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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?"
Oblig xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/955/
I guess I'd have to start paying attention to self-published papers after they were rejected by peer review.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Blah, I've followed a blogger who seemed to have a good grasp of how things works, and then he publishing something gushy about free energy I felt sad for him.. Now my standards for slashdot must be much lower, this doesn't surprise me I'm just disappointed. Ignore them. Please.
Big Copper will probably kill it off.
I guess I'd use it to wirelessly power my flying electric car.
where's all that Karma?
The discussion for events happening today has been moved onto its own thread:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2011/10/e-day-thread-rossis-1-mw-e-cat-plant-tested-by-first-customer/
PES Network is going to be tweeting about it:
https://twitter.com/#!/PESNetwork
Prepare for some real-time cognative dissonance from Rossi et al.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
now my/our expectation on bad topics (or rather ads) from /. can't go any lower. It can only get better. In 10 years from now we will remember this day as the low water mark!
(I so so so so hope at least. Please...)
If it works? Have a party of epic proportions. Or possibly just epic intensity with a few select friends.
Given the history of the man, I don't hold out MUCH hope. But the prize is so great that I can't help but hope a little.
If it works, the future for my daughter will be more likely to be safe and secure. We might even have a stab at world peace.
If it doesn't work... well, it's a shame. It gives the people who are really trying a bad name, and fewer chances at funding.
/me strokes evil white pussy.
And it's not quite true that 'he would have published if it was real'.
If you have sufficiently ridiculous claims, journals may not accept your paper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Shechtman - as one example of work ridiculed at the time that went on to win a Nobel prize.
Unfortunately, for example, there are also people that write letters like this: http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/smithsonian.asp
If it is true, I would send the guy my heartfelt thanks, and not buy the expensive heatpump for this winter.
You sound like the lot that cried "impossible" on the topic of humans crossing the oceans, flying in the air, leaving the planet's atmosphere, and, may I add, on the topic of nuclear power. Why can't shitheads like you just wait a while longer?
If you're thinking of the zero-point energy, quantum mechanics actually makes it pretty clear that it's completely unavailable, even in principle. If you could extract the zero-point energy - hypothetically - you would cause a vacuum metastability event, which would destroy the observable universe.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"Free energy", when used in a scientific (not pseudo-scientific) context, refers to a thermodynamic quantity, basically an entropy-corrected energy. It doesn't mean "Energy for free".
"Zero energy" means just that, an energy value of zero (depending on the context, it doesn't need to mean the minimal energy, e.g. for bound systems the energy scale is usually taken so that the bound states have negative energy).
Maybe you meant "zero point energy", which is basically the energy of the vacuum. Since effects like the Casimir effect can locally suppress some vacuum fluctuations, some people dream of extracting that energy from the vacuum. But generally the vacuum state is considered the lowest-energy state possible.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It will work for a short amount of time....
and then slowly drop in output and fail.
Because all the AA batteries that are hidden inside all the equipment will have been drained.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
“Grams/Power for a 180 days charge
Hydrogen: 18000 g
Nickel: 10000 g”
According to my calculations this would compute to:
100 g of hydrogen, and about 56 g of nickel per day to run a 1 MW plant; OR
4.17 g of hydrogen, and 2.3 g of nickel per hour.
Fuel use would be 0.00417 g of hydrogen, and 0.0023 g of nickel per kWh.
How nice and neat that 1MWh power generation for 1 day = 100grams of Hydrogen used. nice clean round numbers that come out after all the losses have been accounted for.
even for laymen this guy is full of crap, or is lying about what he is doing or using. NOTHING in physics is nice clean round numbers as if they had been pulled randomly out of a hat.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
He is a businessman and a tinkerer that has managed to make it work in a commercially viable fashion. He may very well end up being the world's first trillionaire. There are problems, regulatory and safety issues, including thermal runaway. But, it does work. The chief science writer for AP appears to be at the test, so we should hear a lot in the next day or two.
Eat it. No, seriously.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
So the question is legit: how would efficient fusion change our lives?
Personally I don't think it would be good, as a cheap, clean and seemingly endless source would trigger an exponential growth in energy consumption, and when fusion fuel runs out there will be no other source to satisfy those needs. With our current consumption we still have a chance to switch to renewable before fossile fuel runs out, using nuclear as an intermediate solution until we re ready to do it.
Because there's still time to rip people off?
"But generally the vacuum state is considered the lowest-energy state possible."
I'm pretty sure a couch potato playing Farmville is the lowest energy state possible.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I'll eat my (tinfoil) hat.
"Until some hour ago I felt a strong pressure, now, at the eve of the battle, as usual, I am recovering all my coldness and calm. We are ready."
If that doesn't describe the thought process of a sociopath, then I don't know what does.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
What would be the way most befitting a nerd?
Excellent question. Death by bawls? Choking on a cheeto? Drowning in mom's basement?
Personally, if I were to go, I would want to be like those Korean Starcraft guys that died after a marathon session of their favorite video game. They literally played themselves to death. That's a nerd's suicide!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Dorito and Mountain Dew deprivation.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
which would destroy the observable universe.
Equally unbelievable.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If the fusion fuel is hydrogen, and we use it reasonably efficiently, then when it runs out the so-called renewables will have run out as well. They are just second hand fusion power derived from a fusion reactor 93 million miles away, running on the same hydrogen as we are using for our fusion. Hydrogen has run out, the sun will be cooling as well. There is enough hydrogen in Jupiter that if we fuse it all on Earth, we will have killed ourselves with waste heat and be in danger of melting the Earth.
Not that I believe this particular project is real, but if we did get very cheap hydrogen fusion power, heat pollution would be a problem long, long before running out of hydrogen was a problem.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
No, a little polonium goes a long way.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Fusion fuel in general basically cannot run out, there is simply too much of it.
There are 1.4*10^21 Kg of water in the hydrosphere.
About 1*10^20 Kg of that is hydrogen.
3*10^16Kg of that is Deuterium, or 1.5*10^19 moles, or 10^42 atoms.
In D-D fusion, the energy released per nucleus is about 8MeV, so that's 10^49eV of energy.
4*10^23kWh.
Assuming a hundred billion people, that's 4*10^12kWh, or assuming a hundred kilowatts per person, 4 billion hours from D-D fusion.
Around half a million years.
And this is neglecting hydrogen.
If you have exponential growths in available energy, that leads to exponential growths in:
- Spaceflight potential (hell, it suddenly becomes a cinch to take a entire power station to the Moon or Mars and back - and while you're there look for fuel, etc.).
- Food, water, heat, light, etc. for humans, which leads to many more productive, educated, "worryless" humans (i.e. we have 7bn productive people learning science instead of most of them trying to scrape a living to earn enough to eat for most of their day).
- Particle physics (which can only help us throw more energy at more subatomic matter and find more possible fusion fuels - this is ignoring the fact that fusion is a quite efficient way of using a fuel, much more so than the stuff we use at the moment - e=MC^2 provides a lot of energy from a little bit of matter if you do it right).
- Computing power. You can now just throw billions of simulations and refinery analysis etc. at a supercomputer that consumes whatever it needs and cools itself to whatever temperature you want. Farms of the damn things, limited only by space.
I don't see that we would have major problems even if we assume that humans are inherently dumb and will just consume whatever they can (and everyone ends up pulling MWh's for themselves all day long).
We really need an "Energy Age" where we solve that problem first, in order to prove that it won't spoil us. But of course, the next week the paper's will be begging us to cutdown because of shortage of X or environmental impact Y.
I mean free energy as in "perpetual motion"
I can go to Home Depot or Lowes and buy my very own Cold Fusion power-plant and take my house off the electric grid and it really works and lasts 10 years or more..
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
.
That being said, this one is obviously a scam. Why do I say so? Dig back through the previous stories and you will see a picture of a shipping container full of little black plastic buckets in racks, which is supposed to be a 1MW reactor. Excuse me? You but 1MW of thermal energy in a confined space like that and it will heat up so much that all the liquid would evaporate and the steam would kill anyone attempting to maintain it. The reaction produces heat energy, and plastic buckets aren't going to last very long. These CF reactions have been known to scorch the tables that the apparatus were sitting on. A plastic container is just plain stupid and this photo only demonstrates a man with a limited intelligence at work. Also, where is the generator? The reaction does not create electricity, it produces thermal heat. You need a generator my friend, and preferably a brain containing half a conscience would not hurt either..
Is this plant built where one can extract some geothermal energy from the ground? 1 MegaWatt isn't all that much to scam. The only problem would be getting rid of all the sulfur and mercury that comes up with the steam without anyone noticing.
This is a neat schedule. Are we starting a tradition of Loony Friday?
I believe I drank your beer. Sorry, but it was free and open
rewriting history since 2109
The heat pollution results after the power is used. Even if the generating system produces no waste heat at all (thermodynamically impossible), all the energy beamed down ends up as heat after it is used. Your computer needs fans to get rid of the used heat from its operation. And bussard ramjets are overkill - as I said, Jupiter contains more hydrogen than we can safely use.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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.
What would you rather watch - the wreckage of someone's revolutionary rocket-powered flying submersible consisting of two bathtubs welded together, or said vehicle as it's launched over the ocean?
Any nerd claiming to wear a tinfoil head is either a wannabe or part of the tinfoil conspiracy!
It is so obvious that tinfoil hats might cover you from alleged hostile brain control waves from sattelites thousands of kilometeres awas, but otoh forms a nearly parabolic antenna to the whole communication wires and infrastructure below pedestrian lanes just a couple of meters away. And coincidentally only relevant people will be affected, since only they are likely to wear - wait a minute, there is someone knocking at my door, I will write more. later.
Trolling is a art!
I had to think about that. Here are my top 5:
5. Hypothermia from being underdressed near Vostok, Antarctica which holds the record for the coldest temperature on the planet. I'm not sure what it feels like to freeze to death, but I'm betting it is less painful and unpleasant than most methods. Have a friend bury you in a chipped out block of ice. Poor man's cryonic storage. Like those frozen bodies on Mount Everest that have been there for decades.
4. Fill a room with nitrogen. Supposedly it doesn't have some of the nastier effects that Carbon Monoxide or Carbon Dioxide would have. It's what we normally breathe. You'd still might get headaches from the lack of oxygen before you passed out, but no suicide method is perfect.
3. I have heard that drowning is one of the more pleasant ways to day. Quite painless. Using excessive diving weights, drown yourself above the Challanger Deep, a part of Mariana Trench near Guam. Hopefully you would die before you reached the bottom 6.78 miles down. You would truly have gone where no man has gone before.
2. Radiation poisoning while attempting to build your own nuclear fission reactor. Or you could do the tickling the dragon's tail experiment by piling subcritical bricks of U235 on top of each other until you get a nice blue flash of Cerenkov radiation or maybe even a tiny nuclear explosion.
1. Try to beat the high altitude record for a manned gas balloon of 34.67 km set by Malcolm Ross and Victor Prather in 1961 in a 300 ft diameter balloon. Use hydrogen. You'd get to experience a view of the earth that you would never otherwise get to see. When your bottled oxygen ran out I am guessing you would asphyxiate in the near vacuum nearly 4 times higher than Mount Everest.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Actually it's a pretty easy trivial thing to derive.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Are Atomic Energy Plants "Stuff That Matters"?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
His raw material is heavily laced with a load of polonium and thinly plated on the outside. No detectable radiation from the Po.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It's called the Long Con.
I'm thinking of the Rapture guy. A few people gave their life savings to him. At the very least he's getting ad clicks, maybe. When you do a Long Con you have to push it really close like a game of chicken and Spin-Doctor the daylights out of the last 12 hours.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
CBS 60 Seconds take on this (below), military is working on it too. Maybe he really has found something, not fusion, they are calling it LENR.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyNn_Z6wCIk
Beaten to death in a federal prison after being sent there for releasing software to allow people to backup their DVDs.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
That doesn't make it true. The WHOLE universe? Such claims fail to pass my "extremes" filter.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm pretty sure drowning would be rather unpleasant.
Not that I've ever drowned, but I have been under water long enough for my "must have air" drive to override my "must hold my breath" decision and "breath" some water. It was very unpleasant.
Celebrate.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
To extract energy from the zero-point vacuum, we must assume that it is a "false vacuum", and a lower-energy vacuum could be created. If you convert a region of false vacuum into a lower-energy vacuum, you can extract the difference in energy. Unfortunately that region must necessarily obey different physical laws than our universe, and because it has a lower energy, that region will expand at the speed of light. By definition anything that is currently observable will be within range of that effect.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Hold your breath
Or the Piano wire suicide
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Explain "major disaster". It seems to me that you are extrapolating to fusion reactors the failings of fission reactors, when one of the major virtues of fusion reactors is that they are inherently not susceptible such failings. A fission reactor is fuelled up with about ten of years of fuel, and has days of energy unstoppably being generated at any moment, so it is a disaster waiting to happen. Where as a fusion reactor has tenths of a second of fuel in the reactor at any moment and can be turned of in milliseconds. The energy available to cause a disaster is several orders of magnitude different.
The problem with solar and wind are that they are so diffuse. We have to cover many acres of land with concrete and some sort of energy collector. A fusion reactor would be one building delivering the outputs of several thousand of the largest windmills, or several square miles of solar collectors. the environmental cost of building the solar farms (concrete, roads, solar cells, pylons) is something to be avoided.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I agree completely, but I must add that we're presently going in the opposite direction, since shutting down nuclear power plants after the Fukushima catastrophe will soon lead to energy scarcity and price increases.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
It is not a matter of expectations, it is the behaviour of the proponent, Schectman (admirably) stuck to the scientific method despite the scorn of his peers, and had all his results available for inspection. This guy is not: he has restricted observers to what he wants them to see. The establishment way well be, and has been, wrong. But when rejected by the establishment, good scientists react one way, and fraudsters or crackpots another. This guy is behaving like the latter, not the former. Which does not prove him to be a fraudster or crackpot, but has my alarm systems on edge.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
No, they'd clearly be stuff that dematters.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
There's a tried and true con game, called "salting." Criminals would "salt" an exhausted mine with uncut gemstones or the ore of precious metals, and let the investor "find" them, and thus trick the investor into giving them millions for a worthless hole in the ground.
If this power plant does work, I'd bring a geiger counter with me to check that these "fusion" devices weren't simply black market radioisotope batteries from Russia.
Or Rossi's pants.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Really, this is going to happen in Bologna... Isn't that a bit ironic?
1. Tell everyone you invented a cold fusion reactor 2. ??? 3. Profit!
- This old grey mare she ain't what she used to be
If you want to know what's really going to happen, it's pretty simple. First tomorrow their will be a lot of heat but not near 1 MW. However, real Scientists will take a look at the device and figure out how it works sometime before Thanks Giving. One these scientists will get a little over ambitious and build large a more efficient device. It will fire up on December 12, 2012. However, the cold fusion will produce a lot more heat and huge magnetic field that will fuse the moisture(Hydrogen) and co2 (carbon) in the air this will spread out in about 2.5 seconds across the globe. The reaction will be so intensive that earth will covert into a star for around 10 minutes. The spiral of the star earths magnetic field which is such that it causes sub-atomic particles to vibrate in the electromagnetic plan (or dimension if you prefer). When this happens atoms exposed to this field will fuse because of a loss of magnetic repulsion causing the atoms to collide and fuse. This BTW is how cold fuse works because when the hydrogen is exposed to the electromagnetic forces it's proton vibrates on in the electromagnetic plan. But what people won't know is that when it fuses it create a never before seen spiral magnetic field that cause other atoms to be vibrate in the same dimensional plane. The Sun will follow suit burning a large amount of it's own fuel in about 16 minutes. The other plants will also follow suit. This will create a HUGE magnetic spiral that might chain react across the universe transforming it. Over trillions of years the subatomic particles no longer repelled by electromagnetism will continue to fuse and grow ever large masses this will lead to the next big bang. Anyway, that's what the Mayans were saying would happen.
Spaceflight potential (hell, it suddenly becomes a cinch to take a entire power station to the Moon or Mars and back - and while you're there look for fuel, etc.).
Space flight is limited by fuel, not energy. Except if we build a space elevator/giant railgun wich may or may not be possible.
Food, water, heat, light, etc. for humans, which leads to many more productive, educated, "worryless" humans (i.e. we have 7bn productive people learning science instead of most of them trying to scrape a living to earn enough to eat for most of their day).
Food and water can't be produced by energy. Human population can't grow exponentially much longer.
Particle physics (which can only help us throw more energy at more subatomic matter and find more possible fusion fuels - this is ignoring the fact that fusion is a quite efficient way of using a fuel, much more so than the stuff we use at the moment - e=MC^2 provides a lot of energy from a little bit of matter if you do it right).
You are assuming we find a way around the second law of thermodynamics.
I don't see that we would have major problems even if we assume that humans are inherently dumb and will just consume whatever they can (and everyone ends up pulling MWh's for themselves all day long).
I didn't assume humans are dumb, I assumed they will act according to their best selfish interest.
I don't think you understand exponential growth.
I don't think you understand "hundred billion people".
Will we ever learn the lessons from http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Project_Arcturus
I suspect not..
That's not even the same scam as this one...
No sig today...
Andrea Rossi is his own worst enemy - his arrogance, paranoia and lazy approach to instrumentation (as well as a total inability to accept advice) has resulted in something like 11 inadequate demos so far, any one of which could have made him a billionaire if he had only spent another few hours setting up to take measurements of demonstable veracity and run the thing for half a day or more rather than a couple of hours. He can't even be bothered to record data during his demos, even when all it would take is the insertion of an SD card into his thermometer! He basically expects the world to take him at his word (in spite of his history of scam-like behaviour), and while supreme belief in one's own correctness is a useful attribute as an inventor, it is hurting him badly now - he has had to sell his house to keep going.
That said I have spent a lot of time trying to forensically extract answers from the crappy data and other info gathered during his demos, and his latest on 6th October looks pretty convincing - it ran for 3 hours producing 3+ kW output with about 100W of control input, with reasonably good calorimetry. His latest move to a 1MW plant demo is extremely stupid - expensive, dangerous and totally unecessary as any potential investor would be happy with a 5kW demo done with care.
So even if his engineering and judgement is atrocious (he built a steam pressure vessel as a box shape FFS!!) I am personally convinced that he has something (neither he nor anyone else knows how it works, but it works). But at this point he should be removed from the project and replaced by someone competent for his and the world's sake.
But what were the Mayans saying about how this would impact the global confusion over the difference between itsand it's? Will that finally get straightened out? It might be worth having the universe end if it would put an end to that problem. That, and the end of people using loose when they mean lose. I'm all for the apocalypse if I never again have to read a forum thread in which theoretically academic people talk about how the wrong sort of science and public relations can cause a program to loose it's funding.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I can't tell if you are a shizophrenic or one of those random text generators intended to circumvent spam detection.
wrt #4 - I remember hearing on the news a few years back that a guy transporting bull semen died while on the job. The dewar of liquid nitrogen tipped and spilled, "diluting" the air in the enclosed van. (It was winter and the windows were closed.) Also some time back, workers on one of the shuttles died when they went into some engine compartment that had been previously flooded with helium.
In both cases, the issue is that you pass out without warning. Your breathing reflexes and warnings are triggered by buildup of excess CO2, not by lack of oxygen. You're still breathing long enough to flush the CO2 normally, but you're not getting any oxygen, and that's what kills silently.
I pay special attention to this because one of my old desires has been to fast-freeze fresh strawberries in liquid nitrogen, then move them to a conventional freezer for storage. Strawberries never freeze/thaw well because of the crystallization of the water content. I've wondered if liquid nitrogen would freeze them fast enough to avoid this.
I once looked into getting some, and decided it was too expensive to mess around with. Even though it's billed as "cheaper than milk," that must be in larger quantities. Plus you need to rent the dewar to transport it. Plus they won't give it to you in anything other than an open-bed truck. (See bull-semen reference above.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
They will have to shut down the test because they do not have the necessary permits to run a nuclear power generation station. They will try again once they get the necessary permits but could take months for the paperwork to get done.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Growth in energy consumption would still be capped by how much electricity we can actually transmit and use. As in, the wires coming to your house probably can't deliver more than a couple hundred amps to every house. Upgrading and maintaining that infrastructure isn't free, so you will still pay for electricity. Even if everyone had a generator at home you still need to pay to maintain the generator itself and all the wiring. And all the gadgets that use the power aren't free.
To extract energy from the zero-point vacuum, we must assume that it is a "false vacuum", and a lower-energy vacuum could be created.
Okay
If you convert a region of false vacuum into a lower-energy vacuum, you can extract the difference in energy.
Uh huh
Unfortunately that region must necessarily obey different physical laws than our universe,
Umm
and because it has a lower energy, that region will expand at the speed of light.
Oh, come on!
The e-cat is essentially a "black box", with no moving parts, which produces electricity. What will the video be showing? The readout of an electric meter showing volts/watts/amperes? I suppose mostly it'll show reaction from whoever they got to attend the event?
I don't think you understand the limits of growth. Exponential growth never goes on forever. And in the case of hydrogen fusion it's not the fuel which will be the limiting factor.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If you take short positions on oil and gas, you, uhhh, lose your shorts.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, this is actually legit. It'll take a decade or two, at least, before enough of these are built to even make a small dent in the international energy market. Shorting stock is a game of predicting that the stock will lose value within the next *week*. Plus, if this is real, I expect the current energy giants to get a stranglehold on the technology, so that they control the technology (or they own most of the nickel mines, or whatever else goes into the e-cat to make it work, so they continue to control the resources).
I never thought there'd be a way to look like even more of a douche than missing the point entirely and posting inappropriately smug and condescending comments on Slashdot. Oh wait, there isn't.
Seastead this.
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).
this is very related, it is the same phenomenon (LENR)
Beaten to death in a federal prison after being sent there for releasing software to allow people to backup their DVDs.
"...they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order."
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
You've put way too much thought into this... XD
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Or having sex with an actual, real female.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
and wonder what horrible unforseen consequence its use will create. It probably sterilizes everyone or creates genetic modifications that turn humans into politicians, or zombies, or some other type of monster.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
...military is working on it too.
Yes. These are the same people who researched using psychics for intelligence. It means nothing (other than, if you have enough money, you can afford to waste it outrageously).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Are we sure that cold fusion isn't possible from extracting economic sustainability and financial stability through the ether? I think that's how Rossi got it working.
Authority questions you. Return the favor. -- d474
It's not prejudice, it's critical thinking. The kind that lets you understand that even though you can write an algebraic proof that 1 = 2, one does not really equal two.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This reminds me of the coverage surrounding Madison Priest's "magic box". Do the Google, or check these two articles (sadly no pics in the archived articles).
The "excessive diving weights" would probably help though, by the time you run out of oxygen you should be 100m down and it's highly unlikely you can do anything remotely like breathing in a pool.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think you have Sockatume's argument backwards. He's not arguing that it is possible for us to destroy the universe - he's arguing that if you have a theory that says that you can get free energy, but the math works out such that it would destroy the universe... you probably don't have a way to extract that energy. In other words, the free energy "proof" works out to 1=2.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Plants like this put cities like Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook on the map!
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Here's a 12-step plan to flash-freeze strawberries:
1) Obtain strawberries
2) Obtain a Styrofoam cooler
3) Obtain a small amount of dry ice
4) Put dry ice in cooler
5) Drive to liquid nitrogen supplier with cooler, dry ice, and strawberries
6) Arrange for the purchase of several liters of LN2
7) Place strawberries in cooler
8) Have LN2 supplier pour LN2 over strawberries.
9) Wait until they're hard as rocks
10) Pour out remaining LN2 or allow it to boil off
11) Close cooler
12) return home with flash-frozen strawberries on dry ice.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
This. It's something which is impossible, and even if you could do it - you had a magic wand or something - it would be limitlessly catastrophic.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I know, it reads like I should be filling in blanks on fucking Star Trek, but I swear it's as accurate as my understanding of it.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I think that ingesting at least an LD50 of caffeine would be a VERY unpleasant experience. You might want to rethink that.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'm still alive. Thanks, I went and did all that for nothing!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
"you would cause a vacuum metastability event, which would destroy the observable universe."
so do it with your eyes closed. the worst that will happen is that your eyelids will vaporize.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hey real scientists in the run up to the Nuclear and Hydrogen bomb said that detonating the bomb would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the planet.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
3. I have heard that drowning is one of the more pleasant ways to day.
It's not. It triggers the lower brain to cause a panic. Basically you'll be scared shitless during your last moments of consciousness.
2. Radiation poisoning while attempting to build your own nuclear fission reactor.
Cherenkov radiation. Also, you wouldn't see this unless you were also underwater. The flashing you've heard of was because of interactions in the eye's aqueous humor and/or interactions in your visual cortex.
1.... When your bottled oxygen ran out I am guessing you would asphyxiate in the near vacuum nearly 4 times higher than Mount Everest.
Yea, no thanks. Asphyxiation by that cause is just as unpleasant as CO2. That's what makes suffocation suck so much... the CO2 builds up because you can't get rid of it. That's why your Nitrogen idea works - you just lose consciousness because you still exchange out the waste gasses.
It's odd. You seem to know of a lot of interesting things, yet lack or have completely wrong the details.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Well, posting a fictional conversation between Pol Pot (of all people, why him?), and government funded "physicist" (why the quotes, is he or is he not a physicist) does not really enhance your case.
Also see: long winded, rambling.
crushed to death under the weight of their magic card/comic book collection.
Your statement is based on the premise that we have already reached a total understanding on how the universe actually works. The vast majority of our knowledge base in particle and energy related physics is based on mathematical models combined with a lot of assumptions. The majority of our knowledge in astrology related physics depend on the validity of the fine-structure constant and the theories of dark matter or dark energy needed to make the math work. So far we have evidence that the fine-structure constant appears to vary depending on which part of the universe you are looking at.
Great points and you might like this: http://ecatsite.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/dr-george-miley-replicates-patterson-names-rossi/
http://energycatalyzer3.com/news/some-of-rossi%E2%80%99s-cold-fusion-results-reportedly-replicated
By me on why the results should be freely released, btw: http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm gonna hold my breath! See! I'm holding it! Ok, fire 'er up!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
No, they didn't. They considered the possibility of a runaway nitrogen fission chain reaction, ran the numbers, and determined it would not happen. Sort of like the LHC blackhole bullshit. "We considered the possibility, the odds are trillions to one against" "So......they aren't zero? SCIENTISTS CONFIRM LHC MAY DESTROY UNIVERSE".
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Skepticism is good, but it should lead to investigation not prejudice.
After a while you figure out that life's too short to investigate every kook out there.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is a much better way to do it.
If his machine works then let him show it in action. A positive result is very easy to measure and as far as I know we don't have easily concealable 1-megawatt batteries yet.
No sig today...
Help help! I'm being repressed! Come and see the incompetence inherent in the institution!
https://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/93edc128d5cd0054
Essentially, whenever a system does not seem to obey the second law of thermodynamics, we just invent new science.
And here is another essay by me sent to Andrea Rossi on why cold fusion information be made freely available because of a paradigm shift in economics from scarcity towards abundance: http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If it works, oil is obsolete, consider the implications of that.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
"Perpetual motion" isn't free energy. For free energy the wheel actually needs to speed up.
No sig today...
The cost of electricity is already significantly lower than gasoline. The reason we don't all drive electric cars is they are too expensive and don't have sufficient range. If those factors were to change, everyone would switch to electric cars with or without cold fusion.
Another crackpot or scam artist catering to the terminally stupid. From some responses here, I gather there are a lot of those. Still, nothing even of remote entertainment or informational value.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The problem was that government officials and Teller were trying to Cover their asses and that is why that was put into the official document that went to washington.
Oppenhimer himself said that Teller, "lacked the sense to shut up" about it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
For fission maybe, wouldn't fusion make it rematter?
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.
And yet they went on to detonate it anyway, which pretty much sums up how the rest of the scientists viewed this extreme conclusion.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"What would you do if it were real?", build my own, obviously! What a stupid question.
You mean retail price, not cost. The cost of gasoline is not related to crude barrel cost in USA, and heavily loaded by taxes in UK (for example). The cost of electricity generation is often discounted by government; best example being nuclear electricity generation which is priced artificially cheap.
The current post says no pictures taken because the company did not want to be ID. In particular, did not want engineers and testers to be shown. My guess is that the testers is another nationality and race: chinese. Therefore, it would show up easily on a pix that it was somebody from China.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Throw the idiot in jail when it doesn't work.
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.
Infinite energy sounds like all energy problem are solve, does it? Now, think better. Energy is useful only if you transform it into work. What is work? Motion (that is generated by friction, so thermal loss, and that must be stopped by braking, which is almost total thermal loss), or heat (that ends up as thermal loss), or electronic gizmos that compute (almost complete thermal loss here too). Whatever energy we produce, it will end up as thermal loss, because thermal energy is a byproduct of using the energy.
As of now, we do not care about that aspect, because we use only 10^-7 energy units less that what earth receives as input from the sun. Now lets consider that we do, actually, have infinite energy, and use it. Then we will quickly reach the point were we produce some amount of energy that competes with solar input, say 2%. Does an increase of 2% of energy input on earth change the climate ? What about now a 10% increase (thats something like 5 years at exponential growth rate)?
And it is not like there is any comprehensive way to get rid of that extra thermal energy. There is no convection in space, and radiating in the void is the most inefficient way of dissipating energy. We could create convection by ejecting matter in space, but that does not sound practical (energy spent to put stuff in orbit is huge, probably more thermal loss than what the "payload" carries away from earth).
So basically, there is a stronger limit on possible energy consumption than the amount of energy we can produce, it is the thermal envelope of our atmosphere, that must remain somewhat constant to avoid disrupting the fine equilibrium that permits life (at least human life). Infinite energy does not solve the problem, it creates greater opportunities for us to multiply up to destroying ourselves.
Hush, filter, I know there are many capitalized letters there. That's what was posted. I wonder how much must be said which is not capitalized before the caps filter will quit whining and let the original be posted the way that it should be posted. This much, apparently.
That sounds more like a happy accident than a ritual suicide...
Did you just get back from Occupy Wall Street?
Seastead this.
Irrelevent, an accident from fusion reactor is far more dangerous than a fission rector, no matter how much fuel is used at any time. Neither fission nor fusion should be used
This is simply false. I invite you to provide some evidence for that assertion.
A fusion reactor cannot produce a bomb-style thermonuclear explosion. No should not, not ought not. Can not, The matter is not in the reactor. Matter that is not present cannot explode, no matter what man may do to cock it up.
Usuable areas of land aready exist for both solar and wind
I said nothing about area of land used. I am talking about the use of concrete and steel. Concrete production is one of the biggest polluters around. Rinning roads through wilderness areas destroys ecosystems.
Fusion is not combustion under any sane definition.
One of the virtues of is fusion is its inability to cause disasters.
How can efficient power production cause power shortages?
Why should fusion cause monopolies? Nobody is suggesting a single fusion reactor any more than anybody is suggesting a single ginormous wind farm. If the system in TFA worked (which I doubt) it would be far more distributed than wind power: you could have a fusion reactor in every house. The fusion reactors which I expect to be built will be smaller than a large hydropower system, and lower power (and hence more distributed) than the wind farms we would need to power our current cities.
You have made some colossal and false assumptions about how fusion power would work, if it did. You are running in fear from a bogye man which does not exist.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Well, no, the system isn't 100% perfect and nobody claimed it was. But your example is irrelevant as a criticism of peer review anyhow. It wasn't published in a peer reviewed journal and thus wasn't subject to peer review in the first place.
This has already happened. It's called the Casimir Effect. There are many ongoing attempts to devise a cavity structure for a MEMS device that produces a net directional force. Some have already been found (see the paper), but detailed calculations show that the energy extracted does not overcome the energy expanded due to frictional losses for the current designs. The design in Figure 2 was published in 1983, so this isn't exactly a new concept.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
The vast majority of the 7bn people, even if given 100% of their waking hours to study science (and prerequisite areas such as reading), would not be able to be "productive" in science as a result. Science, as most fields, is moved forward not as much by the number of people involved but by the intelligence and insight of the rare few who have the mental capacity and orientation to do what others with lesser capabilities didn't even consider.
If all 7 bn people studied science, we might end up with an additional 100x (or more) people vaguely literate in science (not a bad thing, but not something that will directly accelerate scientific progress significantly) but perhaps only 2x or 5x more "stars" who would actually advance science science more quickly.
All in all, it would be wasteful for everyone to learn science beyond their level of interest and capability - there are so many other things to do (drink beer, aspire to live in a nicer trailer park, wash one's 4WD baby every day on the front lawn, get one's mullet trimmed more often) that would be more productive for many.
For example, I'm pretty sure that given unlimited time to learn to play the violin, I might be able to earn a couple bucks a day in the subway. However, I would never be a "violinist's violinist" or be remotely qualified to play in any of the top ten symphony orchestras in the United States (let alone the world). Training me in violin would really contribute nothing to society at large except employ a fraction of an additional violin maker and slightly increase employment in the residential soundproofing materials market as a byproduct of my neighbors new soundproofing requirements.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
I believe I drowned once when I was young, and I don't remember it being an unpleasant experience. I just remember looking up at the pretty light show of the sun shining through water and then my dad's arm grabbing me and a lot of coughing. In my teens I swam competitively for something like 8 years, but never really tried breathing water again. At this point I think it would be unpleasant since my body now realizes that breathing water is bad. Naturally my mother was never told of this incident to protect my fathers continued existence, so the specifics are lost to posterity.
Go to your local hospital / large clinic or especially a dermatology clinic with a nice smile and a small thermos. They could probably give you enough to test out your theory.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If you have exponential growths in available energy, that leads to exponential growths in:
- Spaceflight potential (hell, it suddenly becomes a cinch to take a entire power station to the Moon or Mars and back - and while you're there look for fuel, etc.).
I am immediately going to being a campaing to save the gas giants. My God, in a thousand years, there will be nothing left of Jupiter!
Advice: on VPS providers
If it is true, then he has solved the energy problems of the world. And he patented it.
Which would mean that twenty years out, we'd have it free and clear, plus documentation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Delp#Death
Barbeque grill in the bathroom, and a nice considerate note on the door to be careful of the carbon monoxide.
Nope. E=mc^2. If you're getting energy out, there's less matter left than when you started.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
No, he's right.
Your posts are incoherent, and since you pretend to know something about technical subjects, someone chastising you for your incoherence is not a douchebag.
The douchebag is the one who, when told of his unclear communication, does not adapt but blame the critic for his own failings.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
. . . the Singularity will stop it.
Is that the one for polarized products available for the special price of $19.95 (plus shipping & handling)?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I should, merely, have responded:
WHOOSH!
So let me hereby make amends by so responding to you:
WHOOSH!
Seastead this.
I'm NOT ALLOWED to publish as I don't hold qualifications
Then publish in a double-blind venue. Those are the really credible ones anyway. The real problem is that your idea will be immediately rejected because you are not familiar enough with the field to show that your idea is both novel and useful. In other words, you think you have a good idea, but you don't really know. There are millions of people who think they have a good idea, but don't really know. If you want someone to listen, you have to set yourself apart somehow. Either learn the field, or get the qualifications.
3. I have heard that drowning is one of the more pleasant ways to day. Quite painless. Using excessive diving weights, drown yourself above the Challanger Deep, a part of Mariana Trench near Guam. Hopefully you would die before you reached the bottom 6.78 miles down. You would truly have gone where no man has gone before.
Sorry, but Jacques Piccard has you beat.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
By definition, the QM vacuum is the state with the lowest energy possible. If you want to extract energy from something, that something must lose energy and go to another, lower energy state. Therefore, if you want to extract energy from the vacuum, you are explicitly assuming that there is a state with an energy lower than that vacuum. This means that the new lowest energy state is your actual vacuum, and your previous "vacuum" was a local minimum or something like that (a "false vacuum").
So yes, if you want to extract energy from the "zero point vacuum", you MUST assume it is a false vacuum. If you don't, you'll want to extract energy from somewhere it's impossible to extract energy.
That a mop and bucket are his daily work colleagues?
Clearly, the best way to discuss falsification in science is to cast it as a discussion between a cannibalistic dictator and a strawman.
“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met” - Abraham Lincoln
"Stop...making...your...point...so...ineffectively!" - Phillip J. Fry
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
What this guy claims isn't unlikely, it's impossible.
If you are saying that cold fusion is impossible, and implying that is a scientific fact, then your post qualifies perfectly under the standard definition of pseudo science. Congratulations.
Here is a more complete list. I have left out entries like bozo the clown where the material has yet to be recognised as having any scientific merit by anyone, I also realise that many of these are still not the accepted scientific position.
Arrhenius (ion chemistry)
Alfven, Hans (galaxy-scale plasma dynamics)
Baird, John L. (television camera)
Bakker, Robert (fast, warm-blooded dinosaurs)
Bardeen & Brattain (transistor)
Bretz J Harlen (ice age geology)
Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (black holes in 1930)
Chladni, Ernst (meteorites in 1800)
Crick & Watson (DNA)
Doppler (optical Doppler effect)
Folk, Robert L. (existence and importance of nanobacteria)
Galvani (bioelectricity)
Harvey, William (circulation of blood, 1628)
Krebs (ATP energy, Krebs cycle)
Galileo (supported the Copernican viewpoint)
Gauss, Karl F. (nonEuclidean geometery)
Binning/Roher/Gimzewski (scanning-tunneling microscope)
Goddard, Robert (rocket-powered space ships)
Goethe (Land color theory)
Gold, Thomas (deep non-biological petroleum deposits)
Gold, Thomas (deep mine bacteria)
Lister, J (sterilizing)
T Maiman (Laser)
Margulis, Lynn (endosymbiotic organelles)
Mayer, Julius R. (The Law of Conservation of Energy)
Marshall, B (ulcers caused by bacteria, helicobacter pylori)
McClintlock, Barbara (mobile genetic elements, "jumping genes", transposons)
Newlands, J. (pre-Mendeleev periodic table)
Nottebohm, F. (neurogenesis: brains can grow neurons)
Ohm, George S. (Ohm's Law)
Ovshinsky, Stanford R. (amorphous semiconductor devices)
Pasteur, Louis (germ theory of disease)
Prusiner, Stanley (existence of prions, 1982)
Rous, Peyton (viruses cause cancer)
Semmelweis, I. (surgeons wash hands, puerperal fever )
Steen-McIntyre, Virginia (southwest US indians villiage , 300,000BC)
Tesla, Nikola (Earth electrical resonance, "Schumann" resonance)
Tesla, Nikola (brushless AC motor)
J H van't Hoff (molecules are 3D)
Warren, Warren S (flaw in MRI theory)
Wegener, Alfred (continental drift)
Wright, Wilbur & Orville (flying machines)
Zwicky, Fritz (existence of dark matter, 1933)
Zweig, George (quark theory)
In many cases science is moved forward by accident, and in many other cases science is moved forward by thousands of hours of grunt work. While what you say is true for certain areas of science and certain discoveries in history, there are countless counter examples where sheer numbers would have made the discovery faster. We will always need gifted scientists, but having a billion non-gifted ones will advance science and saying that it wont is obviously wrong
Human population can't grow exponentially much longer.
It's surprise you admit that, since it's completely undercuts your point. This more than anything is the primary factor behind exponential growth in energy consumption.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Get one for my garage, of course.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If you're going to piss in the pool about running out of fuel for fusion power, have you ever stopped to consider that the big ball of fusion in the sky that powers most of your renewables (solar, wind, hydro) is also a finite fusion power source?
That ignores the other renewables, with geo being of course fission powered in earth's core (just as bad, lots less fuel there) and tidal being leftover gravitational energy/angular momentum from when we captured the moon and earth's orbit around the sun.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
People used to said the world was flat... Now we know it isn't...
Laws of physics are derived by people so they can be faulty and therefore if people say something can't because the laws of physics say so then they are wrong..
I'm not saying this is real, but I'm openminded to say that our understanding of physics is far from complete and therefore cannot explain a lot phenomena..
We only can hope this is real as it would solve a lot of energy problems.. (and ofcourse create others)
selfserving idiotic doublethink post
The consumption of those sources is limited, thus an exponential growth don't appear.
It appears that it may have actually worked, but at about 1/2 the expected output? https://twitter.com/#!/PESNetwork
"Q&A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later."
CONGRATS ROSSI!!
Peswiki - Q and A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later.
I'm skeptical, but damn, I hope I'm wrong.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
I'm pretty sure there just aren't a billion people on the earth with the IQ and bent towards science to be useful - and, in fact, most of the billion will get in the way. The time spent training them, overseeing their work, and keeping them up to date by those who know what they are doing would be better spent by those who know what they are doing, well, doing.
I'm guessing that many software developers here can relate to this. If a mediocre developer who just doesn't "get it" somehow gets hired into a strong team (and, for some reason, doesn't get fired quickly), they usually result in the team getting less done than if the head count was left open. For example, instead of explaining to the mediocre developer for the third time the perils of double-checked locking (in whatever "creative" way the mediocre programer has obfuscated it this time), it's more efficient for the person doing the explaining to just design and implement whatever the mediocre programmer was tasked with.
Of course, smart teams sometimes figure out how to marginalize and ostracize mediocre developers and they leave of their own accord after a while regardless of what management wants but not all teams are sufficiently Machiavellian to execute this maneuver cleanly.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
There are several retail outlets which make ice cream with liquid nitrogen.... in part for the reasons you are mentioning in terms of the crystalization of the ice within the strawberries. Especially because they have food handler permits anyway and have a ready supply of the liquid nitrogen, paying them $10 or $20 to freeze a batch of strawberries seems like something they would take in stride or even use to make a strawberry milk shake out of the stuff if you really cared. It may even be on their menu. At least as an experiment it could be used to your satisfaction.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream#Using_liquid_nitrogen
The Mayans didn't say any such thing. Their freakin calendar ends in 2012. Ends like our calendar ends on Dec 31st every year. Does that mean the end of the world? No, our calendar starts over with January in the next year. So too does the Mayan calendar start over in a new cycle.
Exponential growth in population isn't necessary for exponential growth in energy consumption. It's enough for consumption per capita to be exponential.
If you suspected you had discovered a new energy production method which makes everything else pale in comparison, would you publish all the details of it?
Now, the guy is a moron for trying to get a patent on the method without all the details in the patent, as the whole point of a patent is full disclosure to benefit humanity.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You don't get headaches, nor do you need to fill a room with it. Simply open a nitrogen valve, go near it and breath in.
Nitrogen is one of the more dangerous substances in chemical industry, because the first sign that something is wrong is that you pass out and stop breathing.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
http://www.e-catworld.com/2011/10/e-day-thread-rossis-1-mw-e-cat-plant-tested-by-first-customer/
Latest update:
18:06 GMT
From PESWiki: Q & A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later. – SilverThunder 11:07, 28 October 2011 (PDT)
Still no independent confirmation, but they SAY they did great...
Get a DeLorean
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
But the Mayans didn't publish their protocols!
"...they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order."
Great quote - great show.
It makes little difference whether or not Rossi destroys this planet. Earth is a classic type 13 which typically destroys itself at about this stage in it's development. Sometimes through war, often through environmental catastrophe, but more commonly a type 13 planet is unintentionally collapsed into a pea sized object through scientists trying to determine the mass of the Higgs Boson Particle.
The elephant in the room here is tax. A petrol driven vehicle's per-mile costs are FAR more expensive than just the fuel itself accounts for, because significant road taxes are integral to the price of the fuel. When they add road taxes to the cost of the charge that goes into an electric car, you'll find that the savings you thought you had have been deeply invaded. And you can be sure they will indeed add those taxes. Roads have to be paid for, and if you're not buying petrol... they're not going to let you get out of paying for the roads. Once that happens, there's going to a lot less difference in terms of dollar economy between the two types of vehicles.
I'm still all for electrics, because in the end, they *will* use less fuel (big generators are much more efficient than small ones, IC or otherwise) and we need that, and also because the vehicles become fuel-agnostic; nuclear, coal, whatever. Electrons are all that matter to the car, so we can change the underlying infrastructure at our convenience, which is an awesome benefit. So are independent all-wheel drive, huge torque, lower noise, better operating temp ranges, etc.
What we really need here are good ultracaps. And that still looks to be a few years out. They're improving, but it sure is a gentle curve. Still, when (if) they get near battery performance in terms of energy per space measure and (to a lesser extent) weight per energy measure, that'll change a whole lotta things for the better, from iPods to 18-wheelers and right on up to ocean going ships and spacecraft.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Wake me up when there is more than secret ingredients, secret buyers, secret third party consultants and media blackouts. Wake me up when any independantly verifiable information of any kind is released.
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.
Ah. They probably wouldn't be caught as often if they stuck to building 2-3 story buildings, at least in residential areas.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
What most people don't realize about the Tesla is that it is built on a very small chassis. While it is certainly a high performance vehicle, it isn't even as practical as a present-day Camaro or Mustang. When you look at one in person, you get the impression of a slightly over-sized go-cart.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I am very skeptical. I have friends who have degrees in nuclear physics and this was my first choice for a career except when I saw the Fonda's in China Syndrome creating hysteria I decided to get into computer Science instead.
I know of no laws of physics that allow this gadget to work.
However this was also true when Einstein published his papers on special relativity. It took a generation of physicists to retire before that was proven. And as Richard Feynman said: There is plenty of room at the bottom as in we still have likely more to discover than we currently know.
Here is a reason the "customer" might not want to be known. Suppose it doesn't work. Politics says a major firm will walk away with egg on the face and no major firm wants this.
So we need to sit back and let these events unfold as they will. If it works then great. But it still does not solve a problem which has been solved in the 1960's through the 1990's This problem is the "spent fuel problem". There is enough energy sitting in the swimming pools on the current nuclear reactor sites to power our world for 1000's of years. Generation IV reactors like the molten salt reactor from Oak Ridge or the IFR which Argonne labs designed... either will burn that "spent fuel" and they can do this because the fuel is not "spent" at all. Its not waste. Its fuel.
These are tested designs and the physics is worked out and IMHO it is totally stupid to not be using them. It is totally fraudulent for the media and our governments to be totally misrepresenting the physics. Here is one example. I read in the papers that fuel reprocessing should not be allowed because:
The because is because of Plutonium. We can make bombs from Pu239. Well this is true. It is also true there is Pu239 in the "spent fuel". What is not told to the public is that there is also Pu240, Pu241 and Pu242 in that "spent fuel" and no one in their right mind would try to make a bomb with that stuff.
So what we should stop doing IMHO is enrichment because the main reason for this is to make bombs. Canada has the Candu and its proven and we don't need enrichment. We don't need to shut down NYSE:USU. I was a stock holder and made money. We need them to start doing reprocessing.
If we clean the crud from the "spent fuel" we can stuff it into Candu reactors and run them for 1000's of years. This is how we get rid of the nuclear "waste". At any time we can build the gen IV reactors.
But the thing is its still going to take a 1000's years to burn it and during this time there is going to be all the electricity our world needs flowing from these reactors.
If the e-Cat works then what? The nuclear industry dies and then who looks after the swimming pools.
In a way I hope the e-Cat doesn't work. I'd like to have one in my car and another heating my house but I think I would rather like to see a logical well thought out energy system which gets rid of the highly radioactive isotopes. This means fuel reprocessing and we shut down the enrichment industry because we already have too much.
According to their twitter feed, it worked:
PESNetwork PES Network, Inc. Q&A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class, especially since I rule.
The one time in my life that I've really hallucinated was due to caffeine. Had *waay* too many cups of witches brew (that pot (or collection of pots) of coffee that's been on the burner all day at a cheapo greasy-spoon diner and has thickened up in the process). Went out driving with a friend (me in the passenger seat). Every time we passed a Mobil gas station, I got sucked through the big red "O". And not in a fun way. Got violently ill later and took an hour on the side of the road pacing before I felt like being in a car wasn't going to make me vomit.
Having so much caffeine as to kill you would be much less enjoyable than this. Starcraft would be infinitely preferable.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Yea, no fun indeed: Caffeine Intoxication
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Dear sir:
I regret to inform you that your credibility card has been revoked.
signed,
lolz
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
All I can say is that you seriously do not understand the technology of fusion. The residual heat etc is less energy than, say, a tanger of gasoline. If every single erg of energy from the fusion chamber of a fusion reactor escapes, we merely have a significant industrial incident. But much smaller than some recent refinery blowups.
A fission reactor is ten years fuel being let out slowly - you hope. A fusion reactor is one tenth of a seconds fuel being coerced to react against it's will. Look up the physics for heavens sake. A fission reactor is distantly related to a fission bomb. A fusion reactor is no relationship at all to a fusion bomb, which needs a fission bomb to start it
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
What fuel is being used, and how much is readily available?
WALSTIB!
There won't be any wreckage, because there was never a rocket-submersible. Only smoke and mirrors to convince gullible people to invest their money into Rossi's scam.
If someone actually did manage to stumble in to a way to do it. Nobody would believe them. Therefore even if it is scientifically possible, a legion of crackpots have made sure mankind will never achieve it.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I have been following this lightly for a while. On the one hand Rossi's history does not give confidence to this being real. On the other hand he doesn't seem to approach it like I would expect a scammer to approach it - he does get in touch with universities and professors, and he does not ask for money, even apparently financing the contruction of this 1 MW plant himself. Also holding a large-scale demonstration with big-name media present does not seem usual. If it is a hoax, I am not sure what he would get out of it besides publicity (being in the news).
There are 3 options: (1) it is a hoax/fraud, (2) he really believes it is true and cannot manage to do measurements correctly or is in some kind of denial and interprets the results incorrectly so they fit his beliefs, (3) it is true.
It is not clear whether this demonstration will make it clear. There have already been 11 other smaller-scale demonstrations and apparently there has never been conclusive evidence throughout all these. It also depends on who is vetting the test. There is someone from PESwiki there tweeting updates, tweeted "Q&A just finished; reading of results; 470 kW maintained continuously during self-sustain; customer satisfied; sale made; more later." and expects to post an article on the wiki/blog in the next hour or so. PESwiki historically has followed/reported on hundreds of bogus technologies. But the customer is satisfied? Who is the customer! Also an AP writer from NY is apparently attending the demo. However, a link to the likely writer says that he covers "telecommunications, consumer electronics, etc" for the AP, so it's not likely he is knowledgeable about energy technologies.
It will be very interesting to see the reports.
Here are the various semi-high-profile news articles about this technology that have recently been published, to collect them all in once place:
Forbes blog, Oct 28th
Wired, Oct 28th
Forbes blog, Oct 17th
Wired, Oct 6th
And then plenty of other sites like blogs and physorg since January of this year.
Wow, what a great idea! With these the normal way of spotting those operations by power usage is totally eliminated! Covert grow operations will be lining up to buy these in droves! DEA will have to buy a lot more dogs and thermal imaging equipment, since they won't be able to depend on the electric company to spot for them any more!!
Dogbert invented it first, followed by this press conference announcement.
I once looked into getting some, and decided it was too expensive to mess around with. Even though it's billed as "cheaper than milk," that must be in larger quantities. Plus you need to rent the dewar to transport it.
At Caltech, you used to be able to just get liquid nitrogen (or maybe it was the less dangerous liquid "air") self-service at the physical plant anytime 24-7 and put it on your student account (back then for about the price of gas which was about a buck a pound, which probably scales more like the price of milk these days). Maybe if you know someone at a local university they might be able to get some there. We used to just put the LN in an ice-cooler (a thick styrofoam cooler, cheap plastic one generally will not survive, nor will usually a cheap styrofoam one as LN tends to collapse the compressed styrofoam beads and reduces the structural integrity of a cheap cooler) and transport it wrapped in blankets carefully. We didn't use no stinkin' dewar, we usually just walked it back to our house, or just opened the windows on the car and turn on the AC full blast...
You can certainly fast-freeze fresh strawberries (and many other foodstuffs), but thawing food that contains large amounts of water like strawberries produced results that were generally still mushy (because of ice crystals that burst the cell walls during any freezing process). However, they look "better" when in the fast-frozen state than ones frozen more slowly. If you shatter the strawberries (which is what we usually did with LN frozen food), you can just eat (a few) small shards with a spoon which is very interesting. If you save them in the freezer and eat them still in a partially frozen state (of course not LN temperature, but say 1/2 way between freezer/refrigerator temperature), they were generally more palatable than the mushy results you got going back to room temp. You might want to google for Molecular gatronomists as they might have better "recipes" for LN for frozen strawberries, if you are curious...
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Steorn yet.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Steorn
http://slashdot.org/story/06/08/21/173253/irish-company-claims-free-energy
http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/07/04/1628259/perpetual-energy-machine-getting-lots-of-attention
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/06/24/149247/steorns-free-energy-jury-comes-back-to-bite-them
Anyone taking the eCat too seriously should read a copy of Voodoo Science
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Voodoo_Science
Yea, no fun indeed: Caffeine Intoxication
Oo, rhabdomyolysis! What joy! Nothing quite like pissing your muscles away -- quite literally... Well, at least until the proteins block up your kidneys. :-P
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The definition of QM vacuum being used is inadequate for the current purpose, for it implies that there is at least one quantum state with a probability of 1, which would break quite a lot of the quantum mechanics model. I suspect that the definition was imported from some other aspect of the QM model where it works as well as centrifugal force works in classical physics. That is, as a convenient fiction that can sometimes be used within a specific context to hide a lot of unnecessary complexity that is not germane to the issue at hand. Those kinds of convenient fictions do not fare well when they are taken out of context and plugged in somewhere else.
To be blunt about it, do not confuse logic with reality, and theory with truth. Physics is a game of model building where the goal is to make new models that are closer to reality. But physics works only with models, it says nothing directly about reality. This is especially important in the quantum realms. Do not confuse the baubles of the QM model with the bight shines that we work so hard to observe.
Back closer to topic: Assume that the neutrinos are traveling at light speed and that there are no errors in measurement of time or locations. Then the question changes: How can the actual distance traveled by the neutrinos be longer than the calculated distance between the locations? Is there, perhaps, enough mass in between the two locations to curve space in such a way that the 'straight line' distance is 17 meters longer than it would be if the points were located in interstellar space?
Will
well put. I hope it is real, even with the sad wall of cynicism I've erected around myself.
I think a priority should be put on consuming that "wate fuel", just for public safety.
From the light reading I've encounter, there is another nuclear waste problem - materials used for handling radioactive fuel and waste. The Straight Dope, at least, asserts that the majority of bulk radioactive waste is this sort. The highly radioactive spent fuel is, by bulk, the smaller problem.
I would love a world where contaminated shoes, gloves and wrenches could be turned into electricity. I don't see that happening, and this mountain of junk is part of the legacy of the conventional nuclear industry.
Ahem. Apologies are in order.
I had to take a phone call while writing the above reply, and I now see that I had lost track of which thread I was in. The main points I made are valid, but I confused this thread with the one about the neutrinos.
Will
You always know a dickwad by the number of times they use the word "fuck" in their attempt to convey something.
Well, the first part of your prediction came true. They are claiming it generated 473 kW for 5.5 hours in self-looping mode. Not near 1 MW, as you predicted.
http://pesn.com/2011/10/28/9501940_1_MW_E-Cat_Test_Successful/
I'll believe this one when Al-Jazeera starts picking it up...
We are the 198 proof..
Teancum does a great job of explaining the gaps that make those to understand this field very skeptical, but keeps as much of a open mind as someone can considering what this is all about.
I will say however, I am continually suprised by the number of scientist from NASA and other "groups" who I either get to talk to or I see speak who seem rather opptimistic about this project.
Quite a curiousity, and exciting to speculate about.
Space flight is limited by fuel, not energy. Except if we build a space elevator/giant railgun wich may or may not be possible.
Fuel is stored energy. If energy were free, we'd be able to have floating platforms (like Shield from Marvel comics, or so many other super-villan stories) and launch at much higher altitudes, reducing the needs for fuel, and the fuel would be cheaper to make because the energy to make it is free.
Food and water can't be produced by energy. Human population can't grow exponentially much longer.
What is "desalinization" and why is it currently constrained by the cost of energy? And are you really so proud of the fact you've never heard of a greenhouse and grow-lights? "I'm stupid so your ideas can't work!"
You are assuming we find a way around the second law of thermodynamics.
Nope, there's nothing in it that violates the laws of thermodynamics. Just because you can't understand someone doesn't make them wrong. It makes you wrong, and then doubly stupid for publicly calling them on it with your inanity.
Learn to love Alaska
Space flight is limited by fuel, not energy. Except if we build a space elevator/giant railgun wich may or may not be possible.
What about Ion thrusters and vasimir rockets. They are limited by power. Our current rockets are mostly fuel limited cause thats easier to produce and carry than energy generation. Proper fusion would solve that.
Food and water can't be produced by energy. Human population can't grow exponentially much longer.
Food certainly can be grown using energy, no idea why you think it can't. And the planet is covered by water only limited by use of energy. You could move farming indoors if you had energy no problem.
You are assuming we find a way around the second law of thermodynamics.
No idea why you think we need to break thermodynamics to use fusion or other methods to extract energy from matter.
"The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke ~1980
What about Ion thrusters and vasimir rockets. They are limited by power. Our current rockets are mostly fuel limited cause thats easier to produce and carry than energy generation. Proper fusion would solve that.
The biggest problem with space exploration is getting stuff from the surface to orbit, and ion and all other alternative thrusters are far too weak for that. Not because of energy, space probes have onboard nuclear reactors. We need fuel because of the conservation of impulse.
Food certainly can be grown using energy, no idea why you think it can't. And the planet is covered by water only limited by use of energy. You could move farming indoors if you had energy no problem.
Sure, you can build desalination plants. On the seashores where they already have more than enough rain. And farming requires water.
No idea why you think we need to break thermodynamics to use fusion or other methods to extract energy from matter.
I didn't say fusion was impossible, in fact, I was posting about what would happen were it possible. But parent suggested that we might discover a way of converting matter directly to energy, based on a misunderstanding of special relativity.
S'alrite, seems some clod drank too much, stumbled and knocked us off topic.
FREE BEER
Is good to find...
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Thanks for the link. If I had mod points, I would have appreciated your contribution thusly.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
It's the definition of a false vacuum. It's axiomic.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If you're going to use physics to argue in favour of something, you must accept physics as a counter-argument. The incompleteness of modern physics is reason to disbelieve the idea of extracting energy from the vacuum, just as much as it's reason to believe in the the same idea.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Having come near death through hypothermia I can tell you that it certainly isn't a nice way to go. It is true that you get to a point where your brain is so addled that you don't know what is going on and therefore aren't scared about what is happening but the lead up to that is absolutely horrible. Feeling extremely cold, knowing that you are on the road to death but not being able to bring your muscles or your brain to do anything about it, hallucinating that everything is ok and then coming out of it to find that it isn't. It all adds up to a horrendous and pretty traumatic experience.
I think the myth that hypothermia is a painless way to go comes from people being found curled up looking like they just went to sleep. That does happen, but only after you have been through everything else.
Blacklight Power, an alternative energy research company, has replicated the Rossi H-Ni reactor and is letting Rowan University test the output: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfjOIoPwolg The list of co-conspirators is growing! - Brad
The best way to freeze strawberries, by far:
Before you freeze them, turn them into strawberry freezer jam. :)
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
FYI old liquid air is liquid oxygen (a controlled substance).
So what ever you do with liquid air do not put the thermos into a deep freeze for a few days. That would leave you with a much smaller quantity of liquid oxygen and a potential felony charge.
Further don't play with liquid O2. It is no fun at all.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
According to the discovery article, "[Sterling Allan] told FoxNews.com that Paul Swanson with the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems unit (SPAWAR) can vouch for the demonstration." Also, "FoxNews.com spoke with a man at SPAWAR who identified himself as Swanson, and who said only that he was "not in a position to talk to the press." Several other sources within the Navy and the Pentagoneither declined to comment or did not return messages."
Discovery, like myself, is still skeptical. However, if it's true someone from the SPAWAR was there, it's possible there's something to it.