlucid]

Physicists should study physics, although we're talking about nuclear physics and anything I get wrong is some High Level Shit(TM).

The main point of that particular signature is basically a nod to pre-modern Chinese/Japanese culture and a curse at modern world culture. Eastern and Western culture are still different, but ... Eastern culture is decaying, and so is Western culture.

I can universally justify both Go and Philosophy. Geometry not quite; I can directly justify that but you can directly justify chemistry in the same way.

The study of Go actually improves your abstract and logical reasoning; your memory; and your ability to abstractly recall information without explicit linking (useful for everything from solving engineering problems to cracking jokes the moment somebody sets themselves up). This is useful in social life, in home life, in management, in engineering, in everything really. Apparently the brain is not a muscle, but even bone gets stronger with use and atrophies if it's never put under load.

Philosophy is harder to discuss without discussing philosophy. Most people around here are familiar with "Why Is There Air" and "Do We Exist" philosophy; I've had a really hard time convincing people that questions about abortion and taxes are inherently philosophical questions, and that politics is just an application. All base (non-religious, non-doctrine) questions involving right and wrong and honor are philosophical; all questions involving the scientific study of impact are economic (like if we legalize and socially ENCOURAGE abortion, what does that do to, say, STD rate, given lowered inhibitions). Questions like how much liberty should we trade for so-called "security" are philosophical. Lack of a strong philosophical binding produces people who complain about Wal-Mart's serious detrimental impact on society while shopping there religiously.

Philosophy is, most basically, the act of thinking about what is happening in the world around you and what it means to you. It's when you actually sit down and think, you know, it's annoying but they're not hurting anyone groping me and X-raying me going through the airport; but we are all being treated horribly abusively, they think they can shove anything they want down our throats and we'll dance like puppets, and our god damn dignity is more important than the 0.0001% of lives we "might" lose for refusing to be treated like slave-animals. We need to get some backbone as a people and stand up to the transit cartel; and then we need to stand strong as a country and not panic and cry about "terrorism" because we're better than they are and we shouldn't let these cowards break our spirit and our backbone.

Geometry is more direct. You need it to figure out how much cake mix to use to make a different size cake. It's useful math. Of course you could make arguments about physics and engineering and chemistry too; although I've applied Geometry to Physics when we took basic physics to avoid doing 85% of the work for tensile problems (law of consines is a quick solution, but they had a 7 step process using the pythagorean theorem like 4 times). I think as a benchmark, Geometry makes a good base-- it implies (if you're not the US school system) a strong grasp of Algebra, it gives a starting point for Trigonometry, and it's critically important for anything but the most basic calculus--which forms the basis of physics and engineering.

I would have probably said Go, Algebra, Meditation, and Martial Arts, but I pieced this together more from things I've heard others suggest. Meditation and Martial Arts are philosophy facilitators to me anyway (meditation helps improve physical and cognitive senses, but also calms your mind down enough to actually process shit; and the study of martial arts makes a person FAR more willing to stand up for himself and others, because people take offense to bullies and once the fear is dispelled they become hostile to it). Plus Go and Aikido are meditative to me, along with Yoga; but I am strongly familiar with meditation and know how to apply such things in such situations.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Eunuchswear]

Physicists should study physics, although we're talking about nuclear physics and anything I get wrong is some High Level Shit(TM).

Well, not all that high level.

Sometimes I'm surprised scientists are so stupid, really.

Before accusing others of stupidity you should maybe know a little about the subject under discussion

They have that whole mass-energy conservation bullshit,

bullshit?

but both fission and fusion apparently produce tons of energy.

Now might be the moment to think "stop! Maybe I don't know as much as I think I do"

So if you can get the energy to cause the reaction in one direction, it's exothermic; if you can do it in the other direction, it's also exothermic.

Now is certainly the moment to think "yup, I must be making some elementary mistake here"

If you can make it oscillate, it produces a run-away exothermic process that self-feeds and turns the universe into a ball of molten liquefied thermal radiation expanding at the speed of light.

Garbage in, garbage out. You've correctly reasoned from incorrect premises.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[bluefoxlucid]

That was mostly the point.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[DarthVain]

You should take a printout of your post and send it to them... "SEE!" :)

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[c6gunner]

I would presume that most governments would maintain similar ability to commandeer any technology that could be considered of national security interest, and limitless, virtually free energy would certainly come under that heading.

I don't see how. "Limitless virtually free" energy doesn't have any national security implications unless it's also really easy to make, AND really easy to weaponize, a-la the Outer Limits episode with the "cold fusion bomb".

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[c6gunner]

It doesn't orbit, and it doesn't "get energy". You know how you middle-school teachers showed you that picture of an atom that looks sorta like a little solar-system? Yeah, well they lied to you. Throw all that out the window, and go take a university course on particle physics.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[c6gunner]

Now, the fact that they cant explain it doesn't exactly lend any credibility to the story. If I invented cold fusion, irregardless if I could explain it or not, I would have every scientist I could find come look at it.

Eh. Personally, I'd have James Randi come take a look. That million-dollar-prize would eliminate the need to go looking for funding, and the publicity generated by winning it would be better than any friggin' TV commercials. I'd be a billionaire by the end of the week.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a theory that explains all the LENR phenomena and allows Pd to produced excess heat on demand with ordinary water not D2O.
You should first listen to the presentation at
www.brillouinenergy.com/BE25Tec.PPS at least once,
and then read the doc
www.brillouinenergy.com/GodesIE82.pdf
The hypothesis put forth in this paper explains this and most other LENR reactions.
This material has been reviewed by a multidisciplined groups at MIT labs and Amherst. Both groups feel that it contains no show stoppers and just might work. An attorney at now Kilpatrick Townsend with a Ph.D in high energy physics and a member of the team that found the top quark. They have written two applications for Brillouin Energy Corp. in exchange for a stake in the company. More importantly they have paid the filing fees in the US. EU. Japan, China, and India in exchange for that stock. You may also look at some early work in a high pressure high temperature calorimeter on the website as well. All tests are run with ordinary distilled water.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[macpacheco]

What about the scientist's claim that they have a prototype running continuously providing a factory with heat for the last 6 months ?
How much H2 is needed to generate 10kW of heat for 6 months using non-nuclear methods ?
Unless that information is a hoax as well, there's something serious about this. The quantity of hydrogen needed for burning versus fusion would be tremendously different and very easy to discern over just a few days.

On the non-disclosure. Those guys have more to gain by keeping this under as much wraps as possible from other scientists.
There might be similar ways to accomplish the same thing with other metals plus hydrogen that might not be covered by their expected patents.
The potential monetary value of their patent licensing is worth what, billions, the Nobel prize can wait.
Finally, I'd assume they're too busy perfecting their machine to be collaborating with hundreds of other scientists on reproducing their process.
This is huge business. There are lots of interest contrary to this. Specially big oil, big stakeholders in fission nuclear power plants, even wind and solar power investment might become obsolete. From my guesstimate, this would replace coal power plants with a 100 fold reduction in costs. 1 pound of Ni costs less than US$ 1 ! Just the reduction in space, the complete elimination of CO2 emissions, modularity of their initial product, this would allow for producing electricity and heat inside of factories and other heavy users of electricity.

That doesn't mean I'm 100% sold on this matter, just that I'm taking their claim very seriously.
It won't take a full year to know if this is true. They claim they will begin delivering what might be pre-production units in just 3 months. No word on cost of their machine yet.
They claim they're already working on a 1MW plan by combining in the order of 100 such units.
We'll see. Very exciting.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[bLanark]

Hmm, the SF writer Heinlein had a story where some dude invented a cheap "battery" (called a shipstone, IIRC). They decided *not* to patent it as no-one else was likely to discover how it worked, even by dissection of a "shipstone", so instead of being limited to the lifetime of a patent, with all the explanation, etc., they just built the things, in secrecy, expecting that none would discover the secret of how they worked. Neat side-step of patent law, and better control of IP.

I'm not for a minute suggesting that these guys have really made a fundamental, non-obvious invention for cheap energy!

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[Geoffrey.landis]

What about the scientist's claim that they have a prototype running continuously providing a factory with heat for the last 6 months ?
[...] Unless that information is a hoax as well, there's something serious about this.

Until people can independently verify this information, it's just stuff that they say. They can claim anything they like. They can claim that they have ten trillion percent efficiency, conversion of lead into gold, a cure for cancer, and time travel, too-- but until somebody else sees it, it's just claims.

...On the non-disclosure. Those guys have more to gain by keeping this under as much wraps as possible from other scientists....

Yeah. Except that this is always what gets said when they won't let anybody else see their miracle machines... and somehow the miracle machines never do end up getting revealed to the world. If they did, in fact, what they say they did, they would become the most famous human beings in the world by letting other people see it (and, as a bonus, their patents would not be rejected).... but, no, rather than be the most famous human beings on the planet, they "have more to gain" by not letting anybody see it.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[macpacheco]

Have to admit that until yesterday I didn't know that one of the pair of scientists behind this had some spats with Italian law.
By mid year we'll know. Counting the days... Need clean energy. Coal poisoning the world.

Re:All you need to know, from TFA

[badkarmadayaccount]

You are an idiot.

Extraordinary proof

[RenHoek]

Results like that should be extremely obvious to replicate. Could this finally be the Holy Grail we've been looking for?

If so, I just hope it doesn't have any snags that will prevent us from actually extracting useful amounts of energy out of it.

Re:Extraordinary proof

[Anonymous Coward]

One word: NO.

Re:Extraordinary proof

[Maritz]

I hope they've succeeded in this, but won't be holding my breath.

Cold Fusion has a low plausibility. This in itself isn't a guarantee of failure, but it makes the other problems with their research more damning. For instance;

1 - They are claiming this is cold fusion without having found any evidence of ionizing radiation. On their patent application they mention finding zinc, calcium, potassium, sulphur, silicon, chlorine and copper. They show no analysis of the pre-treatment nickel powder but two analyses of the post-treatment powder. So they seem to be claiming to have LOTS of fusion and fission reactions going on, producing NO ionising radiation, but many kilowatts of heat energy. Dubious.

2 - They are claiming that they are planning to start selling this within months. Rossi says "We are arrived to a product that is ready for the market. Our judge is the market."

3 - It is interesting that they would carry out an experiment with such low prior plausibility and make heat measurement their only data output.

4 - Their patent application was rejected.

5 - The journal the paper is published in is their own.

6 - One of the researchers allegedly has been accused of tax fraud and illegal importing of gold.

All in all I wouldn't hold my breath but of course would be happy to be wrong about it. Can anyone who knows more about nuclear physics tell me - is it plausible to have an exothermic nuclear reaction involving nickel and a proton? I thought all fusion reactions beyond Iron were endothermic (this then being the reason why massive stars implode and give us supernovae, neutron stars and black holes).

Nickel and Hydrogen?

[jpmorgan]

It could just be bad reporting, but nickel and hydrogen?

Maybe it's possible with some extreme isotopes of the two, but as far as I can tell, the fusion of nickel and hydrogen is not exothermic.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your reasoning? Hydrogen is energy-packed so it should be exothermic. Anyway it's easy to find out. I chose the most stable compatible isotopes:

mass(H-1) + mass(Ni-62) - mass(Cu-63) =
1.00782503207 + 61.9283451 - 62.9295975 = 0.0065726
mass(H-1) + mass(Ni-64) - mass(Cu-65) =
1.00782503207 + 63.9279660 - 64.9277895 = 0.0080015

The left side is heavier than the right side, so the reaction is exothermic.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Maybe where YOU are, but what about in Italy?

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[wvmarle]

If the mass of the hydrogen plus nickel atoms is more than the mass of the resulting copper, the fusion will release energy. Let's check some values (source: Wikipedia).

So start with Ni-58 (the most abundant), mass 57.9353429 amu.

Add hydrogen: 1.00794 amu.

Total: 58.943283 amu.

Get Cu-59, mass 58.9394980 amu.

And you just lost 0.003785 amu - mass which has become energy. That's how you get the exothermic fusion.

The problem here is that Cu-59 is unstable with a half-life of just 81 seconds; pretty hard to detect. Though skimming through their research paper I found that they say that the decay results in other isotopes of copper, or even decaying back into nickel. Anyway if this fusion takes place, there will be copper left, and energy is set to be released.

Now whether this whole reaction takes place, that's for other researchers to figure out - "all" they have to do is "just" try to reproduce the results, which may not be easy. It seems something happens, and it may be interesting to figure out what it is. The amounts of energy they claim to have produced are significant, too much to be simply systemic errors. But what is going on - well that's nothing I can speculate on from here.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[imsabbel]

Cu-59, IIRC, produces about 5MeV per decay. Thats MORE then the energy of fusion you calculated. And at 81S half-life, with enough power the boil a significant amount of water, the reactor would be a complete hot-zone, radioactively speaking.
You should see the Cerenkov radiation of all those gammas in the watertank...

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only fusion reaction that will produce heat is hydrogen to helium. All other take energy to fuse.

That is the reason why the sun runs out of energy after producing Iron(FE).

If this was actually producing energy then the sun would be full of copper.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 Significant Figures.
-1 __No Uncertainties!__

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[WatchMaster]

no one has yet mentioned that this baloney comes from .... the University of Bologna

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jointing two elements that are smaller than iron (e.g. fusion) should be a net gain in energy.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Antisyzygy]

As far as I can tell, the theory relies on lowering the energy of a hydrogen atom's electron orbit to make some weird "low energy hydrogen" called Hydrino. It releases excess energy in the form of UV light and as a byproduct it makes the Hydrino, which apparently has bordeline "miracle" properties as an element for use in plastics and other industrial products. The weird thing is that some guy named Randell L. Mills presumably from the United States is claiming he has "revolutionized" physics and made some new grand unified theory. He is marketing these reactors under Blacklight Power. I am not sure what these Italian scientists have in common with this other dude. It seems sort of crack-pottish to me but we will see. They claim all sorts of crazy things like self-regeneration of their power source. So called "Free-energy" reactors means its probably an elaborate hoax.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should read what you said again, and see the glaring mistake you made.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, yeah they did....40 minutes before you

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[pigeon768]

You're correct about the Cerenkov radiation, but for the wrong reason. Cerenkov radiation is the result of a particle which is traveling faster than whatever speed a light impulse is traveling through the medium. Cu-59 decays via positron emission, which means a positron is emitted which will travel 99%+ c. The positron will quickly annihilate into a gamma ray. The positron is what will cause the Cerenkov radiation, not the gamma ray.

Also note that Cu-59 will decay into Ni-59, which is radioactive and has a halflife of 76000 years. So even if this did work, you haven't solved the problem of radioactive waste.

IANAP

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Cu-59 ( a 3.5 MeV beta emitter) would be very easy to identify. The nuclei has well known excited states which will gamma decay to the ground state after the proton and nickel nuclei combine. It should be easy with a combination of a magnetic spectrometer and calorimeter to observe the gamma spectra from excited states of Cu-59 and the beta spectra from radioactive decay. If they are producing enough power to heat water there should be enormous beta and gamma fluxes (since these are the sources of the heat). I haven't read the paper but large amounts of Cu-59 production and decay with a minute and a half life would be easily demonstrated with a Geiger counter sitting near their black box during a series of on/off tests for the device.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Panaflex]

That's because it's one of the oldest universities in the world... from 1088. Dante and Copernicus were alumni I think. They're certainly lost their luster in the past couple of hundred years, but who knows?

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[amRadioHed]

Your comment doesn't make sense. If hydrogen is the only fusion reaction that produces energy then stars would collapse after enough helium accumulates in the core. That they actually collapse when fusion of iron begins indicates that iron is the first element that requires more energy to fuse than it produces.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The only fusion reaction that will produce heat is hydrogen to helium. All other take energy to fuse.
That is the reason why the sun runs out of energy after producing Iron(FE)."

You know He's atomic weight is 4, don't you? And that the one of Fe is about 55, don't you? Where comes the energy to produce iron from, then?

Basically everything up to iron will produce energy. That's why stars basically end up with it.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[WatchMaster]

you didn't expect me to read the other comments did you?

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Motard]

I just tried it. The reaction didn't happen. I put a nickel from my pocket in a glass. I didn't have any pure hydrogen around, but decided to use water, which has, like, twice as much hydrogen as oxygen. So I poured the water into the glass, expecting the nickel to be transformed into five copper pennies, some oxygen to be released, and a heating of the remaining water.

Nothing happened. It is therefore debunked.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[mdsolar]

This is incorrect. Fusion is exothermic up to iron, not just up to helium. There are two possibilities for stable isotopes of Ni to go directly to stable isotopes of Cu via addition of a proton. 62Ni+p->63Cu appears to be endothermic and 64Ni+p->65Cu appears to be exothermic. 64Ni has low abundance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_copper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_nickel

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Nadaka]

So utterly wrong.

Fusion produces energy up to iron, but not beyond.

A stars fusion progresses outward from the core in shells, first burning hydrogen, then helium, then ever heavier elements once the pressure at the core gets sufficiently high. Only sufficiently large stars will generate copper by fusion in their normal life cycle.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Nadaka]

ugh... brain not work today today, must caffeinate. copper will only be produced on collapse of a sufficiently large star.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[chill]

Up to your old tricks, eh Morgan? Shutting down Tesla's research wasn't enough for you. You have to come back from the grave and make sure the job is done again.

Back to Hell with you, fiend!

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[mdsolar]

Oops, forgot the crazy carbon 12 offset. both are exothermic by about the proton mass excess of 0.007 amu. When we say fusion is exothermic up to iron, we are thinking of stellar conditions where the alpha process dominates the final stage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_burning_process The rp process can contribute to the formation of heavier elements.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[ShakaUVM]

>>Also note that Cu-59 will decay into Ni-59, which is radioactive and has a halflife of 76000 years. So even if this did work, you haven't solved the problem of radioactive waste.

What problem? It either has such a long halflife that it's barely radioactive, or it's active enough you can extract electricity from it.

The waste problem is a political one.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[notsoanonymouscoward]

Meh, all you need to read:

"Although the reactors can be self-sustaining so that the input can be turned off, the scientists say that the reactors work better with a constant input. "

So, we have a machine that produces 8 units of energy out for every 1 unit in while consuming the nickel-hydrogen fuel, but it cannot feed back on itself? Me thinks there's a problem with their output units.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[jpmorgan]

Yeah, that makes more sense. I was mixing up my isotopes.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[hey!]

It doesn't necessarily follow that the system is not producing net energy. An internal combustion engine generates more mechanical energy than is put into it, but it stores some of that energy in a flywheel so it can compress the fuel air mixture, a phase that *consumes* energy. If your engine design had no means for capturing some of the energy from the power stroke, you'd have to feed your engine a constant stream of external power, say from an electrical motor or actuator.

This thing might well produce net energy as heat, but require something like electrical input to operate. Until you could scale the thing to a size that could generate electricity, you can't do the definitive demonstration of feeding a load while sustaining the reaction.

That said, I'm dubious. But if experimenters can reproduce a reaction into which they put nickel and hydrogen, and extract copper where there was none before, I'll buy that there is fusion going on.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Iron Condor]

Your comment doesn't make sense. If hydrogen is the only fusion reaction that produces energy then stars would collapse after enough helium accumulates in the core. That they actually collapse when fusion of iron begins indicates that iron is the first element that requires more energy to fuse than it produces.

And Nickel is ... heavier than Iron.

Hummm...

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[number6x]

You guys are thinking actual nuclear fusion from physics. What is happening here is a well understood exothermic chemical process.

They are not fusing a proton from hydrogen and a nickel molecule into copper. They are causing a well known chemical process that separates the small amounts of copper that are naturally found in nickel.

Ask a mining engineer or metallurgist about the 'Sherritt-Gordon process'.

As someone with a degree in physics, I have to say this is embarrassing.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your reasoning? Hydrogen is energy-packed so it should be exothermic. Anyway it's easy to find out. I chose the most stable compatible isotopes:

mass(H-1) + mass(Ni-62) - mass(Cu-63) =
1.00782503207 + 61.9283451 - 62.9295975 = 0.0065726
mass(H-1) + mass(Ni-64) - mass(Cu-65) =
1.00782503207 + 63.9279660 - 64.9277895 = 0.0080015

The left side is heavier than the right side, so the reaction is exothermic.

You forgot the part where input energy is required to fuse the H-1 and Ni-62/64 together. In theory, iron is the heaviest element which results in a net energy gain from fusion. Y'know, except for in this case, because cold fusion! Cold fusion!

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Also note that Cu-59 will decay into Ni-59, which is radioactive and has a halflife of 76000 years. So even if this did work, you haven't solved the problem of radioactive waste.

Just step through one more H fusion event and get Cu-60 which decays rapidly to stable Ni-60

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Er... if the halflife is 76,000 years, then it's safe enough to juggle with. I think we have solved the waste problem. Compact it in to juggling balls and sell them to gypsies!

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

1.00794 amu? If you're gonna use a mix of H-1 and H-2 as your "hydrogen", then you should do the comparison relative to the same mix of Cu-59 and Cu-60.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but you're wrong. You need energy to get over the potential barrier, yes; but that energy is released after the reaction, just like in the Sun. Iron is the heaviest element you can get in a star, yes, because the regions of the star that are iron-rich don't have any light elements anymore; but as you can see from the GP's simple calculation, you can in theory fuse Ni62 with Hydrogen. The only problem is how the heck you'd do that (and "cold fusion" is not the answer), but the reaction is energetically possible and exothermic.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[macpacheco]

I wonder how many people commenting against this have a vested interest against this working...
1 - The patent is going to the Italians, not to the Americans, Germans, French or British
2 - I hold a ton of oil/energy stock that will plummet if this is true
3 - I'm a physicist and can't profit from this
4 - I'm in the nuclear fission/wind/solar power business that probably will go under
The list goes on...

The ones to gain are just about everybody else that doesn't have a vested interest against it.
The ensuing power revolution will advance society greatly, just as the industrial revolution, mass production, the .com revolution, ... did
But there will be side effects, people out of jobs, very serious impact.
Large energy producing countries that run around energy production... Will suffer hugely. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela tops the list, with Canada, Australia getting significant impact too, even my Brazil is investing hugely on ultra deep pre-salt Petrol production, oil prices might drop so much, that all those oil fields might become inviable to run. US$ 30 / barrel oil would happen for sure. Only cheap oil will survive. Thermal coal production essentially shutdown.

Re:Nickel and Hydrogen?

[wvmarle]

They were giving energies of 3-8 MeV for the (fusion) reactions of the various isotopes in the article. I haven't fully read it; it appears they take not only the fusion but also the subsequent decay into account.

And the best part...

[Quantus347]

...is that they don't understand why it works, just that their magic box makes more energy than they put in.

Re:And the best part...

[Zen-Mind]

Isn't that the case for almost everything? We have many "observed" universal behaviors, but did anyone really break the fundamental working to explain the universe? For instance, I think nobody has been able to explain gravity; I think they tried to explain it using a particle called graviton, but nothing was ever proven.

Moreover, many things were actually discovered before they could be explained. At one point, unless it can be dangerous (which could apply in this case), the fact that it simply works should be enough for most people.

Re:And the best part...

[Penguinisto]

At least they're honest about it, which means that if it can be replicated, it's worth looking into.

I give 'em props for being honest enough to say 'nope - we don't know why it works either.'

Re:And the best part...

[bws111]

I'm not sure that you have to understand why something works to show that it does work. For instance, if you look at the prescribing information for many drugs, you may see statements like 'the mechanism of this action is not known'. We can show that the drug does in fact reduce blood pressure. We can show that it is safe for humans. We can show that it causes these side effects. We have no idea why it reduces blood pressure.

Re:And the best part...

[Anne Thwacks]

Its a success when more Money comes out than goes in.

When that happens, call me!

Re:And the best part...

[Anonymous Coward]

How does gravity work?

Re:And the best part...

[Anne_Nonymous]

It's commonly known that a controlled reaction of pasta and anti-pasta is a source of unlimited, free energy. The trick is not letting the reaction run out of control.

Re:And the best part...

[UnknowingFool]

Yes and no. Einstein figured how gravity works on at large scales of distance like molecules, planets, stars, etc in that gravity is the curvature or matter in space-time. The more mass, the more curvature. Einstein, however, was unable to resolve how gravity works at the subatomic level.

Re:And the best part...

[expatriot]

Their history of fraud is not helping the perception of honesty.

Re:And the best part...

[Nadaka]

It works gravely.

Re:And the best part...

[newcastlejon]

Personally I feel that if you invent/discover something cool but have no idea how it works you should treat it with kid gloves, which seems wise considering what happened with preliminary research into radioactivity.

Radium enema, anyone?

Re:And the best part...

[amliebsch]

Through the interactions of gravitons and graviolis.

Re:And the best part...

[TeknoHog]

"Gravity as curvature" is a neat model, but you can always go a little deeper and as why/how it _really_ happens.

Re:And the best part...

[UnknowingFool]

Depends on what you mean by "deeper". For the OP, he means at the quantum level which is an unknown today. General relativity and quantum theory are incompatible on the same scale, and Einstein spent the remainder of his life trying to resolve them. If you mean deeper as "profound implications" then Einstein's General Theory of Relativity by linking, mass, gravity, and space-time together has to led a deeper understanding of fundamental processes of how the universe works (black hole formation, gravitational time dilation, etc). Currently the best candidate for linking describing quantum gravity is string theory but as it is stands today, not complete or tested.

Re:And the best part...

[Tromad]

We still don't understand the causes of depression, which affects about 10%-25% of the US at any given time. There is the serotonin hypothesis, except about half the modern drugs for depression don't target serotonin. That doesn't stop people from doing research and creating drugs and treatments for it, even if they do not truly understand the mechanism.

Re:And the best part...

[shaitand]

Gravity could just as well be the magical side effect of god being annoyed or liking spheres. Perhaps it is the method his magic wand is using to clean up the spill of matter we interpret as the big bang. Sort of like a cosmic rainx.

Labeling something and predicting its behavior IS knowing something about it. Arguably, it is the most important thing to know about it. But it ISN'T the same as knowing what it is. Knowing what something is might not even make it easier to predict its behavior. Certainly hasn't helped predict my wife's behavior.

Re:And the best part...

[shaitand]

history of fraud? The closest thing to fraud I heard was tax fraud and even though the word 'fraud' is in there I doubt you'll find too many people who look down on tax evaders (mostly because you won't find any who aren't cheating any way they think they get away with themselves).

Re:And the best part...

[shaitand]

"Its a success when more Money comes out than goes in."

That depends on whose perspective you are looking at it from. For the scammer you are right since what is coming would likely be going out to him. The investor would probably prefer the opposite. I suspect they'd prefer there be more money coming in than going out.

Re:And the best part...

[shaitand]

Blasphemer! How dare you reveal the sacred mysteries of the FSM!

You must repent. Dress in full pirate regalia and say thirty "Yo ho ho"s and he will absolve you of your sin.

Rejected by peer reviewed journals ...

[Syncerus]

Also, the site on which this report was published is owned by the authors.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/24/italian-scientists-claim-cold-fusion-breakthrough/?test=faces

Re:Rejected by peer reviewed journals ...

[AaronLS]

LOL I'm not surprised it's on Fox News.

Re:Rejected by peer reviewed journals ...

[torgis]

Also, the site on which this report was published is owned by the authors.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/24/italian-scientists-claim-cold-fusion-breakthrough/?test=faces

Also breaking news, Fox news reports a useful piece of information. More to come.

Re:Rejected by peer reviewed journals ...

[Anonymous Coward]

lol, you're a troll with nothing to add and don't even make any sense

Re:Rejected by peer reviewed journals ...

[AaronLS]

I'm not trollling, but actually referring to the 2 separate studies posted previously on Slashdot that showed that viewers of Fox news are more misinformed than those who get their news from elsewhere. I was simply making a reference to information that was previously posted on Slashdot.

Re:Rejected by peer reviewed journals ...

[AaronLS]

And it does make sense, in that we expect that something which exhibits classic trends of manufactured information being published on fox news, because they are well known for not following up stories with any fact finding or verification. This is based on facts and you can use the search feature yourself to locate these studies yourself.

Coming to you in 5 years...

[Anonymous Coward]

First post!

RTFA first

[Anonymous Coward]

based on the article, it sounds like another hoax.

Another writeup

[Anonymous Coward]

This looked to be more informative commentary...

http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/19/rossi-and-focardi-lenr-device-probably-real-with-credit-to-piantelli/

I call baloney

[Nicky G]

But, if it's true, and repeatable by others, well, wouldn't this just solve all our energy problems.

Re:I call baloney

[Dunbal]

But, if it's true, and repeatable by others, well, wouldn't this just solve all our energy problems.

But if pigs could fly, we'd solve our transportation problems at the same time.

Re:I call baloney

[Gilmoure]

And people would carry really strong umbrellas.

Re:I call baloney

[JTsyo]

not really. I'm not sure nickle is a cheap fuel.

Re:I call baloney

[hajus]

We'd have to worry about peak nickel.

If only I could beleive this.

[jabjoe]

Wouldn't it be great if this was true. I just can't believe it is. If something seams to good to be true.......well normally it is.

Doesn't pass the smell test

[JW CS]

From the article:

"Rossi and Focardi’s paper on the nuclear reactor has been rejected by peer-reviewed journals, but the scientists aren’t discouraged. They published their paper in the Journal of Nuclear Physics, an online journal founded and run by themselves, which is obviously cause for a great deal of skepticism."

Everything about this seems like a scam.

Re:Doesn't pass the smell test

[atticus9]

Well if I had stumbled upon a nickel-hydrogen combination that produces copper and energy I wouldn't spend a lot of time trying to convince the scientific community that it's real (since I'm not an academic). Instead I'd start implementing it and selling energy. Like if I discovered a room temperature super conductor but couldn't back up the physics behind it, I'd be more interested in putting my super-conductor to use, then going back and spending a decade on chalk-boards trying to figure out why it works.

Anyways if this is a hoax (the reactor doesn't produce 8:1 energy with nickel-hydrogen fuel) it seems like the sort of thing that can be debunked pretty readily :3

Might not be fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

They could have accidentally made a Nickel-Hydrogen battery. A remarkably efficient battery, which itself is pretty useful, but until they provide some concrete evidence that fusion is producing the majority of the power output here (e.g. a high fast-neutron flux), other methods of power production are more likely.

Assuming the device actually works, of course.

Re:Might not be fusion

[vlm]

They could have accidentally made a Nickel-Hydrogen battery. A remarkably efficient battery, which itself is pretty useful, but until they provide some concrete evidence that fusion is producing the majority of the power output here (e.g. a high fast-neutron flux), other methods of power production are more likely.

Assuming the device actually works, of course.

A better question, is why does their nickel-metal hydride "reactor" produce excess power that never showed up when the NiMH researchers did their rather extensive battery experiments in the past? News stories about batteries spontaneously combusting are mostly about lithium batteries not NiMH.

Now if it was common knowledge that NiMH battery plants occasionally went nuclear, then maybe their experiment would have some merit, but...

Re:Might not be fusion

[maroberts]

If they get copper as a product then its not a chemical reaction, so not a battery in the traditional sense of the word

Re:Might not be fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Only problem is, if it does work then it most likely produces significant radioactive waste due to the copper it produces being unstable and degrading to something quite radioactive (like some nickle isotope). So even if it works it might not be any better than our fission reactors, possibly worse.

Re:Might not be fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno, but doesn't the sudden appearance of all this coppery-stuff, flame spectroscopized and all, indicate fusion of some sort?

Re:Might not be fusion

[bmcage]

As somebody mentions up, there is 50ppm copper in nickel normally, so they are just extracting it. So http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_extraction_techniques#Recovery_from_nickel-cobalt_sulfide_concentrates_.28Sherritt_process.29

If you oxidize the nickel via contact with air, put it in, you can keep a reaction running to deoxidize the nickel, creating steam. Question is then, is the energy you get out of that higher than the energy needed to make the nickel in the first place?

Bullshit and Snakeoil

[imsabbel]

Those guys fell from the fraud tree and hit every single branch on the way down:

- Created their own, "serious sounding" journal for publication
- Do not disclose the actual device they claim to have been running
- Do not allow independent observation of the experiment
- Experiment is an open system (making it SO easy to fake)
- Making totally implausible claims that would be too much even if it DID work.

Not only have they yet to prove they did any kind of fusion, they also would not produce energy with the process they claim to do even if they were doing it (trans-iron fusion is not exothermic).

And the really stupid thing is that there will be tons of "sceptics" that have no fucking clue about science that will eat up their claims just because they are "anti-established science". Wankers.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[Anonymous Coward]

And the really stupid thing is that there will be tons of "sceptics"

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[LWATCDR]

True enough. I think you have gotten it down pat. Until it has been replicated it is all just fantasy.

And yes the "skeptics" do tend to be the worst kind of true believers.
I had this discussion at work about UFOs. I said that I didn't believe that they where from other planet's and or star systems because.
1. They would be so big and put out so much energy that every one would know they where their.
or
2. They would be so good at hiding that we would have no clue the where their.

It just struck me as dumb that a race that could travel across light years and not require massive ships that had exhausts as bright as stars would be dumb enough to fly around with with their headlights on if they wanted to hide.
I was declared a happy villager...

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[scharkalvin]

Trans-iron fusion with ITSELF is not exothermic, but trans-iron with Hydrogen?
In small amounts this might happen in stars, but by the time a star has anything more than trace amounts of elements up to iron it has exhausted its hydrogen so any fusion of other elements with hydrogen is in the minority and doesn't contribute to the stars energy.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[ebuck]

And the really stupid thing is that there will be tons of "sceptics" that have no fucking clue about science that will eat up their claims just because they are "anti-established science". Wankers.

You can only estimate the number of times I've wished that anti-established science wankers could be sent to an environment where they didn't reap the benefits of established science. Established science has self-correcting methods such that even if some understanding was incredibly wrong, it eventually drifts into correctness. That's how we replace the Earth at the center of the Solar System with the Sun, and how we replace Eculid's elements with Atoms.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[Anonymous Coward]

Wankers.

brilliant

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[imsabbel]

Sorry, you are right. Was a knee-jerk reaction. There is the possibility of a slightly exothermic fusion of iron with hydrogen. Some other comment posted it.
But the result would be a highly radioactive copper isotobe, emitting beta and gamma radiation, with the majority of the net energy gain of the reaction yielding from the radioactive decay.

And significant amount of energy produced would result in tons of radiation to be detected ( not only background +50%)

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[Salamander_Pete]

- Making totally implausible claims that would be too much even if it DID work.

Not only have they yet to prove they did any kind of fusion, they also would not produce energy with the process they claim to do even if they were doing it (trans-iron fusion is not exothermic).

I do agree with most of your points, except about trans-iron fusion not being exothermic. This is true if both isotopes being fused are trans-iron, as iron is at the top of the 'curve', but when one is above iron and one is below iron, it will depend on their relative 'energy per nucleon', and that of the product. A few people farther up have done the sums and shown exothermic results. The problem with this kind of thing is not the relative energy levels of reactants and products, but that of the transition states in between. This is the reason fusion bombs have fission bombs as initiators: to provide enough initial energy to overcome these transition states and actually get to the products + more energy. I still think it is a hoax, but the numbers do stack up.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[SuricouRaven]

It does with the quote marks. The term skeptic has been to some extent co-opted now by people who are most unskeptical by the conventional definition, in order to try to appear more credible. An example would be 9/11 skeptics, or climate change skeptics. Their existence annoys the older skeptical movement who fear that their brand is being cheapened and confusion created - when everyone is proclaiming their skepticism, it's difficult to tell who is really studying evidence and weighing arguments and who is merely searching for an excuse to dismiss something they do not wish to be true.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[SuricouRaven]

3. Alien teenagers think it's fun to drop in on a pre-FTL civilisation and scare the locals.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[bill_mcgonigle]

It just struck me as dumb that a race that could travel across light years and not require massive ships that had exhausts as bright as stars would be dumb enough to fly around with with their headlights on if they wanted to hide.

You co-workers may be true believers, but since you effectively have zero chance of understanding the technology required for interstellar flight, it's probably best to remain a noncognitivist on this one.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[Stele]

That's called "buzzing" you know.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[epine]

Mod parent up. If it went over your head, read it again. Input enough mental energy to achieve comprehensive, then enjoy the ride down.

Another thing: the idea that there's no value in a reported result until it's been replicated is crap. There's value in the initial report if a stock market trader who acts on the information (that everyone else chooses to ignore) makes a larger profit in the long run (all averaged out).

Prior to corroboration through replication, you're trying to reach judgement on inherent plausibility and anticipated impact. The prior expectation for this kind of thing is extremely low. If the hints that they've muscled other scientists away from measuring specific observables have any truth, we can take the low prior and pour in a fistfull of additional zeros.

If the specific observables are being hushed up for proprietary reasons, they aren't actually doing science, which is a collaborative endeavor or STFU.

If there's no specific observable which sheds light on what is taking place in this reaction, they need a pretty strong argument about why they have failed to detect the change of physical state associated with energy release. (News flash: unchanged matter releases energy.) Trace quantities of an unusual isotope of nickle or copper can't go unobserved for long in a sustained reaction.

Novel electron configurations of the hydrogen atom might go unobserved, since the modified hydrogen would be hard to isolate (yes, we're fairly deep into science fiction here). But surely if produced in large quantities (aka commercialization) you'd soon be picking up differences in spectral emissions or something, even without isolating it from the regular hydrogen.

This special hydrogen is interesting stuff. Los Alamos will be glad to finally discover why their yield calculations have never come out right. And if regular hydrogen has a decay rate to special hydrogen (with an energy release) we can finally correct our model of the cosmic background radiation, too, eliminating another sore spot.

So this is potentially a pretty big result which would change our understanding of the visible universe, and yet somehow it's been there all along only we've just never managed to see it.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, you think Elements is about the classical elements? You have no idea what you're talking about.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[Tanuki64]

I just wonder why are they doing it? What they claim is not some tiny effect which needs serious statistical methods to be verified or disproved. A failure to reproduce it cannot just be explained away by someone stupidly kicking the table at the wrong time.

To make up something like that comes close the to claim to have invented the perpetuum mobile.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[hyades1]

The points you raise are all valid; sooner or later, they'll all have to be answered.

You have to admit, though, that if they believe the device works as advertised, they'd also believe they had more than adequate cause to be just a wee bit paranoid.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[dido]

We didn't replace Euclid's Elements with atoms. Lobachevsky, Bolyai, and Riemann's work notwithstanding, the Elements is still on a perfectly sound mathematical basis... I suppose you meant the classical elements, which concept predates even Socrates.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[Anonymous Coward]

The other classic sign of B.S is when the inventors go straight from a lab-sized experiment to a commercial-sized implementation without ever exploring the theory behind it or having other people repeat the experiment.

If they claim it can be used to run a car - then you'll be able to write them off without further investigation.

    --Steve

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[LWATCDR]

Well I do have enough understanding of the technology that if they didn't want to be seen we wouldn't see them. I just don't they they would keep the head lights on.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[bill_mcgonigle]

Well I do have enough understanding of the technology that if they didn't want to be seen we wouldn't see them. I just don't they they would keep the head lights on.

Those aren't navigational lights, they're an essential part of their anti-gravity system and their zero point drives.

I don't know that, of course, because I don't know that.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[Genevish]

Those guys fell from the fraud tree and hit every single branch on the way down:

• Created their own, "serious sounding" journal for publication
• Do not disclose the actual device they claim to have been running
• Do not allow independent observation of the experiment
• Experiment is an open system (making it SO easy to fake)
• Making totally implausible claims that would be too much even if it DID work.

Not only have they yet to prove they did any kind of fusion, they also would not produce energy with the process they claim to do even if they were doing it (trans-iron fusion is not exothermic).

And the really stupid thing is that there will be tons of "sceptics" that have no fucking clue about science that will eat up their claims just because they are "anti-established science". Wankers.

You missed one branch: "...they plan to start shipping commercial devices within three months..." So, not only can they not explain how it works, but they're ready to cash in on it.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[rjstanford]

The best part of the common arguments is that they depend on all of Earth's governments being at the same time completely incompetent and corrupt and able to maintain a massive, planet-wide conspiracy at all levels for decades.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[LWATCDR]

Like the 100 MPG car engine that GM is keeping secret or zero point energy. It is all so odd that it boggles the mind.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[tompaulco]

Also, why would UFOs have lights? Wouldn't it be extremely unlikely that creatures from another planet (or even this one) happened to have evolved to develop eyes or some other mechanism of using light as an input source?
Also, why would creatures from some faraway galaxy happen to be approximately 6 feet tall, 180 pounds, have a similar facial structure, two arms, two legs, opposable thumbs and so forth? In other words, out of millions of other species on the Earth, why would they so resemble us? If there are little green men, what are the odds that their size would be within an order of magnitude smaller or larger than us?

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[LWATCDR]

How small will be limited by brain size. So no they can not be an order of magnitude smaller. Also their will be an upper limit because oxygen use and the practical maximum amount in a planetary atmosphere.
Of course this is all based on a carbon oxygen life-form.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[Culture20]

If they claim it can be used to run a car - then you'll be able to write them off without further investigation.

Just like the guy who made the french fry oil powered car engine. Crackpot.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[Anonymous Coward]

- Trans-iron fusion is usually not exothermic. I did the excess energy calculations for the reactions they claim last night, This particular set of reactions is exothermic, i.e. it would produce power if it actually worked.
- Their latest paper was rejected by the journal they submitted because the paper did not have enough specific details of the experiment and they have no clue how it works, which they admit. If you discovered this process, which could potentially be worth billions, would you publish the details? So they made their own website to publish it.
- There have been several reports of independent observations of their experiments. They just don't allow other parties to have the specific details necessary to replicate the reaction itself, see the above point. However, the independent observers have in some cases provided and set up the measuring devices used to demonstrate the energy produced.
- It doesn't really need to be a closed system because it produces so much power with so little fuel. They claim to have run the demonstration for 6 months last year. Now if they do that for 6 months in an independent observers lab, with only measured water in and measured steam out, then it would be a little harder to fake.
- Implausible claims. You got me there. Of course it's fraud. I didn't even think that.

It's odd that they claim they will have commercial devices in 3 months. Usually the snakeoil CF people say 1 year or 2 years, which gives them time to rake in gullible investors. Could someone have actually hit it this time? Who knows.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[shaitand]

You make a bigger assumption than that. You assume a chemical based lifeform that utilizes a system of intelligence similar to ours in the form of a brain.

Even on Earth we know of an intelligence that is substantially different than our brain. Birds have a brain which is substantially different in form and function from mammals. It is possible that there are creatures with intelligence we don't recognize because its form is drastically different from our own. Insects for instance could be far more intelligent than we credit. If you are looking for and expect to find simple behavior you are going to be looking for macro behavior patterns that can be explained with few primitives. Just because you find them doesn't mean there isn't more going on.

If we studied humans like we do ants we might find that our behavior can be simplified to a model of not much more complexity. Especially when you consider that we tend to favor behavior like our own and call it intelligence. For instance, tool usage.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[shaitand]

"Established science has self-correcting methods such that even if some understanding was incredibly wrong, it eventually drifts into correctness."

True enough. But that doesn't make the understanding of established science at a given moment, on a given topic, correct.

Sound logic, combined with the scientific method, will give you the answer that has the highest probability of being correct at any moment. That won't stop you from being wrong, and on a daily basis. It just gives you the potential to lower your probability of being wrong next time.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[shaitand]

This is easy to identify. Skepticism goes both ways. You have to be as skeptical of those who want to discount claims as you are of those making them. By assuming neither stance and acting as if the side which is backed by the most (in quantity and/or quality) evidence is correct you automatically keep a view that is open to change should the evidence scales tip the other way.

Just as science works toward an answer which makes correct predictions with greater consistency and accuracy you will be working toward views and methods of evaluating evidence that provide greater consistency over time.

Re:Bullshit and Snakeoil

[LWATCDR]

As I said it is all based on carbon based life. We have yet to see any none carbon based life so that is all complete conjecture. I am not including AI since electronic based life as far as all our theories go can not arise without being created by chemical based life.
Yes birds have a high intelligence for their size but again that would still put a lower limit on the physical size. An avian that had they physical strength and brain size to build large structures and a technological society would still have a mass greater than one tenth a human's.
To evolve in to a technological society one they would have to harness combustion and smelt metal at some point.
As to insects I would say that you are very far off into wild congecture on to their intellegnece.

Of course I am ruling out the really extreme possibles but I think it is fair work form reasonable assumptions based on physics and chemistry for now. Of course they could have very small probes that are harder to detect but I doubt they would have their head lights on as well.

 

Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[Penguinisto]

I remember (vaguely) some similar claim being made in Utah back in the 1980's (or was 1990s? I forget).

Anyrate, it was hailed with a big amount of hoopla... until no one else could replicate the results. Then the questions came, and the original scientists couldn't provide a single answer.

Last I checked, Mr. Newton still has the last laugh. There was a bit of 'cold fusion' research awhile back that involved chasing bubble cavitation as a source of energy, but otherwise no one seriously (or rather, no serious scientist) chases that particular dream anymore.

Now if a third party can replicate the results, then maybe it's worth looking into, but until then, I think it can be safely filed under "yeah, right - now pull the other one".

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[nido]

nyrate, it was hailed with a big amount of hoopla... until no one else could replicate the results. Then the questions came, and the original scientists couldn't provide a single answer.

Actually other labs did replicate the results, but replication was inconsistent: some labs got it, while others did not.

Slashdot had a story in 2007 about the Naval Weapons Research Lab's cold fusion experiments: Cold Fusion Gets a Boost From the US Navy.

Here's another /. story: 20 Years After Cold Fusion Debut, Another Team Claims Success.

The real problem with Cold Fusion is the implication that Tesla was right: energy is abundant and free to anyone who knows how to harness it. JP Morgan financed Tesla's experiments until his advisors told him about the true implications of Tesla's later work: no need for electric power companies, no need for massive investment in power infrastructure (financed with loans from Morgan's bank), no dividends paid to him by his utility companies. It was simpler to just "fix" Maxwell's Equations to eliminate the unknowns, and just train physicists with the simplified equations.

Remember what Max Planck said: "Science advances one funeral at a time." Wrong ideas die slowly, especially when large sectors of the economy are predicated on a certain understanding of Physics.

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[torgis]

I believe you're referring to Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann's "discovery" of cold fusion at the University of Utah in 1989. They suspended a palladium electrode in a deuterium bath, applied electricity and...stuff happened. Stuff that nobody else could reproduce and for which they had no explanation, that they believed to be fusion at room temperature.

This case was probably one of the earliest lessons in the fallacy of making announces on the internet without first having your research thoroughly peer-reviewed. The press got hold of the announcement and, unchecked, proceeded to announce to the world that power as we knew it was going to change. Alas, no. We remain regretfully fusion-free.

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[mangu]

JP Morgan financed Tesla's experiments until his advisors told him about the true implications of Tesla's later work: no need for electric power companies, no need for massive investment in power infrastructure (financed with loans from Morgan's bank), no dividends paid to him by his utility companies. It was simpler to just "fix" Maxwell's Equations to eliminate the unknowns, and just train physicists with the simplified equations.

Yes, and the same advisors told him about the true implications of Ford's work: no need for horse feed comapnies, no need for horseshoe manufacturing, no need for buggy whip factories.

Free energy, if it existed, would be the biggest economic miracle in all the history of mankind, make no mistake about that. JP Morgan was certainly smart enough to realize that. He was also smart enough to realize that Tesla was a crackpot who had one good idea, three-phase alternate current.

The problem with most of Tesla's ideas is that they were just crazy speculations without any basis in reality, it's as simple as that. Otherwise any investor would be happy to finance him. George Westinghouse, for instance, bought Tesla's patents on AC motors, if electricity could be obtained at lower cost it would allow Westinghouse to sell more motors.

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[denzacar]

Free energy, if it existed, would be the biggest economic miracle in all the history of mankind, make no mistake about that.

Miracle as in "OMG! We can make money out of this! Economic boom FTW!" or as in "OMFG! We are so fucked, everything will now be free! RIP economics, we don't need most of you now."?

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be joking. Maxwell's equations have been extremely well
tested in practice and they _do not_ have any secret parts only known
to the MIB. As a nuke physicist I can say that low energy nuclear
physics has much more unknowns and it may provide
some insight to those results.
 

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[Penguinisto]

Bits and bobs:

The real problem with Cold Fusion is the implication that Tesla was right: energy is abundant and free to anyone who knows how to harness it.

...well, at long as the Sun and all entities like it keep going, anyway. :)

As for the cites, I asked some bits about them w/ your sibling poster, and covered them there. :)

Before you think I'm trying to refute everything you wrote, I just want to say that yeah, Plank was right then, and is still right today. Also, I'm not saying it's impossible... just that some proof and provable reproducibility would be nice.

As for JP Morgan? I suspect that he knew he could make more money selling electric-powered tools and toys than by selling electricity. After all, Edison was already doing just that (the only real diff is, Edison stupidly kept clinging to DC as the means to distribute it).

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[Penguinisto]

You may want to look up Thomas Edison. He made bank by selling electric-powered stuff - and considered electric power generation to be a necessary evil in his business plan.

If he were smart enough to embrace Westinghouse's AC distribution scheme (and were as much of a businessman as an inventor), he would have made even more than the massive pile he made anyway.

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Tesla was a crackpot who had one good idea

Really? What about remote control radio, sparkplugs, establishing the principles of modern radar, Nobel prize nominee, patenting the first instance of VTOL aircraft, reaching the cover of Time magazine, fluent in eight languages, calculating the resonant frequency of the earth, and demonstrating wireless energy transmission as far back as 1891? He may well have been a crackpot but he was an absolutely brilliant crackpot, with many good ideas.

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[shaitand]

"He was also smart enough to realize that Tesla was a crackpot who had one good idea, three-phase alternate current."

And radio waves, and the transformer, and the capacitor, and wireless power transmission. Of course those were just a few of Teslas good ideas which came to fruition. His really good ideas are (officially) untested but theoretically sound.

Tesla wasn't a crackpot and he didn't have any ideas for 'free energy' in the classic sense. The energy was to be produced by normal natural means using generators that Tesla invented, built, and had successfully implemented in massive installations. http://www.teslasociety.com/exhibition.htm

Using a massive stream of energy his (simplified) plan was to send a stream of electricity up to the ionosphere (big lightning). This would ionize the air between creating a highly conductive path of ionized air. Tesla could then send ac current at a particular frequency into the ionosphere and that energy would propagate through the ionosphere and could be picked up by a coil at any point in the world tuned to that frequency.

Essentially, Tesla wanted to use EMF to transfer energy (and therefore information) with almost no loss from wherever it was generated to any point in the world where you needed it. The problem is that to a non-technical listener radio sounds like the same thing, in fact an understanding of radio is implicit to the scheme indicating Tesla is the one who discovered radio first and simply had a different idea of how it should be used.

But there was no 'free energy' in the scheme or even anything involved that isn't sound in theory. Free distribution, and no obvious way to meter usage, but there is no reason it couldn't have been commercialized and eventually provided a medium for global communication that computers would likely be using today. It just wouldn't make Morgan as much money and would cost him more money. Even that assumes that he understood the difference between Teslas idea and radio.

Actually, to some degree the idea has been reinvented in the form of the HARRP project.

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, are you saying that what I learned as "Maxwell's Equations" at school are not correct, and that the "true" equations have been suppressed by a conspiracy of bankers?

Er, citation required?

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[coolmoose25]

The biggest reason that Tesla's investors abandoned him at the end was that he wanted to do wireless power transmission, using the Earth and it's ionosphere as the transmission medium. Using Tesla coils, he demonstrated that he could indeed transmit power wirelessly. Then they asked him how the electricity (that had to be produced at a significant cost) would be metered. When he told them there would be no way to meter it, they abandoned him. If you can't make money off of it, why would you do it was the question the inventors asked. Edison, OTOH, knew that it was ALL about making a buck. That's why Edison is revered today, and Tesla's wild claims and ideas are seen as borderline crackpot science today.

Re:Welcome to Salt Lake City, err, again.

[jwhitener]

Your car analogy doesn't quite work. In the case of Tesla, if his beaming free energy theory was right, there would be no way to charge any money for the power freely floating through the air. In your Ford car analogy, sure, the buggy makers are out of business, but JP Morgan would still be making money selling buggies 2.0 (cars).

No one would finance him if there was no way to sell the resulting product.

The cold fu***?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cold Fusion DEEZ! Come back when you have built a full reactor plant for the plain purpose of just testing the process out.

Can't be cold fusion yet...

[JazzyJ]

"...the experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31"

Well since the power gain was only 31, it can't possibly be cold fusion.

When they hit '42'....let me know....*goes back to sleep*

Re:Can't be cold fusion yet...

[s0litaire]

They need to add a nice cup of tea...

Re:Can't be cold fusion yet...

[fishexe]

Cold fusion is not based on the principle of infinite impossibility. Duh.

Re:Can't be cold fusion yet...

[fishexe]

Cold fusion is not based on the principle of infinite impossibility. Duh.

s/impossibility/improbability/g

Maybe I've had one too many pan-galactic gargle blasters since I last read those books.

free copper!

[tverbeek]

Finally someone figured out a way to synthesize copper, so people can stop stealing it from the plumbing of abandoned buildings in Detroit.

The question is how to get rid of all that extra waste energy it releases... Maybe we can shunt it into space somehow?

Re:free copper!

[Culture20]

Finally someone figured out a way to synthesize copper, so people can stop stealing it from the plumbing of abandoned buildings in Detroit.

The question is how to get rid of all that extra waste energy it releases... Maybe we can shunt it into space somehow?

No joke. AGW folks will go nuts when they find out we're not just making greenhouse gases, we're making heat!

Re:free copper!

[Anonymous Coward]

You would of cource use it to grow weed.

Re:free copper!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is a joke, troll. Most people who are concerned about global warming are smart enough to understand what a power plant is.

Re:free copper!

[TheRaven64]

You joke, but it's actually a serious problem. If this device is real, then at the rate it consumes fuel any house can easily have a constant supply of 10kW with the current model, maybe 100kW in the near future. That's a lot of waste heat to dispose of. Writers like Clarke and Niven have pointed out that this is a problem that any advanced society encounters.

Re:free copper!

[moonbender]

No big deal, if electricity is free we'll just leave the fridge open all day every day! Instant planetary cooling!

Re:free copper!

[zAPPzAPP]

Let's try sending all that waste energy to mars. It's pretty cold there, so there is room for a lot of that stuff. Send some people with it, to make sure the energy gets properly disposed off.

Re:free copper!

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to see my future house, city, car (running on free electricity), all verde gris.

Re:free copper!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've gotta say: sometimes I think some posts here on ./ are more deserving than their "score: 3 (funny)" indicates but this is the first one where I've ever thought that the arbitrary 5 limit should be increased. "Get rid of extra waste energy" had me literally (and I mean literally literally, not figuratively literally) rolling on the floor - mein Gott, man, this one deserves a 7 at least :-)

I'm SO excited . . .

[MarkvW]

It is the salvation of mankind! It is the end of poverty.

Uh, haven't I been here before?

Produces copper?

[ebcdic]

Did they weigh the copper wires to the electrodes before and after?

Re:Produces copper?

[imsabbel]

Fully open system, they did even let the steam escape.
So if they really HAD done fusion, they would have radioactively contaminated their whole building.

Re:Produces copper?

[davev2.0]

That assumes the water, and thus the steam, becomes radioactive.

Re:Produces copper?

[daid303]

So if they really HAD done fusion, they would have radioactively contaminated their whole building.

Don't worry about this. With these claims they might as well develop superpowers because of that.

Re:Produces copper?

[iceaxe]

Rossi has specifically stated that 'cold fusion' is not what is going on.

There's a lot of misinformation in the comments here, and in the slashdot post title. Go figure.

Go read this

Kudos to another poster for that link.

It is an abomination!

[Anonymous Coward]

The tab for the article is showing up as "Italian Scientists Demons.." in google chrome. I think this truncation explains it all.

No ..

[AstroMatt]

No. Free. Lunch.

Re:No ..

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no no no. Free lunch!

Re:No ..

[Ant P.]

Well if it's real, the price of NiMH rechargeable batteries will probably skyrocket as people stockpile Nickel for these things...

I, for one, ...

[Tanks*Guns]

Io, per esempio, il benvenuto ai nostri signori fusion italiana

There's a 'Primer' joke in here somewhere

[Kratisto]

They later found that a stopwatch placed inside the box ran for about 1300 times longer than the time elapsed outside the box.

Re:There's a 'Primer' joke in here somewhere

[SuricouRaven]

After attempting to send a laboratory mouse into the box, the engineers agreed never to speak of that test again.

Re:There's a 'Primer' joke in here somewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

It runs down parabolically. *Cue eye-roll*

Although I did really like the movie...

Re:There's a 'Primer' joke in here somewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

1301, it was always odd.

Re:There's a 'Primer' joke in here somewhere

[martin-boundary]

Also, in a later experiment, they put in a mechanical spider, and out popped a tiny Sam Carter. What's up with that?

Point out the obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

University of Baloney. Nuff said.

Leave it to the Italians

[JackSpratts]

Steve jobs or no, if they can shove one of those into an iPad I might just break down and buy one.

Game analogy

[jack2000]

Fusion is the Duke Nukem Forever of the physics community.

Re:Game analogy

[Nameisyoung007]

Fusion is the Duke Nukem Forever of the physics community.

So we'll finally have it on May 3rd?

Re:Game analogy

[gaderael]

Um, Duke Nukem Forever has a release date now, May 3rd, 2011.

Re:Game analogy

[cbope]

Except that we may actually see DNF this year...

Re:Game analogy

[mdm-adph]

Just like we'll eventually see fusion power, but not until long after everyone stopped waiting and moved onto other things. Get it?

Re:Game analogy

[jack2000]

It had a release date before too, several in fact :D

Re:Game analogy

[Quiet_Desperation]

As others have said, that joke doesn't fly anymore thanks to Gearbox software.

I hereby introduce the "fusion is the Half Life - Episode 3 of the physics community" meme.

Re:Game analogy

[UnknowingFool]

Fusion exists. Any star is an example. Here on Earthy physicists have been able to replicate fusion. The problem is that they have not been able to sustain fusion for long periods of time. I think the record these days is measured in minutes. The fusion itself is not self-sustaining and requires more energy than it produces. Also fusion that scientists have been able to replicate are most similar to the sun in that they are high temperature involving plasma. Cold fusion has always been the elusive unicorn.

Re:Game analogy

[oobayly]

I thought it will be released on the 32nd of March.

Re:Game analogy

[SuricouRaven]

It's had release dates before. They came, they went. Maybe this one will be it, but, given the game's history I wouldn't put money on it.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

So... we'll have balls of fusion after 12 years?

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusion is the Duke Nukem Forever of the physics community.

In that it'll be here in May?

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

DNF is coming out 3 May 2011. Are you saying this "Cold Fusion" is real?

You might want to pick a different analogy

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

So, we'll get it this year?

Re:Game analogy

[jack2000]

Ok, viable fusion(including cold).

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

So we're going to get Fusion in the beginning of May this year?

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

That means fusion is only two months away!!!

Re:Game analogy

[Locke2005]

You know what they say: practical fusion energy is just 20 years away! It always has been 20 years away, and always will be 20 years away!

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

pwned.

Re:Game analogy

[orange47]

they forgot to mention 2011 is in hex

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

It has every once in a while. The same way that CF is once again "just around the corner" with this "discovery".
GP's analogy works perfectly until someone actually sees either CF or DNF released.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusion is possible; just not financially feasible (since the energy needed to do fusion outweighs the energy returned, so it's not beneficial). You probably mean cold fusion because that is the white whale which the results are beneficial.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

So there are now two competing theories as to the near-existence of Duke Nukem Forever:

A) The universe will end before the release.
and
B) Like the LHC, a series of implausible accidents will culminate in DNF not being released for causal reasons.

Personally, I am hoping for B. Although I will not be able to enjoy Duke's one-liners, I think it is safer for everybody concerned.

Re:Game analogy

[brainstem]

OK, so Bitboys Oy then.

Re:Game analogy

[Toze]

I think you mean May 26, 2009.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.

Re:Game analogy

[ByteSlicer]

You might want to take a look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-97N6jNKb4

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. All we have to go on is their own words on their own website. I'll believe it when I see two other institutions replicating it. Besides some basic temporal problems and going against known physics, we all have been burned too many times to finally believe that such a thing truly exists as Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

exactly...

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Cold fusion is a recent comer to the Duke Nukem franchise. Hot (Tokamak) fusion has been a player for generations. The catch phrase is 'we are only 50 years out...' and the phrase has been around for over 70 years. Hot fusion, flying cars, men colonizing Mars and all of the other planets, you name it, its all part of the 'we are only 50 years out...' plan.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

That was a misprint. The real release date is scheduled for 12/22/2012.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, Duke Nukem Forever has a release date now, May 3rd, 2011.

So has cold fusion, it"s in the summary: end of 2011, so December 31st at the latest.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Than this fusion system must work!

Re:Game analogy

[mozkill]

Sounds sorta like the "nuclear Iran" theory. Since 2003, they have been 1 year away from Fission.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

I see that you haven't yet noticed that Duke Nukem Forever's announced release dates are always in the future.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

I will believe it when I can buy it in a store.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, Cold Fusion has a release date now, May 3rd, 2011. [completebullshit.url]

Re:Game analogy

[noidentity]

Duke Nukem Forever has had release dates for the past decade, just as fusion has had for decades.

Re:Game analogy

[gaderael]

Yes, that is very true, but it's a new company releasing it now. The same guys that did Borderlands. There have already been playable demos this last year.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Energy Crisis Averted!

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

So does fusion, apparently. These guys say they'll be selling commercial units in 3 months (which puts it remarkably close to the Duke Nukem Forever release, actually.)

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Related: Hell is getting a bit chilly.

But really, I believe they just trashed the game and made a new one, and gave it that name just before telling it's almost ready. Also, I believe that's not enough to trick the universe.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't think that will hold up... they need to keep up the title "Duke Nukem (wait) Forever".

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, Duke Nukem Forever has a release date now, May 3rd, 2011.

If DNF is released, surely the end times must be upon us!!!

Re:Game analogy

[LongearedBat]

I really wish that could apply to fusion too.

Re:Game analogy

[tragedy]

Interesting. Actually, the fusion we produce here on earth is not that much like what happens in the sun because we can pretty much only achieve it economically using Tritium and Deuterium, whereas stars like the sun are overwhelmingly made up of regular hydrogen. The prominent reactions in our sun, the proton-proton-chain reactions, involve regular hydrogen atoms combining and seeding additional reactions with their byproducts. The reactions we humans produce on earth are pretty much all tritium-deuterium reactions because they're easy and release lots of energy.

The big problem with solar style fusion working for us is that the sun is very dense compared to terrestrial matter (around 150X the density of water at its core) but has an energy output per unit volume about the same as that of your typical compost heap. It still has tremendous energy output, but that's because it has so much volume. If we could make a fusion reactor that replicates the suns core conditions (temperature and pressure) in an area 20 meters on a side (close to a 7 story building) it would weigh about 1.2 billion tons and produce around 2.2 Megawatts. That's not a lot of power for something that weighs a good six times more than the city of Manhattan. It would only run about a 5000th of Manhattan, for example. Not to mention that it would take more energy to compress and heat up than you could get out of it in any realistic working lifetime.

So, when we try to do fusion on Earth, we have to do a _lot_ better than the sun.

Re:Game analogy

[Culture20]

You know what they say: practical fusion energy is just 20 years away! It always has been 20 years away, and always will be 20 years away!

So we need a way to extend power cables 20 years into the future (or past, depending on which us you're considering).

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

As does cold fusion, according to this article.

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Well duh, and so does cold fusion - 3 months!

Learn to read summaries, noob!

Re:Game analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

BRILLIANT. So we're getting cold fusion at around the same time I'm guessing?

It's University of Bologna!

[roman_mir]

All you need to know is that this research comes from the esteemed University of Baloney.

Re:It's University of Bologna!

[bugs2squash]

University of Bologna (UNIBO) looks to be a bone-fide establishment, and if so, why can't it bring some serious academic analysis to bear on this experiment (even if it has to invite expertise in from the outside). I suspect this "team" will prove to have little if anything to do with research at that university.

Here's how you'll know if someone invents...

[A beautiful mind]

...cold fusion or any similar energy generating scheme: one day you'll notice that they'll offer to sell large companies electricity at half the market price.

Re:Here's how you'll know if someone invents...

[vlm]

...cold fusion or any similar energy generating scheme: one day you'll notice that they'll offer to sell large companies electricity at half the market price.

That market is too highly regulated. Now if they start squirting out refined aluminum for less than what other companies pay for their electric bill... Also "free energy" means infinite ammonium based fertilizers, watch that market too.

Re:Here's how you'll know if someone invents...

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 to this. If I invented cold fusion, I would shut up and start selling electricity at market price, in large quantities. Once it was unavoidably obvious what I was doing, I would write a book, and buy up the large energy distributors with the combined proceeds (which would probably be suffering due to the ensuing market readjustment).

Re:Here's how you'll know if someone invents...

[roc97007]

...or GE will buy them out and you'll never hear of it again...

Einstein figured out what gravity was.

[Anonymous Coward]

"For instance, I think nobody has been able to explain gravity;"

Actually, Einstein figured it out. It is the warping of space caused by an object. Actually any object warps space somewhat for small objects, the warping is infinitesimal. For a very massive object such as a black hole, the warping is very great. Of course, this is a vast oversimplification but most of us here are not astrophysicists.

Re:Einstein figured out what gravity was.

[chichilalescu]

let's be honest. Einstein gave us a very nice theory, but (so far) nobody can fit his theory with quantum physics. and quantum physics works. and unless you fit your gravity theory with quantum physics, you can't claim to truly understand gravity.

Re:Einstein figured out what gravity was.

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

Actually, Einstein figured it out. It is the warping of space caused by an object.

Great. What's space?

We use it to mean a coordinating medium (everything is within "space" and so, all being contained in the same area, they interact instead of passing through each other). Why is that warpable? Does the space have an equivalent of mass or energy (volume perhaps) that would have to be conserved, and if so, where is it going? If it doesn't have any such inertial equivalent, why does space only warp in the presence of mass--if physically speaking, there is no incentive not to warp?

He gave us an idea, but it's not an explanation until certain key questions are answered.

Re:Einstein figured out what gravity was.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, this was not Einstein's idea, but Clifford's

Re:Einstein figured out what gravity was.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the warping of space caused by an object. Actually any object warps space somewhat for small objects, the warping is infinitesimal. For a very massive object such as a black hole, the warping is very great.

All you’ve really accomplished by that is you’ve mapped the problem out of polar into Cartesian coordinates.

Granted, you’ve moved gravity from a complex 3-dimensional problem into a nice linear one where space is flat and gravity just makes things move “down”. But you’re still left with the question, why?

Re:Einstein figured out what gravity was.

[quetzalblue]

> Great. What's space?

Hmm, lets see. If TIME is what the physicists invented to keep everything from happening all at once, then SPACE must be what physicists invented to keep everything from happening all at the same place. There, problem solved. ;-)

Re:Einstein figured out what gravity was.

[bucky0]

Umm.

Quantum physics works, and general relativity works (both are experimentally verifiable to all kinds of accuracy).

The problem is you can't write a theory of one in terms of another.

Re:Einstein figured out what gravity was.

[chichilalescu]

That was kind of my point. The two theories don't fit, therefore we can't really say we understand either class of phenomena.
I would say we understand something if we can predict the outcome of any experiment, but with gravity, there are experiments where we don't know what will happen.
I think Zen-Mind was talking about the reason why a certain term appears in an equation, rather than a solution for the equation in certain parameter ranges (which we can obtain because some terms are very small and we ignore them). And this probably means a unified theory.

Over 100 years ago

[gstrickler]

The US Mint been fusing nickel to copper for over 100 years.

REDEEECULOUS

[Ancient_Hacker]

Reedeeculous.

The real test of cold fusion would be detecting neutrons, LOTS of them if they were getting kilowatts of heat. I'm too lazy to calculate again how many neutrons, but it's certainly enough to fry everybody in that room.

You'd think after Pons and that Margarine guy made the same dumb mistake, not claiming scads of neutrons, these guys would patch up that hole.

Re:REDEEECULOUS

[Anonymous Coward]

Reedeeculous.

The real test of cold fusion would be detecting neutrons, LOTS of them if they were getting kilowatts of heat. I'm too lazy to calculate again how many neutrons, but it's certainly enough to fry everybody in that room.

You'd think after Pons and that Margarine guy made the same dumb mistake, not claiming scads of neutrons, these guys would patch up that hole.

Doesn't that depend on the fusion reaction in question? DD fusion releases neutrons. Does PNi fusion?

Re:REDEEECULOUS

[jrvz]

There should be radiation, but not necessarily neutrons. I'd be very interested in a gamma spectrum from this device. That should tell us which nuclear reactions are taking place, though not necessarily why (e.g. how the catalyst works).

Re:REDEEECULOUS

[ceoyoyo]

Strangely, not all fusion processes produce free neutrons.

Money making machine

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA "Krivit also noted that Rossi has been accused of a few crimes, including tax fraud and illegally importing gold, which are unrelated to his research."

So, my guess is that we got all wrong. The machine works. But it was designed to generate money instead of energy. I also like the part:

"reactor seems similar to a nickel-hydrogen low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) device originally developed by Francesco Piantelli of Siena, Italy, who was not involved with the current demonstration. In a comment, Rossi denied that his reactor is similar to Piantelli’s, writing that 'The proof is that I am making operating reactors, he is not.' "

Yeah. making money reactions.

This again?

[Drakkenmensch]

Independant replication or it didn't happen.

Has it been independently verified?

[davev2.0]

No? Then, I don't believe it.

I seem to remember a similar claim from the late 1980s and the fallout from the claims.

Yes, of course!

[VincenzoRomano]

That's important also for Mr.Berlusconi. Cold fusion.

Hoax.

[Anonymous Coward]

This ain't be published in "Hardware" but in "Idle" ./

Is it already April 1st or what?

where is the profit in lying?

[craftycoder]

It hardly matters how it works. It only matters that is does work. Smarter people can then go about figuring out how it works. Let these people make the investment in a factory to build these machines. The DoE can buy one can test it. If it takes nickel and hydrogen and energy and makes copper and 31*energy, then we can all retire or join the United Federation of Planets. Otherwise we are just out a few thousand dollars; money that otherwise would have been spent to kill brown people for Jesus in a foreign land. We are all better off no matter what how it turns out!

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[dcollins]

"where is the profit in lying?... we are just out a few thousand dollars"

Answered your own question, and quite efficiently. I nominate you to provide the few thousand dollars.

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[highacnumber]

No. This is a fraud, and by sending these jokers any money you only encourage more fraud in the future. At most it might make sense to try to replicate their results, but please don't give the perpetrators any money.

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[Anonymous Coward]

It hardly matters how it works. It only matters that is does work.

[Replication Needed]

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[Idarubicin]

where is the profit in lying?

...The DoE can buy one [and] test it...

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you just answered your own question there. Particularly if you substitute "DARPA, DoE, UK MoD, and a whole alphabet soup of agencies and utility companies" for just "DoE". Even if it doesn't work at all, they get the revenue from all those sales -- and they're set for years if they can sucker just one of those agencies into an ongoing research program.

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Profit in lying?

Well, you can get millions in startup capital from gullible investors, that is pretty good motivation.

Look at how many millions (billions?) that the fake "vaccines cause autism" paper in the Lancet generated.

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, did you read your own answer? the profit in lying is in getting retarded people to lobby their governments to buy these reactors. i highly doubt they'd sell just one machine to a foreign government especially when they can't secure a patent. they'll do a convincing demonstration to a few "evolution-is-a-myth" and "omfg-global-warming" congressmen, then sell a nice million dollar package of salt-water and tin-foil reactors. by the time the thing makes it through the bureaucracy to get installed and tested the "scientists" will have made a few hundred deals with other companies touting how US bought their product. even if US never pays them they will have successfully sold a few hundred bridges.

hype, rinse, repeat, profit.

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[AchilleTalon]

And it is not to tell him his: "money that otherwise would have been spent to kill brown people for Jesus in a foreign land." is the other part telling us about the profit of lying. So, in conclusion, it doesn't matter what is your lie, as long as there is profits.

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh? Do you propose assisting a Nigeria Prince provided he only ask for "a few thousand dollars"? Science is not some lottery with random chance of success, it is either correct or not correct.

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[craftycoder]

The investment in their factory to manufacture these machines will be more than the cost of a single unit.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/profit
Look it up, it's a cool word.

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[craftycoder]

If they are building a factory and mass producing these things, as they claim, then they must believe they work. They would be investing a lot of money in tool manufacture to get the factory pumping out units. If they really do it, the device almost certainly works to some degree. Lenders are not stupid (recent events in the mortgage industry aside) so they will only finance it if it works and if these guys are fraudsters motivated by making money, building a factory isn't the profitable way to start.

This is all much ado about nothing until the product is in the Sharper Image catalog. When it is in there though, I'll read the reviews at Amazon and then I'm going buy one. If this is all a fantasy of a deranged mind, then who cares anyway?

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[craftycoder]

I think you are missing the point of the story. It is SO FANTASIC a tale that to test it out will be very easy and therefore very cheap.

Every once and a while people stumble onto fantasic advances. No reason to ignore it completely when a trivial inspection can verify it.

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[Anonymous Coward]

investment money for a new pool, retirement security, etc. Snake oil is a profitable commodity.

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[Eil]

Typically, people who knowingly publish rigged demonstrations or papers (especially in the field of energy generation) are going after private and government grants. What they do after they have the grant money varies, but I suspect that most of them have successfully deluded even themselves that they can make their crazy physics-bending ideas work if only they could find a way to quit their day job to work on them full time.

And even after they've had decades to show that their idea has merit, they will often argue until their death that they're only 2 years or so away from changing the world. A little sad, really.

Re:where is the profit in lying?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they are building a factory and mass producing these things, as they claim, then they must believe they work. They would be investing a lot of money in tool manufacture to get the factory pumping out units. If they really do it, the device almost certainly works to some degree. Lenders are not stupid (recent events in the mortgage industry aside) so they will only finance it if it works and if these guys are fraudsters motivated by making money, building a factory isn't the profitable way to start.

Here's a free clue: when an alt-energy scammer SAYS they are building a factory and will be hitting mass production Real Soon Now, they may not be telling the truth! Imagine that!

Especially if the next words out of their mouth are a pitch to get you to invest in their factory. You're right that large lenders aren't usually stupid enough to pour lots of money down this type of hole without doing due diligence first, but this kind of scam is built on bilking small, naive investors out of their retirement funds on the promise that they'll get rich by investing in something revolutionary.

Re:no?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Most certainly no. If someone thinks I'm wrong, then the remedy is obvious. Have the machine reviewed by a lot of people. If Stephen Hawking, Phil Plait, and Paris Hilton all say it works, then I'll believe it too.

Fusion or Fission, it ain't making copper.

[jbeaupre]

I don't totally buy that it is making copper. It could be true, but unlikely. A few things to consider:

Nickel isotopes have high nuclear binding energies. Ni62 has the highest binding energy. Very tough to get a nuclear reaction that produces power out of Ni, impossible from Ni62. Reactions with Ni62 are endothermic.

Copper has 2 stable isotopes. The rest don't last long. Cu63 and Cu65 are stable.

The Ni is ether absorbing or emitting a particle. Ni62 and lower seem like poor candidates. Wrong side of the tracks.

Ni64 could become Cu63 from some sort of fission, but would also be endothermic.

Evil Energy Companies

[Kaziganthi]

Obviously the energy giants are combining forces to defame the scientists and destroy the technology. What a weekend, Duke Nukem Forever and Cold Fusion both confirmed!!!!

Cold Fusion and Myth of Mormons Putting Out

[IgnacioB]

Why am I having the profound sense of dejavu? I suddenly feel like I'm 20 years younger....wandering around Salt Lake City for the elusive Mormon tail at University of Utah.....reading the newspaper about Cold Fusion discoveries. Wait, it was a hoax then. I wonder if it is now? If not....maybe this time I'll finally succeed in doing the deed with a hot college Mormon and flimsy moral standards. ;)

Re:Cold Fusion and Myth of Mormons Putting Out

[Locke2005]

30 years ago my college roommate actually succeeded in deflowering a "hot college Mormon", then dumped her. So she started dating his frat brothers (like me). One very confused young woman!

Re:Cold Fusion and Myth of Mormons Putting Out

[Anonymous Coward]

The trick to bedding Mormon chicks (and other fundamentalist types) is to convince them that you can be discreet. If they're sure that they won't get caught -- that they can maintain the facade of chastity -- they will be happily bouncing up and down like a coked-up sorority girl in no time.

Re:Cold Fusion and Myth of Mormons Putting Out

[Anonymous Coward]

You dated his frat brothers?

Re:Cold Fusion and Myth of Mormons Putting Out

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, don't make him feel uncomfortable about his sexual orientation - this *is* the 21st century, after all.

Maybe, maybe...

[enterix]

If you recall initial reaction to Albert Einstein papers... Scientific community is very cautious about new discoveries.

On the other note... reading that article it looks like even inventors do not really understand how that work, which is interesting. If that really is fusion, maybe scientific community should retest that in lab as a peer review, instead of rejecting it at the spot. Maybe they are on something... crossing fingers... I want one of those for my lab :))

excellent

[roc97007]

Hopefully it's repeatable this time.

Re:excellent

[mdsolar]

Looks like it was repeatable last time http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BarnhartBtechnology.pdf

the evidence against it is...

[dAzED1]

So, lots of folks saying both that cold fusion is impossible, and that it would be marked by particular types of activity that were obviously not present in this experiment.
Apart from the internal inconsistency there, perhaps a bit of that cliche', "thinking outside the box" crap is in order? Maybe we just think this experiment is bogus because it doesn't happen the way we think it won't (which sounds silly to say, but is what people are saying...)?
My money is on bogus too, but at some point - while we're already admitting we have no clue either - we have to acknowledge that the answer might end up being something completely unlike that which we were expecting.

Some lousy alchemists there!

[Anonymous Coward]

So they're transmuting nickel into copper, while nickel costs almost 3 times as much compared to copper... that won't make them a profit! Anyway, even if they'd master cold fusion, that wouldn't get them any closer to the whole 'lead to gold' profit-model.

yeah, but...

[Thud457]

they claim to be far along in the process of commercializing their invention.
Since this purportedly releases radiomination, I'd feel a lot more comfortable if they bothered to develop some understanding of what's really going on before selling their gizmos to any gullible Thomas, Richard and Harold who will then radiominate the unsuspecting public.

Re:yeah, but...

[Culture20]

they claim to be far along in the process of commercializing their invention. Since this purportedly releases radiomination, I'd feel a lot more comfortable if they bothered to develop some understanding of what's really going on before selling their gizmos to any gullible Thomas, Richard and Harold who will then radiominate the unsuspecting public.

No worries. It's impossible for them to radiominate anyone.

Re:yeah, but...

[damnfuct]

I got irradiominated and the doctor said it shaved at least 3i years off my life.

*super sad face*

Re:yeah, but...

[Culture20]

I got irradiominated and the doctor said it shaved at least 3i years off my life.

Bonus! When you can't imagine anything any more, you know you have 3 years left.

Re:yeah, but...

[ElizabethGreene]

>> I got irradiominated and the doctor said it shaved at least 3i years off my life.

Time to get real.

Extraordinary Evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw the science debate. A working device qualifies as extrordinary evidence. If they are shipping commercial devices in 3 months it should not be impossibly difficult to get ahold of one; try it for a while and see what it does.

This especially in light they claim it has already been in production for *two years*. If they can't produce a prototype for whatever reason when they are shipping commercially in a quarter with mass production in a year they are full of it.

A little investigative work would go a long way...they supposedly have another company working on mass production. Understanding who that is and the terms of their arrangements would be revealing.

Obviously it would be particularly awesome to find out where their devices have been used for two years and get some background on that. This would seem to me to be the most direct method of revealing any fraud if it exists.

A Hoax

[rolfc]

Obviously it is a hoax. How can anybody claim that 101 degrees Celsius is cold?

Re:A Hoax

[fishexe]

Obviously it is a hoax. How can anybody claim that 101 degrees Celsius is cold?

I'm a pot of boiling water below sea lever, you insensitive clod!

Pay attention!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is from the University of Bologna.

That is, Baloney University.

Clearly, it is on the cutting edge of baloney. some of the best baloney out there.

What are the guys at the U. of Pastrami up to?

University of Bologna! Oh the irony.

[Logger]

Someone call the Onion they missed the scoop!

Start saving nickles!

[Anonymous Coward]

Save your nickles boys and girls.

Apart that cold fusion wasn't claimed

[SmallFurryCreature]

The scientists did NOT make the cold fusion claim, this was added later. Frauds or not, they can't be blamed for not doing cold fusion if they never claimed to do that.

Here come the environmentalists

[alta]

They're going to be bitching about how hydrogen and nickel are non-renewable, and how this raises the temp of water, which kills the fish ;)

Just kidding. Skeptical, but hope it's true.

Scientists are seriously pursuing it

[soren100]

until no one else could replicate the results. ... but otherwise no one seriously (or rather, no serious scientist) chases that particular dream anymore.

This is simply not true. There are many scientists who were able to get similar results -- Navy researchers got a paper published in Naturwissenschaften in 2007, and reported further significant results in 2009 .

As a matter of fact, the American Chemical Society hosted a 2-day conference on the subject at their 239th meeting last year in San Francisco.

"Years ago, many scientists were afraid to speak about 'cold fusion' to a mainstream audience," said Jan Marwan, Ph.D., the internationally known expert who organized the symposium. Marwan heads the research firm, Dr. Marwan Chemie in Berlin, Germany. Entitled "New Energy Technology," the symposium will include nearly 50 presentations describing the latest discoveries on the topic. ...

"The field is now experiencing a rebirth in research efforts and interest, with evidence suggesting that cold fusion may be a reality." Marwan said. He noted, for instance, that the number of presentations on the topic at ACS National Meetings has quadrupled since 2007.

What happened is that to avoid the seemingly near-religious 'skepticism' displayed yourself and others, the actual scientists working on the subject had to refer to their results as "anomalous heat" and refer to the field as "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" (LENR) to avoid controversy.

So while you are busy deciding if anyone is replicating the results or if the field is worth looking into, a great deal of serious scientific effort has gone into the field for the last 20 years.

Re:Scientists are seriously pursuing it

[Anonymous Coward]

That "Navy" paper is, frankly, a piece of crap. It has no hard data, just a couple of microscope pictures. Around half their citations are for their own papers. There is no real development of either the experimental setup, experimental results, or theoretical models. And of course, Naturwissenschaften is a somewhat respected publication in the field of biology. Why would you publish a Physics paper in a Biology publication?

As for the "significant results in 2009", all I see is a news piece on a conference talk. Where is the article?

Note that these "anomalous heat" experiments are happening in chemistry and chemistry only, because that is the only place where an "anomalous heat" could come from. Chemical reactions. Not from actual nuclear fusion, which requires you to overcome an absurdly strong potential barrier, so strong that even in the high pressure and temperature you see in stars the reactions happen only through the tail of the energy distribution.

You made some quite extraordinary claims there. Please, back them up with extraordinary evidence. Actual evidence, not a 4-page letter without any real information and with a cycle-jerkoff of citations.

Re:Scientists are seriously pursuing it

[Penguinisto]

Couple of questions and bits:

1) Why would a *biology* journal publish physics work?

2) From your 2009 "significant results" cite:

Despite their claim to cold fusion discovery, the Fleishmann-Pons study soon fell into discredit after other researchers were unable to reproduce the results.

...err, I said pretty much the same thing, and it refutes your own assertion that what I said wasn't true. Que?

3) As for ascribing motives to me, let me help out a bit: Personally, initial skepticism in the face of discovery is always warranted until proven otherwise - it's how science is supposed to work. I think it's cool that the Italian team got something, but until/unless others can do the same thing at least halfway reliably, it'll remain not much more than an academic chemical curiosity.

Re:Scientists are seriously pursuing it

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Why would a *biology* journal publish physics work?

The wikipedia entry on Naturwissenschaften says that it's focus is 'interdisciplinary' natural sciences, which include physics and chemistry. Wikipedia does not state that it's a "*biology*" journal.

2) There were some initial failures in replicating the Pons-Fleischmann experiments. Later on there was much success after the reasons for the early failures was worked out:

Independent laboratories have duplicated all of these methods, and the reasons for failure when using commercial palladium metal are now understood. The reason for the failure while using commercial palladium is that the required properties of the palladium are neither uniform, nor easily duplicated. Only rare pieces of palladium, which do not crack when reacted with high concentrations of deuterium, are suitable. Apparently, having very fine particles of a suitable material is another essential condition for this phenomenon to work.

3) The initial failures by some teams to replicate the results did support initial skepticism, but the success of others to replicate the results and the discovery of the reasons for those initial failures has shown that the initial skepticism to be totally unfounded. There is *something* there -- exactly what that is has yet to be worked out.

Your statements that scientists are not pursuing this field is what is being disproven. There is plenty of work in this field yet to be done, but the work is being done.

Re:Scientists are seriously pursuing it

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry man, but take a look at its entry at Springer, then tell me with a straight face that you see an interdisciplinary journal. Actually, while you're there, click "About" and see what the journal says about itself. Okay, let me quote it here:
Collection
Biomedical and Life Sciences

Subjects
Life Sciences
Life Sciences
Environment

Doesn't sound so interdisciplinary, does it?

Re:Scientists are seriously pursuing it

[timbo234]

"1) Why would a *biology* journal publish physics work?"

'Biology' is a mistranslation. The word Naturwissenschaft literally means 'natural sciences' and means any science dealing with the natural world - eg. biology, physics and chemistry, as opposed to social science (Sozialwissenschaft), the arts/humanities (Geisteswissenschaft) and other branches of science.

http://www.springer.com/life+sciences/journal/114 makes it clear that this journal deals with physics too.

Still open-minded scepticism is the way to go until there are independently verified results.

Fantastic

[Yvan256]

All I need is their cold fusion device, hydrogen and a five cents.

Curve of Binding Energy

[PvtVoid]

Nickel is on the wrong side of the curve of binding energy: energy is released from elements heavier than iron by fission, not fusion.

Snake.
Oil.

Re:Curve of Binding Energy

[mdsolar]

Be a little careful. You need daughter elements that end up higher on the curve for fission to be exothermic. You can not say that tearing off a proton would be exothermic because one of the daughters, the proton, ends up a the bottom of the curve. Actually, adding protons remains exothermic for quite a ways along the curve. Adding alpha particles does not.

That's what you get...

[Foske]

Of course cold fusion was to be expected any time soon now Duke Nukem Forever will be released...

Translation:

[Locke2005]

Focardi and Rossi is Italian for Fleishman and Pons.

copper plus metal "X" = energy

[cmiller173]

I'm probably not the only geek around here that is old enough to have this bring back memories of the Skylark series by E.E. "Doc" Smith, but there are probably not many.

Re:copper plus metal "X" = energy

[aiht]

I'm probably not the only geek around here that is old enough to have this bring back memories of the Skylark series by E.E. "Doc" Smith, but there are probably not many.

I'm ashamed to admit that I had not thought of the connection, but I wholeheartedly agree.
Well spotted!

Re:copper plus metal "X" = energy

[tehcyder]

I'm probably not the only geek around here that is old enough to have this bring back memories of the Skylark series by E.E. "Doc" Smith, but there are probably not many.

You can still read his books today, even if you're only ten years old., you know.

Amish heaters

[wcrowe]

Although the reactors can be self-sustaining so that the input can be turned off, the scientists say that the reactors work better with a constant input.

Hmmm. I'll bet. So does my toaster oven. I wonder if these guys also make "Amish" space heaters.

Re:Amish heaters

[fishexe]

Although the reactors can be self-sustaining so that the input can be turned off, the scientists say that the reactors work better with a constant input.

Hmmm. I'll bet. So does my toaster oven. I wonder if these guys also make "Amish" space heaters.

You mean like a wood-burning stove?

Re:Amish heaters

[wcrowe]

No, I'm talking about one of these:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/garden/12amish.html

Which is actually no better than any other $20 space heater, but claims to lower your energy costs.

anti-philosopher's stone

[Scooter_Libby]

According to this website nickle has a spot price of ~ USD 11.8 per pound and copper has a spot price of ~ USD 4.36 / pound. http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/nickel_historical_large.html http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/copper_historical_large.html So _if_ this works, it is a type of anti-philosopher's stone: converting an expensive metal into a less expensive one.

Re:anti-philosopher's stone

[rjstanford]

Well, to be fair, its converting a more expensive metal into a less expensive metal and a lot of heat. After all, most people would pay more for coal than for soot too...

Ni to Cu in a Copper Tube

[Alanbly]

Anyone else notice that they are claiming to "produce copper" using Ni in a Copper tube as proof? Seems to me that there's an easier explanation for the copper produced than fusion.

Shame on you!

[fishexe]

...for raining on our geek-parade with your "facts" and "history" and such!

Re:Shame on you!

[nschubach]

Stupid "History" and "Facts"... They always get in the way of me doing something unique.

Re:Shame on you!

[fishexe]

Stupid "History" and "Facts"... They always get in the way of me doing something unique.

Yeah, I would be a world-famous inventor if all those fuckers hadn't invented my shit first.

Methinks you are reading out of context.

[brennanw]

SuricouRaven isn't saying that perpetual motion can be done, you're parsing the sentance wrong. Read it this way:

"Cold fusion isn't a theoretical impossibility (like perpetual motion). It can, in principle, be done."

In other words, OP is making a distinction between cold fusion and perpetual motion. Perpetual motion is an impossibility, cold fusion is at least in THEORY not impossible.

The sentence could have been parsed better so I can see how you misread it.

Lying or Not-Lying

[bill_mcgonigle]

They could have accidentally made a Nickel-Hydrogen battery. A remarkably efficient battery, which itself is pretty useful, but until they provide some concrete evidence that fusion is producing the majority of the power output here (e.g. a high fast-neutron flux), other methods of power production are more likely.

Assuming the device actually works, of course.

If they're not lying, they have a production device that's been heating a factory for two years, presumably on a single 220VAC circuit. To do that with a battery would require an incredible amount of deception (sneaking in every night to re-charge it) and an incredible battery.

I think that reduces the scope of the open question to "they're lying", or "they're not lying."

Re:Lying or Not-Lying

[rjstanford]

Not to mention that said incredible battery would be a) more acceptable, and b) extremely valuable, so they probably don't have one of those.

Besides, its not 'free energy.' It takes power and nickel, and returns power and less nickel. Huge difference from claiming to take in power and return more power.

Calm down, it's just the drugs

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

"The reactors need to be refueled every 6 months, which the scientists say is done by their dealers."

Yeah my dealer comes round every 6 months too and fuels me up, but holy shit if they're seeing cold fusion I want whatever they're getting.

the man who mooned Hitler

[Thud457]

goddamned time-travelling trolls are the worst kind.

Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, not Cold Fuston

[maroberts]

I note they claim its not "cold fusion" but a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction device

Whilst sceptical, I do however ask myself if it is a fraud, why are they doing it? They're fully aware that any claims of producing energy from such a system will be subject to intense examination and a high degree of scepticism.

Pons and Fleischmann remain a laughing stock nearly 2 decades after their cold fusion announcement, so to make a claim in this field definitely requires Balls of Steel and a willingness to stake their reputation on the outcome.

Stars fusion stopps at Iron

[Script Cat]

I had the impression that stars stop fusing elements at Iron. After that fusion was an energy loss. All of the heavyer elements we see today are the result of the supernova expolsion after a star dies.

Also. Nickle has two stable isotopes. One with 30 neutrons the other with 36 neutrons. Copper has two stable isotopes one with 34 neutrons and the other with 36 neutrons. if they fused Ni with H there would be no additional neutons from the hydrogen which is just a single proton. If the fusion occured the resulting copper with 30 or 32 neutrons would quickly decay. Copper would not be the by product noticed from the reaction.

This is just another electro chemical reaction or some kind of hocus pocus scam.

Re:Stars fusion stopps at Iron

[Script Cat]

Whoops Nickle has 30 or 32 neutrons. point still valid.

Re:Stars fusion stopps at Iron

[mdsolar]

There are no protons available as a fuel in the core, so it is alpha particle fusion that sets the iron limit. You can keep on going for a bit with protons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_burning_process

What does it mean if it is true?

[JoeSchmoe007]

Can someone seriously explain in a simple terms what this means if it is true? From what I understand - cheap(er) energy/electricity? Just how much cheaper that what is available now?

BS Factor=100%

[Anonymous Coward]

The addition of protons to any nucleus from iron upwards is endothermic. Nickel is heavier than iron, so it's not possible to have a net gain in energy.

As soon as a heavy star begins to make iron in its core, it collapses into a supernova because there is no outward pressure from nuclear fusion.

Re:BS Factor=100%

[mdsolar]

Not so. It is the addition of alpha particles that is endothermic. You can keep going with protons for a bit. They are just not present as an available fuel in the core. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_burning_process

Re:no?

[toastar]

Most certainly no. If someone thinks I'm wrong, then the remedy is obvious. Have the machine reviewed by a lot of people. If Stephen Hawking, Phil Plait, and Paris Hilton all say it works, then I'll believe it too.

Paris Hilton???!?!?!!!?

Re:no?

[dex22]

She decides what's hot and what's not.

Re:no?

[Zediker]

that was just to see if you were paying attention. ;)

Doh!

[jbeaupre]

I should have used mass instead of binding energy for fusion (lots of nickel isotopes, so tried to take a shortcut). My information was correct, but conclusions wrong. I looked at mass for fission, so was at least half right.

Sorry.

A problem on our hands

[BurfCurse]

OMG, what are we going to do with all that copper!?

Is the human body a type of cold fusion machine?

[Magic Twinkles]

So this is probably a dumb question, but, here we go anyway.

Is the human body a type of cold fusion machine?

Think about it. We intake food as fuel, that we convert to energy or store as fat. Is it possible that we produce more energy than we consume? We need very few calories/fuel to function, and the daily output of the human race is enormous. I know we use a lot of external resources from the earth, but the human body very efficient.

the tell-tale quote

[Anonymous Coward]

“We are arrived to a product that is ready for the market. Our judge is the market. In this field the phase of the competition in the field of theories, hypothesis, conjectures etc etc is over. The competition is in the market. If somebody has a valid technology, he has not to convince people by chattering, he has to make a reactor that work and go to sell it, as we are doing.”

In other words, this is so awesome that we don't care to share the knowledge with anyone since we can just sell a product now. Since, a working reactor with a scientific description would undoubtedly win a Nobel prize and the researchers would be famous, one can conclude one of two things from their quote. Either, (best case scenario) they are bad scientists who got excited about getting rich rather than being diligent about their research, or (worst case) they are charlatans who are knowingly trying to rip-off investors and so are keeping the 'science' of it secret.

My bet is on the latter.

mod parent up

[tempest69]

I'd mod you up if I could. rocking observation.

At this point...

[coldsalmon]

At this point, I just ignore Slashdot posts about cold fusion -- except, of course, for the time it takes to tell everyone that I ignore them.

Just make sure to keep one eye closed...

[ridgecritter]

that way, you can confirm your observation.

Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of fudgepacker 12-yo modded this down? Too young to remember all the stupid cold fusion ploys of the past 20 years? Or too busy working on your Digg comment thread on why Republicans suck while listening to Sigur Ros?

Let's translate videos a little bit for 'ya

[ashmikuz]

Professor Levi from UNIBO, that helped settle up the experiment, says that probably there is some new physics that are involved in the experience, and even them have only a theoretical explanation of what really happens inside the machine. The machine itself is under patent, that's why we don't know anything of its insides. Besides from that, at the experience attend (as an example) prof Paolo Capiluppi, member of italian institute of nuclear, director of Physics dept of Bologna, some sort of role at LHC. So we're not talking about some drunk people that pretend to have solved all our energetic problems. The fact that they aren't disclosing data is a shame, for me, but as long as they are researching on their own without money from university and stuff, they can do whatever they want with their work. Think we need an English version of videos for people to get less skeptical about this.

Re:Let's translate videos a little bit for 'ya

[rjstanford]

The machine itself is under patent, that's why we don't know anything of its insides.

Taken by itself, that's one of the most absurd single sentences I've seen on /. And that's saying a lot.

Greens won't like this one bit....

[jameskojiro]

To Quote a Famous Greenie Paul Elrich: "Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."

Hey Billy, here is an AK-47, try not to fill the neighbor's cat full of holes and play nice now ok....

Keeping the dealers in bidness...

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA: "The reactors need to be refueled every 6 months, which the scientists say is done by their dealers."

'Psst, hey, you lookin' to score? I got some nickel bags here all ready to heat you up, my man...'

Cold Fusion Atomic Bomb ie. Copper Bomb!!!

[jameskojiro]

So take a bunch of Nickel and powerize it and pack it into a casing then use a C-4 powered injector to inject the Hydrogen gas into the powderized Nickel at supersonic velocity.

Ka-Blooey!!!! And you don't have to fiddle around with refining Uranium.....

Plus none of that pesky fallout.....

This is the last thing the world needs...

Re:Cold Fusion Atomic Bomb ie. Copper Bomb!!!

[Greyfox]

I think I've been watching too much Mythbusters, because that sounds fun whether or not the reaction in question is nuclear.

Energy Shortage, Copper Shortage, SOLVED!!

[jameskojiro]

If this does end up working then these guys have solved two major problem concerning our technologic society in one fell swoop.

But eventually we will run out of Nickel and will have to mine Asteroids which contain... Nickel!!!

Yay! I hope this is true....

It's a bloody flux capacitor!

[Anonymous Coward]

they've invented the flux capacitor! ... just sayin.

No peer review and and invitation-only press

[mschaffer]

Rossi and Focardi are taking cues from Fleischmann & Pons.

Just need repeatable results, not a theory

[hcg50a]

I call BS.

For every nickel atom converted to copper, you need about 4 additional neutrons to make stable copper (they state there is no left over radioactivity). Where are those coming from? Those are probably harder to get than shoving the single proton into the nucleus, which is hard enough!

Not plausible. But repeatable results by independent investigators is always plausible. And they don't have that either.

Re:Just need repeatable results, not a theory

[Aelcyx]

Didn't see the whole video yet, but in the beginning it is mentioned that nickel takes on a hydrogen nucleus to become copper. If this is indeed happening, it's possible it's affecting only one isotope within the nickel sample, so couldn't go from 62-Ni to 63-Cu? Would there be leftover radioactivity this way? (I'm not a nuclear physicist)

What's Next?!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, to recap our top stories from the last week, we have P=NP, and cold fusion.

Sayeth the prophet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lisa! In this house we obey the laws of thermo dynamics!!!

I use ColdFusion every day

[StuartHankins]

Pfft... it's no new thing. See all the CFM files in this folder?

Either withholding evidence or illiterate

[Anonymous Coward]

Since raising the temperature of water by 80C and converting it to steam requires about 12,400 W of power

Actually, you can do it with 1 W of power if you're willing to wait longer.

I distrust summaries of "science" where the authors apparently can't distinguish the difference between power and energy.

English Translation

[Panaflex]

Here's the same video with English subtitles

Click on CC mark to show subtitles.

CharlieBeach

[CharlieBeach]

It really doesn't matter if it works or not, the world's economy will not allow it work. Oil and the world's economy are so intertwined, that if this were to actually work, it would have ramifications across the globe. It would not happen overnite, but the way technology progresses, in a few years, our need for oil will be drastically reduced. Actually, it would not be just oil, any other energy source would potentially be affected. It's great that there are people out there trying to develop new energy sources, but it's really futile at this point. Again, the world's economy will allow it to progress.

Re:CharlieBeach

[CharlieBeach]

I was typing to quickly. My last line should read, "Again, the world's economy will not allow it to progress."

It works best when pugged into the net

[Sla$hPot]

"Although the reactors can be self-sustaining so that the input can be turned off, the scientists say that the reactors work better with a constant input."

Of cause it runs better on electrons from your local power plant.

Anyone who doesn't believe cold fusion is possible

[gestalt_n_pepper]

should meet some of my ex-girlfriends.

Here's Why That "Scam" Sign Won't Stop Blinking

[crunchygranola]

What these guys claim to have discovered is a nuclear reaction heretofore unknown to science.

What a scientist does when discovering something like this (or if they truly think they have) is to set up a closely controlled demonstration of the phenomenon that carefully documents the physical conditions, and all of the measurable evidence associated with the reaction.

Turning nickel into copper? Amazing! Forget all the boiling water stuff, the commercial power production claims, etc. - lets just see a reproducible experiment of nickel being turned into copper on any scale. They don't even need a theoretical explanation - a good experiment opens the door to theorists galore. Theorists love unexplained experiments - that are real.

Was high temperature superconductivity ignored because there was no theory that explains it (and there still isn't an adequate one)? No!

A few points

[meerling]

This would be great, but let's face it, without independent verification, it's like Harry Potter 12, people want it, but it's not likely.

I like how they say they've been using a unit to heat a factory for two years, but won't identify the factory, much less let it be examined. Just like the alien spaceship I keep hidden in my secret vault, but I can't tell you where lest the aliens get mad at me...

Even if it's fake, they'll sell a few units in 3 months, if they actually do ship on time.

As to them not being able to describe the physics involved in the process, that's not so strange. Unfortunate, but feasible. There have been many discoveries throughout history that the discoverers didn't understand until much later, but that never stopped anyone from taking advantage of them. I'm glad they didn't try to use some scientific technobabble double speak to try and say that "something" is happening and this is how it usually occurs "this way" but not with our process and we really don't know what's going on here. There have been plenty of others that have done that in the past.

Wonder how small a complete unit that can power a decent quality car would be. That would be really nice.

Open loop instead of closed... They are going to have to fix that before anyone will take them seriously.

bunk

[Dr. Tom]

We already went over this on Fark, it's old news. In TFA, they say (waving hands) that the reaction works BETTER when there is a constant input of energy. If they had a sustainable reaction they could plug the output into the input BUT EVEN THEY SAY they can't do this. They need constant input. This is clearly a major red flag. Also, they are only accepting "serious requests" from "investors willing to purchase" ... This is a load of horse turd from some charlatans. tl;dr, troll 0/10

Ummm...

[denzacar]

Exactly which part of "making the bank" was based on creating free electricity out of thin air?

Re:Ummm...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the part where he sold all the stuff that used that "free electricity". ;)

Duke Nuke 'em...

[phorwich]

... forever. Is it more likely than cold fusion? I mean, both are theoretical, promise good things for mankind, and have a spotty past filled with false promises and dashed hopes. I am guessing we see a Duke sequel before we see a perpetual energy source, but that's me looking on the bright side.

Except that Fusion beyond Iron is a Energy Sink

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusing elements heavier than Iron is an energy Sink not a source of of energy. It takes more energy to fuse heavy elements then the energy releases. This is why Stars that run out of light elements burn or or explode (supernova).

Text from Article:

Krivit also noted that Rossi has been accused of a few crimes, including tax fraud and illegally importing gold, which are unrelated to his research..

Re:Except that Fusion beyond Iron is a Energy Sink

[mdsolar]

That is the case for alpha particles, but you can go on from iron quite a ways exothermically when adding protons.

Once upon a time . . .

[sfarber53]

a fellow named Edison found 10,000 things that didn't work before he found just one that did.

Think about it.

Umm, really?

[dskoll]

I'm not a physicist, but I dimly recall that elements with a lower atomic number than iron release energy via fusion while elements with a higher atomic number release energy via fission. Since nickel's atomic number is 28 (iron's is 26) and copper's is 29, surely you have to add energy to convert nickel to copper?

Aha! According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_capture, "Nuclei of masses greater than 56 cannot be formed by thermonuclear reactions (i.e. by nuclear fusion),". Copper has an atomic weight of over 63.5, so this is snake-oil.

Re:Umm, really?

[mdsolar]

You might want to read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rp-process

Sounds like a lot of Bologna!

[Anonymous Coward]

...

do you see calorimetry there? I don't.

[swschrad]

you could just as well claim it's an infinite power gain, or an infinite power loss. any number is unproveable. to me, it looks like they're trying to make gin.

add in no neutrons, no detectors, and no theories, and it's basically a news event to try and whip up some quick funds. this time, instead of government agencies, it's sales of prototypes to the masses. quick, buy the address lists of the Nigerian scammers, there's your target audience.

Pennies

[pseudorand]

This is great news! All that extra copper will drive down the price and a penny will no longer cost more than $0.01 to produce. It may only have a small impact on the federal budget deficit, but every little bit helps.

If I had a nickel...

[Godskitchen]

If I had a nickel for every time I heard about a new "working" fusion reactor.... well, if this thing does actually work, I would be rich!

Time to take out a loan and invest in nickel futures! ;)

Already debunked by esowatch

[crabel]

The german consumer protection portal esowatch has already written an article about them highlighting the dubious history of Mr. Rossi and linking several articles that debunk the claims. http://esowatch.com/ge/index.php?title=Focardi-Rossi-Energiekatalysator

Re:no?

[Sulphur]

Most certainly no. If someone thinks I'm wrong, then the remedy is obvious. Have the machine reviewed by a lot of people. If Stephen Hawking, Phil Plait, and Paris Hilton all say it works, then I'll believe it too.

Does "Its Hot" mean "it works?"

Sheldon reactor

[roger_pasky]

Maybe It has been mistranslated and they are talking about Sheldon Cooper

How to invest in this technology

[Genevish]

DEAR SIR, CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSAL HAVING CONSULTED WITH MY COLLEAGUES AND BASED ON THE INFORMATION GATHERED FROM THE NIGERIAN CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY, I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO REQUEST FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE TO TRANSFER THE SUM OF $47,500,000.00 (FORTY SEVEN MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS) INTO YOUR ACCOUNTS. THE ABOVE SUM RESULTED FROM AN OVER-INVOICED CONTRACT, EXECUTED COMMISSIONED AND PAID FOR ABOUT FIVE YEARS (5) AGO BY A FOREIGN CONTRACTOR. THIS ACTION WAS HOWEVER INTENTIONAL AND SINCE THEN THE FUND HAS BEEN IN A SUSPENSE ACCOUNT AT THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA APEX BANK. WE ARE NOW READY TO TRANSFER THE FUND OVERSEAS AND THAT IS WHERE YOU COME IN. IT IS IMPORTANT TO INFORM YOU THAT AS CIVIL SERVANTS, WE ARE FORBIDDEN TO OPERATE A FOREIGN ACCOUNT; THAT IS WHY WE REQUIRE YOUR ASSISTANCE. THE TOTAL SUM WILL BE SHARED AS FOLLOWS: 70% FOR US, 25% FOR YOU AND 5% FOR LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL EXPENSES INCIDENT TO THE TRANSFER. THE TRANSFER IS RISK FREE ON BOTH SIDES. I AM AN ACCOUNTANT WITH THE NIGERIAN NATIONAL PETROLEUM CORPORATION (NNPC). IF YOU FIND THIS PROPOSAL ACCEPTABLE, WE SHALL REQUIRE THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENTS: (A) YOUR BANKER'S NAME, TELEPHONE, ACCOUNT AND FAX NUMBERS. (B) YOUR PRIVATE TELEPHONE AND FAX NUMBERS -- FOR CONFIDENTIALITY AND EASY COMMUNICATION. (C) YOUR LETTER-HEADED PAPER STAMPED AND SIGNED. ALTERNATIVELY WE WILL FURNISH YOU WITH THE TEXT OF WHAT TO TYPE INTO YOUR LETTER-HEADED PAPER, ALONG WITH A BREAKDOWN EXPLAINING, COMPREHENSIVELY WHAT WE REQUIRE OF YOU. THE BUSINESS WILL TAKE US THIRTY (30) WORKING DAYS TO ACCOMPLISH. PLEASE REPLY URGENTLY. BEST REGARDS

Re:no?

[Anonymous Coward]

this is not cold fusion... this is fusion on a scale small enough to be cooled with water.

That's exactly what cold fusion is: fusion on a scale small enough to be operated at near-room-temperature. Since the product of fusion is heat, yes, that obviously means you have to cool it, genius.

Another patent system foulup - the other way.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Call me when it's repeatable in more than 2 other labs please.

Unlikely any time soon (even assuming it works just fine).

They applied for a patent. The Italian patent office demanded that they provide a scientific theory to support their claimed mechanism before they'd consider granting the patent (rather than just patenting the design and claims).

To get scientists to reproduce it in the lab and (if it works) come up with a plausible theory, they'd have to disclose all the engineering (including all the ingredients of the "secret sauce"), without patent protection. And the scientists will not be interested unless they can in turn publish them with their own results. So if it does work the whole world will be racing them to market with their own design but without their development and research costs.

So (they say) they're keeping their process a trade secret - to the point of shutting it down when one of the observing scientists, in violation of the agreement, switched his gamma detector from count to energy-histogram mode (which would have given him details on what was going on inside the device.)

So maybe they're crooks. Or maybe they're just some engineers who got it to work repeatably and practically without a full and correct model of the physics. But don't hold your breath waiting for somebody in a couple labs to come out with a replication. That seems unlikely unless/until some physicists reinvent it.

And with the dominant paradigm, after the original cold fusion flap, being that "there's nothing behind the curtain", efforts on reproduction will likely be few and underfunded unless/until they DO ship a working product.

Even as claimed that would work.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Call me when they can attach a generator to it, hook the output up to the input, and keep it running by just putting in cold water and getting steam.

For the mode they claim to be demoing and intending to ship as the first model, there's enough heat at a high enough temperature that you could use considerably less than all of it to drive a heat engine and generator to get the excitation.

They also claim they can run it both much hotter and/or in a mode where the run-time excitation requirements are absent - but that they're demoing it and promising first product in this mode because it's easier to keep it under control and safe, while still beating the economics of an electrically-powered heat pump by a factor of several.

Re:Even as claimed that would work.

[DavidTC]

For the mode they claim to be demoing and intending to ship as the first model, there's enough heat at a high enough temperature that you could use considerably less than all of it to drive a heat engine and generator to get the excitation.

I didn't say to call me when they calculate they could do that.

Call me when there's actually a box somewhere, unconnected to a power supply, where you can feed in water or metal or whatever, and get out power.

Re:Even as claimed that would work.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I didn't say to call me when they calculate they could do that.

Call me when there's actually a box somewhere, unconnected to a power supply, where you can feed in water or metal or whatever, and get out power.

The engineering of the remainder of a system (heat engine + generator) is sufficiently well understood (for well over a century) that I wouldn't require them to actually construct it to be convinced that they had a real device (or a VERY good fake). I'd be happy if the basic demo of a core heat generator could be run at the rated power and input long enough, with honest instruments, to demo that it's really doing something beyond oddball chemistry and would run long enough to more than pay for its construction.

If you won't be convinced unless somebody actually builds the closed-box system that's a mesaure of your personal standards of proof, trust in the instrumentation, or understanding of heat-engine physics.

"Advanced magic IS indistinguishable from a rigged demo."

Re:Even as claimed that would work.

[DavidTC]

The engineering of the remainder of a system (heat engine + generator) is sufficiently well understood (for well over a century) that I wouldn't require them to actually construct it to be convinced that they had a real device (or a VERY good fake).

Um, yes, 'a VERY good fake' being the operative other option.

Until I see an actual unconnected box that can supply power in exchange for something, and do so for long enough that batteries would not have done it, I don't believe it, period. No ifs, ands, or buts. It must do that.

There have been way too many fakes, way too many things that seem to work but inexplicably only work for ten minutes (because they used batteries) and other such nonsense.

Incidentally, where the hell are the italics in this new view? They do realize they can't strip them out, we've been using them to quote things this entire time, right?

And if it DOES work...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Of course, the better way to go about this would perhaps have been to send detailed plans and experimental records to colleagues at other universities and ask that they try to replicate it.

Then if it DOES work:
  - the physicists work out the mechanism
  - their competitors work out a better design
  - and their business plan is toast.

If they were just scientists trying to get their names recognized and grants and tenure this would be fine. But they claim they've got a marketable product, they apparently don't understand the physics of it well enough to be sure there isn't some variation that's orders of magnitude more competitive, and the patent offices won't grant them patent protection until after the physics is worked out (and even then it wouldn't cover later improvements or unrelated designs by others).

So don't hold your breath waiting for them to destroy their own business by leaking the trade secrets to satisfy academics' curiosity. If they really DO have something and DO ship it, the market will likely reward them. Then the physicists will have the hints needed to work out the physical processes behind it eventually.

And if it's all just a scam the device will never be deployed and we can all continue hunting for something that DOES work.

Oh FFS dumping on the ghost of Tesla again

[dbIII]

Ignore Edison spending truckloads of money to turn Tesla into the poster boy for mad science and then the furthur subversion of that turning him into a mythical being. He was a real human being pushing at the limits of his field and there is no reason to make him look either mad or supernaturally all knowing simply because he thought things were a little different to what later researchers found over time. A permanent lightning storm at the antipode of Tesla's oscillator would have been one known nasty side effect but that wasn't really clear until later. Besides, the stuff he developed that we use all the time is even weirder (Earth return sounds pretty much like magic if it isn't described carefully, then there's radio).
"Free energy" is of course all over the place but it's not free to get to it. One old column in Scientific American told you how to use the electrical potential difference between a kite in fine weather and the ground to move a little motor made from a couple of sheets of polyvinylacetate. It's not supernatural, but it's not much per unit area and it's not so easy to use it. Now take that and consider if somebody had only just discovered the ionosphere - that's what Tesla was getting excited about. You don't get things right all of the time moving into the dark from the cutting edge.
The second thing is that you don't find out if stuff is real or not by unrelated stuff in a similar field (eg. putting up that the navy is also doing stuff), but instead by trying exactly the same stuff to see if there are external factors or even if people are lying. There have also been some truly spectacular frauds over the last couple of decades.

metal tube

[Anonymous Coward]

What was the metal tube made from in this demonstration?

Re:What's got 4 Walls and a Woof?

[skila]

One of the first experiments at Bologna was the attempt to transmute metal into gold, which ultimately failed. Fortunately the experiment produced a number of pink fleshy tubes joined together at the ends and smelling faintly of pig. Unfortunately, the university mascot ran off with the links and the students were never able to repeat their experiment for others, so Bologna remains to this day more famous for it's university than it's meaty creations, or it's ability to repeat experiments.

Hoax???

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean it did take place at the University of Bologna......

Excited - like in a cartoon.

[WhipItGood]

Not sure whether to call Pons and Fleishman or Phineas and Ferb.

What is the present value of uncountable money?

[HornWumpus]

Take your conspiracy theories at face value.

What would the asking price be?

GE couldn't afford it.

Re:no?

[gfolkert]

She decides what's hot and what's not.

But... wait... it it works? It should be *hot*!

Problems holding back science...

[Paul Fernhout]

Two slashdot posts by me on general problems with research and peer review:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1932134&cid=34740048
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1932134&cid=34740098

Others stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour
"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/?pagination=false
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."

http://www.webscription.net/p-236-kicking-the-sacred-cow.aspx
"Galileo may have been forced to deny that the Earth moves around the Sun; but in the end, science triumphed. Nowadays science fearlessly pursues truth, shining the pure light of reason on the mysteries of the universe. Or does it As bestselling author James P. Hogan demonstrates in this fact-filled and thoroughly documented study, science has its own roster of hidebound pronouncements which are Not to be Questioned. Among the dogma-laden subjects he examines are Darwinism, global warming, the big bang, problems with relativity, radon and radiation, holes in the ozone layer, the cause of AIDS, and the controversy over Velikovsky. Hogan explains the basics of each controversy with his clear, informative style, in a book that will be fascinating for anyone with an interest in the frontiers of modern science."

One hopes that eventually science is self-correcting, but can that sometimes take centuries?

Vapourware

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, sounds like vapourware to me.

I believe!!!

[celtic_hackr]

I believe them, because I've created a perpetual motion machine. It's really simple, I repeatedly say "LOOK! What the HELL is THAT!" and when everyone looks away I give it another push!

PV/Renewables vs. Cold Fusion

[Paul Fernhout]

"We remain regretfully fusion-free."

Except for cheap solar power from the fusion plant in the sky (the sun) with widespread USA grid parity from PV expected by many in the next few years. :-)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
    http://www.abc.net.au/rn/saturdayextra/stories/2008/2169588.htm

One big thing I see about this demo, if is it true, given the continuing progress of solar/wind/etc and batteries and energy efficiency, is that cold fusion could power advanced vehicles like flying cars or ion-drive spacecraft. Or even mobile robots. Rocketry might be the biggest beneficiary though, and we might start seeing trips to the Moon becoming common in a decade or so and the beginning of space habitats? Once we are on the Moon again, we can mine H3 for other fusion techniques.

Mining on Earth for nickel can still be ecologically disruptive, and it is not clear how much nickel is needed in practice for each generator even if only a small part of it fuses (is the rest poisoned or can it be reformed?). I'm not sure of the relative impacts of nickel mining per watt vs. renewables though, and renewables themselves take mining of various sorts for the materials. I'd think the ecological advantage would be in favor of the cold fusion though, at least as far as using up ready supplies of nickel?

Socioeconomic implications of cheap energy

[Paul Fernhout]

I posted to this to Andrea Rossi's website, and I'll post it again here in case that site ever goes down (with some added links and some typos fixed):
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270

January 22nd, 2011 at 11:33 AM

Andrea-

When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made their original cold fusion announcement, I sent them a copy of the book "Midas World". It is a collection of science-fiction short stories by Frederik Pohl on some of the socioeconomic implications of cheap fusion energy. It includes a funny satirical story called "The Midas Plague", originally published in 1954. Wikipedia has a page on the book, which reads in part: "... in this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the 'poor' are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, so that the 'rich' can live lives of simplicity." In that imaginary world, only the "rich" get to have small homes, to eat plain food, and to work a lot both to help other people and to tend their small gardens; the "poor" are condemned to living in mansions, to eating vast amounts of fancy food, to being entertained endlessly, and they are not allowed to do meaningful work for others or themselves -- all to make an old-fashioned scarcity-based economic model still work out in an age of cheap energy. :-)

In the last chapter of the book, there is a section quoted from the inventor's diary on his bitter disappointment about how humankind used his invention. He had hoped cheap fusion power would liberate humanity for a life of contemplation, creativity, or even just loafing around (see also Bob Black's essay "The Abolition of Work"). But instead that fictional world ended up with "a snowmobile in every driveway ... and a dune buggy plowing up every patch of sand".

The inventor said he was shut out by large corporations etc. from advocating positive ideas about the social issues relating to his invention of cheap fusion energy, and his aspirations for humankind's social uplift. While he got a lot of money from the patents, the cheap energy soon made everyone rich in material terms, and so being financially obese did not mean much anymore. Fortunately, even though the inventor was pessimistic, humanity did expand into space habitats eventually in that fictional world (given room in the solar system for quadrillion of people in habitats built from asteroidal ore), and one could hope such a human proliferation (or even better robotics and AI) would bring some wider social diversity along with time for reflection by some individuals on a healthier relationship between consciousness and the universe.

I'd recommend reading that book just for some general insights into the social and economic side of cheap energy (and some laughs for stressful times). As it is a satirical novel, I'm not saying its predictions are going to be 100% true (I sure hope not), but it is a useful cautionary tale to read none-the-less. James P. Hogan's hard sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" is another good book on a similar topic, about the collision of a society rooted in scarcity assumptions with a society built around abundance assumptions and cheap energy.

In reality, there are many non-paying activities most people would like to do more of, things that take a lot of time. These are essentially voluntary things, like to be a good friend, to be a good neighbor, to be a good parent, to be a good caretaker for sick relatives, or to be an informed citizen. I hope material abundance through cheaper energy and other innovations could make it more possible for people to have time to do those essential humane tasks as well as people want to do them; people may otherwise be prevented from doing those things well by the need to work just to get a basic subsistence income (even as meaningful productive work itself can be a very good thi

Re:Socioeconomic implications of cheap energy

[godefroi]

I'll see your "Midas World" and raise you one "Star Trek".

See? It's easy.

Re:Socioeconomic implications of cheap energy

[c6gunner]

you're an idiot.

I would have gone with "lunatic".

Re:Socioeconomic implications of cheap energy

[Paul Fernhout]

Great point!

penny wise and ft-lb foolish ...?

[Anonymous Coward]

What, no penny wise and ft-lb foolish jokes. Come-on people. The setup is perfect.
  copper penny... oh yeah, pennies are not copper anymore, young wiper-snappers.
 

3 months...

[Anonymous Coward]

3 months... April... I see where this is going

thanks for the insights

[nido]

I ran across one of your posts a few months back. I'd been thinking about the 'abundance problem' for a couple years now, and appreciate your eloquent take on the situation.

If I had a mod point, I'd give a +1. :)

Re:thanks for the insights

[Paul Fernhout]

You're welcome. Thanks for the comment. I've been refining the message. I hope the meme continues to propagate and others adapt it for local circumstances and their own unique style. James P. Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear is one big source of that meme for me. Marcine Quenzer was influential too:
    http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
As was Doug Lisle:
    http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
And others (Gerry Pournelle to an extent with his "Survival with Style" essay, lots of other writers with a bit here and there, including Theodore Sturgeon and "The Skills of Xanadu"). So I'm just standing on the shoulders of giants. :-)

BTW, if you like Edgar Cayce, how do you feel about Herbert Shelton, Joel Fuhrman, and Blue Zones?
    http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/shelton.bio.bidwell.htm
    http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
    http://www.bluezones.com/

The Flexner Report (by Abraham Flexner, in conjunction with the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations) is where things really started to go wrong with US medicine, as someone with success doing hands-on stuff with K-12 education tried to apply it to medicine where it was less appropriate since prevention, infrastructure, and complex psychology/spiritual issues are more important for wellness:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
Ironically, now we have hands-on treatment focused medicine, and abstraction-oriented K-12, mostly just the opposite of how it should be...

More on that from one perspective:
    http://www.sntp.net/fda/piper_griffin.htm
"In the meantime, while doctors are forced to spend hundreds of hours studying the names and actions of all kinds of man-made drugs, they are lucky if they receive even a portion of a single course on basic nutrition. Many have none at all. The result is that the average doctor's wife or secretary knows more about practical nutrition than he does."

More on how medical and other research has gone wrong in the USA (another post I made to this story):
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1964112&cid=34989572

If this cold fusion thing does work out (or even if it does not), these issues may help explain why it (as well as alternative medicine) encountered so much resistance. Still, I hope things may have improved somewhat from the days of Ignaz Semmelweis:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Re:thanks for the insights

[nido]

My introduction to the Flexner Report was 100 Years of Medical Robbery. I don't read mises.org anymore, but that piece is still memorable. I also recommend the followup, Real Medical Freedom.

Read a summary of Voyage from Yesteryear - it sounds interesting. Thanks.

Herbert Shelton, Joel Fuhrman, and Blue Zones?

Not familiar with any of those, sorry. I've read your links, and I have heard of Natural Hygiene before. I had something like lupus, and diet didn't make a difference. From my study of the Cayce material, I decided that I needed to go to an Osteopath, and that was quite helpful for my specific case. The second chapter of Spontaneous Healing has the best introduction to Osteopathic Medicine that I know of. (Most used book stores have a copy - google's preview snips the first page of that chapter. boo, hiss, boo.) Donna Eden's approach to Energy Medicine is also rather successful, and learn-able.

thanks again. :)

-jjk

Re:What's got 4 Walls and a Woof?

[mug funky]

"metal into gold"

EUREKA! this gold is metal!

And here we have...

[holophrastic]

yet another way to boil water. You just got to wonder what an outsider would be forced to think, watching us spend billions of dollars, hours, and years, and so much innovation to find new things, only to do the same thing with it -- boil water again.

Although, I must say, I do like asian teas. Maybe that's the only goal -- to steep tea.

Cold Fusion == more tea.

Still not sure about the rate of credibility?

[Krigl]

There's tried and true scientific measure for this stuff, Crackpot Index. Count score for yourself:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

Of course, measure is a little outdated, e.g. the founding of a scientific magazine for the publishing of your work is not rated, which is really a shame, hopefully the author will work it into some future version.

prrof of fusion/fission would be emitted radiation

[kubitus]

Physical review quotes the energies emitted by Cu59 by Positron decay as 0.343±0.004, 0.463±0.010, 0.872±0.005, 1.305±0.005, and 1.70±0.01 Mev, with respective relative intensities of 16±3, 15±5, 29±4, 36±4, and 4±2%. The half-life of Cu59 was measured to be 81.5±0.5

If you want to proof its nuclear, get out your low-energy radiation detectors.

Re:no?

[Kalriath]

For Cold Fusion, I'd imagine "that's hot" means it isn't working would it not?

Question marks

[AP31R0N]

Question marks mark questions.

Finally!

[Compulawyer]

Now where did I put my Flux Capacitor? I could swear I left it right next to the DeLorean ....

Alchemy!

[DarthVain]

YES! After extensive study and plumbing the depths of knowlege I have discovered the arcane secret to transmute gold to lead! ...

Wait... Oh DAMMIT!

Re:no?

[c6gunner]

Right, because you're going to convert water into steam with a refrigerator.

What really happend in '89

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really want to know what is going on, don't follow the news, follow the money. Read the document mitcfreport.pdf and then ask your government officials to launch an investigation in to the misconduct at MIT that has stifled progress in a promising source of primary energy.

From

Why “MIT and Cold Fusion”?

by Eugene F. Mallove, Sc.D.

MIT Class of 1969 (Aero/Astro Engineering ‘69 SB; ‘70 SM)

Chief Science Writer, MIT News Office 1987-1991

http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/mitcfreport.pdf

"The truth about the calorimetry experiment performed at MIT in 1989 under DoE contract funding (DoE Contract DE-ACO2- 78ET51013) is stark and unambiguous. Its purported “negative” result was used to influence the U.S. Department of Energy’s rushed 1989 report against cold fusion. In alphabetical sequence, it is the very first report cited in the U.S. DoE’s ERAB (Energy Research Advisory Board) Cold Fusion Panel report of 1989. Some would characterize the data manipulation in the sixteen author MIT paper of 1989 as mere “data fudging.” We do not mince words: the use of improperly handled scientific data to draw in the public mind and in the mind of the scientific community a completely false conclusion about an emerging discovery of overarching importance to humankind is high-level scientific misconduct, plain and simple." ...

“Inappropriately manipulated” is actually a very charitable way of describing what was done. We do know, however, that this erroneous study in the spring of 1989 at the MIT Plasma Fusion Center was defended by then Plasma Fusion Center Director Ronald R. Parker. ...

For several years after leaving the MIT PFC, he was stationed at the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in Garching, Germany. Since 1989, the U.S. Government has funneled billions of dollars into magnetically confined thermonuclear fusion development on projects, such as ITER.

NOTEs:

          1. As of 13 July 2010, the total price of constructing the experiment is expected to be in excess of € 15 billion.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#cite_note-21] Only a year earlier that estimate was € 10 billion.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#cite_note-23] Prior to that, the proposed costs for ITER were € 5 billion for the construction and € 5 billion for maintenance and the research connected with it during its 35 year lifetime.

      2. ITER itself has been designed to produce 500 MW of output power for 50 MW of input power, or ten times the amount of energy put in.("Key component contract for Iter fusion reactor". BBC NEWS. 14 October 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11541383. Retrieved 20 October 2010.)

      3. The fusion reactor itself has been designed to produce 500 MW of output power for 50 MW of input power, or ten times the amount of energy put in[5] for at least 500 seconds.
      4. Gain is the fusion power produced within the plasma divided by the external power added to the plasma. To produce electricity from a device of this type it would have to produce 20 times the amount of energy put in. Page 90[http://www.ofes.fusion.doe.gov/News/ITERCostReport.pdf].

proud

[bassimat]

proud to be italian, hope they dont keep it under industrial secret - it would be a real shame for the scientific world

That's not news! Already known in 1994

[VincenzoRomano]

You can read it here (ridiculous Google translation) while the original is here.

Demo Numbers?

[Baldrson]

How much heat energy, in Joules, was generated during the demo?

How much electrical energy, in Joules, was consumed during the demo?

Why is it those two numbers appear in none of the news reports?

When will this technology be available?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to add fuel to the whole military-industrial-oil complex conspiracy theory, but if this works (pretty big if), I don't think you'll see one of these in your backyard any time soon. Probably never.

Some of the excerpts of Rossi and Focardi's article I've seen online mention neutrons being generated. The article claims the neutrons are safely contained by a lead jacket.

Hmmm ... what happens if you put a uranium jacket around the reactor instead of a lead one? I'm not up on all the physics, but wouldn't that be a handy way to make plutonium? The nice part is you probably wouldn't need to enrich the uranium first, or pump a lot of energy into the system. Just add a steam turbine and you'd have a nice self-sustaining generator.

6 in my garage

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, I have six of these in my garage that I cannot seem to shut off that my wife won't let me bring back inside the house after the air conditioner broke down trying to keep the house cool this winter.

Where's the Copper?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone verified that copper is produced. i.e. add nickel, hydrogen, and actually observed the copper being produced?
From what I have read, the copper part is hearsay! I see no evidence that verifies the production of copper from just nickel and hydrogen.
When it's verified, then I will conclude, yes, they made copper from nickel and hydrogen, ergo, transmutation of an element by fusion.
Hmm, can they make gold from mercury?