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1 MW Cold Fusion Plant Supposedly To Come Online
First time accepted submitter Jherico writes "Andrea Rossi (covered here a few times before) is scheduled to bring his 1MW plant online Oct. 28th. This will likely either be the point where 'unexpected technical difficulties' unmask this for the scam it is, or the presence of an actual 1MW plant with no chemical fuel source will silence a lot of skeptics. What would you do if it were real?"
Seriously? Next you'll be posting about water-powered cars, or over unity devices...
Can we stick to real life please?
take short positions in oil and gas?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This will not work. There's absolutely no reason not to publish such stuff in respected journals -- if it really works, it will pass the muster. The guy is a scam artist with a long history, it's irresponsible to expect anything else from him without a lot of due diligence. Since he doesn't let anyone do their due diligence, I say it's still a scam.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You know who did those things? Scientists.
You know who didn't do those things? Shamans mixing pastes in sheds according to arcane rules.
Rossi's work falls into the latter category.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"But the prize is so great that I can't help but hope a little."
And that is how a truly great scam works. "They more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie," as it says in Mein Kampf. And likewise how religion benefits from Pascal's Wager.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
That's a load of nonsense. If there's anything to the claims, and if the writer isn't completely incompetent explaining them, there's no reason a paper shouldn't pass peer review. Peer review isn't some kind of insurmountable obstacle to getting radical ideas published. It's more challenging than if something is more conventional (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence), but, sheesh, we just had research published that makes the audacious claim that neutrinos might be traveling faster than the speed of light, and I've seen some pretty bold and silly things appear in peer reviewed journals (it's not *that* harsh a filter).
When someone making a bold claim can't get their work published in a peer reviewed journal, it tells me that either their claim is bogus or they don't know how to put a series of decent sentences together into a logical explanation of what they have done.
I'd love it if these claims were valid. But the fact that a paper couldn't get past peer review is a very bad sign and always will be.
They laughed at Galileo.
They laughed at Einstein.
They also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I'd keep getting up in the morning, going to work, and paying my electric and heat bill. Perhaps when I'm an old man, my energy bills will be lower or about the same as they are now (instead of rising with inflation).
I agree with you, but where is the equivalent skepticism on /. when it comes to mining asteroids, harvesting He3 on the Moon, camping on Mars and the dozen other Space Nutter fantasies and delusions?
Range is problematic, and even if you did get 300 miles out of a single charge, it's still 2-4 hours (in an ideal world, even) to do it again. Weight is problematic.
Not for me. I will buy an electric car that can reliably get 150 miles per charge when the temperature is -10F and the battery pack is 5 years old. THis easily will cover my needs for a 40 mile one way commute and associated driving that day. I will GLADLY plug in everynight and let it charge for 8 hours.
Problem is the Nissan Leaf in cold weather will get 1/2 the quoted range and it's battery is wearing faster than most people though. a Lot of owners lave lost 15% of their battery capacity after 1 year of ownership.
I would buy one now, but then I'm not the typical idiot that has to drive a v8 400hp 5800pound 8 foot wide SUV all alone to and from work every day... I currently drive a civic as it gets the best gas mileage/cost ratio out there.
Chevy Volt is a joke. it's so overpriced that I might as well buy the same size car (civic) and pay for gas because the price difference is the gas cost for 10 years of driving.
Most people will buy electric if the math ads up and there is savings. Almost nobody buys a car to be "green" I dont give a rats ass about being green, I'm a cheap bastard that barely makes enough to begin with. I need a cheap small car that controls my cost of commuting to work.
And for you idiots that say "move closer to work" I say, I would love to, tell work to pay me 2X my salary so I can afford the rent near them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's also how science works. Every a lab lights up a CERN lights up the merry-go-round, they know the likelihood of finding the Higgs is incredibly small, but they hope... and they try.
So "the hope" isn't really a great way to peg a scam. Instead, you just have to wait for proof. Tonight's the night... so just wait and see.
Water covers most of the planet. Desalinization is mostly a problem of not enough energy. Food production also gets a lot easier if artificial lighting makes economic sense - you could literally build a skyscraper and grow food on every floor. Similar to what marijuana growers do when they bypass the electric meters.
If this technology works, why bother with a 1 megawatt plant? Why wouldn't you build the equivalent of Bloom boxes and sell them to homeowners? Get rid of the grid entirely.
FYI for anyone not familiar with the parent AC: "Space Nutters" is the parent's term for "Anyone who does not violently hate any and all ideas for future projects involving space, and also anyone who questions my unsupported assertions regarding them". That's not hyperbole or exaggeration, it is a literal description of his exact behavior. He is about to prove it for me.
From my study of cold fusion, it is at best an intellectual curiosity where it might rival the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor as something to produce a neutron radiation source that can be turned on and off with a light switch. There certainly are some applications for a device like that, even if you don't have "net energy", and indeed with the Fusor such devices are sold commercially. It is a niche product that only a nuclear physics researcher or some applications in nuclear medicine would have a use for such a device.
One of the better run studies conducted a study of "cold fusion" where they were checking for radioactive products (as opposed to a calorimeter) and they were able to measure a significant statistical deviation from the "background radiation" of the environment of the laboratory where the experiment was being made. In other words, real fusion was taking place, but the amount was so low as to be something only for a research paper or to discuss at a fusion conference. The problem is that Pons & Fleischmann made such a circus out of the concept that anybody saying "slow down a minute.... it isn't really that big of a deal" were dismissed as crackpots and the entire concept was shot down.
Where Rossi and his "fellow researchers" are coming off as completely off their rockers isn't that they've discovered a repeatable way to create fusion through packing Palladium with Hydrogen (a known property of Palladium), but that they have basically said that Pons & Fleischmann are just pikers and didn't know how to generate manly amounts of energy from their device. The claims for the amount of fusion, that the reaction is aneutronic, and method of presenting their discovery via press conference (like Pons & Fleischmann) instead of through scientific journals is what makes those in the field look at Rossi as a crackpot or even a flagrant fraud.
Either the guy is a stinking genius and has discovered the cure to world peace (depending on how it works out), or the guy is a brilliant con artists that would make Frank Abagnale look like a rank amateur. From what I've seen of the thing, I put it more like 80% likely he is a con artist, but I'm still giving that 20% wiggle room he might be telling the truth. He isn't violating thermodynamics or even basic principles of physics, but it does seem unlikely that he has discovered a genuine power source based upon current knowledge of materials and previous attempts to generate power.
On the other hand, because it seems like Rossi doesn't have a firm scientific theory on how his device works (he sounds more like a tinkerer along the lines of James Watt or Thomas Edison), if this device does work out it will unlock a whole new field of scientific exploration with real money. I expect it will be something more akin to room-temperature superconductors, where new classes of materials can be discovered to incorporate the basic principles and perhaps even get higher efficiencies than what Rossi has discovered. But that is a big "IF" the device actually produces energy in the manner that he claims it does right now. At some point this device is going to need to be dropped on the desk of some competent nuclear energy researcher at Los Alamos, and likely other major labs, where it will be tested, dissected, poked, rebuilt, and critically examined just to see if it works before it gains any real credibility.