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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.
Big Copper will probably kill it off.
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?
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.
Entertaining scams about pseudoscience are still "news for nerds", IMO. I realised more about the importance of being a good scientist from watching bad ones than anything else.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Sometimes it's desirable to put these scams under a spotlight, don't you think?
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.
There are a lot of people with money who either have too much ego to defer to expertise, or too little intelligence to even think of doing so.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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?
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.
Because the struggle against stupidity is a constantly ongoing battle, and pausing it will give all the scam artists more space to scam innocent people.
Then there is of course the definition of who is the "shithead". Those of us who simply say "prove it", or those who are willing to believe anything that seems only faintly credible by people who have a good long list of false claims?
BTW: Wanna buy a car that runs on water?
You mean your flying electric car currently has a power cable?
No wonder the range is limited.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
I think "has managed to make it work" is the aspect that people have the most objection to. There is no evidence that this is the case.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Or the naysayers who claim it is impossible to go faster than the speed of light. This http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15471118 is what happens when scientists make an observation that appears to go against our current understanding of the laws of physics. This level of disclosure and scrutiny is not happening with the cold fusion claim.
"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
Why use a flying car? I would just catch a pig and use it a flying mount.
"Sometimes it's desirable to put these scams under a spotlight, don't you think?"
Yes, it worked wonders a couple of weeks ago, for the moron who claimed he had discovered quasi-crystals, when everybody knows no such thing exists.
And don't forget human greed. People with too much easy money thinking "oh, I'll give this guy venture capital for a 90% cut and if it pans out, I'll be a gazillionaire".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
How the hell did he convince anyone to fund a cold fusion reactor anyways?
Why do people buy Powerball tickets? Similar chance of success: both round to zero.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
.
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.
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.
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.
I think that would be interesting. Car gets a dent and then I get rear ended. :)
How the hell did he convince anyone to fund a cold fusion reactor anyways? ...(and get some more funding)
He convinced himself. Its entirely self-funded. He ONLY makes money if his 1MW reactor works. Period. If he needs more funding, its coming out of his own pocket. If he's to make any money off this, he must get the 1MW reactor online. Otherwise, he's out of pocket the entire cost of the project. In fact, it was previously publicized that he's turned down funding from others to the public dismay of those would wanted to invest.
Your post is extremely uninformed and ignorant. That's not to say I've bought into his effort but I am wishing.
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.
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?
No, they'd clearly be stuff that dematters.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Really, this is going to happen in Bologna... Isn't that a bit ironic?
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.
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.
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).
...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."
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.
Yeah, 'Cold Fusion' and LENR are largely synonymous, but the former term has been tainted by bad press over the last 20 years. In point of fact my submission used the term LENR in place of Cold Fusion, but apparently the editors felt it wasn't mass market enough. And to be fair, there have been some quotes by Rossi saying it's not actually fusion, but some sort of weak field interaction, but since it supposedly consumes nickel and produces coppoer, not calling it fusion seems more like marketing.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
currently has a power cable
I have the same problem with my Evangelion.
"Lame" - Galaxar
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.
Dogbert invented it first, followed by this press conference announcement.