Slashdot Mirror
Does Italian Demo Show Cold Fusion, or Snake Oil?
An anonymous reader writes "Today, Wired.co.uk is running a story, 'Cold fusion rears its head as "E-Cat" research promises to change the world.' It gives an overview of the technology that claims to fuse hydrogen and nickel into copper, with no radioactive by-products, to produce copious amounts of heat, inexpensively, with a 1 megawatt plant scheduled to come on line later this month. Apparently, Wired was not aware that today is a big test in Italy by scientists from around the world, who will be observing the technology in operation, including self-looped mode. A real-time update page has been set up at PESWiki, which has been a primary news provider of this technology since it was announced last January." Wired's article is remarkably optimistic. I'd love for this to be true, but many decades of scientific-looking free-energy machine scams make it hard to be other than cynical; the claim of a secret catalyst which "can be produced at low cost," controlled-access for outside observers, the lack of published science to explain the claimed effect, and skepticism even from the free-energy world — along with a raft of pro-E-Cat websites registered anonymously earlier this year — all make it sound like this follows the marketing style of previous "over unity" / perpetual motion machines. I invite Andrea Rossi to take part in a Slashdot interview, if he's willing to answer readers' questions about his claims.
Wired's article is remarkably optimistic.
Parts of it, yes. But I think the article does an okay job of keeping cautious. Maybe you read only the sentences you want to? Allow me to cherry pick a few:
Rossi's heavyweight supporters include 1973 physics Nobel prize winner Brian Josephson. Josephson also supports telepathy research.
Skeptics point to the lack of published science, and the way that Rossi keeps details of his special catalyst secret. They also point to his past involvement in Petroldragon, a company involved in converting organic waste into fuel, which collapsed in the 1990's amidst allegations of dumping toxic waste. (Rossi maintains that he was the victim in this complex case).
Until August of this year, Rossi was planning his big launch in Greece, and an E-Cat factory was being built in Xanthi. But the deal has somehow fallen through for unexplained reasons, vaguely blamed on pressure from "international energy interests" who may be threatened by the invention.
"According to my analysis, his claim has no scientific credibility," Krivit told Wired.co.uk. The device he claimed to heat a factory in Bondeno seems to exist only on paper."
At this point, I'm calling it 'tabloid science journalism.' This guy is looking to get rich quick not contribute to human knowledge so I'm not paying attention to him just yet. Hopefully I get to backpedal in a couple months when he starts shipping but ... well, I'm betting there will be some 'delay' imposed by 'ominous forces' as Rossi's wallet fattens.
My work here is dung.
Most of the world operates on first-to-file, not first-to-invent. If you had a working "secret sauce", how insane would you have to be to not file a zillion patents on it? Protecting such inventions is exactly what the patent system is actually for.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I bet you $200 it's not cold fusion, or any other kind of new physics.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Nickel has the highest binding energy of any nucleus. When stars die it is because they've turned every element into iron and nickel and it is impossible to fuse anything further exothermically. Heavier elements, including copper, can only be produced in supernovas and they take excess energy to make. How could you get energy out of changing nickel to copper if copper has a lower binding energy? You can't. This process, like most free energy scams, defies the conservation of energy at a fundamental level.
He's apparently not an expert either. He's not a physicist, but rather an entrepreneur. (But to be fair, his partner is a physicist.)
Actually, the invite from /. may be a great litmus test - if he eagerly agrees, it suggests that he's a charlatan who will take any publicity he can get--which he almost certainly is.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
You really find a lack of skepticism about global warming out there? Rather, despite more skepticism than about any other topic in current science, 98% of scientists with expertise in the field conclude that anthropogenic global warming is a major threat to our species.
Sometime you might try skepticism about skepticism. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. A skepticism that's promoted by a PR firm working for the oil companies, that previously promoted skepticism about tobacco and cancer on behalf of the tobacco companies, is a good target for skepticism about skepticism. Or do you believe that loading up the lungs with tobacco is health, too, just as you apparently believe that loading up the atmosphere with CO2 is benign?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
http://22passi.blogspot.com/2011/10/test-e-cat-7-luglio-2011.html
http://www.esowatch.com/en/index.php?title=Focardi-Rossi_Energy-Catalyzer
http://coldfire-lenr.blogspot.com/2011/09/ready-set-go.html
But the most important public tests are happening today, and at the end of this month in the US.
The process is Ni powder + hydrogen gas + heat + pressure + (mystery processes/catalysts) = excess heat and transmutation of Nickel to copper. Water is not involved in the process.
I think the big question on everyone's mind is if this actually *is* a nuclear reaction. There could be some sort of chemical reaction going on with the hydrogen, causing it to give off heat. If so, this 'reactor' is just another hydrogen fuel cell (possibly more efficient, maybe not). Not that a fuel cell which can be made using a "cheap catalyst" would be a bad thing - Slashdot has had a number of stories of people working towards such. But, fuel cells are not an energy "source", in the same way as an alkaline battery is not an energy source - but it could be a very convenient storage mechanism.
They appear to claim that injecting a nickel powder with hydrogen gas under high pressure forces hydrogen into situations where the nickel will capture a proton, turning into an unstable copper isotope, which will beta decay back to nickel emitting a positron which annihilates with an electron, producing heat energy.
As far as I know there is no known theoretical basis for such a reaction. Even if you could squeeze the hydrogen into really tight spaces in a heated crystal structure then cool it to get atomic forces to squeeze the hydrogen to an insane degree, you still won't come close to enough force to get proton capture. And the heat levels they are talking about aren't going to get there either.
History is littered with crackpots who believed their own nonsense and fakers who drummed up hype to get investor's money (or just coast for a few years while drawing a paycheck and not having to get a real job). I predict more of the same in this case.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
The bigger problem is that Ni62 is the most tightly bound nucleus known, http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/nucbin2.html#c1 or http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/ Fusion or fission of Ni62 require an input of energy; they clearly aren't measuring spontaneous release of energy in a fusion event...
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For those saying "why aren't there patents" - there have been attempts, which were rejected for lack of clarity on what was being patented. For most of the time (including now as far as I know) the only people willing to publish their papers are owned by, well, themselves.
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I've not looked up the masses, but yes, this end of the periodic table doesn't have much you can do with binding energy in it. I probably should, so I could state definitively that this can't work. If it was really that easy, would we not have seen it before now, happening by accident and so on? I put hot H (actually mostly other H isotopes) in nickel containing stainless steel daily -- nothing special happens at any energy regime I reach (which are in general well above what the Rossi claims are).
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I think everyone honestly in the fusion field wants some form of it to be real, and to work. But we also realize that there are a lot of people in this field for various dishonest reasons, from gaining corner offices with perks, to tenure, to just making sure they have a job for life, as in give us X billion more dollars and Y more years, and we'll really make it work this time - we just didn't make it big and expensive enough the last 4-5 roundy rounds. Even fairly honest people fall into that trap when it means lifetime security at a cushy job, and those of us in the open source fusion world (yes, it exists and is thriving) wish it were otherwise - but there it is.
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I AM a betting man - my day job is as a trader. Anyone want to take a bet with me? You get the side that "this is real" to win, I'll take the other side for plenty of money and a year time limit. I'll put my money where my mouth is. I'll take anyone, but what would be fun is say if Rossi himself would take that bet for say, half a million -- with a registered agent holding the bucks (must be real money, and guaranteed no counterparty risk). I note that while they've taken plenty of "bets" it's under conditions where it's not actually a bet -- they don't pay back if they fail.
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To me it looks like they climbed to the top of the snake oil tree and fell out, hitting every branch on the way down. No disclosure. No duplication of the results in independent labs. No explanation of why it could work. No patent apps that actually disclose the process. Just the usual "gimme money and someday it will work". A couple of prominent boosters mean nothing - those guys can be had with the average financier's lunch money, famous or not, and examples abound on both sides of every science controversy.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Sigh.
Look, Uranium, it's higher up than Iron. Heavier, more protons, higher atomic number.
Uranium is hard to fuse. You can't move from Uranium to Plutonium easily, lots of input energy required. It happens, but it's not efficient. Most of the Uranium in breeder reactors turns into lighter elements, and a lot of energy is released. Enrichment setups where you line the walls of the reactor core with Uranium absorb energy lost in reaction to radiation. The natural production of Plutonium occurs the same way.
Conversely, breaking down Helium or Carbon into smaller elements (Hydrogen, Lithium, etc) is not easy. Fusing Li + Li into C would emit energy, whereas fissing He into H would lose energy. It's exactly in reverse.
Iron is the most stable point here. Fissing Iron into lighter elements is hard, and absorbs energy to create mass--the products of the fission are slightly heavier. Fusing iron into heavier elements is also hard, and creates slightly heavier elements.
Nickle is heavier than iron.
Fissing Cu into Ni + H would result in Ni + H + free particles (electrons, neutrons, whatever) that are LIGHTER than the original piece of Cu. This is because part of the mass of the original Cu is released as thermal energy. Conversely, fusing Ni + H into Cu will bind some of the thermal energy input into the structure of the Cu atom, raising the mass of the products.
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About a month ago I got an email from my dad in which he asked my opinion on this issue, since I have a PhD in engineering and work as a researcher. The case had been presented to the public in a Italian TV magazine. I drafted a debunking on various grounds, which for your benefit I report here.
Short version: this Rossi guy is a convicted felon, his buddy Focardi an old, crooked professor with no relevant publications since the 60s, and they are after the money of naive investors.
Detailed version:
Mr. Rossi is therefore only looking for rich, greedy fools that will pump money in his next bankruptcy fraud. As a consequence of a certain prime minister and his modifications to the legal system, crimes like bankruptcy fraud are now very difficult to prosecute in Italy, so Rossi could just get away with it this time.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
This would be awesome; nickel and hydrogen are both extremely plentiful,
No 'they' aren't.
Nickel is the fifth most common element in (in, iN, IN!) the Earth.
Nickel is a metallic element, making up [ONLY] 0.008% of the Earth's crust.
http://oldsite.nickelinstitute.org/index.cfm?ci_id=13&la_id=1
Nickel is abundant in space, where supernovae and stellar cooking
has created it in chunks and hurled it about the universe. Exactly
where we can't get to it.
[although I have imagined a time where 'mining' asteroids ended up being
the controlled deorbiting of chunks of mined asteroids. Think there are
big crowds for a shuttle launch? I think the antithesis would be a deorbited
chunk of nickel. New lines of betting would come up in Las Vegas. People
with a death wish would use boats and planes or pilgrimage to the target
zone. We'd have some awesome footage... for the first dozen times, then
people would get bored with it, haha.]
Hydrogen is only abundant on earth in molecular or compound form
with a really weak 0.14% by weight showing. Once again, abundant in
space, where we can't get it to cheaply.
and if copper is a byproduct, this would become a very inexpensive source of pure copper
No, it wouldn't... are you getting that nickel for free??? Remember why
hydrogen cars "aren't taking off"? Where are you getting the hydrogen from?
which can eliminate at least some environment-damaging copper mines.
And replace them with nickel mines???
It sounds like you are regurgitating college 'book facts'.
Lastly, I know the nickel is used as a catalyst... and a lot might not be used
but anything that increases its price will change the price of another process
that uses nickel and none of use want to see it go up in price. STEEL.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Wow, that is one of the most elitist things I've ever heard. Just because I'm not willing to bend over and take abuse, I'm suddenly not good enough to be a scientist.
Yep, pretty much. Someone who doesn't want to take orders isn't good enough to be a soldier. Someone who doesn't want to run into burning buildings isn't good enough to be a firefighter. And someone who isn't willing to publish controversial work in the face of opposition isn't good enough to be a scientist. You can call that "elitist", if you want, but anyone with an IQ above the boiling point of Ether will realize that you're just whining because you want to be granted the same kind of respect and deference without having to do any of the work that's required to get there.
Plus, the fact that you think "elitist" is a dirty word also suggests that you're not good enough to be a scientist.