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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."
Call me when it's repeatable in more than 2 other labs please.
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.
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.
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.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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.
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!
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.
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?
Er, I live in Vancouver, BC you insensitive clod. What is this strange bright thing in the sky you are talking about?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.
-- Let's go Viridian.
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!)
...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.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
>>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.