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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."
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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.
Um, Duke Nukem Forever has a release date now, May 3rd, 2011.
Anyone got a light for my sig?
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.
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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.
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.
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!)
>>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.