Can NASA Warm Cold Fusion?

TomOfAmalfi writes "Andrea Rossi says he can provide domestic energy sources (about 10 kW) based on his E-Cat system (a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction or Cold Fusion energy source) for between 100 and 150 US$/kW and begin shipping this year. Many people are skeptical about Rossi's claims because he has not explained how his 'reactors' work (apparently the reactors contain ingenious security devices to prevent reverse engineering), there is no theoretical basis to support his process, and no one has supplied independent measurements to support the specs on his black boxes. However, buried at the bottom of a NASA web page there is a comment about progress in 'cold fusion' research and a link to the slides used in a September 2011 presentation (PDF) which talks about LENR research. NASA has also released a video describing the great benefits we will get from NASA LENR research. Could Rossi be on to something?"

Comments

Answer, in brief:

[dudeman2]

No.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Skarecrow77]

Wait wait now, before we dismiss him out of hand, there is one very important question.

Does he have any contacts/spies inside North Korea?

I have it on very good assurance (no less than the former president of NK) that the country had Cold Fusion research in the bag.

So it is possible that this Rossi guy has himself reverse engineered hyper-advanced North Korean technology (which they themselves perhaps stole from santa or the tooth fairy).

Re:Answer, in brief:

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

No.

Mod this up to 11! Yeah, Rossi's on to something all right, in a P. T. Barnum kind of way....

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

I think his number is $150 per installed device capable of producing a KW...that is quite a nice rate (assuming the entire thing is not a fraud)...solar is $1-2k per KW just for the solar cells (nothing to convert the power to usable energy, no installation...just the cells) and has marginal economics, for coal (the cheapest) the plant is still quite expensive (ie $200,000,000 to produce 1000000KW==$200/KW, and that does not include the price coal).

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Courageous]

$150/kW was the proposed cost to own the generation capacity, not the unit cost of the kW. Your thinking of cents/kW/hr.

$150/kW/Yr = .01/kW/Hr.

You'd have to postulate how long the device would last to get to a genuine kW/hr figure.

Granted, I won't believe it until I see it.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[dabridgham]

I think you're confusing kW and kW-hr (kilowatt-hour), a common mistake. If I could pay $1,500 for a 10kW generator that would sit there producing that power constantly and reliably for 10 years with no additional expenses, then I'm only paying $0.0017/kW-hr.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Look again at your energy-bill. Notice the 'h' after kWh?

Rossi says 2 year between refueling, so 10 kW during 2 years comes down to 175.200 kWh for $ 10.000-15.000.

That's 5-8 cent per kWh. Now look again at your energybill. Currently you pay least two to three times as much.

Sounds too good to be true. Which it most likely is. No need for science, just simple math makes this a probable scam, until shown proof.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[dakohli]

I just put in an air-source heat pump, with two inside units cost me about $5000 CDN for 18000 BTU (5200W), so if it works, that is a pretty good price point.

Now, how much will it cost to run, or fuel, and does it require much hands on to operate? I set the heat-pump and forget it.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Raisey-raison]

And for anyone who thinks this guy is legit - why won't he just publicly reveal his so called discoveries? He could then patent them and make a fortune. Our IP laws are stronger than ever.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

But even if that is the case (and its by no means clear it is), it is still only kW of heat, by the time you convert that to electricity, you will be talking many thousands of $'s just for the domestic units, and you still have all that horrible radioactive waste to dispose of.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Dunbal]

Or the mere couple dollars/kW for solar/wind etc. But I'm sure that if you manage to tamper with all those security devices and open up his magic box, you'll find a car battery.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[drolli]

I agree. The most comprehensive document i found using the search lenr on the NASA webpage on the research there seems to be:

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/sensors/PhySen/docs/LENR_at_GRC_2011.pdf

It is an obviously very optimistic document on why NASA should fund cold fusion research. And let me - as somebody who was a scientist for 10 years - clearly state that you viewpoint should be an optimistic one, when presenting in terms of "why is that fundamentally interesting". However, you should have a realistic opinion on "what needs to be done to verify the effect" *before* promising fancy devices.

these are the references cited in the presentation above, which are not conference presentations, progress reports, or books, but real peer-reviewed papers:

Li, Xing Z.; Liu, Bin; Tian, Jian; Wei, Qing M.; Zhou, Rui and Yu, Zhi W.: âoeCorrelation between abnormal deuterium flux and heat flow in a D/PD system,â J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 36 3095-3097 (2003).

Widom, A., Larsen, L., âoeUltra Low Momentum Neutron Catalyzed Nuclear Reactions on Metallic Hydride Surfaces," Eur. Phys. J. C (2006)

Kim, Y. E., âoeTheory of Bose-Einstein Condensation for Deuteron-Induced Nuclear reactions in Micro/Nano-Scale Metal Grains and Particlesâ, Naturwissenschaften 96, 803(2009).

Let me say that very clearly: i am not an expert on the field. But if there would be anything which seems close to being implemented to people working in the field, then i know there would be several high-ranking papers.

what makes me *particularly* (i am an experimentalist) doubt about this research, and especially Rossi (who claims incredible rates of conversion of the material) is that it should be extremely easy to detect the helium or other products (in Rossis case) in the output. The order of magnitude of the effects cited would be *massive* and easily detectable by the signature of the reactions in the waste products. Instead of looking at the reactors, i claim it would be better to examine the material input and output.

Show me the peaks in am AMS, (if needed for efficiency, please use an acceleration mass spectrometer) for the fresh fuels and the spent fuel, and i believe in Cold fusion. Show me nice pictures and make a fence several meters around your device and don't publish in peer-reviewed journals and you will trigger my scepticism.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Air-conditioned cowh]

And for anyone who thinks this guy is legit - why won't he just publicly reveal his so called discoveries? He could then patent them and make a fortune. Our IP laws are stronger than ever.

Maybe the idea, then, is to hide his technology, by offuscation, from other people's patents. Personally, if I just invented some free energy source I would release all the plans for the benefit of the world and put all my resources into proving the concept for scientific verification. Maybe there's a problem with that approach that has stopped others dead in their tracks that I haven't thought of.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[rally2xs]

The problem with that approach is that after you have released all your plans for free, you get to go back to your job and try to stay ahead of inflation, cope with dumbass bosses and backstabbing co-workers, and probably have your job shipped to China anyway. OTOH, if you retain control of it, you get to sell it, retire, live in a nice house, use your time exactly how you see fit, and don't have to please anyone else that's not also a loved one.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Teancum]

If you are so stinking worried that North Korea, Iran, "The Taliban", Irish Republican Army, Ku Klux Klan, Symbionese Liberation Army, Deseret Liberation Organization, Martian Frontier Front, or any other group of would-be idiots who may have some intelligence to understand the basic principles of physics on their own, you need to convince your local congressmen that the laws of physics need to be repealed and modified so only friendly governments could ever discover those laws on their own. Something like legally making pi equal to exactly 3.12 instead of the more traditionally accepted irrational number. Legislators have that authority and ability, don't they?

If you know anything about nuclear physics in general and about how cold fusion is even claimed to be working, you might even wish that these kind of nut jobs spend all of their resources, time, and energy into developing cold fusion if for no other reason than it is a wonder way to keep people spinning their wheels doing something that will never be productive or useful. Sort of like how the Allied High Command in World War II kept bombing "ball bearing factories" and "heavy water factories" even though both were sort of pointless other than as a way to throw off potential researchers thinking there was something significant there.

I suppose you could make a bomb out of cold fusion devices. You can also make a bomb more successfully out of a gallon of gasoline or 190 proof alcohol. You don't need an advanced degree in nuclear physics to figure out how to make something that will kill somebody else. You can also make a bomb out of chicken poop, some grass clippings, and burning down part of a tree if you have some patience. Those who are so worried about the potential of somebody else doing harm are likely going to harm themselves in the process. Does that imply we need to control the sale of eggs, wheat, and acorns as those might be considered potential munitions?

The sad thing is that this kind of thinking how perhaps you can stop this line of research is a common type of government policy at the moment. It is also important to note it will stop more legitimate scientific progress in a great many other areas, and more significantly by stopping that kind of scientific inquiry it is going to keep more people in a state of poverty and ruin far more lives because that research is being stopped than would be the case if people simply are granted liberty to act as their own agents. Outlawing research also has a way of biting you back as it even encourages the research to be done... by the kind of people who would deliberately use it for malicious purposes.

More generally, I am not worried at all about Andrea Rossi with what he has developed, regardless of if he has a working device that actually produces energy or if it is a bunch of tea kettles in one of the most brilliant con games in history. Well, almost the greatest, he still hasn't been able to beat Bernie Madoff yet.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[PIBM]

Actually, there's a 10 time error in the price (150/kW, 1500 => 10kW). But then, it might be only 70-90% in converting that heat into electricity for those who need the electricity rather than the heat (here, the heat would be welcome 7-8 months /12) as we have no figure on that. Anyway, can't wait to see them in action, afterward I'll see if I get one :)

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

I think you are confusing Amp hours and Watt hours.

That "h" after your bill is just the multiplier for the quantity of energy you have used.
a 10kW battery can produce 10,000 Joules for one second, or 1 Joule for 10,000 seconds
a Kilowatt hour just means you were using 1,000 Joules every second for an hour- i.e. you used 3600kW.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[tenco]

I think you are missing an "h" on your cents/kW.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[TheLink]

IMO the "cold fusion" was worth looking into because even if it wasn't really fusion, it might have led to a different type of "battery" technology. At worst it might be some interesting phenomena.

So I was a bit disappointed when the whole thing became a polarized mess, rather than a good start into proper scientific research. Almost any scientist who investigated cold-fusion was considered a quack immediately.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

i.e.
1kWh = 3,600kW

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

I wish electricity and heat were 3,600 times less expensive than they are, unfortunately they are not.

(as above, 1kWh = 3.6MW)

Re:Answer, in brief:

[TheTurtlesMoves]

It requires magic. So once you run out of magic your boned.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[thunderclap]

Cold fusion doesn't produce radioactive waste. Thats fission. Water would be the waste by product. *facepalm*

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Cold fusion doesn't produce radioactive waste.

Not so.
Many products of fusion are themselves radioactive, and some fusion processes produce neutrons directly. In fact, detecting neutrons is one of the ways we tell if fusion is actually taking place at all.
I've no idea where you get water as a waste product from. None of the potential fusion processes being considered produce oxygen, and none could H, though D or T are possible, I suppose.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[simcop2387]

No Water would not likely be the waste product. It'd be helium in most fusion reactors. Which means that we'll all have lots of latex balloons for parties.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Teancum]

Le'ts think that through a little bit more. Rossi just "announced" how his "1 MW" reactor is now going to be sold for the low, low price of $1.5 million (from the previous $2 M he has been supposedly selling them for). For the sake of argument here, let's say that this reactor technology can scale down to a home generator plant for 10kW at a proportional price, which would give you a $15,000 home unit instead of the $1500 one that you think you are going to get. BTW, this is the only thing that Rossi is actually selling at the moment, or at least claiming to sell and the rest if a pipe dream. Perhaps "economies of scale" can help reduce manufacturing costs, but that is the only hard data point I have at the moment. Rossi claims it could get as cheap as $50 per kilowatt, but that sounds more like a con man talking than something real. I will grant the upper price limit of about $20k for a 10kW unit, and if you want to put the lower price limit at $1500, I'll buy that as reasonable.

On top of that, there has been absolutely no discussion as to what "ongoing" expenses there might be to actually operate this device. Even from Rossi's own accounts and from people "in the know" that have successful devices running cold fusion, the longest I've heard of one of those devices working is about a week or so, perhaps a month on the outside. I'll give the benefit of the doubt that Rossi has made a substantial breakthrough and made a device that will work non-stop for about a year (considered a miracle even among the true believers in cold fusion), I still don't see how this is going to make it to ten years. Keep in mind even all of the "demonstrations" that Rossi has done only lasted 24 hours, perhaps two days at most. He has yet to set up a device running for several weeks at a time, if only on a web cam as a "demonstration" that could easily be faked as well. It is a stretch, but I would put ten years as the hard absolute limit of operation before the device needs to be refurbished even if it works exactly as Rossi claims (which I have my serious doubts).

Even with all of this, there seems to be some sort of power requirement necessary to keep the reactor sustained (at least if you even think this device works at all). The most common way to deliver that energy is through electricity, where you can leverage the power consumed by the device by some ratio of energy input to energy being produced. Keep in mind that the power rating that Rossi is claiming is heat being produced by the devices and not electricity, noting that there will be some energy conversion costs transforming that heat into electricity. Here is also where the fuzzy details of how the device really works make a real problem trying to nail down prices. With the demonstration last October with his 1 MW plant, he had a 100 kW diesel generator sitting beside his "power plant" that was running during the demonstration. There was a "self-sustaining" mode, but my point here is pointing out that there is only some leveraging going on of the electricity input, and that a continuous power supply is necessary to make the thing work.

Sure, your "home energy unit" might be producing 10 kW of heat, but it sure won't be producing 10kW of electricity. I really am not convinced that if you had two of these units both connected to hyper efficient turbines producing electricity with some thermocouples trying to pick up some of the last watts generated before the waste heat finally has to be vented that they will even be able to power each other. For the sake of argument here, let's just presume that there still is an energy gain of some sort (wishful thinking even if Rossi is correct) and that you also don't need an air conditioner to keep the reactor room cool enough to operate if it is in a warm climate (further reducing efficiency). The question comes up therefore what is the ratio of energy input into a unit vs. how much is actually produced. Another variable is the efficiency of the turbines available that can be scaled to a home energy uni

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Dr_Barnowl]

Erm, no, you used 1000W, for an hour.

You used 3600 x 1000 Joules, or 3.6MJ

You don't measure total energy in kW - Watts are always a unit of power, the rate at which energy is used.

Adding the h means "for an hour" ; it's a way of expressing energy in units that people understand - because their appliances are rated in terms of their power consumption, it's easier to think about what they consume if left on for an hour. "3.6 megaJoules" doesn't mean much to most people. "Leaving your hairdryer on for an hour" does.

Saying a battery is a "10kW" unit makes no mention of it's capacity - only it's possible power output (10,000 Joules per second). The battery can run, say, 10 hairdryers, or three modern kettles, but it might only be for a few seconds. or it could be a million years. A 10kWh battery tells you that it holds 36MJ of energy, enough to run those kettles for an hour, but it says nothing about whether that battery can release that energy fast enough to boil the water.

0.5c per kWh is indeed a bargain, even if it's just raw heat. But the whole "reverse engineering proof" thing really doesn't raise my opinion of Rossi or his alleged technology.

If this thing is real, it's a revolution. It has the possibility to produce world peace. People fight over perceived differences in wealth. Energy is the root of all modern wealth - one of the reason things are getting so fraught is that energy (specifically fossil fuel) is getting harder to come by. Reducing the cost of energy by an order of magnitude could usher in a new era of peace. The guy would probably win 2 Nobel prizes. Instead he comes out with petty crap like that, revealing that he's just in it for the money. Being a genius doesn't preclude you being a materialistic ass .. but most of the materialistic asses I'm aware of ain't geniuses.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[drolli]

Definitely.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Oligonicella]

"...that have successful devices running cold fusion,..."

Please provide a cite. I know of not a single functioning cold fusion device. Not one.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[canajin56]

It's you who is confusing units. You can never compare watts and watt hours because they are measuring different things. You might as well have given the ratio between miles and miles/hour. Without a time to go along with the second figure, you can't compare them at all, ever. 1kWh on your bill means you used 3600 kJ, not kW. And a 10kW battery doesn't mean "this or this or this or this" it means "can produce 10,000 joules per second, with no given limit on how many seconds it can operate, at all". Batteries are measured in Watt-hours, not watts, because obviously there is a limit on how long they can operate at a given power level. My battery says it holds 56 Wh. It lasts like 3 hours, so my laptop must draw around 18.6 watts on average. 18.6 W * 3 h ~ 56 Wh.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Locutus]

but the guy can make lots of money getting clicks from ads posted on Facebook. And if he could get Colbert to talk about it then he'd have a line at his door of Conservatives wanting to purchase it. Maybe it'll be the next Pet Rock.

LoB

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

None sense.
a kWh is just kilowatts scaled to hours rather than seconds -> i.e. 1 kWh = requires a 3,600 kW power source
i.e.
A power source with 3,600kW of potential energy can provide 3,600 Joules for 1 second, or 1 Joule for an hour.

http://paul-a-heckert.suite101.com/energy-and-power-in-physics-a49740

It is unclear if he is quoting 1kW "potential energy" for $150 (which could be provided by a small gas cylinder for a few cents) or is not quoting any capacities - in which case all the numbers are completely meaningless.

if its "1kW sustained for 2 years" (quoted earlier in the thread, but can't say i've seen it myself), then there is going to be a hulluva lot of really shitty toxic radioactive waste from all the loose neutrinos making any material they touch radioactive.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

^^ should be kilo Joules

Re:Answer, in brief:

[dabridgham]

Yes, I'd noticed the order of magnitude disparity in pricing between his large system and his small. I think he's claiming that since he'll mass produce the small units, they'll come out 10 times cheaper per kW than a large installation.

Hey, I didn't say I believed any of this. I just wanted to point out the common error of confusing kW (unit of power) with kW-hr (unit of energy). Saying that $150/kW is a lot more than the cents/kW-hr you buy electricity off the grid is a nonsensical comparison until you start taking in a lot of other factors, as you did in your post.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[doghouse41]

Maybe.

But he's still a lot cheaper than the $15+Billion Hot-fusion scam that the scientfic community has been running on us all over the last 50 years.

Either he's on to something, in which case great.

Or he's fooling himself, in which case it makes good soap opera.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Confusador]

Generally the kind of people who come up with these sorts of things are not working the kinds of jobs that get sent to China. Once their ideas are made public, they are certainly not.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[jamstar7]

Um, yeah, it does. Hydrogen fuses into helium. It also releases neutrons.

Ordinary combustion has water as a waste product. The ratio of water to the total of all the waste products of combustion depends on how much carbon is present, and how much the combustion is compressed. Camp fires produce carbon dioxide & water. Automobiles produce carbon monoxide, various nitreous compounds, and minimal water.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[MightyMartian]

This is Slashdot, the site that never misses the opportunity to give a cold fusion or perpetual motion fraudster the opportunity at free advertising.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mtrachtenberg]

Here is a talk given at SRI in October 2011 that suggests you should be less brief and more open.

The talk has been uploaded as eight videos and the link is to the first. They suggest there is more here than just smoke, in the opinion of many sophisticated people. Whether Rossi can actually commercialize any of this is the question, but it does appear that something interesting is going on, that Fleischmann and Pons found it, but that they had the misfortune to not realize what was required to replicate their experiments.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCcQtwIwAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DEtweR_qGHEc&ei=fQ0TT6z8IMaC2wWRo4mFCg&usg=AFQjCNEqRT16r7o-A8LmurcqxagfDk6ZFg&sig2=1gh_88fhHkJO_cXlDbGHsA

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

and neutrons not neutrinos
Doh.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[axlr8or]

Of course, the problem with your insinuation then... Is to approach the matter in exactly the same way the world has for thousands of years. Thus supporting ideologies such as NK, China, Syria, The US, Israel basically any existing entity that is proof of the lowest common denominator. The only thing that will break the backs of mobs like those is to remove their centralization of human necessities. Your approach takes care of yourself. Our approach takes care of ourselves, and others (including you). Hmm. Which is more noble. Basically, when I hear patent fanatics, all I envision are people who are afraid to work. Not because they can't, but because they think they are better than everyone else and they are lazy. They talk about risk, which they usually spread to others around them. Then blame others when it fails. I'm frankly more concerned with people who want to price their ideas so cheaply to make them available for everyone and yet zealously guard their secret. It only makes me think this thing could be dangerous.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is there no moderation option for incorrect/wrong/misleading/moron?

1kWh != 3.6MW

Re:Answer, in brief:

[0123456]

No, nuclear-powered airships! The future will be here tomorrrow!

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know what you're talking about, kW has nothing to do with seconds, that would be kWs.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Also the cheapest gas fired power plant is more than $500 per kW installed capacity. I don't believe something this small can be cheaper

Re:Answer, in brief:

[vuke69]

No, you are incorrect.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[yndrd1984]

None sense. a kWh is just kilowatts scaled to hours rather than seconds -> i.e. 1 kWh = requires a 3,600 kW power source

No. I'm sorry, I know it's a weird unit, but that's just wrong. A kilowatt-hour is one kilowatt for a hour - i.e. a 1 kw power source left on for an hour.

A power source with 3,600kW of potential energy...

Is the same as saying "A power source with 3,600 Joules per second of potential energy..." - the units don't match the kind of thing you're measuring.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[msauve]

1kWh = 3.6MW

Huh? You're confusing energy (kWh) with power (MW).

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Courageous]

Well; the reasons to be skeptical are manifold. However, Argumentum ad Maximus is probably not a good argument to make here. :-P

Re:Answer, in brief:

[c6gunner]

The problem with that approach is that after you have released all your plans for free, you get to go back to your job and try to stay ahead of inflation, cope with dumbass bosses and backstabbing co-workers, and probably have your job shipped to China anyway.

Buds, if you discovered a viable method of cold fusion, I can guarantee you wouldn't go back to your cubicle to wallow in obscurity. The million-dollar Nobel Prize alone would keep you humming along trouble-free for a few years. You'd be getting honorary doctorates shoved at you from every side, along with requests for appearances, book deals, job offers, etc, et al. You couldn't go back to your old life if you wanted to.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

one watt is defined as one joule for/per one second (W=J/s)
one kilo watt (kW) is 1,000 joules for/per one second (kJ/s)
one kiloWatt hour (kWh) is 1,000 Joules per second for 3600 seconds

Seems a large portion of /. needs to retake primary school physics.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

"...that have successful devices running cold fusion,..."
Please provide a cite. I know of not a single functioning cold fusion device. Not one.

He did, it was in-line, just before the bit you quoted. Here it is again, for emphasis:

from Rossi's own accounts and from people "in the know"

Take note of the quotation marks.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[bsane]

I think he's claiming that since he'll mass produce the small units, they'll come out 10 times cheaper per kW than a large installation

Which isn't possible- if the 10kW units are 1/10 the cost of 1MW units (per kW), you'd just buy 100 10kW units and be done.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there are many more fusion paths than most realize, every element up to Iron can undergo fusion and release energy, some are just harder to do than others. The Hydrogen => Helium generates Neutrons as you mention but some of the other combinations don't , and they happen at lower temperatures as well, still no where near room temp but still significantly lower than the 4H=>He that you mention.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

Is the same as saying "A power source with 3,600 Joules per second of potential energy..." - the units don't match the kind of thing you're measuring.

Not quite.
Its "can deliver maximum 3,600 Joules per second of potential energy..."
The difference is, we are talking about where the system where the energy comes from rather than actually doing the work.

Say for example, you have a car battery rated as 500W
This means the battery can sustain 500W of power over a very short period of time.
I would say his $/kW is using this definition - (since its low energy) - $150 for one kilowatt is equal "in umpf" to two 500W car batteries in series.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[vuke69]

A joule is the total energy, the amount of work done. Divide that by seconds, and you get Watts, which is an instantaneous measurement, and has NO TIME COMPONENT!

W=V*A
Volts have nothing to do with time. Amps have nothing to do with time. WHY THE FUCK would watts have anything to do with time?

Yes, PLEASE, retake primary school physics. Perhaps then you would not be so persistent at proving to the world how poorly you understand simple concepts.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[dabridgham]

Interesting how you can get all this right and be completely wrong everywhere else.

Yes, 1 kWh is 1,000 J/s for 3,600 s. Notice if you multiply those together, including the units, the seconds in the numerator and denominator cancel and you end up with 3.6 million Joules. 1kWh = 3.6MJ.

Joules is a unit of energy just like kWh and unlike kW, which is a unit of power. Power is how fast energy is being used (consumed or generated).

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

Amps have nothing to do with time

ROFL.

FAIL.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[roman_mir]

It's best not to patent it and not to tell anybody how it's done but instead to keep it a trade secret and protect technologically and build the generators, but not sell them yet in the beginning, but instead rent them out to companies.

Biggest trucks that we have, locomotives, cranes, ships, diesel and coal electrical generators, heat generators, all of this can be replaced by one or more of these 'magic black boxes' that generate electrical power, and as long as they can be rented cheaper than it takes to operate and fuel large diesel/gas/coal engines, then the money will come.

Million dollars at that point is absolutely nothing. You are talking hundreds of billions, likely into tens of trillions. If eventually you have a 'black box' that works well with a personal vehicle - a car, a truck, then you have the world in your pocket.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Do a little research before snide comments! His has applied for patents. However, since it seems contrary to what we now understand, the patent office has asked for more proof. Rossi is working on that now. Get over yourself....

Re:Answer, in brief:

[roman_mir]

Biggest trucks that we have, locomotives, cranes, ships, diesel and coal electrical generators, heat generators, all of this can be replaced by one or more of these 'magic black boxes' that generate electrical power

- obviously when I say "all of this", I mean the sources of power that drive these machines, not the machines themselves.

Just for the local pedants and nazis.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

6 months between refueling. Refueling is cheaper than buying a new one.

Thus we can put a ceiling on the number at $0.0228/kWh. Depending on how much less expensive refueling is than buying a new one that could go down dramatically. Using numbers I pulled out of the my imagination lets say the machine only lasts 5 years and refueling is $500 every six months.

That gives us $1500 (initial) + $4500 (fuel * 4.5 years) = $6000
Total output (15kW * 43830 average hours in a year) = 567,450 kWh

$0.009126/kWh (US dollars per kilowatt hour) (Thank you Wolfram Alpha)

Strip three zero's off to get an apples to apples comparison and we have $9.126/MW h

Now - one of the important things to realize is that the're not talking kW of electricity but kW of heat. Big difference. Fortunately you can use a Cyclone engine to get about a %30 efficiency so that drops our 15kW to more like 5 kW. That means we need not only three of these but a Cyclone to turn the heat into electricity losing 2/3 of our energy in the process. I don't have a price on a cyclone unfortunately but it can't be less than a few thousand dollars looking at the numbers I can find. That cranks our 5 year number up to something near $17.62/MW h

That's 1/3 the price of the cheapest energy on the market and over an order of magnitude compared to any renewable.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus christ man. Watt is a unit of Power. Power is unit Energy per unit Time. To get energy, you take Watt and multiply it with time. You don't divide by time. That would give a unit called STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM SCIENCE.

If you have a device that gives you consistently 150 kW throughout one year, the net energy produced would be 150 000 W * (24 hours/day * 365 days/year * 1 year) = 1.314 MWh. I'm sorry if mega and kilo are "too confusing" for you. Goddamn this brownie is salty. Fuck!

Re:Answer, in brief:

[AdamHaun]

The problem with that approach is that after you have released all your plans for free, you get to go back to your job...

Not at all. You hit the talk show circuit, give motivational lectures to businesspeople, write a book, and do whatever else you can to capitalize on your new-found fame. That should get you more than enough money to retire on. Alternately, you keep it secret while starting a company, hit the market a couple years ahead of everyone else, *then* release the plans to the public.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

Don't disagree, but, afaik, its used slightly differently for energy sources.

a "3kW" source, can deliver 3kW over a short period of time, it doesn't have "3kJ" of energy (it will store quite a bit more), but you can get 3kW of work of of it for a short, but indeterminate period of time.

using the example I posted in the cross thread
$150/kW would be equivalent an energy source as 2x 500W car batteries in series.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[vuke69]

Say for example, you have a car battery rated as 500W

False premise. Batteries are not rated in W, they are rated in Wh. They have a roughly fixed amount of stored potential energy.

This means the battery can sustain 500W of power over a very short period of time.

Also false. Batteries are also rated in amps, for the safe amount that can be drawn off them. Given the battery voltage you can obviously convert that to watts, but it still doesn't mean what you think it does. That would be how much it can sustain until the battery has gone flat, not a hypothetical "very short period of time."

Generators, solar cells, etc.; are rated in W, because they have roughly a fixed amount of power they can generate continuously. As such, this guy's (probably imaginary) reactor would also be rated in W. You could rate the fuel in joules or kWh, much like you could rate a barrel of diesel fuel in the same manner.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[jythie]

Esp if the magic is a chemical fuel cell inside the 'tamper proof' box.... or just a bunch of lead acid batteries....

Re:Answer, in brief:

[dabridgham]

I've never heard of that. As far as I know, the word means what it means from physics even if you're talking about energy sources. A 3kW generator can deliver 3kW for as long as its energy source holds out. In other words, saying it's a 3kW source really is not a complete description of the energy you can get out of it. You need to know how big the fuel tank is.

A 3kW hydro-generator can deliver 3kW for so long as the water keeps flowing. A 3kW diesel generator can produce 3kW of electrical power so long as the diesel tank is not empty (and it doesn't break). And a 3kW battery . . . Oops. That would be exactly the error we're all trying to explain to you. Battery capacity is measured in kW-hours or amp-hours (with the battery voltage implied to convert it to an energy unit). In other words, when you want to talk about energy capacity you need to switch to units of energy not units of power.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[vuke69]

The unit is defined as coulombs per second. But you always have to divide by time to convert between power and energy units. If you think amps have anything to do with time, you don't understand them.

This is identical to the relationship between velocity (power) and distance traveled (energy). Velocity is an instantaneous measurement, and has nothing to do with time; yet is measured in meters per second.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[yndrd1984]

one watt is defined as one joule for/per one second (W=J/s)
Pretty much, but it could also be 60 joules over a period of a minute, or 3,600 joules over a hour.

one kilo watt (kW) is 1,000 joules for/per one second (kJ/s)
Again, that's one example, but so is 3,600,000 joules in an hour.

one kiloWatt hour (kWh) is 1,000 Joules per second for 3600 seconds
Another perfect example, but it could also be 1 Joule per second for 3,600,000 seconds, or 3,600,000 joules per second for just one second.

This however:
1 kWh = requires a 3,600 kW power source
Is false. You could just as easily get 1 kWh from 1 Watt solar cell, it would just take it 1,000 hours to do it.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[jythie]

Well, it is possible, I guess, that if the tech actually exists it does not scale well, and thus you get a diminishing return on building bigger units. But, as you say, one should just get a bunch of small units then, unless the units require significant maintaince/fueling in which case there might be cost savings in having one big one to take care of rather then 1000 little ones. Who knows, and since he is leaving that part out of his little narrative, I guess he has not thought up a reason either.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

it is not a generator nor a renewable energy source.
Its [supposedly] a LENR battery
more likely its just a cool chemical reaction that delivers a very high energy density.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[yndrd1984]

The difference is, we are talking about where the system where the energy comes from rather than actually doing the work.

No, the difference is an amount of energy vs. a rate of energy flow.

The reason you're mixing the two up and multiplying when you shouldn't is that "Watt" includes units of time (Joules/second) even though there's no time unit in the name, while kWh does not include units of time even though it uses hours in the name (seconds and hours cancel out - Joules/second * hours = Joules/3,600,000).

Re:Answer, in brief:

[c6gunner]

It's best not to patent it and not to tell anybody how it's done but instead to keep it a trade secret and protect technologically and build the generators, but not sell them yet in the beginning, but instead rent them out to companies.

If your goal is world-domination, sure. In that case you'll need a moon-base and a giant freakin' laser to go with it.

On the other hand, if you're looking to help the human race improve it's condition, while at the same time making yourself ridiculously rich, it's best to patent it and just license the technology to whoever want to use it. There's only so much you as an individual can do at any one time. If you're keeping it a secret, it'll be decades before you manage to develop and market all the products which you've just described. Whereas if you license it, you'll be an overnight billionaire, you'll be seen as a hero to billions of people, and you'll have a revenue stream that makes Bill Gates look like a pauper in comparison. There's absolutely no advantage to keeping it a secret, unless you're a control freak and/or a sociopath.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[BLKMGK]

Honestly? You make great points but if we assume that you're right and we assume that it actually works it comes down to being more expensive per watt than we currently pay. That IMO is where your reasoning goes off the rails a bit.

Personally I'm not really interested in the saving of money so much as I am being a bit less dependent on overseas oil and domestic coal. Cost of electricity could indeed rise if these things proved viable but if not an extreme amount I'd be willing to pay for it especially if it could be some sort of home installation. For that matter if I could get a home solar install done that would cover most of my energy needs for a reasonable cost I'd do it - I'm looking into it actually.

We have it good here, our energy costs are pretty low overall. If doing the right things costs a bit more and will progress the technology I'm okay with it. Hell I'm willing to pay more in taxes if it would help get all of us out of the fiscal mess our Government is in. The cheapest path isn't always the best path long term and long term is what we should all be looking at to the best of our ability...

BTW - for some folks living off the grid far from power lines (the cost of which would shock you BTW) even at a higher cost it might still be cost effective.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[roman_mir]

If there is a working prototype then securing a private source of funding for a cut of profit is ridiculously easy.

And yes, controlling something like that is enormously lucrative and rewarding in more ways than just money, so clearly, it's not a good idea at all to patent it and license it to anybody, it is much better to rent the equipment out, there would be no shortage of willing participants.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

He isn't quoting kWh though,
He's quoting kW

i.e. the max energy the device can deliver at maximum reaction rate.

Any device @ maximum reaction rate isn't going to last very long, and I'm guessing if he quoted it using kWh there wouldn't be all the myth surrounding it that there is.

Either that or the guy is a total fraud (which I'd like to think isn't the case)

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

Perhaps you could rephrase that using a set of UPS specs as an example.....

Re:Answer, in brief:

[__u63]

If you read a pre-print of the Widom and Larsen paper, you'll see that one of the main points of the paper is that the signature is different. What you're describing is the the signature of a H+H or D+D reaction. What they're claiming is that inverse beta decay is occurring and that there are a number of decay chains in which the gamma rays are being absorbed by the same mechanism that is causing the electron capture. Whether this is plausible or in the realm of fantasy is something that goes beyond my level of knowledge at this point.

But finally, it's pointless to proceed from first principles to argue that this isn't fusion. You have to look at evidence, and by this I mean *all* of the evidence, even if it's not something you've been trained in, such as calorimetry. The early objections to the calorimetry data were hasty and cavalier, in my opinion. If you look at the calorimetry and the ash (e.g., small amounts of tritium or helium-4 well above error) and the NAA or SIMS spectra, which show indications of transmutations, and conclude that what is going on cannot be attributed to a chemical reaction, you're left with three other possibilities: (a) the combined set of evidence is in error and the experimentalists are incompetent; (b) there's a nuclear reaction of some kind going on; (c) there's something that's neither chemical nor nuclear that is yielding power densities on the same order as that of a nuclear reaction.

It's fine to require a high burden of proof, but defaulting to option (a) is intellectually lazy, in my opinion.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the Aristotelian physicists who walked away from Galileo's demonstrations still thinking that heavier bodies just HAVE to fall faster than lighter ones!

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Cold fusion doesn't produce radioactive waste.

Cold fusion doesn't produce anything because it doesn't exist. It's mythical like unicorns and scientific literacy on slashdot.

http://www-fusion-magnetique.cea.fr/gb/fusion/principes/section_efficace_gb.gif

In order for to ions to fuse they must over come the coulomb barrier. Classically, this requires incident energies for ~1MeV. However from quantum mechanics we know that particles of ~10keV incident energies can tunnel through at sufficient rates.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[c6gunner]

I never said securing funding would be an issue. I have no idea where you got that from.

Look, no offense, but I'm starting to wonder about your mental health. There is something seriously wrong with anyone who would turn down billions of dollars over the next couple years, and a chance to incalculably improve the lives of pretty much the entire human race, in favor of making trillions of dollars over the next few decades.

It reminds me of the idiots who claim that "Big Pharma" is withholding the cure for cancer because it's more lucrative to "manage" a disease than to cure it. That kind of conspiracy-mongering is absurd on the face of it for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that most people simply don't think that way. Given the choice between making a billion dollars while helping people, or five billion while hurting people, the vast majority of us will choose the former. But judging by what I'm reading here, you seem to be saying you'd go with the latter. Rational, mentally-balanced individuals don't engage in that kind of behavior. If you honestly see that course of action as the logical choice, you need to get some help.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Easy. flip the switch to more magic

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

There is discussion about all of these points on ecatnews.com.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe he's referring to people "in the know" with Rossi, who claim to have received functioning devices from him.

I'm not sure where you got the sense GP thinks a functional cold fusion device is likely.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[solidraven]

Well, at least they don't stack car batteries and a water heater in tin foil...

Re:Answer, in brief:

[jamesh]

On top of that, there has been absolutely no discussion as to what "ongoing" expenses there might be to actually operate this device.

I suspect the ongoing expenses will be large quantities of diesel fuel... purely as a lubricant of course.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[crabel]

Full ACK. Not sure about LENR in general, but the E-Cat is most likely fraud. http://esowatch.com/en/index.php?title=Focardi-Rossi_Energy-Catalyzer

Re:Answer, in brief:

[roman_mir]

How is creating a new innovative product and releasing it to the market in a timely manner, while people are looking for that exact solution is "hurting people"? I am now wondering about your mental health.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mosb1000]

one watt is defined as one joule for/per one second

Ok, this is where you are going wrong: for and per are not interchangeable terms.

Using the word for implies multiplication: 1 kilowatt for 1 hour is 1 kilowatt-hour (1 kW * 1 hr = 1 kWh).

Using the word per implies division as in 1000 joules per 3600 second period is 0.278 joules per second (1000 J / 3600 s = 0.278 J/s).

Do you see the difference?

Re:Answer, in brief:

[DCFusor]

Agree. No. Go see the slides. In any big org like NASA, there's a fair amount of latitude for speculation and blue sky. Those slides don't say *anything* works, just crap they've tried.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[DCFusor]

I do this for a living, and that's my take. No need for a patent, you'd just lose it to the bigger lawyer anyway. All you'd need is credit - and what outfit wouldn't want the "parent of fusion" on their staff at any money and perks they wanted. Buddy, this is trillions of bucks - there will be some crumbs falling off the table no matter what. Trying to hold out for "real money" (billions) just paints a target on your back. Stupid. Solve the doggone problem, then sweat that stuff.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[DCFusor]

The operating costs are of course, the cost of the hydrogen you burn to get that power - with oxygen and a nickel catalyst. No fusion to see here, move along.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[shutdown -p now]

Ayn Rand would disapprove - if you have some economic means to rape somebody and bleed them dry, it is not only your right but your moral obligation to do so. ~

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, stop embarrassing yourself, and go buy a physics textbook.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[roman_mir]

So creating a new technology and allowing others to use it exactly when they need it is 'raping somebody and bleeding them dry'. I need to use that somewhere.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[c6gunner]

Ayn Rand would disapprove - if you have some economic means to rape somebody and bleed them dry, it is not only your right but your moral obligation to do so. ~

Naw. A sophomoric understanding of her works based on reading reviews written by her opponents might lead you to believe that. Though I'm not exactly a huge fan of Rand, I still have to object to such a ridiculous caricaturization of her ideology. All of her work is based on the idea of "rational self-interest". Only a deranged mind would equate "rape somebody and bleed them dry" with "rational self-interest". It's akin to the theistic nitwits who constantly claim that without god we'd have no compassion or cooperation; it demonstrates a complete ignorance of subjects like games theory and the evolutionary advantages of cooperative behavior. I don't think it's possible to read Atlas Shrugged and come away with the impression that she's advocating exploitation.

This is why discussions about economics and social ideologies are rarely productive - too many people are intent on demonizing the opposition rather than having a frank exchange of ideas. Sometimes it's deliberate, but more often it's a simple lack of understanding caused by only listening to the talking-heads that share your own political bubble.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[eggstasy]

I'm not a physicist, and I can't be sure what the poster meant by that, but there are plenty of "devices running cold fusion", they simply do not generate more power than they consume. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

Re:Answer, in brief:

[DCFusor]

I'm an experimentalist IN THIS FIELD. Mod parent up. This is almost surely fake.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Your.Master]

What tangible advantage do you see in going down the renting route? You've described how it can be "enormously lucrative and rewarding in more ways than just money" to rent it. Can you describe ways in which that is clearly better than the other route, both to yourself and to society at large?

I think with c6gunner is getting at is that you're talking about a marginal benefit to yourself that is invisible (100 billion dollars vs. 1 trillion dollars -- if that's personal wealth, then there really is no meaningful difference), while not addressing:

* Increased marginal risk to the world -- what if there's an accident and you die with all the trade secrets?
* What makes you think you could bring your products to market in as timely a manner as a series of competitors who all license your technology (regardless of whether you can secure seed money, which we agree you can)?
* What makes you think that your product is so perfect that either it cannot be significantly improved upon or, if it can be improved upon, you can do it yourself just as well as a series of licensed competitors trying to improve upon the technology? Because if you don't think that, then we're not talking about releasing innovative products to the market in a timely manner, we're talking about artificially delaying them in order for you to retain control.

The mental health crack the GP did may have been uncalled for but the argument really seems to on the level of James Bond villainy. You're grasping at "power" (my interpretation of "in more ways than money") for its own sake without any analyses of the effects of the alternatives.

The fact that you don't seem to understand the metaphor doesn't help -- in the conspiracy theory, Big Pharma isn't literally hurting people, it actually *is* helping people, but it's intentionally doing it in a self-serving way without regard to the fact that it could help people much more and still get great profits. It's a matter of opportunity cost.

It's really an excellent analogy between the two hypothetical business models. The disease here has the symptom is "limited power supply". You have a cure. You could become insanely rich by releasing your cure. Or you could become possibly even more insanely rich, and have some other nebulous benefits you've mentioned, by treating the symptoms.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[DG]

If this is legit - please note my (puts on sunglasses) POWERFUL skepticism as to its legitimacy - once it is out in the wild, it will be reverse-engineered and copied about as fast as humanly possible.

There's not a patent or copyright law in the world that will stand up to the economic pressure of a clean energy source at 1/3rd the price of current sources.

This is the sort of thing that governments nationalize. It would be HUGE.

That being the case, his only real chance to recoup his reward is to extract every red cent he can from it up front, before the secret is out. He'll need it for the patent infringement legal bills.

DG

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Because, of course, we have all the answers and especially the "Standard Model" is so simple and has worked out so well, so far...

Re:Answer, in brief:

[shutdown -p now]

I've read the book (in fact, had just re-read it recently), and that has been my clear personal impression from it. Heck, it's pretty much spelled out in the characters' dialogues, several times even. That's exactly what "rational self-interest" boils down to in Rand's philosophy when it comes to business - charge as much as you can get away with, and leave them with barely enough to scrap by so that they'll be around later for you to milk them again.

Then again, from the utter contempt with which those same characters treat any display of compassion (for all we know, Dagny would rather let someone die in the gutter than to disgrace them and herself with a single dollar of "unearned" charity), they're all clear-cut sociopaths, so "self-interest" can be expected a very sinister bend.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Here.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[roman_mir]

both to yourself and to society at large?

-

1. It's like having control over any resource, it puts the owner into position of power.

2. It's not patented, so nobody is prevented from reinventing it, thus it's already better than what's happening now for society at large.

3. Once you die, there is really nothing to worry about. Nothing matters to you once you are dead, and everybody dies, so eventually everything becomes worthless to everybody.

4. There is a huge difference between amount of capital one has. A trillion is clearly better than a billion, etc., that's simple math, again, it puts you into position of more control.

5. By proving the fact that this technology can exist, the market only creates even more opportunities, people enter that same market in search of the solution, and it's likely that they will find this solution or something different, which actually will benefit the society more than having one solution.

6. Clearly I am talking about power, control, ability to corner the market for some time while others are looking for the same solution or better / different solutions. I don't believe in charity in business.

7. As to pharma - this is an issue of copyrights and patents. In fact this is a completely opposite case and neither you, nor the other poster understand this. Patents and copyrights (and government, as in FDA and other agencies) create the situation in pharma, where it is profitable NOT to look for new solutions, because others are prevented from looking into solutions due to the high barriers of entry set by government in every way, especially patents, copyrights and regulations.

I see trade secrets as the BEST solution for the society in fact, because nobody is prevented from looking for that same solution, nobody can be forced into any licensing agreements, there is more opportunity to develop better / different solutions.

If one person creates / invents something, it's likely others will do too, and patents/copyrights and licenses are in fact barriers to entry into the market and methods of prevention of effective distribution of the solution.

With a trade secret and no patents/copyrights, one has to be in a hurry to develop solutions and corner the market before others find the same or different/similar solutions and enter the market.

This is the principle by which the FREE market operates as opposed to controlled, manipulated market, so anybody making comments on 'mental health' should examine his own levels of understanding or intelligence.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Time does not exist.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[shutdown -p now]

So creating a new technology and allowing others to use it exactly when they need it is 'raping somebody and bleeding them dry'. I need to use that somewhere.

The choices given to you were to patent it and let everyone use it for a decent fee (will net you billions), or don't patent use and keep it a trade secret, and only let them rent it from you (will net you trillions, but is a very nasty case of monopoly abuse).

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Courageous]

If you are responding to me, you are confused.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[c6gunner]

*shrug* it's interesting how your preconceptions can shape what you read. I'd love to see you post one of the lines which advocates the kind of exploitation you're referring to. I have a feeling it would tell me quite a lot about your beliefs and biases.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[HiThere]

You are making assumptions that are probably invalid. The D + D = He reaction has too high a thermal barrier, so that can't be the reaction. But this doesn't mean that there isn't one that hasn't been investigated. (Not quite.) It just means it won't be that simple. And it might not release neutrons. Clearly, if it's going to fuse two atoms they've got be be lighter than iron. (Didn't I hear somewhere that his reaction produces copper? Or consumes copper?)

It's probably not true, but if it is it's quite unlikely to be one of the standard fusion reactions contemplated.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Belial6]

For that extra 900 billion dollars you could buy an awful lot of laws and lawmakers.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[sjames]

The real shame of it (and by that, I mean something that should make the scientific community feel shame) is that the ridicule came not from falsification but from not knowing how it would work, so concluding that it doesn't. Meanwhile, very quietly, we have little hints such as the excess heat from loading deuterium into and out of palladium that demonstrates that there is indeed something going on there.

Agreed, we aren't exactly sure what is happening or how, but it is fair to say that the evidence free quack labels were inexcusable.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

kWh is the unit of energy, not kW/hr !

More details: Watts are Joules/s (J/s) so multiplying Watts times time causes the seconds to cancel, leaving Joules (energy).

Re:Answer, in brief:

[davidbofinger]

there are plenty of "devices running cold fusion"

Well, yes, muon catalysis. But the NASA page mentions palladium. So it isn't talking about muon catalysis and Oligonicella has a point.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[rtb61]

Of course the whole thing could be running on cattle fertiliser. It is not about selling anything than, advertising space, interviews and stores. All one big yarn, keeping ticking over by a steady stream of fantasy. An energy version of alien visitation and communication, of spiritual meetings with those that have passed, of hunting big foot and various other critters. Being able to 'sell' the story at a profit seems to be the driver, from things that are just around the corner and hidden secrets.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[FatLittleMonkey]

Keep in mind even all of the "demonstrations" that Rossi has done only lasted 24 hours, perhaps two days at most.

None of Rossi's demos have lasted a full day. Certainly none have gone beyond a day. Most were a few hours, with the "self-sustain" mode always lasting less time than the "warm-up". For example, the "1MW" demonstration had a 4 hour warm-up time, and a 3.5 hour "self-sustain" time. In a prior (August?) test of a single unit, there was a 2hr "warm-up" and 90min "self-sustain" time.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[fyngyrz]

Rational, mentally-balanced individuals don't engage in that kind of behavior.

Just FYI

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Courageous]

Understood. The "/" was inadvertent. I was tired. I should have written that as kW-Hr or something.

$.017/kWhr = $150/8760 ($150/the watt-hours used in a year).

C//

Re:Answer, in brief:

[fyngyrz]

Imagine a drug company who spends a very large amount of money designing a cure for disease X.

They can't really "hide" the formula; once the pill or whatever is out there, its composition can rather easily be determined, almost no research required.

That means the effort to innovate and the effort to copy are seriously disjoint.

And *that* means that the copy can sell for a lot less than the original; which means the original basically won't sell; which means that the research money was wasted; which means next time, they won't authorize such research and disease Y goes uncured.

So in the end, a trade secret based system will lead to fewer high-end innovations from the private sector.

Now... if we task the government with those expensive kinds of research projects, so that profit isn't the motive... maybe it could work. But we'd need more change than just the patent/copyright system in order to make it practical.

And it's worth pointing out that our government really does a shitty job at just about everything it is tasked with. No profit motive = poor money handling... and it's our money.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[fyngyrz]

you need to convince your local congressmen that the laws of physics need to be repealed

Don't you know that congress never repeals any laws, for any reason? Congress only makes more laws. Now, if you'd like congress to make some NEW laws of physics, I'm sure that with the appropriate donation, they'd be pleased to oblige you.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[genx_walt]

Firstly, NASA states in the last video on the post they have "Demonstrated" LENR. "It has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy, cleanly, without hazardous ionizing radiation, without producing nasty waste." LENR is the more appropriate term for what we used to call "cold fusion" This is what the E-Cat uses. This tells me, NASA has devices that make energy with LENR. They refer to using Ni and H which Rossi is also using.

Also, the Rossi said in interviews that he is running his E-Cat at home, and other people in his team are running them. The link at e-catworld below refers to the interview where he stated this. http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/01/rossi-in-talks-with-home-depot-for-e-cat-distribution-interview-with-james-martinez-on-cah-flow-radio/

His e-cat is with Underwriting Lavatories and awaiting UL certification. This was stated on the latest interview with him. The PESWiki link links to the interview and has a partial transcript of the interview. http://pesn.com/2012/01/14/9602012_Momentous_Breakthroughs_Announced_During_Anniversary_E-Cat_Interview/

You can't forget about the 1MW plant that the customer paid $2 million for after the customer tested the unit.

Walt

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's best not to patent it and not to tell anybody how it's done but instead to keep it a trade secret and protect technologically and build > the generators, but not sell them yet in the beginning, but instead rent them out to companies.

Worked okay for a Mr Watt and Coke.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Doc Ruby]

What he says is that the 10KW plants use a different tech than the 1MW plants, and that the 10KW plants' tech scales better in manufacturing.

FWIW, even if a 1MW plant costs more than 100 10KW plants, there could be other benefits to the 1MW plant. Even fusion consumes fuel, which in this case seems to be nickel, and perhaps the 1MW tech is more nickel-efficient. There's also possibly a size (volume) efficiency; a 1 MW plant could be smaller than 100 10KW plants, though if the 10KW units are residential sized a 1MW plant at 10x10 residential ones isn't going to be very big compared to the very big conventional plants it would replace. It also seems that an external electricity supply is necessary to keep the production going (these plants create heat, not electricity), which might be less efficient in the big plant vs the small plant, which could mean a lot of extra electrical equipment for the larger scale.

There are also possibly manufacturing scale economies for millions of 10KW plants that aren't initially achievable for the smaller volume of 1MW plants expected to be produced.

It could all be a scam. But they claim to be shipping devices now, and supposedly all will be revealed sometime this year. We can speculate, but soon enough we'll probably know.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Doc Ruby]

It looks like Rossi is relying on secrecy and some kind of mechanism to prevent close inspection of the mechanisms, rather than patent.

So I hope you're right, if it works. And if it works, I still expect that Rossi's first mover advantage will make a huge return on his investment, simply by preordering many generators even at the low prices he's claiming.

So if it works, it would not only provide even cheaper and more sustainable energy than for the last century, but it would demonstrate the similarly archaic patent regime that just holds everything back.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Doc Ruby]

Where does "rational self-interest", AKA (the virtue of) selfishness, draw the line? Who is to say what is exploitation? Rupert Murdoch? The bankers at AIG?

I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead years ago, and after I recovered from the fiction and thought about it as philosophy I realized that Rand's Objectivism, or even just its practically applicable values, assign selfishness as the only virtue. It's inhuman in demonizing compassion and sharing where the only gain is one's feeling of helping ("altruism").

Re:Answer, in brief:

[ChrisMaple]

Rand objects to thieves and apologists for thieves. Alas, if you read the book with a third grade level of comprehension or a traditionalist misunderstanding of the world, you miss her message.

Both Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon have very dramatic and obvious scenes of compassion for less fortunate but honest people. That you can read the book and not see these scenes shows not blindness, but a refusal to see.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[ChrisMaple]

Energy is the root of all modern wealth

That claim was debunked about 1975, shortly after the first "energy crisis". Energy is important, but human input (especially mental) is the essential component of modern wealth.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[TapeCutter]

as above, 1kWh = 3.6MW

Let's ignore the fact that one side of your equation has lost the time units and assume you're correct. We can now play ad-absurdium by applying your numbers to my house which uses ~1.5KWh/day, so by your equation my house requires a ~5MW generator. We can now extrapolate that to find the city I live in requires 5TW, which (according to my google fu) is slightly more that the total generation capacity of the entire US.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[roman_mir]

Who is this magical unicorn, 'giving me choices'?

The choices are: patent and copyright the stuff and use government provided way to monopolise the solution and license it to others or do what I think is right, skip gov't monopoly, skip patenting and copyrights (and that is my consistent position) and use the only real free market tool - trade secret.

Using trade secret as opposed to gov't monopoly of patents / copyrights allows the market to continue research in this area, in fact pushes the market into more research, hopefully finding new and different ways of doing the same thing, so it promotes competition, and at the same time it means I have to bring the product to the market to make it, otherwise somebody else will.

Then it's up to my abilities - can I do better with trade secrets rather than patents and government subsidy/protection or not? Maybe, it's more of a risk, but it's definitely more appropriate for the market and if it works out (and it's a risk), then the reward is much greater as it should be.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[roman_mir]

I am against copyrights and patents and against government subsidised protectionism, which means trade secrets are the only proper solution.

Of-course I am against government meddling with business, regulating with departments like FDA, this means (in case of pharma) that to bring a drug or a medical device to the market there would be actual competition, because FDA adds an upward of a half a billion dollar cost to almost any drug/device, which means only the largest protected monopolies/oligopolies can be in that business.

As to drugs being reverse engineered - good. That's what would drive competition, and the government must not be there to protected business models, if anything, protecting business models hurts the customers, doesn't help them.

Somehow people survived without government protecting business models for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, we can do it.

Besides, it's not enough to know the formula in most cases, the production process is more important than the formula and that's where the trade secrets still exist obviously, while the formulas themselves are protected with patents (obnoxiously by the governments, that are completely corrupt and are putting their own political and economic well being above the lives of people they are supposedly representing.)

Patents and copyrights must be abolished, and eventually they will be, they don't matter anymore anyway, where it counts - producing countries, like China, who doesn't give a crap (rightfully so) about your patent and copyright, especially for the internal market.

Trade secret is the only real free market solution and it keeps everybody working rather than seeking rent and preventing others from competition, which means Trade secrets promote competition unlike patents and copyrights, which stifle the competition and cause economic stifling.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[roman_mir]

Trade secrets promote competition and patents and copyrights destroy competition.

The idea that government of the people for the people by the people must protect business models is obnoxious. Buying politicians is only useful when people are ready to give up their rights to the government, which then re-packages and sells this power to control the freedoms of people.

Patents and copyrights should never have existed and they are now being abolished de-facto by people who actually manufacture stuff, and it's a good thing. Buying a politician only makes sense when politician has something to sell, and that's the problem that needs to be addressed - power of politicians to steal liberties from people and sell control over those liberties.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[csirac]

Let's say you've got your favourite 3kW UPS in the rack. Quite bluntly, the 3kW here says nothing about how long the UPS can hold up for, with a 3,000 watt load or a 1 watt load. This isn't a simple number - it depends on the LOAD (measured in watts) and the CAPACITY of the batteries (usually spec'd in amp-hours, but could just as well be watt-hours, average discharge voltage x 1hr discharge current (amps) ~ watt-hours).

So a 3kW UPS just means it can prop up a 3,000 watt load before it buzzes with the front panel screaming "O/LOAD".

But you didn't cheap-out buying the smallest UPS you could get away with, you only have 1kW of stuff attached. Let's pretend 220V gear (and ignore RMS/Vpp/duty-cycle/switching noise/efficiency madness). That means we've got 1000/220 = 4.54 amps of current flowing through the output cables and into your gear.

But say we've replaced those four little 12V DC batteries inside a few times, and we notice they're rated at 7.2Ah (amp-hours). That means those batteries all up are storing 12 * 7.2 * 4 = 345.6 watt-hours of energy (assuming the batteries provide an unwavering 12V AND 7.2 amps continuous output over the entire discharge cycle... yeah right!) AND the UPS is 92% efficient converting the battery power into 220VAC (and the AC waveform is a perfect sinewave, among other lies) into our 1,000 watt load

That's 1000 / 0.92 / 12 / 4 = 22.64 amps flowing through those big fat battery cables on the input side.

Which means when our ideal-batteries suddenly stop working, they will have provided their 345.6Wh after 345.6/1000*0.92*60 = 19.07 minutes. Or, calculate it from the battery's 7.2Ah rating: 22.64 amps from an 7.2Ah battery bank means exhaustion in roughly 7.2/22.64 = 19.08 minutes.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, no, 1kWh = 3600kWs fuckwit.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Hank the Lion]

Automobiles produce carbon monoxide, various nitreous compounds, and minimal water.

HUH??? Automobiles burn mainly alkanes, which are composed of carbon and hydrogen.
When you burn those, you get carbon dioxide and water.
So why you claim that automobiles produce minimal water is a mystery to me.
Most water that is produced will be in vapour form, so you don't see it, but it's there, nevertheless.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[hxnwix]

Jesus christ man. Watt is a unit of Power. Power is unit Energy per unit Time. To get energy, you take Watt and multiply it with time. You don't divide by time. That would give a unit called STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM SCIENCE.

*looks up at you through nerd glasses with 1cm thick lenses*

ACTUALLY, we refer to that as rate of change of power, and it is certainly relevant. E.g. in the case of maintaining constant non-zero acceleration of a friction-lossless car.

*snorts, resumes tipping torso back and forth in chair, looks back down at stack of papers*

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Lispy]

So I was a bit disappointed when the whole thing became a polarized mess, rather than a good start into proper scientific research. Almost any scientist who investigated cold-fusion was considered a quack immediately.

Isnt any other Battery a "polarized mess" from the very beginning?

Re:Answer, in brief:

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

Not really, you are almost guaranteed three noble prizes and a very profitable lecture tour.
Given the alternative is working to retain control from every organisation, government or otherwise, that is probably a much nicer life.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[GodInHell]

I think Rossi's point right along has been that he dosen't care about convincing his skeotics. He's proud ed a machine, not a theory. If the machine works, the thoeries can come later. This is about money to him. Whetherr that makes him a charlatan or an inventir is best left to prove itself out in the next year or two. There is just no ooint in taking a position on his product based on lack of evidence. Don't buy in, sure, but also don't dismiss it out of hand.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Phoghat]

Personally, if I just invented some free energy source I would release all the plans for the benefit of the world and put all my resources into proving the concept for scientific verification.

Bwahahahahahahaha, stop me before I wet my pants, Puhleeeze!

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Teancum]

I take it you didn't read a single thing I wrote. The operating costs are far more than replacing the Nickel catalyst every once in awhile.

*facepalm*

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Teancum]

I was trying to be generous to the guy here. I may have missed a "demonstration" or two but I have never heard of him actually running one of these devices for more than a week. I've also done a rather generous survey of a great many of the "LENR devices" just trying to see what anybody else is doing, and if you even accept the fact that LENR/Cold Fusion is a real realm of scientific inquiry (I understand the hardcore skeptics) one of the persistent problems that seems to be in the field is the ability to keep the things running once you have them going. Typical in a LENR laboratory there are reports of fusion cells running for a few weeks and at most about a month or so, and those are reported as major success stories. For a home energy cell, that would piss off an ordinary consumer.

In other words, even in the realm of Cold Fusion, Rossi seems to be almost a nut job and doing stuff that is fantastic. That is saying a whole lot that ought to be raising red flags even on itself. This "breakthrough" is doing stuff that even people taking LENR seriously don't seem to be able to accomplish after decades of research. While Rossi is claiming all sorts of stuff about what his e-cat could be doing, his breakthroughs seem to be even more on the fantastic and he hasn't even put an upper limit on how long one of his cells is going to be working, or even acknowledging that it might be an issue at all.

This might be an interesting scientific curiosity, and if it is then there certainly is room to tinker in a lab and perhaps even have a "home fusion" kit that you can buy for an elementary school science fair. I think if I had a kid seriously interested in doing that, I would encourage them to instead invest in a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor device than one of Rossi's fusion cells, as the science involved is a lot more clear and looking at a Fusor going into "star mode" is just stinking cool. An e-cat cell might as well be a kettle on a hot plate.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Teancum]

The problem is that you still aren't going to be saving that much petroleum with this device if the costs to operate it not to mention the materials used to make it need to have petroleum based fuels (or other fossil fuels like coal and natural gas) being used to extract the Nickle or other materials being used to build the device.

If you are living "off the grid" and far from a more traditional power source, there still is solar cells and perhaps even a Diesel or gasoline generator to work with that are competing in theory with this device. Perhaps the e-cat could be competitive in price, and I'll admit that the price per kWh with those "off grid" generation methods can be as much as $1/kWh. No, the cost wouldn't shock me at all.

From the way you have written your post, I presume you care about the environmental consequences of energy production, and that is one thing that the e-Cat promoter are completely glossing over. Even if all of the fantastic claims about this device work out for the best and we can create electricity at $0.00001/kWh, I fear that it will lead to genuine global warming in a way that would put to shame anything being done with petroleum based energy production. With energy this cheap, you will see swimming pools being operated year round even in cold climates, people installing devices to thaw sidewalks, driveways, and parking lots for big box stores that keep melting snow, and in general a heat bubble coming out of larger cities the likes of which we have never seen before if for no other reason than energy will be cheap. Home will stop being insulated, and the very notion of energy efficiency will go completely out the window.

I have my current doubts about "global warming" and in particular "anthroprogenic global warming" as a significant factor around the globe right now, but e-Cats would completely clinch the argument for me and convince me that mankind is destroying this planet for once and for all. Energy that cheap would allow some Siberian cities to keep their rivers thawed out year-round and even deliberately deploying them to melt part of the Arctic Ocean. Yeah, that does real wonders for global climate change.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Teancum]

Why would it not scale very well? The question here is more along the lines of why doesn't the end-customers simply take 100 or more of the "home units" and link them together?

Indeed, if you saw any of the videos being produced about the 1 MW plants being built, they are really just a series of much smaller units linked together in parallel rather than one massive reactor vessel. Why Rossi is suddenly claiming the 1 MW reactors is something different after claiming that it was "proof" of his technology is something that makes me even more skeptical of what is going on.

I just don't get it. Then again, perhaps this whole thing is just a bunch of BS from a talented con artist, in which case it shouldn't ever make sense.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you SURE you're paying $0.0017/kWh? Or could it possibly be $0.17/kWh?

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Teancum]

I could split hairs with you, since most of the leading physical science journals simply reject any sort of submission of LENR out of hand when it is presented in the first place. There are some "journals" that cater to the LENR crowd (usually called a "fringe journal" by some) that do have disclosures of running cold fusion devices. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons also claimed to have had a functioning device at the University of Utah, as well as Dr. Steven Jones at Brigham Young University (who used a neutron counter for measurements instead of a calorimeter). The paper in question by Pons and Fleishmann was published in Nature. As to if you accept the results of that paper or if you think it really was a working device, that is your problem and not mine. There are other claimed devices, but I'll admit the science is quite weak and there is legitimate room for skepticism as to if the concept is even valid.

As to if a functioning device could have "net energy gain", much less something that could produce commercially useful amounts of power, I also have my deep doubts about the idea. If anything, I am increasingly convinced that Andrea Rossi is nothing more than a charlatan trying to dupe people into buying a box with a bunch of pinball machine parts.

If you want to see an amazing video to show to "true believers" of the eCat, I highly recommend this amazing video of a "fusion device" purchased at IKEA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsqSEw6Nti8

Seriously, you need to see this video after watching one of Rossi's numerous demonstrations, or at least show this to people who have been freshly exposed to the eCat concept. True believers will leave insulted, but it does put things in perspective.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Teancum]

Members of congress like to replace one complicated mess of laws with an even more complicated set of laws that satisfies some lobbyist group or another. I think that can be done with Einstein's equations quite nicely, as BP and AT&T wouldn't mind a petty little thing like the constant for the speed of light to be modified in some way to improve their profits.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[l0b0]

Your boned what? Your boned (Minecraft slang) plants will sprout? Your bone daemon will tell you when you're out of bones? Come on, don't keep us waiting!

Re:Answer, in brief:

[jamstar7]

Which is why I said minimal water. What water would have been produced doesn't happen because of the pressure and incomplete combustion.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Hank the Lion]

I still don't understand what you mean.
Vastly more water will be produced when burning gasoline than the carbon monoxide and nitreous compunds that you mention.
The main constituents of exhaust gases are carbon dioxide and water.
Compression ratio will not change that.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[delt0r]

D+D fusion produces T. Tritium has a half of about 12 years and decays via a low energy beta decay. Its not totally harmless or anything, but its pretty safe over all because of its low energy decay, and because it doesn't accumulate in any one organ if it does become bio available. However is a real bitch to keep contained.

Neutron activation is perhaps a bigger problem. When we get fusion working, using low Z elements should allow for pretty short half life activation products. So the structure would be safe in weeks to a few years. A poor choice of materials is probably still safe after 20 years or so.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[delt0r]

You can go above iron as well. Adding a single proton or neutron to most elements above iron still gives a net energy output. Quite a bit of output too.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[obscuro]

It uses H3O3.... HO HO HO...

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Belial6]

So, which is the lesser of two evils. Taking part in a corrupt system and using the fruits of it's corruption to lessen the amount of corruption by buying laws that disrupts corruption in that system, OR just letting the corrupt system continue to remain corrupted.

So, given a corrupt system, is it ethical to dismantle the corruption by working within the system?

Re:Answer, in brief:

[delt0r]

In what way was it debunked? By the fact that the western world didn't grind to a halt?

Re:Answer, in brief:

[roman_mir]

Ha ha ha, when was the last time you could infiltrate a mafia organisation and then convince them that they are doing something immoral and make them change their ways from inside.

The only way to change the system is for the people to throw the government out, fix the Constitution to prevent the further power grab, return power to the people and reset the government.

As I said - patents and copyrights are attributes of the corrupt system. Trade secrets is a free market solution to the question of making money from your work and it promotes competition rather than preventing it with government force.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's inhuman in demonizing compassion and sharing where the only gain is one's feeling of helping ("altruism").

Yeah, that's the only gain. I often feel that if more people understood network effects within a social system, there'd be a lot more anarchists.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm having 100 trillions USD per year of DISPOSABLE income can be VERY advantageous even for people not sociopaths and/or control freaks,

you can have whatever you want, say you wanted to sleep with hmm for example angelina joli (she is old but i think i heard she is still having "sexiest women in the world" whatever,

well you come and say angelina i want to beep, beep, beep and beep, she says WTF are you crazy you dirty old pervert, do you know i am married to bred pit, i will call police (i am assuming this guy is old since he is scientist)

and he just replies "well would you do it for a trillion dollars", she would probably reply "off course my dear love, do you want bred pit to hold candle for us, and massage your butt while we are doing it?"

i mean there is a lot of things money can bring you, and those that have money keep saying that you always want more ...

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Belial6]

That would be the last time I had 900 billion to spend on the problem.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[drolli]

Please cite what is *all the evidence*.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Baldrson]

Ignoramous.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Baldrson]

Ignoramous.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[cusco]

people survived without government protecting business models for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years

Apparently you don't understand how feudalistic societies work. You probably should, since the trend towards libertarianism is going to take us that direction. The king/pashah/viceroy/mayor/whoever allows his cousin to be the only buyer of apples for export. His nephew marries into a rich family, which is then granted the right to sell purple dye to weavers. A banker in the next country loans the governor money, the banker's son-in-law becomes manager of the storehouse and market. Governments have controlled access to markets as long as there have been governments, IIRC even Gilgamesh granted certain rights to the goldsmiths. North America in the 20th century was probably the least-controlled market access in history.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[__u63]

That's easy.

It's the calorimetry, nuclear ash, NAA and SIMS spectra documented in the hundreds of papers available here: http://lenr-canr.org/FilesByDate.htm.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[drolli]

95% of all the papers are conference proceedings, presentations, progress reports.

Please tell me which peer-reviewed papers which state what you claim (excess heat at the same time with transmutation).

BTW: infinite-energy is excluded from the list of acceptable journals. I did not find editorial policies on their webpage which explain the peer-review process, should they use one.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[LeadSongDog]

If your goal is world-domination, sure. In that case you'll need a moon-base and a giant freakin' laser to go with it.

OTOH, what good's a giant freakin' laser going to be without a lunar shark to point it?

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

A joule is the total energy, the amount of work done. Divide that by seconds, and you get Watts, which is an instantaneous measurement, and has NO TIME COMPONENT!

W=V*A
Volts have nothing to do with time. Amps have nothing to do with time. WHY THE FUCK would watts have anything to do with time?

Er, hate to break it to you, but Amperes = Coulombs / second. The Coulomb is the unit of electrical charge, and one Coulomb times one Volt equals one Joule. The reason for that equivalence is that Volts are a measure of the potential energy of electric charge; multiply the amount of charge by the potential energy of one unit of charge at that voltage and you get units of energy.

So watts are in fact a rate of energy delivery, with units equivalent to joules per second (J/s). Watts aren't even a unit specific to electronics; they work just as well for systems like, say, internal combustion engines (many countries rate ICE power in units of kilowatts rather than horsepower).

Yes, PLEASE, retake primary school physics. Perhaps then you would not be so persistent at proving to the world how poorly you understand simple concepts.

Take your own advice.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[masterme120]

You can't use "for" and "per" interchangeably. "For" is multiplication, "per" is division. 1,000 Joules per second for 3,600 seconds is 3,600,000 (J/s) * s or 3,600,000 J.
https://www.google.com/search?q=1+kWh+in+J

Re:Answer, in brief:

[__u63]

Your request for evidence from peer-reviewed journals raises a catch-22 of which you're no doubt already aware: only a small number of journals will publish papers on the subject. For this reason the request can be dismissed as not being made in good faith. Anyone who is genuinely interested in determining whether there is something to the LENR claims will have to go to the lenr-canr.org site, if only because it's one of the few places that has made anything available. arxiv.org is another (for pre-prints), and then there are Naturewissenschaften and other European journals.

I would hardly recommend "Infinite Energy" as a source of experimental data; obviously no one who is serious would.

People seem to be willing to resort to all kinds of rhetorical devices to try to bat away this nuisance of a subject. It suggests to me that they're afraid it might gain traction.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[drolli]

You really want to tell me that Science and Nature, the most prestigeous journals for physicists, accepting each one seemingly groundbreaking paper paper, the latter one in 2002 *despite* the big embarassment of 89, is an indication of exclusion of the subject from scientific Journals?

I am not wasting my time with material outside my field which has passed a single peer-review.

preprints are not articles. I personally would propose that arxiv removes (respectively marks) everything which was not published as an article at most 3 years after submission there.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO the "cold fusion" was worth looking into because even if it wasn't really fusion, it might have led to a different type of "battery" technology. At worst it might be some interesting phenomena.

So I was a bit disappointed when the whole thing became a polarized mess, rather than a good start into proper scientific research. Almost any scientist who investigated cold-fusion was considered a quack immediately.

Cold fusion did get looked into. The "considering cold fusion advocates quacks" phase happened after the proper scientific research was a done deal.

The warning signs were there from the start -- Pons and Fleischmann did science-by-press-release instead of writing a paper, getting it peer reviewed, and publishing. Despite this, hundreds of physics labs round the world jumped at the bit to try to replicate the P&F results based on the slim details available. Everyone wanted a crack at it, not just because of the energy implications, but also because it was a completely new and novel proposal for how to get hydrogen to fuse. If there was anything to it, the opportunity to discover new physics and write your name in the history books alongside P&F's was there.

However, almost everyone (especially groups well known for good experimental technique) discovered that energy well in excess of equilibrium simply did not occur. As people took a closer look at what P&F had disclosed, it became increasingly clear that P&F's experiment design, methodology, and measurements were all suspect. But nobody could be totally sure, because P&F pulled a classic pseudoscience move and became secretive. This did not help their cause, it just confirmed suspicions that they were out of their depth, crackpots, or both.

In the years which followed, a selection of fringe scientists hoping to attach themselves to something big kept pushing CF in spite of the problems. The noise from these people, especially those who (like P&F) basically staked their careers to CF, is what caused the long-term polarization.

Cold fusion was an example of a common theme in energy pseudoscience -- a device where the claimed excess energy is extremely small and difficult to measure correctly. In such scenarios, honest people can easily fool themselves with bad experiment design and measurement techniques, and dishonest people can easily produce deceptive results. Last time I read the history of the whole affair in detail, it seemed likely that P&F probably fooled themselves, and let the possibility that they'd solved the world's energy problems go to their heads, after which they weren't really doing science any more, what with the secrecy and the science-by-press-release etc.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

The real shame of it (and by that, I mean something that should make the scientific community feel shame) is that the ridicule came not from falsification but from not knowing how it would work, so concluding that it doesn't.

How do you get the idea that this is how cold fusion came to be ridiculed? Yes, there was focus on not knowing how it would work, but that was hardly the only criticism! A lot of scientists tried to reproduce the Pons & Fleischmann results, and failed, and identified likely problems with P&F's methodology. Problems which P&F not only failed to address, but also arguably tried to sweep under the rug by refusing to reveal more details about their experiments so everyone could be sure they were doing exactly the same things as P&F.

That's what turns mainstream science against you quicker than just about anything else. Yeah, they were under intense criticism, but cry me a river -- having a thick skin and still doing things the right way goes with the territory of announcing a controversial result. If you are right, you will be vindicated. If you are wrong, and admit as much when proven so, you will gain respect for honesty.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[sjames]

Yes, there was focus on not knowing how it would work, but that was hardly the only criticism!

It's not a criticism at all! A big complaint I have is that it was treated as one.

And yet at the same time, there were reports of successful reproduction, and even a tantalizing hint at the key to success but that was ignored in the avalanche of attacks. It seems they were not wrong so much as they actually didn't know exactly what made the difference between success and failure (hardly an unusual state of affairs with a surprise discovery).

Rather quickly, even attempting to reproduce the result came to be seen as the kiss of death for a career. To this day, experiments that DO work and CAN be reproduced have to carefully avoid the term 'cold fusion'.

The whole thing could have been handled with a lot more decorum and a lot less emotion on all sides (admittedly, P&F could have handled things better as well, especially their initial announcement). I stand by my statement that the affair was genuinely shameful.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[__u63]

I think there are few who have taken the time to do a cursory investigation of the subject who would have the slightest objection to the claim that Nature and Science have editorial biases against studies on the subject, even those individuals who believe that the work that has been done is complete nonsense. The claim is simply not a controversial one.

I don't think it would be a problem if you didn't waste your time reading non-peer-reviewed papers on LENR. The field will no doubt move forward without you (or not move forward, if it's bunk).

What is fascinating to me about this exchange, in an anthropological sense, as one observing experimentalists (perhaps you're one), is that I'm not even convinced myself that the LENR stuff is real. I'm simply intrigued by the possibility that those folks might be onto something, and there are no ties to academia or fears for my reputation to dissuade me from investigating the truth of the matter. Similar resistance was shown in the scientific community to the advent of the telescope, to the invention of the airplane, and, apropos enough, to the possibility of nuclear fission. That there were fads relating to polywater and so on does nothing to detract from this.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

Quite bluntly, the 3kW here says nothing about how long the UPS can hold up for, with a 3,000 watt load or a 1 watt load.

Actually, that isn't true is it.

= 19.08 minutes

i.e. "a short space of time"

if you draw 500W instead of 1kW, that will be 38 minutes.

Which comes back to my original point, $150/kW is never going to compete with the cents/kW provided by conventional energy sources. - and why I didn't miss the "h" in kW.
under the assumption that:
cost/kW means how long you can run the rated device for a short space of time (i.e. less than 1 hour)

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

yes,
1 watt = 1 coulomb for 1 second.
1 watt hour = 1 coulomb for 3600 seconds.

hence
1 watt hour = 3600 watts.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

sorry
1 watt = 1 coulomb per second for 1 second.
1 watt hour = 1 coulomb per second for 3600 seconds.

hence
1 watt hour = 3600 watts.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

Sure
just simpler than writing
one watt is defined as one joule per one second for one second.

Sigh.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[csirac]

Quite bluntly, the 3kW here says nothing about how long the UPS can hold up for, with a 3,000 watt load or a 1 watt load.

Actually, that isn't true is it.

You seemed to be mis-using maximum watt ratings in your discussion, and invited a UPS example. So the point I am making is that, in a discussion trying to ascertain the amount of useful work which can be extracted from a given generator+energy storage system, the maximum load rating of the generator component (or the energy storage, for that matter!) is not helpful.

Eg., for a UPS system, the KVA rating has nothing to do with the amount of useful work it will provide (aka "how long will run for"), other than the fact that manufacturers tend to sensibly size the internal batteries (if supplied) to roughly match a nominal utilisation (typical load scenario) relative to the advertised maximum load rating of the inverter circuitry.

So, UPS runtime has everything to do with load (watts) and battery capacity (watt-hours). We do not care about UPS (or battery) maximum ratings, unless the load under consideration cannot be supported, or cannot be supported efficiently.

Well, we could also talk about battery efficiency, inverter efficiency, power factor of AC loads, etc. but again, nothing to do with maximum ratings.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

We do not care about UPS (or battery) maximum ratings, unless the load under consideration cannot be supported, or cannot be supported efficiently.

UPS's, like most battery/stored energy sources "watt rating" are specified to give similar runtimes by usage

So a 1kW UPS will run a 1kW device for 5 minutes.
and a 2KW UPS will run a 2kW device for 5 minutes

the reason to "care", is a 2kW UPS will also run a 1kW device for 10 minutes.

My guess is the reason Rossi is quoting energy cost in kW (rather than kWh) is these devices run similar to this.
I.e. you get a 35kW device for $5,250 and this will run a home drawing an average 0.05kW for 2 years before it needs replacing.

You could yank 35kW out of it. but then it will need replacing in a very short period of time.

As others have noted, none of Rossi's demos have lasted longer than 24hours, but he has demonstrated variable output. So if you have a device that can deliver say 4kW for 24hours, then that same device could run the average home (guessing 0.05kW) for 80 days.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[pnutjam]

The vast majority of people don't run companies...

Re:Answer, in brief:

[pnutjam]

otherwise you are leaving money on the table and some high speed trader will jump between you and your customers.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mosb1000]

Here's what you said:

one watt is defined as one joule for/per one second (W=J/s)

The text is wrong, because the words for and per are not interchangeable. But the expression is correct because you correctly used division rather than multiplication. Here is the wikipedia definition:

The unit, defined as one joule per second, measures the rate of energy conversion.

Since a watt is a measure of the rate of energy conversion, it is not a measure of energy by itself.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[drolli]

> I think there are few who have taken the time to do a cursory
> investigation of the subject who would have the slightest
> objection to the claim that Nature and Science have editorial
> biases against studies on the subject, even those individuals
> who believe that the work that has been done is complete
> nonsense. The claim is simply not a controversial one.

So the reason for speeding up the publication in 2002 by skipping a part of the normal review process was because they had a bias *against* the subject. Very convincing argument......

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry
1 watt = 1 coulomb per second for 1 second.

No. Watts are joules PER second, nothing else. There is no for 1 second in the definition of a watt. If there was, the unit would no longer be a rate, it would just be joules.

You left out something really important, too. For electrical power, P(ower) = I(current) * V(oltage):
1 watt = 1 amp * 1 volt

Which is equivalent to:
1 watt = (1 Coulomb / s) * 1 volt

And since volts * coulombs = joules, the equation is also equivalent to:
1 watt = 1 Joule / s

1 watt hour = 1 coulomb per second for 3600 seconds.

hence
1 watt hour = 3600 watts.

No. 1 Wh = 1W * 3600s = 1J/s * 3600s = 3600J.

And in your later message:

Sure
just simpler than writing
one watt is defined as one joule per one second for one second.

Sigh.

Sighing is what everyone is doing right now reading your post. You don't seem to be capable of understanding that there IS NO "FOR ONE SECOND" in the definition of a watt, no matter how you're calculating watts from other base units.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Anonymous Coward]

UPS's, like most battery/stored energy sources "watt rating" are specified to give similar runtimes by usage

So a 1kW UPS will run a 1kW device for 5 minutes.
and a 2KW UPS will run a 2kW device for 5 minutes

the reason to "care", is a 2kW UPS will also run a 1kW device for 10 minutes.

You suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of UPS kW ratings.

It's not a measure of the battery capacity. Yes, there is a loose convention followed by manufacturers of small, standalone UPS units that a 1kW UPS ought to be able to power a 1kW load for about 5 minutes, but that's not what the 1kW rating is about. It actually means "the inverter circuit which converts DC battery power to AC can handle up to a 1kW load, but no more".

If you only need a 2.5 minute runtime for a 2kW load, you cannot buy a 1kW UPS. A 2kW load would be too much for its inverter. If you try this anyways, as soon as the power grid fails and you need the UPS to start generating 2kW of AC power from its DC battery, the UPS inverter circuit will detect overload and shut itself down (or blow a fuse). (If it's well designed. If it's not, unfortunate events involving the release of smoke inside and/or outside the UPS may begin to occur.)

Large UPS units, especially rackmount ones designed for server rooms, often have external battery connections allowing you to connect more battery capacity to extend runtime. (In some cases they don't have internal batteries at all.) Doubling the amount of attached battery will not make such a 1kW UPS into a 2kW UPS. It will remain a 1kW UPS, but will support 2x the runtime.

Battery capacity is what works how you think UPS ratings do. It is measured in units of watt-hours (watts times hours), not watts. (You may also see batteries rated in amp-hours, which is equivalent -- just multiply by the battery's nominal voltage to get watt-hours.)

My guess is the reason Rossi is quoting energy cost in kW (rather than kWh) is these devices run similar to this.
I.e. you get a 35kW device for $5,250 and this will run a home drawing an average 0.05kW for 2 years before it needs replacing.

Literally everything you've said in this silly subthread is wrong because of your completely wrongheaded understanding of how power and energy units work. Rossi is quoting construction costs: "this is how much it costs to make a plant which can generate up to X kilowatts". He isn't quoting operational costs at all.

Look. Power works exactly like other rate units.

Consider speed. If an object moves at 1 meter per second for 1 hour, you calculate the distance the object moved as follows:

(1 m/s) * (3600 s) = 3600 m

The seconds in the numerator and denominator on the left side of the equation cancel out, and you're left with meters.

Same thing happens with watts. If a device uses 1 watt of power (equivalent to 1 J/s), and is turned on for 1 hour, you calculate:

(1 J/s) * (3600 s) = 3600 J

OR, if you want to think in terms of watt-hours, as is common in electrical power systems, you don't convert the watts to J/s or the hours to seconds, and you get:

(1 W) * (1 hr) = 1 W*hr (also written as W-h or just Wh)

1 Wh = 1 J
1 Wh DOES NOT EQUAL 1W (which is more or less what you've been asserting, over and over)

Re:Answer, in brief:

[mSparks43]

It's not a measure of the battery capacity.

Of course it is, for the simple fact that the power a battery can deliver scales linearly with its capacity.

1 Wh = 1 J
1 Wh DOES NOT EQUAL 1W (which is more or less what you've been asserting, over and over)

no I haven't

What I've said is,
if 1W = 1J
then
1Wh = 3600J

The "h" is entirely a red herring, I've consistently pointed out it has no meaning here.

What I specifically said is
Rossi is saying he can deliver 1kW of heating for $150
and this is non competitive with conventional fuels which can deliver 1kW of heating for a few cents.

There is no way for us to convert this into kWh, other than to guess he means "1kW for a short period of time".
Taking that calculation further, if each 4kW can only sustain 4kW for 24hours (the max any of his demos have run), that translates to a cost per kilowatt hour of:
cost = 4*150=$600
4*24 = 96 kWh
$/kWh=$6.25

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Coren22]

In this particular case, the input is hydrogen and copper, the output is nickel. No, there is no radioactive waste in this case either.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Coren22]

It will be very difficult to detect Helium in the Hydrogen + Copper = Nickel fusion that Rossi is claiming.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[drolli]

"or other products (in Rossis case) in the output"

is there anything wrong with your reading capability?

Re:Answer, in brief:

[Coren22]

I missed that part in the wall of text, my apologies.

Re:Answer, in brief:

[torgis]

I still don't understand what you mean. Vastly more water will be produced when burning gasoline than the carbon monoxide and nitreous compunds that you mention. The main constituents of exhaust gases are carbon dioxide and water. Compression ratio will not change that.

What about a lack of understanding of physics and chemistry? Will that change anything? :)

Re:Answer, in brief:

[csirac]

It's not a measure of the battery capacity.

Of course it is, for the simple fact that the power a battery can deliver scales linearly with its capacity.

Yikes; that is wrong on several levels. Battery capacity (quantify of work; watt-hours or nom. V * amp-hours) has nothing to do with the power (rate of work; watts or nom. V * amps) it can deliver. For example, you can find many batteries sharing the same nominal voltage and watt-hour capacity, but very different maximum discharge current (expressible as watts). Batteries are optimized for the application to which they are intended; the ideal 300 watt-hour UPS battery bank which needs to support 2000 watt loads for a few minutes will be made of very different batteries to the ideal 300 watt-hour solar-charged, remote SCADA monitoring station which only draws a few watts for days at a time. The batteries in our solar application would melt if you tried to put them to work in the UPS, even though they have the same watt-hour capacity.

1 Wh = 1 J 1 Wh DOES NOT EQUAL 1W (which is more or less what you've been asserting, over and over)

no I haven't

What I've said is, if 1W = 1J then 1Wh = 3600J

This is wrong, so continuing this line of thought doesn't seem useful at all.

The "h" is entirely a red herring, I've consistently pointed out it has no meaning here.

What I specifically said is Rossi is saying he can deliver 1kW of heating for $150 and this is non competitive with conventional fuels which can deliver 1kW of heating for a few cents.

There is no way for us to convert this into kWh, other than to guess he means "1kW for a short period of time".

No need to guess; usually, if an electricity generation system is rated at 1kW, it should support a 1kW load for as long as its energy source holds up, "for a short period of time" or otherwise. A 50kW generator says nothing about its efficiency at turning diesel into electricity, or the size of the diesel tank it's attached to, or even how long that diesel would last for (how big is the load?).

TFA uses language such as

We must make a distinction between the price of the industrial plants and the price of the domestic plants.

- and in that context, a unit of kW rather than kWh does make sense; although if he really could build 1MW for $150k, regardless of the energy source, I'm sure he'd be overwhelmed with customers.

On the bright side ...

[Anonymous Coward]

They'd probably achieve more than Adobe does.

now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&rdq

[Anonymous Coward]

Tests conducted at NASA Glenn Research Center in 1989 and elsewhere consistently show evidence of anomalous heat during gaseous loading and unloading of deuterium into and out of bulk palladium. At one time called “cold fusion,” now called “low-energy nuclear reactions” (LENR), such effects are now published in peer-reviewed journals and are gaining attention and mainstream respectability. The instrumentation expertise of NASA GRC is applied to improve the diagnostics for investigating the anomalous heat in LENR.

Electric vehicles

[roman_mir]

Whether this is a hoax or not, it's the right direction. Nuclear and hopeful thermonuclear for use in homes and in vehicles - heavy machinery and private cars, trains, boats, planes and spacecraft.

Re:Electric vehicles

[drinkypoo]

I can't help but think than an ideal battery ought to be good enough for cars and even some kinds of boats (efficient ones, mostly.) Or you know, something vaguely close. As it is you can accomplish quite a lot with the lousy ones we have now. Bring on the shipstones!

Re:Electric vehicles

[dbIII]

Um, why?
Isn't the best idea always to go for the best tool for the job in a sane price range instead of just something that sounds cool in a comic?

Re:Electric vehicles

[roman_mir]

No refueling.

Re:Electric vehicles

[dbIII]

Only if it's imaginary nuclear. Real nuclear needs new fuel every now and again.
Now don't backflip and pretend "no" means something other than in the dictionary. If you didn't know then that's fair enough, but if you did mean it it then don't try to weasel your way out after being caught out in a lie.

Re:Electric vehicles

[peragrin]

True but would you rather refill your car every 20,000 miles or every 400?

If each 20,000 mile refueling cost less than $2,000 you would save money.

Re:Electric vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear and hopeful thermonuclear for use in homes and in vehicles - heavy machinery and private cars, trains, boats, planes and spacecraft.

What could possibly go wrong????

Re:Electric vehicles

[AmiMoJo]

I'm not sure if you are kidding or not, but safety aside small reactors are not very efficient or cheap. It makes much more sense to have large scale generation and pump it out to individual devices as we do now, just with better batteries in the case of cars, boats and aircraft.

Plus we already have a massive fusion reactor supplying enough energy to power the entire world, so might as well make use of that.

Re:Electric vehicles

[aix tom]

The usual: You need to go through a TSA checkpoint on the highway with such a vehicle, and they will deny it because you have a nail clipper in the glove box.

Re:Electric vehicles

[roman_mir]

As I said: no refueling.

As in: no refueling.

Lifespan of a vehicle should be less than lifespan of a nuclear power plant installed into it including the fuel.

Re:Electric vehicles

[roman_mir]

but safety aside small reactors are not very efficient or cheap

- yes, and the early computers weren't efficient or cheap. We need innovation in this area obviously, it won't come as long as governments are standing in the way of people trying to improve in this industry.

It makes much more sense to have large scale generation and pump it out to individual devices as we do now, just with better batteries in the case of cars, boats and aircraft.

- no it does not.

The best thing is to be able to live off the grid, not to have to rely on big centralised infrastructure that belongs to monopolies created and maintained by governments. Sort of like it's best not to rely on government monopolies for anything else.

Plus we already have a massive fusion reactor supplying enough energy to power the entire world, so might as well make use of that.

- and this means we shouldn't try and build our own small ones, that work even at night and output enough energy to power vehicles?

Re:Electric vehicles

[Dare nMc]

> to have large scale generation and pump it out
Currently electric costs $.02 to $.08 to generate in the USA, yet the charges to the household average $.12 add in meter charges... mine goes from this $.12 to $.14. Not to mention the thousands of birds, hundreds of car wrecks that are made deadly by power poles...
Per. BTU it costs more to deiliver electric than natural gas costs total at my house.

Re:Electric vehicles

[PIBM]

Considering the size of his 10kw device as we've seen before, we would waste much more space in the car than current engines takes, for much less power. Then, there's the whole 'heating up' of the device which, from what has been revealed so far, took up to an hour and half. I guess you could waste all that energy in heat to keep it 'warm' and ready to go, but then, just how much heat would we be wasting ?

Oh well, I guess we need to wait and see what he comes up with!

Re:Electric vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

Only half the world at a time.

Re:Electric vehicles

[rubycodez]

you are silly. do you know the cost and weight of the smallest possible nuclear reactor plus adequate shielding? An adequately shielded fission powered aircraft the size of a bomber is impossible.

Re:Electric vehicles

[hedwards]

Hopefully it's a hoax, fusion is safer than fission, but I'm still not sure how comfortable I would be with a device that can't be taken apart and where the inventor won't tell me how it works being anywhere near me. I have a feeling that I'm not the only one.

Unless I'm mistaken about that, it's been a while since I read up on cold fusion and I suppose this novel approach deviates from previous attempts. Personally, I'm not buying it.

Re:Electric vehicles

[GNious]

It think the massive fusion reactor he refers to, is the sun - something you CAN tap (albeit with low efficiency currently) and live off the grid.

As for your idea that small is good, because you get away from monopolies? Some small issues:
1) Monopolies or Government would provide the fuel for small-scale, in-home/vehicle engines, guaranteed.
2) Laws of physics tells us size relates to efficiency, so you better invent something that doesn't pollute. Town/village-based generators might be viable, if you trust your local community.

Note: I am all for placing solar-panels on all roof-tops where possible, to get the strain on the network down and add fail-safety. Fusion-reactors in each house, on the other side, I think is overkill, but could be done on a community-level.

Re:Electric vehicles

[TheTurtlesMoves]

It is possible and was almost built with a prototype rector constructed on the ground. But then we got ICBMs and ICBM subs and bombers with infinite range became moot.

Re:Electric vehicles

[rubycodez]

No, that thing of which you speak had the "inadequate shielding", much to the embarrassment of its project team , with adequate shielding it never could have flown

Re:Electric vehicles

[rubycodez]

there's a reason why the very smallest vehicles with nuclear reactors are huge ships and submarines!

Re:Electric vehicles

[roman_mir]

As I said, currently there is no progress in nuclear because government stole people's freedoms to privacy, private property, business and other liberties. Gov't doesn't allow the private sector to experiment and look for better ways of extracting energy from nuclear and you are stuck complaining about the current state of affairs.

Re:Electric vehicles

[roman_mir]

It think the massive fusion reactor he refers to, is the sun - something you CAN tap (albeit with low efficiency currently) and live off the grid.

- yes, Mr. Obvious, thank you. What do you think I meant by:

that work even at night and output enough energy to power vehicles?

1) Monopolies or Government would provide the fuel for small-scale, in-home/vehicle engines, guaranteed.

- as I said, gov't is standing in the way of progress. I own shares in a uranium mine for example, it means I own part of that business and output, it's a private business, though regulated by government.

2) Laws of physics tells us size relates to efficiency, so you better invent something that doesn't pollute. Town/village-based generators might be viable, if you trust your local community.

- we are stuck heating up water with hot nuclear fuel to produce steam and that's what we use to generate electricity, we haven't gotten past that phase and won't as long as government stands on the way of people working on new ideas in that field.

Re:Electric vehicles

[arisvega]

private cars, trains, boats, planes and spacecraft.

I always wanted my private train.

Re:Electric vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether this is a hoax or not, it's the right direction. Nuclear and hopeful thermonuclear for use in homes and in vehicles - heavy machinery and private cars, trains, boats, planes and spacecraft.

So the next time someone runs the stop sign next to our building and T-bones someone else, the whole neighbourhood gets to invest in lead-lined Fruit of the Looms.

No, thanks.

On second thought, let's just leave it at "No".

Re:Electric vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the thousands of birds, hundreds of car wrecks that are made deadly by power poles...

New and retrofitted electrical grid construction *buries* powerlines. There is not a single pole or dead bird from powerlines for miles in my vicinity because all the cabling is underground.

Re:Electric vehicles

[roman_mir]

so what's stopping you?

Re:Electric vehicles

[jamstar7]

but safety aside small reactors are not very efficient or cheap

- yes, and the early computers weren't efficient or cheap. We need innovation in this area obviously, it won't come as long as governments are standing in the way of people trying to improve in this industry.

I dunno bout you, but I don't trust my neighbor to build a nuclear reactor in his back yard. YOUR neighbors might be PhDs in physics, but mine is a hillbilly. Duct tape is not nuclear-rated AFIK.

He does a helluva tuneup on my truck, though...

Re:Electric vehicles

[TheTurtlesMoves]

No its not. It is because a flying nuclear reactor is politically untenable as a small portable ones. The Russians did have small portable reactors. Just because we don't does not mean we can't. There are some very compact high power designs proposed for space too.

However it is true that shielding requirements are a little less in the military.

Re:Electric vehicles

[cynyr]

one word for your "solar panels on all roofs" comment: SNOW

No really, any flat roof would then need to be shoveled, carefully as to avoid damage to the panels, and to clear snow from them. Any slopped roof still collects snow, which will need to be removed from the panels. How do you plan on doing this in a residential setting without damage to the panels? Snow clearing on a large commercial building would probably make the panels not worth the cost not to mention the reduced power output anyways up here in the north in the winter.

Considering I live in a heating dominated climate, any heat output from this thing(assuming it can make say, 190F water or so, would be very very useful in a house. Use the hot water for heat instead of gas, or electric, use it as a water heater, hot air for the dryer, etc. One of these and an economizer, and an efficient AC system would probably work out rather well. This all gets even better if it produces electricity as well, but i'd even consider the heat only model.

Re:Electric vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess: "the government"?

Re:Electric vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm still not sure how comfortable I would be with a device that can't be taken apart and where the inventor won't tell me how it works"

Seriously?

There are a lot of things consumers don't know how they work. Or are not allowed to figure out (Apple comes to mind, heck i dont know how Windows does what it does. Do you?) Does not mean they don't work. (... usually)

Although i highly doubt Mr. Rossi is anything but a fraud, dismissing an idea (true or scam) without checking it out frst, equals stupidity.

Re:Electric vehicles

[GNious]

Snow is an issue on houses, yes - have seen few installations where it isn't. Coolest one (commercial installation) was able to tilt the panels from 0 to 90 degrees, as well as rotating them to follow the sun. Incidentally, they offer free charging for all cars, motorbikes, moped and bicycles...
(Note: I'm Scandinavian, and haven't seen any snow this year - most houses south of here should be juuuust fine)

But I think your comment points to a greater issue than snow: The assumption that there is a single, golden "bullet" for our energy woes.

No, not saying you're stating that we should have only one solution, but the reaction I usually hear is to point at flaws in 1 solution, and assume that nothing works :)
We definitely need to look at multiple solutions: Windmills, solar, ground-heat, fusion/fission, coal/oil/gas ... Those that can be installed and used domestically, will help there, those that cannot, will have to be run on a slightly larger scale and require at least some infrastructure.

As for heat-only model, I remember seeing a lot of water-heating solutions (as opposed to photoelectric) installed on roof-tops. Don't know if they've progressed since then, but people claimed they ran all their heating (water etc) via it.

As for ACs, no idea; I hate the blasted things.

Re:Electric vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus we already have a massive fusion reactor supplying enough energy to power the entire world, so might as well make use of that.

I concur, though it would also help if that reactor could supply locations with power 24/7/365 at a consistent rate and that this energy could be converted with something better than 20% efficiency.

At the moment tapping that reactor source amounts to little more than a feelgood measure.

Re:Electric vehicles

[drsmithy]

As I said, currently there is no progress in nuclear because government stole people's freedoms to privacy, private property, business and other liberties. Gov't doesn't allow the private sector to experiment and look for better ways of extracting energy from nuclear and you are stuck complaining about the current state of affairs.

Please elaborate on which research into energy sources has been made illegal.

Re:Electric vehicles

[krakass]

but safety aside small reactors are not very efficient or cheap

- yes, and the early computers weren't efficient or cheap. We need innovation in this area obviously, it won't come as long as governments are standing in the way of people trying to improve in this industry.

I dunno bout you, but I don't trust my neighbor to build a nuclear reactor in his back yard. YOUR neighbors might be PhDs in physics, but mine is a hillbilly. Duct tape is not nuclear-rated AFIK.

He does a helluva tuneup on my truck, though...

You sure about that? http://www.amazon.com/3M-8979N-Performance-Nuclear-Slate/dp/B000NG3ZKI

Re:Electric vehicles

[dbIII]

If it's purely imaginary and doesn't have to comform to physics his streampunk nuclear horseless carriage makes perfect sense. He's just wandered into the wrong discussion and ended up in a technical one instead of a Science Fiction one. It's become clear that real constraints are not important in the setting his thinking of so just ignore him.

Re:Electric vehicles

[dbIII]

Ah, from that rant and his links (video only bullshit) it's probably not US laws but some secret one world government laws imposed by the Bavarian Jewish Nazi Zoinist Communist Illuminati that faked the moon landing. Just laugh at him and move on - he's been caught out in his lie so there's nothing much to see here anymore.

Re:Electric vehicles

[rubycodez]

please provide link to one of these "small portable reactors".....I only see a similar bomber program (with heavy monster reactor with inadequate shielding) to the US one with exactly the same issues

Re:Electric vehicles

[Doc Ruby]

It snows in Winter, when the Sun is low in the sky and the panels need to be tilted close to 90deg to the ground. Snow mostly slides off, especially if the panels are mounted over the edge of the roof, with a dropoff below.

But even in the event that snow or other accumulation obscures the panels, cleaning them is just a matter of expending energy. So yes, their net efficiency is low right when their total input is low (Winter Sun). But there are many panels installed in snowy conditions. Germany has about the most, and it's notoriously snowy. It's also notoriously thrifty, and not in the business of installing panels that are a net loss - even if there are subsidies.

Re:Electric vehicles

[roman_mir]

Nuclear research is made illegal by government controlling the sources of nuclear materials. Even as a part owner of a uranium mine, I can't actually hold physical uranium.

Re:Electric vehicles

[drsmithy]

Nuclear research is made illegal by government controlling the sources of nuclear materials.

So you're saying there is no private research into nuclear power ?

Re:Electric vehicles

[roman_mir]

If there is any, it's very little and inconsequential. Certainly more people are writing open source code and are building 3d printers than looking at nuclear power.

Re:Electric vehicles

[Muad'Dave]

"do you know the [size] of the smallest possible nuclear reactor plus adequate shielding?"

Yes, I do. About 11 microns in diameter and very, very light. Fascinating reading material, BTW.

Re:Electric vehicles

[h4rr4r]

United Nuclear has it for sale. Buy some now, and hold it all you like. Do wash your hands after though, heavy metal poisoning sucks.

Re:Electric vehicles

[dbIII]

Shouldn't that be obvious? Big expensive stuff is harder to do than small cheap stuff.

Re:Electric vehicles

[cynyr]

Right. The correct solution for the current location/case. As you pointed out some of these technologies will not work domestically. This would probably benefit from larger scales than single home, perhaps a whole block, or apartment unit, and only provide the base load. There should be very little infrastructure that needs to be dealt with on that level. not much more than a largeish box in an out of the way location and some wire.

Considering the heat in my apartment is owner provided hot water baseboard heat, I wonder what the payback would be for a system like this installed for the block of 4 buildings with ~32 units each (and a small community pool that might need heat sometimes).

I would expect that a roof based system hot water system would work, it could at least be used as a pre-heat loop. The issue in Scandinavia, and MN, USA(where I am) is the same, really cold weather in the winter. The outdoor loop will need anti-freeze in it, something like 30% glycol or so around here. Adding glycol does 2 things, makes it harder to pump, and lowers the heat transfer.

Re:Electric vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

one word for your "solar panels on all roofs" comment: SNOW

This is what Solyndra (yes, the same company involved in the $500M government insured loan scandal) attempted to solve. They developed a proprietary process for making cylindrical solar cells. The idea was that most snow would fall right through an array of small diameter cylinders with gaps between them, and little would collect on top. Since they could generate power from incident light at any angle, you'd want to paint the roof white to maximize output. This also meant they did not need aiming mechanisms to optimize power generation, and actually benefited from any snowfall not deep enough to bury the cells (since snow is quite reflective).

(However, I believe they admitted their system wasn't as efficient as conventional flat cells in good weather conditions. It was a tradeoff which they hoped would make sense in colder weather states, especially on commercial buildings.)

Re:Electric vehicles

[arisvega]

so what's stopping you?

Waiting for the next best thing, that's what. Oh, and that unreasonable three-day waiting period for new tracks.

No.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Rossi us a fraudster, this will be proven to be a scam too. Did you not notice him give a price before giving the science?

Re:No.

[hedwards]

Indeed, and I have a feeling that he doesn't have any patents on it either. Those sorts of black box novelty items usually end up about as well as the Mechanical Turk.

Re:No.

[TheTurtlesMoves]

He has even already gone to jail before for similar fraud *in Italy!*. Now that is an achievement.

Re:No.

[hedwards]

If he can't provide a theoretical explanation, don't you think that suggests that he shouldn't be selling a device which produces tritium those quantities? Furthermore don't you think that it's somewhat implausible that such a person was able to succeed where others have failed? Sometimes it does happen, but the more technologically sophisticated the problem and the more minds working on it, the less likely it is to be accomplished.

Re:No.

[jamstar7]

Or, more likely, his gadget infringes the hell outta a couple hundred patents and he doesn't have the cash to defend himself in court for that 'spark of genius' required by the Patent Office.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that our fraudsters end up into finance, politics... the jailed ones are poor saps who stepped on the wrong toes. This makes this guy legit. Your mathematical proofs about energy and matter say otherwise? Well, the law of Italian absence of law is clearly more fundamental, so please revise your theories and get me a fusion generator for my Fiat.

Re:No.

[SpinyNorman]

No - he did not go to jail for fraud. He did go to jail because a real energy company he founded (creating oil from waste) was polluting the environment, and for alleged tax evasion, but apparently was subsequently acquitted of those charges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Rossi_(entrepreneur)

So, he's a for-real, engineer and entrepreneur with experience in the energy business.

Re:No.

[gweihir]

Wait, is that the "Thermoselect" fraudster? That was marketed as the ultimate solution to waste processing but never did materialize.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not saying much, they put a bunch of geologists in jail for failure to warn of an earthquake.

Re:No.

[ceoyoyo]

He didn't go to jail, but he has already racked up one energy-related scam - he claimed to have invented a ridiculously efficient way to convert waste heat into electricity. Wikipedia (the same article you linked to) says when it came time to deliver the goods they didn't work.

Re:No.

[toddestan]

By your logic, we need to give every snake-oil salesman out there with their extra-ordinary claims a chance. I'm sure people like Rossi love people as gullible as yourself. Current scientific theories says his device should not work. Now, they could be wrong, and if wanted to explain how people would listen. But he refuses to give details. People have every right to be skeptical.

Re:No.

[LaRainette]

I'm just very curious as to why he is doing this ? I mean what financial benefit does he get from this ?
Is he actually making money off the scam right now ?

Of course he could

[msobkow]

There's always the possibility a snake-oil salesman is on to something.

But without independent verification and independent PROOF that it works, everyone will continue to think it's just snake oil. There have been too many claims by "inventors" of cold fusion devices, perpetual motion machines, "free energy" theories, etc. for people to take anyone at their word.

I wouldn't give Rossi a DIME until there was independent verification.

Re:Of course he could

[nurb432]

everyone will continue to think it's just snake oil.

If that were only true. he will find some suckers that will 'invest' in his project. He will make a bunch of money and vanish. Remember there is a sucker born every minute. The only trick is finding them and parting them with their cash with the proper 'smoke and mirrors'.

Re:Of course he could

[lightknight]

Agreed. Independently verify it (with an aggression / truth level set to "Genghis Khan"), then purchase it, tear it apart, and find out what other scientists have been missing for the last 40 years.

Re:Of course he could

[sycodon]

I don't think Pons and Fleischmann were fraudsters. In fact they don't deserve the derision they still suffer today. They saw and reported the results. Part of science is being wrong yet these guys were lynched for it.

  LENR experiments seem to have a modicum of truth in that many times there is excess heat. It's just not easily reproduced or explained. Hell, if NASA is looking into it, no matter how down low they try to keep it, unless you feel NASA employees cranks and nuts, then there is evidently enough there to keep them poking and prodding it.

If you think about it, all this secrecy and mystery does make sense. Today, Energy is what gold was in the past. Anyone who can find a way to generate it cheaply (which $150 Kw is not), without the expense and mess of fossil fuels or the potential risk of fission, will become so fucking rich they would make the so-called 1% look like hamburger flippers. I wouldn't be real surprised if there were many well respected folks working on this, but just keeping it under their hats.

That all being said, wake me when I can buy it at Home Depot.

Re:Of course he could

[rssrss]

I knew Pons's father, and he was a fraudster, who took some one I know for six figures worth -- and there was no technology involved.

Re:Of course he could

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard Newton's father has been described as a 'wild, extravagant, and weak man'.

Re:Of course he could

[Culture20]

I knew Pons's father, and he was a fraudster

One of my ancestors was a horse thief, and another was a despot. Am I thus both of those things?

Re:Of course he could

[garyebickford]

It's worth also mentioning that the PR campaign was not the idea of Pons and Fleischer, it was the university's PR department IIRC. I think P & F were planning to follow normal scientific publication protocols, but things got out of hand once the uni got involved.

Re:Of course he could

[gweihir]

You can always depend on PR folks for true idiocy.

Re:Of course he could

[DrJimbo]

I don't think Pons and Fleischmann were fraudsters. In fact they don't deserve the derision they still suffer today. They saw and reported the results. Part of science is being wrong yet these guys were lynched for it.

I agree they were not knowingly trying to deceive people. OTOH this is not what they were criticised for (link):

On May 1, 1989, the American Physical Society held a session on cold fusion in Baltimore, including many reports of experiments that failed to produce evidence of cold fusion. At the end of the session, eight of the nine leading speakers stated that they considered the initial Fleischmann and Pons claim dead with the ninth, Johann Rafelski, abstaining. Steven E. Koonin of Caltech called the Utah report a result of "the incompetence and delusion of Pons and Fleischmann" which was met with a standing ovation.

When you think about it, science is mainly a set of techniques and methods to avoid self-delusion about your own results. The human tendency towards self-dulusion is vast. A beautiful example of this is Albrecht Durer's attempt to use a geometrical construction to form an ellipse. His own bias bled through the mechanical straight-edge and compass construction so his end result was lopsided and incorrect. This is the type of mistake science tries to weed out. IMO Pons and Fleischmann made a similar mistake. It is often dreadfully hard not to.

Hell, if NASA is looking into it, no matter how down low they try to keep it, unless you feel NASA employees cranks and nuts, then there is evidently enough there to keep them poking and prodding it.

You have to be very careful with this line of reasoning. The potential payoff from commercially viable cold fusion is almost too large to calculate. This huge payoff means it is worthwhile to investigate claims even if the chance of those claims panning out is extremely small. There are some measurements that are hard to explain by any known theory. These measurements are also extremely hard to reproduce. Even if these measurements are eventually explained by some sort of nuclear reaction, it seems unlikely that it can be made into a commercially viable energy source. Experimentalists are usually very good at tracking down and enhancing an effect even before the theorists can explain it. This effect has remained elusive. I'm not saying this means we should stop all research in this area but I am saying that it would be smart to keep your expectations of revolutionary results very low.

Re:Of course he could

[gweihir]

Just read some of the comments here. Plenty of suckers lining up.

Re:Of course he could

[RespekMyAthorati]

It's true: I was a prof at U of Utah at the time. The hype machine was insane.
Example: someone in the physics dept. published a paper disputing P&F's results. As a result, P&F sued the physicist for libel. Since when does publishing a paper constitute libel?
The silliest part is that to promote cold fusion, the university agreed to pay for P&F's legal bills. And as the physicist was a faculty member, they had to pay his legal bills too. Eventually the suit was dropped, but the university still ended up spending hundreds of thousands to sue itself.

Re:Of course he could

[gl4ss]

you seen a picture of them at that press event? smiling like a rockstar getting a blowjob after his first top hit.

Let me guess

[DrXym]

People can "get in at the start" on this miracle by investing small fortunes and they'll receive continuous updates over the next 10 to 20 years how the device is close to manufacturing, and how nefarious powers are trying to "suppress" the device, and how Mr Rossi's eventual prosecution for fraud is all part of this conspiracy to silence him.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Eventual Prosecution? Historical prosecution!

Re:Let me guess

[dpilot]

But other than that last clause, doesn't this also describe the state of conventional nuclear fusion, as well? Hasn't fusion been 20 years away for the past 50 years, or so?

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Controlled, energy-positive, nuclear fusion. Pick two. (conventional)

hoax, not cold fusion. Pick one.

That's what is different.

Re:Let me guess

[vlm]

But other than that last clause, doesn't this also describe the state of conventional nuclear fusion, as well? Hasn't fusion been 20 years away for the past 50 years, or so?

That quote is a confusion of political posturing and engineering critical path project planning.

Here's the standard /. car analogy. For political reasons we will advertise that we will sell a car getting 10 MPG more than our current model. It takes a year or two to design, a year or two to develop and get the assembly line up and running (not a year or two of actual work, but a year or two of calendar time to shut down one line, get everyone ready for the new one, about two weeks of millright time to move the machines...) The newest announced car model is ALWAYS about 3 years away, because thats how long it takes from "say go" to "drive off the stealership lot". At some point, probably early, in the 3 year process, its cancelled.

Another good analogy is we're always 15 years away from men on mars, because every couple years its proposed, they figure it'll take 15 years to get there, they cancel, repeat.

Fusion has always been 20 years away because it takes 20 years from "say go" to "plant pushing power into the grid". As long as its politically useful to put on a big show about how we're starting a new initiative, and later cancel it, we'll continue to do so.

Re:Let me guess

[Assmasher]

Please make all checks payable to Dr. Madoff, Otisville, New York.

Re:Let me guess

[Patch86]

"Conventional nuclear fusion" (aka "hot fusion") is easy; we've been doing it for decades. That's the basis behind the bang in a Hydrogen bomb.

The tricky thing is not making nuclear fusion happen. The tricky thing is making it happen "cold" (that is, without needing to detonate a nuclear fission device to kick start the fusion) and making it happen in a controlled fashion (that is, create a steady source of heat continuously while being fed a constant supply of fuel, rather than using up all its fuel in one go in a massive city-destroying explosion).

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

We've been doing "hot fusion" for years in reactors, which doesn't require a fission device to start and doesn't use the fuel up instantly in some explosive fashion. The problem is not making it colder, but making it more efficient so there is a net gain in power. I.e. more energy can be recovered than is required to run the magnets and/or heating sources.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

But other than that last clause, doesn't this also describe the state of conventional nuclear fusion, as well? Hasn't fusion been 20 years away for the past 50 years, or so?

Negative. Conventional fusion exists, but is not practical at the moment for other reasons, requiring more research to lower those costs. Those other reasons are things like,

  1. dealing with high energy neutron flux and trying to come up with materials that will not be destroyed (during the lifetime of the plant, so at least 20-30 years) by such energy density - this is a materials research question and requires. You can't be replacing the liner every year because it disintegrates.

  2. someone needs to build a prototype plant and invest enough to work out all the uneconomic kinks

http://www.iter.org/sci
http://www.iter.org/sci/beyonditer

Fusion research has increased key fusion plasma performance parameters by a factor of 10,000 over 50 years; research is now less than a factor of 10 away from producing the core of a fusion power plant.

Plasma energy breakeven has never been achieved: the current record for energy release is held by JET, which succeeded in generating 70% of input power. Scientists have now designed the next-step deviceâ"ITERâ"which will produce more power than it consumes: for 50 MW of input power, 500 MW of output power will be produced.

So what is the difference between this and "cold fusion"? The former exists and is close to working. The later is in the realm of perpetual motion machines. It has never been demonstrated to occur in a reliable experiment, never mind producing any real energy.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

People can "get in at the start" on this miracle by investing small fortunes and they'll receive continuous updates over the next 10 to 20 years how the device is close to manufacturing, and how nefarious powers are trying to "suppress" the device, and how Mr Rossi's eventual prosecution for fraud is all part of this conspiracy to silence him.

Provided by roman_mir, no doubt.

Re:Let me guess

[Patch86]

If I remember rightly, nuclear fusion in a reactor environment is often laser-triggered. As with an H-bomb, you need a collossal amount of energy to kick start the reaction- as you say, more than you get out. The principal and the problem is basically the same. And I don't believe nuclear fusion reactors have ever gotten around the "use the fuel up quickly" problem either- the reaction uses up pretty much as much fuel as is available as fast as it can. You can stop that being a huge explosion by only reacting a small amount of fuel, but it doesn't really get around the long-term problem.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Laser based inertial fusion designs of course use lasers. Magneticly confined plasmas are usually heated instead by radio waves, neutral beam injection, or ohmic heating (treating the plasma like the secondary of a transformer). Reactors like TFTR and JET have gotten powers up to 10-15 MW of power on times of up to more than a second, which is a long time compared to how fast something like a fusion bomb works. Additionally, that amount of power would only go through 10s of micrograms of fuel, while the reactors would contain on the order of tens of milligrams, so less than 1% of the fuel being used in a shot. The next magneticly confined reactor, ITER, is supposed to have reactions running as long as 20 minutes. While there is some questions about how much functional it will be, the duration of the reactions I think won't be one of the issues they will fall short on.

that's incredible!

[aglider]

There's still someone talking about the eCat.

Re:that's incredible!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only cold fusion, but a Perpetuum Mobile as well!

Re:that's incredible!

[youn]

must be professor eShrodinger :p

Re:that's incredible!

[Anonymous Coward]

More incredible: Some people still use CueCats!

Less brief, more detailed answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, no.

Re:Less brief, more detailed answer

[Austerity Empowers]

tl;dr

Re:Less brief, more detailed answer

[Thing 1]

"All? NO ALL!"

Re:Less brief, more detailed answer

[Anonymous Coward]

The oldsmobiles....sorry, fake power charlatans are in very early this year.

Re:Less brief, more detailed answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Temperature low; didn't react. Yup, that sums it up quite well.

Re:Less brief, more detailed answer

[Baldrson]

Ignoramous.

Re:Less brief, more detailed answer

[Geosota]

NASA is going to die. Cold Fusion is like Steve Jobs in Switzerland.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[newcastlejon]

At one time called "cold fusion," now called "low-energy nuclear reactions" (LENR), such effects are now published in peer-reviewed journals and are gaining attention and mainstream respectability. The instrumentation expertise of NASA GRC is applied to improve the diagnostics for investigating the anomalous heat in LENR.

A herring by any other name would smell as fishy... in any event if LENR, as you put it, were a practicable possibility I'd expect to be hearing announcements from someone more reputable than this Rossi character. He claims to have invented not one but two cold fusion technologies*. Now this may be a terrible, terrible bit of prejudice against someone who may end up in the history books, but I tend towards a more cynical or pragmatic attitude when it comes to parting with my or the public's money.

*"The 1 MW plants have a totally different technology and engineering."

Not this again...

[Anonymous Coward]

There was no independent test of his device yet, so I consider it highly unlikely to work.

Rossi claims he's heating a factory in italy with one of his devices. I wonder how the authorities would react if they learn that an unauthorized nuclear device is being used there, considering that italy has laws that prohibit nuclear facilities.

Re:Not this again...

[Anonymous Coward]

If the authorities bust him for running an illegal nuclear power plant, then he has won...

Re:Not this again...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be surprised if they outlawed fusion as well as fission; unless it's something that'll get them good press, lawmakers generally are too lazy to outlaw things that don't exist. That said, I'm pretty sure Rossi is in fact a character portrayed by Taylor Negron.

Re:Not this again...

[Anonymous Coward]

They wouldn't do nothing as otherwise they'd be confirming the device's viability.

Re:Not this again...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how the authorities would react if they learn that an unauthorized nuclear device is being used there, considering that italy has laws that prohibit nuclear facilities.

The authorities might choose to not react at all. If they did, Rossi would be able to claim that the Italian government agrees that his devices are functional nuclear reactors.

Re:Not this again...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be surprised if they outlawed fusion as well as fission; unless it's something that'll get them good press, lawmakers generally are too lazy to outlaw things that don't exist.

Unless they were too lazy to be specific, and just passed a law outlawing "nuclear energy".

Obligatory Reddit version

[Twinbee]

Here's Reddit's discussion of the story: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ofz9f/nasa_developing_a_low_energy_nuclear_reactor_its/

A couple from that thread claim that NASA hasn't discovered cold fusion here, but 'merely' radio active beta decay, which is similar to an atomic battery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery

Re:Obligatory Reddit version

[Twinbee]

If some PhD in the field can confirm the above, that would be useful. It would show then that "LENR" doesn't always equate to "cold fusion". This would also provide less evidence for the validity of the E-cat, as wonderful as that would be.

Re:Obligatory Reddit version

[philcowans]

So I've been trying (with minimal success) to find any quality information on this, but there are a few bits and pieces out there.

My understanding is that the most likely theory here is that there's a low energy mechanism for generating neutrons in condensed matter via 'heavy' electrons (high effective mass due to lattice phenomena), and that these neutrons can be used to trigger energy producing reactions (there's a lithium based cycle with no net consumption of lithium, for example). The reactions themselves aren't new, but producing neutrons cheaply enough to generate a net energy gain is. I don't have enough of an understanding of the theory to really judge how feasible it is, but the idea that electrons in lattices can behave in interesting ways (c.f. superconductivity) isn't crazy enough IMO to dismiss the idea outright.

I think this is relatively orthogonal to Rossi and Co., although I believe there was some interaction between him and NASA at some stage. He's definitely mishandled the public relations around his announcement, is likely out of his depth in terms of understanding what he's doing and may well be attempting fraud. That doesn't change the fact that there may be some worthwhile science to be done in the field.

Re:Obligatory Reddit version

[TheRaven64]

LENR is not cold fusion. LENR is a broad category and basically means 'stuff that is not high-energy fission / fusion.' It includes neutron capture (i.e. a neutron hits a nucleus, is absorbed, and no fission occurs) and radioactive decay. There are a lot of LENR generators. Some pacemakers contain betavoltaic generators that are powered by a small quantity of tritium. The Russians used to power lighthouses with radiothermal generators (RTFs) and there are three of them powering each of the Voyager spacecraft, with a rated lifespan of about 60 years each.

eCat sounds like they are claiming two low-energy reactions: a neutron capture followed by a decay. This is potentially feasible, but then good snake oil is always feasible...

Re:Obligatory Reddit version

[Anonymous Coward]

Other that the NASA guys who are obviously PhDs, try with George Miley from UIUC. He claims to have reproduced it. Or Brian Josephson, the nobel laurate, from Cambridge University. Or a couple of Swedish physics profs from their royal academy. Once you look into this it actually becomes more credible.

Re:Obligatory Reddit version

[ColdWetDog]

Other that the NASA guys who are obviously PhDs, try with George Miley from UIUC. He claims to have reproduced it. Or Brian Josephson, the nobel laurate, from Cambridge University. Or a couple of Swedish physics profs from their royal academy. Once you look into this it actually becomes more credible.

Show. Me. The Voltage.

Re:Obligatory Reddit version

[semi-extrinsic]

Just to clarify, the russians still power lighthouses with RTGs. The US also uses several of them at Burnt Mountain in Alaska (google Sentinel 100F)

Re:Obligatory Reddit version

[mbone]

RTGs are powered by the heat of radioactive decay, i.e., physics that would have seemed routine 100 years ago). That has nothing to do with LENR.

Re:Obligatory Reddit version

[TheTurtlesMoves]

All these reactions produce radiation that would have killed everyone around the plant. So unless you arm wave to claim that radiation is not magically produced in this device, your back to square one. Just like with other cold fusion claims.

Also the eCat claims to fuse a proton with Nickel to produce copper. A quick check of the relevant tables gives us a "proton chain" where eventually a stable copper isotope is produced. However there are few unstable copper intermediates in between. These all decay via beta- and hence will yield a pair of 500keV gammas. A quick calculation for the claimed 1MW plant is tens of kW of gammas... without shielding....

In God we trust. The rest of you show me the data.

Re:Obligatory Reddit version

[Anonymous Coward]

Check your history. A RTG would not have been "routine" 100 years ago, they didn't even know isotopes existed until around 1913. Practicle applications didn't follow for a long time.

Re:Obligatory Reddit version

[Polo]

Maybe not an RTG, but Nuclear Reactors have been around for a long time.

Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[Anonymous Coward]

the eCat is a scam. I am tired of seeing this bullcrap around again and again. Could please those who select the news do something? What's next? Tarots ?

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[Kagetsuki]

Oh come on! Everybody knows it's flying cars next

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[postbigbang]

Or videophones.

I wouldn't completely discount Rossi, but on the other hand, he gives no proof. We're completely obliged to be skeptical until he does. Then we resurrect Sarkoff, and have him steal the patents.

Profit!

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[aurizon]

Australian invents jumping cars, sales hopping along...

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[lxs]

No let's keep this alive.
I for one am really interested how Mr.Rossi plans to escape once the jig is up and how this will work out in reality.

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, what? I know your post was probably made in jest, but that's a poor example to follow "flying cars". There are actual videophones on market.

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[postbigbang]

Uh, yeah. This is your whoosh moment.

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin.

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

You know he has already been to jail for fraud before... in Italy of all places.

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[postbigbang]

Didn't know that. Now my discount is 99.9995%.

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[Black Parrot]

I know your post was probably made in jest, but that's a poor example to follow "flying cars". There are actual videophones on market.

Uh, yeah. This is your whoosh moment.

A flying car passing overhead?

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[Black Parrot]

I for one am really interested how Mr.Rossi plans to escape once the jig is up

Maybe he also invented a spaceship.

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[Skidborg]

There are, in fact, flying cars on the market now too...

Re:Can we please stop talking about this rubbish ?

[genx_walt]

If you listen to the last video on the post, NASA says "It (LENR) has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy, cleanly, without hazardous ionizing radiation, without producing nasty waste.". You are discrediting NASA, not Rossi.

Oh, he's "on to something" alright.

[Anonymous Coward]

He's discovered a long-known truth: there's a sucker born every minute. Although he probably has to pre-filter the suckers a bit first, as his "work" manages to encompass EVERY warning sign of woo - a sekrit process, no independent verification, a pseudoscientific explanation...

Re:Oh, he's "on to something" alright.

[lightknight]

Indeed. However, IMHO, the gains from discovering a new bit of science greatly outweigh the gains from scamming people. You can get people to pay more for a real cure for cancer, than they ever would for a fake one.

But yes, it does feel kind of scammy. Still, independent verification will determine whether it is or is not.

Re:Oh, he's "on to something" alright.

[paiute]

You can get people to pay more for a real cure for cancer, than they ever would for a fake one.

But yes, it does feel kind of scammy. Still, independent verification will determine whether it is or is not.

"People" can't by themselves distinguish between real cures and fake cures. That's why we have the FDA and suchlike. Real cures are patented to protect the inventor and then papers detailing the process are published. Fake cures and fake fusion technology are never patented and the details are never published.

Re:Oh, he's "on to something" alright.

[green1]

You can get people to pay more for a real cure for cancer, than they ever would for a fake one.

But it's a whole lot easier to make the fake one...

Between the black box that people can't even look inside under an NDA, and the leveraging of the pseudoscience that cold fusion has become, and the lack of any independent verification of any sort. There are huge warning signs of a scam, and not a single indication pointing any other direction.

Do I think cold-fusion can never happen? no, I think it may be possible, I also think that if you are going to make such an extraordinary claim, you better be willing to back it up with something more than "because I say it works". If you don't want to publish how it works, that's ok, get some independent (and well known/reputable) people to look at it under NDA, get a prototype running for a long enough period of time, under proper observation, to prove you didn't just hide a bunch of batteries or a diesel generator in it.... but do SOMETHING to prove it. Until he's willing to do that, it's such an obvious scam that I can't believe anyone would fall for it... ok, actually, knowing what humans are capable of, I can believe they fall for it... but they really should know better!

Actually, he *is* on to something.

[nurb432]

A way to scam more people out of their cash.

Re:Actually, he *is* on to something.

[dargaud]

And one good way to tell is the use of wrong metrics: 100 and 150 US$/kW doesn't mean shit. The cost per Joule (or kW.h) would be useful.

Re:Actually, he *is* on to something.

[Balthisar]

I read that as capacity, i.e., his 10kW device would cost 1000 to 1500 dollars. Does that include fuel? I have no idea, and I've never read anything about this device. I do know that a 10kW natural gas backup generator would run me about $10,000 installed with an automatic switch, because that's something I've been looking for.

Re:Actually, he *is* on to something.

[vlm]

And one good way to tell is the use of wrong metrics: 100 and 150 US$/kW doesn't mean shit.

$/KW cost of installed capacity is the standard metric in the electric power industry. Its rarely the conceptually simple direct accounting measurement of total overall plant construction project cost divided by capacity, its all excruciating NPV calcs and frankly making stuff up is done to shoehorn non-applicable data into that model. You'll see lots of rolling estimated labor and theoretical financial costs into the capital $/KW figure. If you know what it actually cost, and can compare it to the reported imaginary accounting numbers, you can tell how corrupt they are, which is an interesting management metric for investment planning, which I am personally involved in from long term utility investment. You'd probably not be surprised to know that my management corruption metric has a weak negative correlation with returns and an extremely strong positive correlation with price fluctuations.

Anyway... for example, most modern nukes end up costing about $3000/KW to install, as in, if by some miracle, the cost were perfectly linear regardless of capacity, going from bare dirt to a brand new ready to heat up imaginary one kilowatt reactor in my back yard would cost three grand.

Because the numbers are abused to meet the pre-existing decision, you'll see crazy wild variations in estimates for the same project of at least a factor of two, sometimes three.

One thing is certain, if the guy is quoting plant costs of only $150/KW that literally won't pay for the buildings, turbine hall, or maybe even the switchgear. $150/KW is like, what, the employee parking lot? That does not prove fraud, but certainly smell a stink of it.

Re:Actually, he *is* on to something.

[Courageous]

Agreed; the cost is so low, that if it were true, he wouldn't even need investors. He could just get excellent loans from banks and build his sole-owner-of-the-corporation business himself. I think that the reason people like that find people like us willing to talk about it necks down to the following simple fact:

"We keep hoping".

Re:Actually, he *is* on to something.

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Even ITER left out any generating equipment because even at only about 500MW, the cost of turbines generators etc would put the price up appreciably.

When you work out the price of the electricity generated however, it doesn't sound so bad. 500MW will generate about $600k of electricity per day. Assuming of course good up times.

This is fraud all over. Its not even his first time.

Re:Actually, he *is* on to something.

[Black Parrot]

A way to scam more people out of their cash.

Maybe he's using an analogous method to cheat God out of free energy.

Re:Actually, he *is* on to something.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your car engine does something like $20/KW.

Re:Actually, he *is* on to something.

[vlm]

Your car engine does something like $20/KW.

LOL for about 70 days just above idle, yeah. Think about it, 100 kilomiles is a at least "well broken in". Thats about the age old Saturn GM engines started drinking a quart per kilomile due to valve wear. Assume a mile a minute on the freeway (I live in a civilized area where we can drive that fast, not on the coasts). Thats 100 kilominutes to got 100 kilomiles. div 60 to get hours, div 24 to get days, thats almost exactly 70 days. The capital markets will freak if you try to finance a 70 day electrical plant... They like a nice calm 20 year depreciation schedule, not two months.

The problem is car engines run at a survivable low throttle for almost their entire lives, and at high throttle they don't live very long at all, maybe a tenth or hundredth the time. But we sell on nameplate peak capacity. So I can run just above idle for 70 days and then buy a new engine, or at full throttle, what, maybe a week with luck? Watch some real police car chase shows, they always seem to end in a couple minutes with a blown engine. I'm guessing real world you'd be doing well to run a car engine at full rated output for more than a week. Full throttle = short life.

Now you can, off the shelf, buy truly gigantic diesel engines that will generate a MW or so practically forever, in any weather condition, for hospital generators and large cruise ships and locomotive engines... however expect to spend around a million bucks for around a megawatt, which works out to $1000/KW, and its not nearly as reliable and maintainable as an electric plant needs to be. Or at the small end I can buy a milspec "portable" generator new for just a couple thousand for a couple kilowatts.

Its weird how over many orders of magnitude of power level, we have to pay about the same cost per watt. Its not like that with transistors or electronic components in general. You'd think there would be something fundamental that would change the economics between a little honda portagen and a gigawatt class nuke but whatever market forces shove them to cost about the same per watt despite being 7 orders of magnitude different in power level.

Re:Actually, he *is* on to something.

[Anonymous Coward]

"One thing is certain, if the guy is quoting plant costs of only $150/KW that literally won't pay for the buildings, turbine hall, or maybe even the switchgear. $150/KW is like, what, the employee parking lot? That does not prove fraud, but certainly smell a stink of it."

The $150/kW number is for thermal energy. So it does not include the cost of converting it into electricity.
I don't think it will be a good system for producing electricity as it operates at temperatures which are less than 200C, which would make it very inefficient.

Fusion Confusion

[muon-catalyzed]

For confirmed peer reviewed low temperature fusion see Muon-Catalyzed fusion. What we are approaching here is a whole new field of very promising catalyzed fusion science. NASA already has patents on some approaches and deems it OK to spend public funds on further research.

Re:Fusion Confusion

[philcowans]

Isn't the problem here that it's kind of difficult to produce muons efficiently enough? Fusion is definitely possible when you have muons, it's just not currently possible to get more energy out than you put in and nobody seems to have demonstrated anything that's likely to change that in the near future.

Re:Fusion Confusion

[muon-catalyzed]

Muon is not the only catalyst, heavy fermions/electrons are another candidates.

Re:Fusion Confusion

[philcowans]

Right, okay - well that seems like it has some similarity to one of the proposed mechanisms involved in what NASA are doing.

Re:Fusion Confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is it takes more energy to make the Muon than you get out of the reaction in the end.

From
S. Atzeni and J. Meyer-ter-Vehn, The Physics of Inertial Fusion (Oxford University Press, 2004)

For energy production by mu-catalysed fusion, it is necessary that the Nf reactions catalysed on average by one muon release a larger amount of energy than that required to produce the muon itself. The muon is obtained by the decay of the pion, with an estimated cost of 5 GeV. Assuming that fusion energy is converted to electricity with efficiency of 40%, and recalling that a DT reaction releases 17.6 MeV, then reactor self-sustainment demands Nf > 3000/(17.6 × 0.4) = 700. For practical energy production, Nf > 3000 is required.
A simplified muon catalysis cycle in a DT mixture is illustrated in Fig. 1.7 [for a detailed discussion, see Bertin and Vitale 1992]. The muon can form either a T or D pseudo-atom; in this last case the is transferred to tritium in a time Tdt to form Tmu. A DmuT molecule is then formed in a time tmu ~109 s; here, DT fusion occur in a time ~ 7 × 1013 s. After the reaction, most muons are freed, and available again to catalyse fusion reactions. The whole cycle just described occurs in a time tc ~ 5e109 s. A small fraction ws of muons is instead captured by the alpha-particle and then lost to the cycle. The theoretically predicted value for this sticking probability is ws 0.006. This leads to estimating Nf = 1/(ws + tc/tmu) 120, which is not sufficient for energy production. However, in experiments values of Nf up to 200 have been measured, leaving room for improvement. Research in the field has been reviewed by Bertin and Vitale (1992) and Ponomarev (1990). The primary goals of current activities are the understanding of all the individual steps of muon life-cycle, and finding possible ways to reducing cycle time and muon sticking to alpha-particles.

Re:Fusion Confusion

[rubycodez]

haha, that old thing. That's from the 1950s, and sixty years later making such a reaction is still is a huge net energy loss

Re:Fusion Confusion

[Anonymous Coward]

What ever the catalyst, you need to be able to get out more energy than you put in.

I smell a rat

[Anonymous Coward]

This stinky old turd again.

Tell me again how this individual, who so strenuously resists scrutiny of his 'inventions', and tries to screw yet more money out of gullible investors, has finally managed to do something that the global fusion community hasn't been able to do for the last 50 years. I don't believe it.

I don't believe that his research has been 'suppressed'. I don't believe bullshit conspiracy theories, because they are for rubes, dupes and idiots; in this case, rich rubes, dupes and idiots giving money to Mr Rossi.

I DEFY this man to become the next Einstein, and show the world his invention with 100% openness and scrutiny.

Come on Mr Rossi, I dare you. Put your money where you mouth is. If you can't, then you are a FRAUD and belong in jail.

Re:I smell a rat

[aurizon]

Does Rossi not realize that no so-called 'security device' can not withstand expert examination? Once his 'secret' is out, he has zero protection. He must know this, so the security device is just a layer of sticky bullshit to trap suckers.

Re:I smell a rat

[Black Parrot]

Does Rossi not realize that no so-called 'security device' can not withstand expert examination? Once his 'secret' is out, he has zero protection. He must know this, so the security device is just a layer of sticky bullshit to trap suckers.

You'll know he's for real when he puts one in someone else's hands.

Until then, the hypothesis that best fits the evidence is that he's a con artist.

Re:I smell a rat

[genx_walt]

His e-cat device is with Underwriter Laboratories (UL) for testing according to his latest interview. That should be a pretty good independent test. The post says NASA is warming up to LENR. In the last video on the post, NASA says "It (LENR) has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy, cleanly, without hazardous ionizing radiation, without producing nasty waste.". This tells me NASA has a LENR device too, and proves to me that Rossi may be on to something.

NASA must also be a rat.

Distraction from Polywell

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate the cold fusioners with a passion - every time they trump up another scam like this it makes people distrust real science more and more. So something as exciting and potentially awesome as the Polywell languishes, because no one believes that fusion will work from a device that isn't $10+ billion dollars and smaller than a football stadium.

Strap him to a rocket and shoot him into the sun, if he wants to bullshit about fusion so bad.

Re:Distraction from Polywell

[newcastlejon]

I wouldn't say the Polywell project is languishing. AFAIK they're quietly getting on with testing WB8 and getting data; their research is still being funded by the US Navy. Sure, it'd be nice if they were getting more funding than they are but at least they're doing something.

From what I've read they're concentrating on finding out if the device will scale to larger sizes, which was one of the more contentious points (Bussard claimed that power scaled as size^7) when the idea was first presented. I'd be absolutely ecstatic if something like the Polywell turned out to be practical, because it's a much simpler proposition than ITER: vacuum chamber + ~2m SC coils vs. huge vacuum chamber wrapped in SC coils. That's not even considering the prospect of aneutronic fusion and the direct generation of electricity from fusion products.

Re:Distraction from Polywell

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate the cold fusioners with a passion - every time they trump up another scam like this it makes people distrust real science more and more. So something as exciting and potentially awesome as the Polywell languishes, because no one believes that fusion will work from a device that isn't $10+ billion dollars and smaller than a football stadium.

Polywell has no thermal confinement way so ever. You will never ever get more energy out than you put in to it.

Leave the fusion science up to the professionals.

Re:Distraction from Polywell

[DCFusor]

Well, I belong to, and help promote a large crowd of amateurs who actually produce very measurable fusion in their home labs (see the forums at my sig, and elsewhere, fusor.net). Some of them are polywell believers. There's just one problem - NO ONE has demonstrated convincingly any real fusion out of a polywell, ever. We build some pretty doggone fancy stuff, and we even get things like 3He neutron detectors, serious instrumentation to prove it - my fusor even activates elements to see the radioactive results from all the neutrons it makes. Bussard, on the other hand, only tried one dirt cheap (particularly in the context of the money he spent compared to us) plastic neutron detector, and didn't even get conclusive results - with thousands of times the money and time we've all spent at this. I won't say polywell is wrong (but I easily could - they are trying to make a magnetic monopole -GoodLuckWithThat), or that fusors are the way (they probably aren't). but the real data says that....well, go look for yourself but ask real people really doing one or the other - some are easy to find, some aren't (because there aren't any?). I just wasted a couple hours looking at this crap. Anyone who can't instantly pick out a large number of VERY obvious flaws in this guy's talk is NOT invited to my forums. http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=544

No way

[gweihir]

This is a sophisticated fraudster. It is unclear what he is doing to simulate success, but one credible suggestion was that he could have gotten his hands on a nuclear battery, e.g. from the former soviet union. Such a device could easily produce the amount of energy observed in the given volume.

Re:No way

[sgt scrub]

If he produced observable energy last October, when he was going to reveal the greatness to the world, we would have heard about it. Nobody has said shit; so, I doubt his faud can even be called sophisticated.

Re:No way

[aurizon]

Nuclear batteries can not generate significant power. There are a number of variants, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery.
Some can make high voltages at extremely low currents, some use heat of decay in thermionic generators, etc. etc.

Re:No way

[Anonymous Coward]

It is actually simple how he is doing it, there is a big issue with his "tests"

No one is accurately measuring the actual volume of steam coming out, and some who have seen the test indicate there does not appear to be enough steam coming out for claimed amount...the basic claim is that xx amount of water went in and the same amount of steam came out...but consider xx water went in and 1/10*xx steam came out...that would also explain why he never runs the test for a really long time...the water is collecting in the device. All of the energy calcs are based on "knowing" that all of the water comes out as steam, and from reading the reports that is assume but never actually measured.

The simple reality is that he could easily prove this device (if it was real) by turning it on and leaving it on producing steam for days and weeks (which he claims is possible as he has claimed the device is heating a factory some place and has been running for years)...he has never shown that he always does the shorter test that have the above flaw...which makes me believe the flaw above is the trick being used, and the device does not actually work at all.

And if you look into Rossi's past he has pulled crap this this before...so he is either scamming someone for money, or he believes it is working.

Re:No way

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least it can be called sophisticated:

"The evidence in support of Andrea Rossi's "cold fusion" or "LENR" (low energy nuclear reaction) based Energy Catalyzer continues to grow. For those who are not aware, his system combines nickel powder, hydrogen gas, and an input of pressure and heat to produce a large output of thermal energy. On March 29th, 2011 yet another test of the technology was performed at the University of Bologna. Like previous tests, the outcome was a complete success. However, this time a smaller version of the E-Cat was tested and two new observers were present.

Some well known players were present during the test. These include Andrea Rossi (the inventor of the E-Cat), Professor Sergio Focardi, Dr. David Bianchini, and of course Dr. Giuseppe Levi. Two guest observers were also present. One of the guest observers was Hanno Essen, associate professor of theoretical physics at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology. He is also the chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society. The other guest observer was Professor Sven Kullander of Uppsala University. He is also chairman of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Energy Committee."

http://pesn.com/2011/04/07/9501805_Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Validated_by_Swedish_Skeptics_Society/

Re:No way

[TheTurtlesMoves]

His 1MW demo was hilarious. There was a fault so it only produced about "500kW" or something... There was a 500kW generator at the front that was only used to "bootstrap" the system.... and was never turned off. Yea right. A fool and his money. I just gota work out how to meet these fools with all this money.

Re:No way

[Black Parrot]

What good does it do to have physicists observe a test where they aren't given any theory and aren't allowed to take the device apart? You might as well have a class of second-graders witness it.

Suckering professionals into "witnessing" the tests is just part of the scam.

Re:No way

[Black Parrot]

so he is either scamming someone for money, or he believes it is working.

That's the fine line between 'crook' and 'crank'.

Re:No way

[Anonymous Coward]

Mankind extracted energy from Earth's gravitational field for ages without having a theory for it and nobody complained (watermills are just one example). If this device eventually goes on sale somebody will measure if it really works, then rip it apart and learn how to make another one. The theory can wait.

Re:No way

[Black Parrot]

Looks like you missed the "and aren't allowed to take the device apart" part.

This is more like the Mechanical Turk than a waterwheel.

Re:No way

[gweihir]

It is very easy to overestimate an amount of steam. Without accurate, calorimetric measurements these observations are completely worthless. The short tests are a dead giveaway as well.

If everything screams "fraud", maybe consider it is?

Re:No way

[Anonymous Coward]

Basic problem with Rossi's device, based on my reading of his own descriptions, is that the only source of information is Rossi. According to him, when he demonstrated it, no one besides him and his people were allowed near the device, HE stated the customer was satisfied, HE told everyone a certain individual there was a representative of the customer, but would not allow anyone to talk to him, HE stated the massive generator in the next room hooked up to his device was not providing power to it, but did not allow anyone to verify that.

Bottom line - every bit of "evidence" comes down to "Rossi said" - which in science means nothing. IF he has something, he needs to come clean, allow independent verification, and allow others to talk to his customer, including being able to independently verify who the customer is.

Re:No way

[DCFusor]

So could simply burning the hydrogen.

Re:No way

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who evaluated the unit you are talking about were okay with the results and bought the thing. The fact that the lame stream media has not covered it is of no concern to any serious analysis of this or any other issue. The vast majority of so call journalists could be replaced by a monkey with a microphone.

They are making heat, not electricity

[Anonymous Coward]

Andrea Rossi
January 14th, 2012 at 3:21 AM

Dear Bob Norman:
1- please remember that the 1st generation of domestic E-Cats does make only heat, not electricity
2- when we will apply the electric generator it will be silenced
Warm Regards,
A.R.

see http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=510#comments

Re:They are making heat, not electricity

[History's Coming To]

journal-of-nuclear-physics.com is a blog, not a peer reviewed journal. One glance at it quite clearly shows that it is designed to give the impression of quality peer reviewed studies, while actually being sloppily thrown together propaganda, and hence discredits the very thing it is trying to promote.

Re:They are making heat, not electricity

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Further more, it was set up by... you guess it, Rossi!

Not necessarily entirely a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

I do think it's interesting that NASA would publish a video which kind of implies that they consider this to be available technology rather than a speculative research programme, although I don't have enough of an understanding of the inner workings of the agency to judge what that may or may not imply about what they're doing. My understanding is that the interesting physics here is the possibility of low energy neutron production from hydrogen in condensed matter, which in turn could trigger various energy producing nuclear reactions, rather than those nuclear reactions in their own right. While I don't really know enough theory to really have an opinion on the details, I do have a degree in physics, and the idea that collective phenomena could enable this sort of thing doesn't seem completely implausible. It's a shame that any discussion of this topic rapidly becomes a total train wreck. Rossi is at best out of his depth and guilty of massively mishandling his announcement, and he's quite possibly attempting fraud, but in my opinion there are a few hints that there's some real science to be done in this field.

Not Again...

[Anonymous Coward]

No explanation, no peer review, no dice. Why is snake oil so attractive?

Re:Not Again...

[bhlowe]

When was the last time you saw an inventor worry about getting his invention peer reviewed? That is a just plain silly argument.

Yesterday's frauds...

[AlienIntelligence]

Yesterday's frauds... sometimes end up being tomorrow's innovations and discoveries.

20 years ago... "We" are the only system of planets in the universe
Last week... The number of planets in the universe outnumbers the number of stars

20 years ago... Einstein thinks black holes should exist but most think he's nuts
Last few years... A black hole exists in every known galaxy

There may be plenty of lolz when all the naysayers are warming their snarky asses
by electricity generated from a Rossi invention.

-AI

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[Xyrus]

The difference between your examples and this Rossi character is that black hole and planetary discoveries were verifiable science that could be reviewed by others. Rossi's got a black box that no one really knows anything about. His evasion and roadblocks he puts in the way of trying to determine exactly what is going on is highly suspect.

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every thing you said is crap.

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[vlm]

20 years ago... Einstein thinks black holes should exist but most think he's nuts

Seance?

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yesterday's frauds... sometimes end up being tomorrow's innovations and discoveries.

20 years ago... "We" are the only system of planets in the universe
Last week... The number of planets in the universe outnumbers the number of stars

20 years ago... Einstein thinks black holes should exist but most think he's nuts
Last few years... A black hole exists in every known galaxy

There may be plenty of lolz when all the naysayers are warming their snarky asses
by electricity generated from a Rossi invention.

-AI

I think you're confusing the notion of a theory with that of a fraudster.

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is independent verification, and not independent thought.

Your examples illustrate that idea aptly: we knew that there were other solar systems based upon models for planet formation decades ago. But we had to wait for observational methods to exist to verify it. Even then initial observations were taken skeptically until other researchers could reproduce the results. Ditto for black holes.

These generators though, we can't even verify that they work as advertised never mind that it's fusion.

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[Anonymous Coward]

All of the examples you listed were scientific theories that were proved/disproved through independent discoveries.

So when is this Rossi fellow going to allow someone to rip apart his invention to independently verify how it works?

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the potential to make direct money for the scientists from those discoveries was a lots less than the potential monetary gain to Rossi from his little scheme. Not to say that making money precludes you from making good discoveries, but that I'm going to put a much larger burden of proof on someone who stands to make a shitload of cash from their claims.

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[alphatel]

20 years ago... Einstein thinks black holes should exist but most think he's nuts

Actually it was almost 100 years ago and the primary mechanics were worked out by Karl Schwarzschild though they are considered a result of the conclusions from Einstein's General Relativity,
The concept of a black hole was not even introduced for another 40 years and was always part of relativity discussions in peer review.

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[JoshuaZ]

20 years ago... "We" are the only system of planets in the universe Last week... The number of planets in the universe outnumbers the number of stars

No one who knew anything at all seriously claimed this. What was claimed was that we didn't have the technology to detect planets around other stars and that we weren't likely to have it for a while. The second part turned out to be wrong, but that's a much milder claim.

Occasionally science is wrong, but the vast majority of the time it isn't.

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[Anonymous Coward]

Applying your logic 20 years from now:

20 years ago... Some fraudster claims he has cold fusion device.
Last week... First actual cold fusion device (using completely different technology) goes into service.

In other words, you're making an argument against Rossi which seems to contradict your last sentence. ???

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[Black Parrot]

Yesterday's frauds... sometimes end up being tomorrow's innovations and discoveries.

20 years ago... "We" are the only system of planets in the universe
Last week... The number of planets in the universe outnumbers the number of stars

20 years ago... Einstein thinks black holes should exist but most think he's nuts
Last few years... A black hole exists in every known galaxy

Fortunately there weren't any scams 20 years ago.

There may be plenty of lolz when all the naysayers are warming their snarky asses
by electricity generated from a Rossi invention.

-AI

Is he peddling snarky ass warmers too?

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[Culture20]

20 years ago... Einstein thinks black holes should exist but most think he's nuts

Seance?

Weird seance. Just imagine a seance where scientists are gathered to ask secrets of the universe from dead scientists. The candles drop low, the room grows cold, a wind stirs the heavy velvety curtains, then suddenly the candles roar to life like welders' torches! She blinded me with seance!

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[Nidi62]

20 years ago... Einstein thinks black holes should exist but most think he's nuts Last few years... A black hole exists in every known galaxy

There may be plenty of lolz when all the naysayers are warming their snarky asses by electricity generated from a Rossi invention.

-AI

There's one big difference here. Einstein wasn't trying to sell anything to anyone or get investors. And he actually put his work out there to be analyzed.

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[nedlohs]

Occasionally science is wrong, but the vast majority of the time it isn't.

I don't think so.

Take just one current theory: relativity.

Special was published in 1905 and general in 1916. Call it 1920 for widespread acceptance. So assuming relativity is in fact correct science has been correct for 90 years. Whereas Newton's laws of motion where published in 1687, so we had about 230 years of it. Science has already been wrong for a longer time than it is right. But we had other theories before Newton, all the way back to Aristotle in ~350BC. So call it 2300 years of being wrong versus 90 years of being right (and of course chances are someone will work out that relativity is "wrong" and needs some major tweaks/wholesale replacement at some point in the future).

Every other field is the same - structure of the atom, biology, etc, etc.

Science is almost always wrong. But it gets less wrong over time

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[JoshuaZ]

Yeah, I don't disagree with that substantially. The notion of science becoming progressively less wrong is essentially correct. What I mean by wrong in the sense is that scientific ideas are rarely overthrown wholesale. So when SR replaced Newtonian mechanics, Newtonian mechanics still worked as a very good approximation for the vast majority of cases. Actual total overthrow of an idea is extremely rare.

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[Niscenus]

A black hole exists in every known galaxy

Fortunately there weren't any scams 20 years ago.

What? Don't you remember those early 90's Personal Black Hole scams? The convenience of not having to worry about wandering garbage scows and peeling labels off of recycling? All you have to do is throw your crap, including recyclables, non-recyclables, annoying relatives and pets, and even your crap, into this one convenient box, bag, jar, can or hookah, and you will never have to worry about disposal bills of any type ever again!

I got one from the back of a catalog that I was going to take to school as my science fair project, but it really was just some deletium that ran out after about 10 kg. It consumed the bottom of the container, so the last 2 kg was a hole in the school parking lot. My parents weren't charged for the fill in since they had to pay for treatment of the radiation burns.

To this day, I never order anything from UserFriendly.

Re:Yesterday's frauds...

[genx_walt]

The post is about NASA warming up to LENR. In the last video on the post, NASA says "It (LENR) has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy, cleanly, without hazardous ionizing radiation, without producing nasty waste.". I think LENR is real, especially after NASA basically says they are doing it too. If Rossi would wait for the science behind this technology someone else would beat him to the market.

w00t!

[sgt scrub]

Finally a methode that will work! Damn shame the world will end this December.

Shave and a hair cut
two snarks
[insert rimshot here]

Re:w00t!

[Black Parrot]

Finally a methode that will work! Damn shame the world will end this December.

Maybe there's a connection? What if he turns on one of his machines, can't shut it off, and it sucks all the free energy out of the universe?

Re:w00t!

[sgt scrub]

and it sucks all the free energy out of the universe

It was free. No loss.

Re:w00t!

[jamstar7]

The universe is a pretty big place. Have to be one bigassed machine to suck all the energy outta it in a year...

Scientology SuperPower redux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be ready to go about the same time as Scientology's SuperPower building (http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/01/scientology_super_power_building_secrets.php). Both conveying upon Humanity infinite leisure and infinite survival. And if you believe that, I also have a Bridge you will want to buy...

Derp

[Legion303]

"Could Rossi be on to something?"

No.

If he is on to something

[koan]

This would be one way to approach it, otherwise (and still likely) he will be murdered and the information suppressed.
Imagine a World where we didn't need oil...

Re:If he is on to something

[Anonymous Coward]

How does keeping the secret entirely in your own head make you less of a juicy target for silence-by-murder? Isn't that the optimal situation?
If he cared at all about this information not being suppressed...why is he suppressing it himself? There is no excuse. He has an internet connection, there's no reason why the information isn't on several newsites, message boards, public trackers...

This could work

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about the power that could be generated by giant irradiated cats chasing balls of yarn, I think thats about as feasible as this dude's plan.

This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

Rossi plans to unveil a 3rd new technology for Gigawatt reactors... December 21, 2012. Yay!

E-Cat is not science.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible he's on to something? Of course. The chances are slim, but not zero. It is not science, however. Science requires reproducibility, description of methods, the relevant data, peer review, and so on, and so forth. He's not giving that out. So, forget about the science angle.

So what do we have there? Someone claiming to sell a device that generates power. That's easy enough to verify. Get a device, put a power meter and a suitable load on it, have it run for a couple months. Does it do what it claims to do? What guarantees does the seller offer? I don't know. Anybody willing to find out, do try and share the experience. With a full-on scientific log, for example.

Show me

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not from Missouri, but IF this works, it is time to SHOW ME. No irreversibly engineered black boxes, no mystery. Just show that it works.

Patent the heck out of the process and show the world. Then we can leave the fanatic nuts in the Middle East to killing each other and not care about oil so much.

If you have it, SHOW IT. Show the world there is another way.

Security devices to prevent reverse-engineering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, he's a bullshitter. These demo models are probably loaded with batteries of some sort to scam people into believing they're for real. Once he gets some big contracts, he'll disappear. Just another snake-oil salesman in a long line of such. Nothing to see, move along.

How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[Arancaytar]

Science that works cannot be kept secret. Observe that over centuries, every single real invention has been independently discovered by multiple scientists in such close succession that it might as well be simultaneous. That is not a coincidence. New discoveries build upon existing discoveries and technologies, and when their time has come, they will appear.
If this invention were based on a theory that actually had some basis in reality, other physicists would have grasped it by now, at the very least by knowing what to look for. This scam is targeted at the gullibility of people who don't understand how scientific advances are made.
"No one else has figured it out, so there must be something to it" is the wrong argument. If it's a magic box, we should be treating it as a magician's sideshow: Not to be believed until proved fake, but to consider it fake until all its workings are fully and extensively public and shown to be sound by other scientists.

Five hundred years ago, self-styled alchemists and sorcerers parted investors with their money by claiming to have some secret apparatus to turn lead into gold. It's depressing to see that now, after the periodic table, the theory of relativity and the discovery of the atom, we're falling for the same trick. We shouldn't even be debating whether it's real, just like we don't debate whether the world will end this December. It should be dismissed out of hand until the inventor decides to either cough up how it is done or shuts up and goes away.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[Courageous]

TLDR; "Shut up and only believe it when you see it."

The slashdot/reddit blather and yammering will not help.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[SpinyNorman]

There's no secret - did you even read/view the NASA presentation and video linked in the slashdot story?

Or how about this - a Nobel Prize winning physicist who believes the Rossi reactor is for real.

http://pesn.com/2011/06/23/9501856_Nobel_laureate_touts_E-Cat_cold_fusion/

Note that in the NASA video the scientist is talking about this as a very practical device for home generation of power and heat. The physics may not be well understood, but evidently trustworthy organizations like NASA have no problem creating devices that consistenty produce heat that cannot be explained using known physics (although there are a half dozen theories about what may be happening).

The trouble is that "cold fusion" got a bad name because the voices of those who were initially unable to reproduce the effect has heard over those (such as NASA!) who were able to. These types of process are now being referred to as LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions) instead, and serious research continues.

If you think the reality of LENR heat producing devices is a secret, it's more an indication that you get your news from Fox news than it is a reflection on the reality. Try listening to NASA instead of Fox news.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[khallow]

All that and $5 gets you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. A working power plant trumps all this.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Five hundred years ago, self-styled alchemists and sorcerers parted investors with their money

I wonder what type of returns their progeny would be in line to receive on 500yrs worth of compounding interest. Because I'm pretty sure we can turn lead into gold today.

CAPTCHA: particle

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[swillden]

What a snake oil salesman does:

• Hype super-cool device based on as-yet-not-understood physics.
• Carefully keep secret any information about how it actually works.
• Raise money by promising future demonstrations.

What a real inventor does:

• Build a working prototype.
• File a patent disclosing the details and ensuring control.
• Raise money by selling working devices.

Give me one counterexample, one case where an inventor acted like the first list and yet really had something significant.

(I wish slashdot would stop screwing up the display of bulleted and numbered lists.)

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[ka9dgx]

Science that works cannot be kept secret. Observe that over centuries, every single real invention has been independently discovered by multiple scientists in such close succession that it might as well be simultaneous. That is not a coincidence. New discoveries build upon existing discoveries and technologies, and when their time has come, they will appear.

Wrong - Here are 2 examples from History to set you straight.

Babbage's difference engine really worked, it wasn't kept secret, it wasn't suppressed by a cabal, it was just very hard to do, and was slightly ahead of it's time. Had there been a Bridgeport Knee mill with power, tools, and a few skilled machinist to use it available in 1823, he would have been a fairly immediate success. After all, he was funded with enough money to build a well kitted out battleship over the course of the project. Unfortunately for him, he had these ideas before things like standard thread sizes, in fact it's because of him, and the follow on effects of his work that we eventually got standard thread sizes, etc. It also didn't help that he suffered from the Osborne effect, having found the next great generation of a technology (the analytic engine) before making the first one profitable.

There's also the Antikythera mechanism, which was effectively an mechanical analog computer built about 100BC. We didn't get the modern equivalents until the 14th century.

Science that works has to be correct, or close enough to work. But it's not fair to say that failure of implementation implies bad science.
Just because it took about 1400 years for mechanical computation to become mainstream doesn't mean that genius who built the Antikythera mechanism was a fraudster... in fact his device worked.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

This actually reminds me of the black box energy sources in Robert Heinlein novels. There was an actual story of how they were invented and how the inventors figured the patents would be seized by the government for the "public good".

Which makes me believe that Rossi is a fraud that likes Heinlein.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even Nobel prize winning physicists can be wrong, and Josephson isn't known for rigorous skepticism. Open-mindedness is, of course, a good quality in a scientist, but if you're looking for a convincing source, you're going to need more than someone who seriously believes in the paranormal to say it might be real.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[bussdriver]

Actually, science doesn't require an explanation or understanding - merely a form of proof. Now science is not static; it is a process. More proof and study follow; especially for things that are poorly understood (bigger discoveries likely= more interest.)

The black box is unproven, not fake. As far as I've heard (which is little.) You can't be doing science if you assume it is fake; you must PROVE it is fake. This is much harder, it is far easier to just prove it doesn't work. ;-)

This "skeptical" science line is on par with being a "lazy" programmer or the 1/3 image framing rules in photography. They are a generalized guidelines not a rule!! Probably such things should be limited to students only because we have too many ignorant people using them as rules. I'm waiting for a congress moron to talk about how all our good programmers are lazy and if they would only work harder... our internet tubes wouldn't clog up so often...

"Cold Fusion is impossible" is bad science because this has never been proven; we have many times where theories and discoveries were proven false but no proof. Flight was loaded with failures for 100s of years; lots of proven false theories/experiments later somebody proved one true and we didn't understand why it worked at the time either. It worked and that is all that mattered to most people.

If it takes in X amount and outputs Y amount. It could be influential if it runs at 1% efficiency because your gas car is below 50% on expensive fuel -- if it runs cheaper at 1% it still wins! (if it is nuclear or fusion the power density would be so great wasting wouldn't matter again...until that fuel supply gets low...) Somebody credible needs to test it; if it works, then others will test it... Actually, it may not work but it could raise interesting problems which leads to discoveries none of which could result in a new power source. I forget but MIT was looking into some Canadian gadget with magnetism which was some silly over unity type thing (from the sound of it) because it didn't fail as predicted and raised interesting questions-- that one was quite a while ago

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[SpinyNorman]

You do realize that Rossi has working devices that have been inspected by dozens of scientists, right?

You do realize that NASA also has working devices they've built on similar principles, right? The fact that something works rather trumps the fact that you don't yet know how it works.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

We didn't discover gravity until it hit someone on the head.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[IRWolfie-]

Mentioning Brian David Josephson, with his belief in telepathy and parapsychology, hardly makes it sound credible.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[FooAtWFU]

Usually after the prototype the modern inventor will need to raise money to set up factories and production lines to make working devices. (Possibly outsourced, but they'll still want money up front.) This is the purpose of venture capital, IPOs, and the like.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[DCFusor]

How could I realize something that never happened? You are misinformed.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Love your post, but just to be clear on one point:

"New discoveries build upon existing discoveries and technologies, and when their time has come, they will appear."

The reason this happens is that all scientific literature is open and available. Want to learn everything we know (as a planet) about a particular topic? It's possible, you can read and read and read all the literature on that topic, and once you've done so you'll have an idea for how to extend/push/expand what we know.

The whole point is that anyone else who's also read the same material may also have the same idea. And that is why "they will appear" seems to happen.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

TLDR; "Shut up and only believe it when you see it."

The slashdot/reddit blather and yammering will not help.

In that case, it won't hurt, either.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[genx_walt]

Exactly what you said on your first comment. Rossi and NASA are working on the same thing. NASA had to say something to save face before Rossi's device is proven to be real and work.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha! Yeah.
Also "Science that works cannot be kept secret."
Tell that to Coca Cola, inc. A recipe, believe it or not, is science.
I've got almost a complete 15 year stack of "Infinite-Energy" magazines around here. There is plenty of skeptical blathering and yammering, but the little actual science continues quietly and carefully. Just like programming. It's out there, but as long as we have our hearts set on Big Science and sports, it's all just bling in the human consumption scheme: and the video games are where the money is at.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[swillden]

You do realize that Rossi has working devices that have been inspected by dozens of scientists, right?

"Scientists", huh?

Talk to me when he's gotten his patents filed (which is a much safer way to protect your ideas than "ingenious" countermeasures against disassembly), and when he's getting factories set up.

That's what real inventors do.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[swillden]

Usually after the prototype the modern inventor will need to raise money to set up factories and production lines to make working devices. (Possibly outsourced, but they'll still want money up front.) This is the purpose of venture capital, IPOs, and the like.

Sure. That's all part of selling working devices. I didn't want to go into all of the complexities there.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be dismissed out of hand until the inventor decides to either cough up how it is done or shuts up and goes away.

What if the Inventor sells working product without telling you shit? Then your screwed.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[DaveV1.0]

Simple. This is what happens when you take the scientists out of science policy. This is what happens when lawyers are put in charge of the government. This is what happens when outrage and appearance are valued over intelligence and competence. This is what happens when schools teach to the lowest common denominator and everyone gets a trophy just for trying.

This is what happens when politicians want to keep the populace ignorant and thus happy.

Re:How is anyone even taking this seriously?

[Baldrson]

Ignoramous.

rossi and The National Instruments

[Anonymous Coward]

The National Instruments is rossi partner .on their official website they put rossi company "Leonardo Corporation" beside "CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC)" and "tokamak fusion(iter)" as example of most advanced projects they involve with.

see yourself
http://digital.ni.com/worldwide/bwcontent.nsf/websearch/2c6b449a3f0f8f3a862579480060a07f

Re:rossi and The National Instruments

[rubycodez]

It's called "name dropping", very old confidence man trick

Re:rossi and The National Instruments

[GerryHattrick]

"...NI has contributed product solutions to some of the most advanced projects including the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and tokamak fusion device control systems. Additionally, the Leonardo Corporation has intentions to incorporate NI tools in its control system." - So they might sell him a reliable ammeter? We should celebrate!

Re:rossi and The National Instruments

[jamstar7]

My parents knew John Denver. Does that mean I qualify for a Grammy?

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[paiute]

Tests conducted at NASA Glenn Research Center in 1989 and elsewhere consistently show evidence of anomalous heat

There are plenty of ways "anomalous" heat can be generated during chemical/mechanical processes without jumping right to the conclusion that it must be two nuclei fusing - the same way that seeing something unknown in the sky does not automatically mean it came from some other planet.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[gl4ss]

if the guy could begin shipping units this year, he would already have working units and investors lining up.

Technique will pay dividends

[Anonymous Coward]

Could Rossi be on to something?"

I think he is. He has leveraged some pretty promising scientific ideas, taking advantage of the power of the neurons of the gullible. Certainly he will win the Nobel Prize for Marketing.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Anonymous Coward]

but I tend towards a more cynical or pragmatic attitude when it comes to parting with my or the public's money.

Come on now, at about 1.5M per MW, if it wastes public money, its going to come back at him pretty quickly.

Science or religion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rossi's device is now more on the side of a "religion" or cult.

Science is based in proofs, and religion in faith.

He has a lot of "believers".

I hope someday something like this could work. The global impact in the world economy would be extremely helpful for everybody, but not for the 2%.
Now, the corporations controlling the fuel or energy generation have a direct impact in the economy of a country. Among with the money cost (FED), it affects your pocket instantly. The price of gas impact your everyday commute and all the food you buy.

I think one of the pillars of evolution is cheap energy.

Brain Dead Sunday

[mbone]

Come on. First, the three no's in the summary is really all one needs to read:

"...because he has not explained how his 'reactors' work..., there is no theoretical basis to support his process, and no one has supplied independent measurements to support the specs on his black boxe"

I mean, no theory, no engineering and no independent results, what more do you need to know ?

Second, the actual presentation to NASA completely falls apart on page 13. Look carefully at the right side, and ignore the red curve. The D2 curve is not producing energy. It is absorbing energy. It is just absorbing less energy than the H2 curve.

Absorbing less energy is not the same as producing energy. Thanks for playing, come back when you are actually producing energy.

(As for why there is an ~10 second blip where the D2 and H2 curves diverge a little, I could speculate, but I don't really care. It doesn't really matter, as long as the total energy production is negative. Offer me a consulting contract at my full rate, and maybe I'll look into it.)

Leave Rossi alone!

[Anonymous Coward]

How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Rossi after all he has been through!
He lost his job, he went through a divorce. He had two fucking plants.
His colleague turned out to be a user, a cheater, and now he's going through an IP battle.
All you people care about is.. readers and making money off of him.
HE’S A HUMAN!

What you don’t realise is that Rossi is making you all this energy and all you do is write a bunch of crap about him.
He hasn’t published in years. His technology is called “give me more” for a reason because all you people want is MORE! MORE-MORE, MORE: MORE! LEAVE HIM ALONE!
You are lucky he even researched for you BASTARDS!
LEAVE ROSSI ALONE!..Please.

Slashdot talked about professionalism and said if Rossi was a professional he would’ve pulled it off no matter what.
Speaking of professionalism, when is it professional to publicly bash someone who is going through a hard time.
LEAVE ROSSI ALONE!... please *sniff*
Leave Andrea Rossi alone! right now! I mean it!

Anyone that has a problem with him, you deal with *me*, because he's not well right now.

*sniff*

Leave him alone...

(for the clueless)

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Anonymous Coward]

"when it comes to parting with my or the public's money"

So, you trust the non-predictive social science of economics and the logical ad hominem fallacy over NASA's scientists?

Worse than that

[Kupfernigk]

I went to school in the 1960s. At the time, the Government was funding teaching of basic nuclear chemistry and physics in schools in the belief that there would be a need for a large supply of nuclear engineers. Fusion was thought to be about 20 years away.

The last I saw, a practical fusion reactor was estimated to be between 50 and 70 years away.

The reason is dirt simple. In the 60s, people didn't have a clue about the problems that needed to be solved. Because high energy plasmas and superconducting magnets didn't exist, there was no way of knowing how difficult confinement was going to be.

It is like Arthur C Clarke predicting flying cities in the 1950s - the technology gap was so huge, people didn't see how unbridgeable it was.

I am quite prepared to believe that practical fusion power is simply not achievable, because at the moment every single step between "think of fusion power" and "profit" is actually a series of question marks.

Re:Worse than that

[jamstar7]

I went to school in the 1960s. At the time, the Government was funding teaching of basic nuclear chemistry and physics in schools in the belief that there would be a need for a large supply of nuclear engineers. Fusion was thought to be about 20 years away.

So did I. At the time, they believed we needed to do some serious research into nuclear energy and engineering to see what all was there and develop it.

The reason is dirt simple. In the 60s, people didn't have a clue about the problems that needed to be solved. Because high energy plasmas and superconducting magnets didn't exist, there was no way of knowing how difficult confinement was going to be.

They wanted to know what it would take to do the job. They knew it was possible every time they looked out the window. They just didn't know how to do it in their own backyards.

Re:Worse than that

[dpilot]

Which schooling were you in, in the 60's? That's when I was in grade school, either sitting under the desk or sitting out in the hall back to the wall, for the nuclear war practice alerts.

As a general commentary, it appears to me there there is indeed a phenomenal amount of snake-oil surrounding CNF or LENR, whatever you call it. I strongly suspect that that happens any time there's a nascent technology that could make such a difference to our lives. These days the 100mpg carburetor is apocryphal, but once upon a time there were articles all over about it, and frequent conspiracy theories about how the oil or auto industry had bought out the patents to keep the status quo.

But there does seem to be something happening here that we haven't explained adequately, yet. A little research is not a bad idea, at the very least it can have one of two outcomes - it'll debunk the whole thing, which won't stop it, but will at least push it back to the fringe where it belongs, or perhaps there really is something there that can be exploited once we actually understand what is happening. Keep in mind that what's happening at the snake-oil level is not science. What NASA is talking about is. If NASA's effor stays as science, then they will either find something or debunk. Of course if it turns into bureaucracy instead of science, all bets are off.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[tgd]

Tests conducted at NASA Glenn Research Center in 1989 and elsewhere consistently show evidence of anomalous heat

There are plenty of ways "anomalous" heat can be generated during chemical/mechanical processes without jumping right to the conclusion that it must be two nuclei fusing - the same way that seeing something unknown in the sky does not automatically mean it came from some other planet.

This is true, but cold fusion research never really stopped, and there are a half dozen large labs around the world that have spent 20 years doing research, trying to figure out what is going on, even if there's no good theory behind the science yet. Discounting their work out-of-hand without a theory is just ignorant. There is vastly more published evidence *for* those reactions happening than against them, no matter what the theories might say. (And the variables that impacted the rapid set of tests that couldn't reproduce the P&F experiments are much better understood now -- according to published papers, the reproduction rate is near 100% in the last ten years.)

So the real electrochemists working on the problem don't claim to know *what* is causing the excess heat, but from a power generation standpoint, it kind of doesn't matter. They also have proven they're getting at least some transubstantiation going on, which suggests at least *some* of that heat is coming from nuclear processes.

Its weird (and strangely ignorant) that on this one subject, so many researchers take the "we don't know any way that COULD be happening, so lets not research it" position instead of the "something we don't understand is happening, and that is exciting to research" position. Even if it was a purely chemical reaction, there's something exciting about figuring out THAT, too!

Home version likely a targeted scam

[jsimon12]

My guess is he came out with the "Home Version" to start scamming the general public out of cash at $1000 a pop. Likely because momentum in the commercial/industrial world has slowed as they realize this is all fakery.

Wrong analogy

[Kupfernigk]

Fusion is probably like this: James Watt thinks of the condenser and sees a possible way to make a more efficient atmospheric engine. An imaginary journalist hears about it and predicts horseless carriages on the roads in 20 years. By the time the metallurgy, the metal forming, and the technology has sorted itself out to the level at which a steam road vehicle is actually practical, it is obsolete because spark ignition and compression ignition oil engines have been invented, followed by the gas turbine.

Re:Wrong analogy

[Briareos]

So what is going to make fusion obsolete? Directly tapping into the vast energies of Hyperspace(TM)?

np: Pink Floyd - Sorrow (A Momentary Lapse Of Reason)

Re:Wrong analogy

[vlm]

So what is going to make fusion obsolete? Directly tapping into the vast energies of Hyperspace(TM)?

My guess is some sort of biological organism that takes our current day tough plants at a fraction of a percent efficiency and adjusts the tradeoffs for intense human supervision combined with maybe 50% efficiency. Also I'd like to see a yeast genetically engineered that can ferment up to about 90% purity, to reduce the costs of distillation. Even if you could buy the reactor for free, it would be hard to compete.

You don't even need the fusion reactor for mobile and military purposes, because with that much free energy floating around you go antimatter for stored energy...

Re:Wrong analogy

[the biologist]

I read your comment three times and I still can't understand what you were trying to convey in the first sentence.

Re:Wrong analogy

[DrXym]

I assume they are saying that there is some way of producing biomatter which can be turned into energy.

Off topic but...

[Kupfernigk]

A Russian radiothermal generator is a significant plot device in the Russian film How I ended this summer, (Russian title omitted due to lameness) which is a film all geeks should be required to see.

Misleading summary

[Yvanhoe]

Like usual, this summary is misleading and try to link 2 different things. First thing first. Rossi is a fraud. The problem is not that he doesn't explain the mechanism of his reactors, it is that he refuses to even prove that it works. He called a scientist to certify that his black box was outputing more energy than it was inputing and the scientist disareed and asked for more information. Rossi dismissed him saying there would be no more tests of his claims. Consider Rossi out.

Now about cold fusion. It has been an active subject of research a few decades back. It continues to generate a low but continued amount of interest. The problem is that for a few years, there have been several crackpots like Rossi claiming to have a functional reactor. There has been several frauds. Cold-fusion quickly became associated with crackpottery and scientists relabelled it "low energy nuclear reaction" to be left alone by sensationalist journalists.

After the debacle, however, both NASA and the Army examined the results of these crazy years and concluded it was still worth allocating a small budget to continue experiments "just in case".

Re:Misleading summary

[ErikZ]

I would think if he's selling power sources, the simple test would be "Do they output what he claims?"

If Yes, then good.
If No, then scam.

Re:Misleading summary

[Yvanhoe]

The device is a bit more complex than that : it inputs electricity and produces steam. The disagreement with the scientist called to make measurement was in the level of output. He argued that the steam was not "dry steam" and therefore output less energy than the claim of Rossi. He could not give a precise measure but said that Rossi's calculations were erroneous. In a regular scientific process that is normal : you accept criticism and act accordingly. Rossi should have presented a way to check the quality of the steam but he prefered to start personal attacks on the scientist.

For me it is clearly a fraud.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[newcastlejon]

So, you trust the non-predictive social science of economics and the logical ad hominem fallacy over NASA's scientists?

Of course not, don't be obtuse. If NASA scientists come out with a statement saying this thing actually works then that will attract my interest. Until then the only thing NASA are doing is investigating the "anomalous heat", perhaps not even that if they're merely giving advice on instrumentation as the quote actually said.

P.S. Do you realise that you decried my ad hominem and presented an appeal to authority as an alternative? *sigh*
Arguments based on pure logic aren't much use in real life, where weighting statements based on past experience/reputation actually do tend to work out better than blindly accepting a crackpot's statements as a basis for making decisions.

scientific politics

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when we let politics kill science (I'm talking scientific politics here).

"Cold fusion" was such a disaster that the entire field became off limits. In the end, the US had maybe half a dozen experts left in low energy nuclear reactions by last year.

Here's what will happen: Some DoD guy will get excited about cold fusion in the news, maybe this Rossi stuff. There is no credible scientist working with DoD who can talk him down and show him the truth, the last DoD LENR lab was just shut down. Money will get spent on frauds because of this.

The field of atomic physics is already nearly swallowed up by particle physics and nuclear physics (there's a lack of chemical understanding in those areas). Very few people have the knowledge of nuclear processes and high energy chemistry needed to get up to speed fast in this area.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Anonymous Coward]

A herring by any other name would smell as fishy... in any event if LENR, as you put it, were a practicable possibility I'd expect to be hearing announcements from someone more reputable than this Rossi character.

Like Dr. McKubre?

I'm not saying that Rossi isn't a fraud, but the problem is that once science has reached a consensus that something doesn't work, it's very hard for even a reputable scientist to get their work published and they may be reduced to publishing their work in less reputable journals. Which may lower their reputation even further.

The second problem is, assuming cold fusion is real, reducing it to a practical device is a whole other problem.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[chichilalescu]

you say that "according to published papers, the reproduction rate is near 100% in the last ten years".
could you please provide a few citations?

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than that; there was an enormous amount of excitement over the P&F results initially. Many scientists tried to reproduce the results and failed. These failures then called P&F's results into question and ultimately burned them pretty bad. What we have now is a region of science that nobody will lay their hands on. Most people working on this subject are doing so at home. I'm not saying that they don't do good, careful research (they can). I'm saying that the idea of fame and glory that might be able to be easily reproduced in your living room might tend to attract charlatans and the like (and yes, I have concluded that Rossi is one).

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[yndrd1984]

They also have proven they're getting at least some transubstantiation going on...

I'm pretty sure that if they find blood in there, it's because someone cut their finger.

SRI is curious; why not be less brief, more open

[mtrachtenberg]

Cute, but SRI doesn't seem to think it's open and shut, either. See this talk from SRI researcher Mike McCubre. The link is to part one of eight.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCcQtwIwAQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DEtweR_qGHEc&ei=fQ0TT6z8IMaC2wWRo4mFCg&usg=AFQjCNEqRT16r7o-A8LmurcqxagfDk6ZFg&sig2=1gh_88fhHkJO_cXlDbGHsA

Fleischmann and Pons had the misfortune of not understanding how to reproduce their experiments. There's been a great deal of work since, but many people are happy to consider themselves sophisticated by turning this into a joke. I don't understand why.

Note that this is a completely separate issue from whether Rossi is a scam artist.

LENR != Rossi AND Rossi=Scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you see someone mention LENR, you shouldn't assume they are talking about Rossi.

Rossi is the most vocal scamster on the net.

Just the fact that Rossi has implanted this ideal in your head shows how good he is at manipulating a non-critical thinking group who want the green revolution to mystically appear as has been foretold a since the late 1960s.

Rossi isn't the guy you are looking for.

A disaster for ecogeeks

[Anonymous Coward]

If this thing were true, a big if, it would be a disaster for eco fanatics. They will find more difficult to push most of their social engineering plans to the population. Ride a bike, turn off all the lights, buy a tinfoil car, live in the dark, use a jacket instead of eating, do not travel

Rossi's answer

[Anonymous Coward]

you can find what Rossi think about that here: http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/01/rossi-admits-nasa-is-a-competitor-intends-to-beat-them/

Heat without neutrons

[Anonymous Coward]

cannot be coming from a nuclear reaction, low-energy or otherwise. They've discovered some unexpected chemical process, if anything.

Re:Heat without neutrons

[Elder Entropist]

Completely without neutrons, probably. But the term aneutronic fusion is defined as any form of fusion power that releases less than 1% of the fusion power as neutrons. Boron-proton fusion is the most famous.

Cold Fusion

[hackus]

Such claims are not unrealistic. Consider what they did to the original researchers. Way beyond what was required to disprove a theory. They had to utterly destroy two fine individuals, not just their theory. This was a coordinated response from the entire scientific community.

It isn't too hard to see how irrational the response was to the initial claims of Cold Fusion. Instead of firing the imagination, it got the attention of bean counters at M.I.T. who saw such a direction destroying billions of potential dollars in Hot Fusion tech research. M.I.T. lead the way to insure these sceintists would never have any theory ever published again, and anyone who would dare challenge HOT fusion would be destroyed, not just disproven.

I believe, Cold Fusion exists from looking at the research, which refuses to die. But there are very powerful ineterests in OIL and ridiculous HOT fusion approach which is nothing but a black sink hole of money, which hasn't produced any results in over 50 years.

Ultimately we are going to pay a price for our Greed. Which you can see from research to banking to food and how obese people are.

The price will be whether we continue to exist as a species.

Over the past 100 thousand years of civilization we have had plenty of opportunities to stop and correct this behavior.

We continue to refuse.

-Hackus

Re:Cold Fusion

[phantomfive]

I believe, Cold Fusion exists from looking at the research, which refuses to die. But there are very powerful ineterests in OIL and ridiculous HOT fusion approach which is nothing but a black sink hole of money, which hasn't produced any results in over 50 years.

It is great that you believe that, but no one cares. Think about this, you need to get your conspiracy theories lined up, you're way out of whack.

Coal companies are the ones that want to stop new electricity research. They are the big multinational cartel polycorps behind that. They assassinate people and stuff.
Oil companies are the ones who stop new car research. Get it right, you look dumb when you mix up their respective motivations. Coal companies, electricity. Oil companies, cars.

Sometimes they join together but most of the time they stay apart. There is a lot of enmity and competition between the polycorporations, they don't like to cooperate when they can help it. Also, sometimes santa claus assassinates competing elves. Really, we've seen the footprints.

Re:Cold Fusion

[hackus]

"Coal companies are the ones that want to stop new electricity research. They are the big multinational cartel polycorps behind that. They assassinate people and stuff.
Oil companies are the ones who stop new car research. Get it right, you look dumb when you mix up their respective motivations. Coal companies, electricity. Oil companies, cars."

Now, I didn't say this was a conspiracy theory. It is historic fact. You can easily check the records.

It is public, and not a conspiracy.

You just proved my point, it is simply about greed. Has nothing to do with science or research.

I certainly acknowledge there are many players in the energy industry and that quite a few operate on the same motive operandi.

But this isn't a conspiracy theory, it is a fact.

Furthermore there is nothing secret about the whole Cold Fusion debate, or what happened.

You can check the records yourself which is why I am not linking anything.

It is very easy.

-Hack

Re:Cold Fusion

[phantomfive]

You just proved my point, it is simply about greed. Has nothing to do with science or research.

It's not about greed. It's about you not understanding reality.

"Oil companies" is not a single monolithic entity. There are many competing companies. The one who gets the patents on cheap energy wins, and will make tons and tons of cash. If it were only about greed, we would have cheap energy by now.

It is very easy.

Uh huh, are you also one of those people who believe that al qaeda didn't fly planes into WTC?

Re:Cold Fusion

[VojakSvejk]

Just posting to undo an accidental moderation; sorry.

By the way, I was in physics when P&F came out. Guess that makes me a cabalist, too...

Re:Cold Fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/2776421/posts

Re:Cold Fusion

[ceoyoyo]

Hilarious. Somehow MIT managed not to notice how much a patent on practical cold fusion would be worth, and instead was worried about some grant money for hot fusion? Seriously?

Re:Cold Fusion

[elgol]

MIT is a top notch establishment, but that does not mean everything they do is beyond question. Think "Witricity".

Re:Cold Fusion

[ceoyoyo]

Maybe you were taking my post seriously - the idea that anybody would stifle a genuine discovery of cold fusion because they were worried about losing some grant money for hot fusion is ridiculous. Working cold fusion, as described in 1989 by F&P would be worth FAR more than all the hot fusion grants ever given, everywhere. As a motive for suppressing a discovery it fails miserably.

Re:Cold Fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing, isn't it, how a concerted worldwide front was constructed to completely bury cold fusion research? Even in places like Russia where psionics was considered a legitimate field, or North Korea where *anything* from the 20th century would be appreciated, or China where they're seriously in danger of running out of resources right in the middle of their industrialization and couldn't care less about the price or the energy industry establishment.

One could almost call such a concerted front The Laws Of Physics.

Re:Cold Fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Pons and Fleishman make the decision to skip the peer review process and instead they went to the press? there is some risk in doing that..

Yeah right

[SmallFurryCreature]

Except that Einstein and astronomers don't hide their stuff, they publish and answer questions and invite scrutiny of their claims.

That is the difference between conmen and real scientists, real scientist want you to look behind the screen, in fact, there is no screen.

Apple called

[future assassin]

they want their magic back. Magic is part of their design mark so no one can use it for anything else except for magic shows.

Its all in how you do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Its all in how you do it. You need a sturdy, sealed containment vessel. Then you need a kind of trapping mechanism. Then you load the vessel, and set the trap. After probing and prodding in the right way, you are ready to spring the trap at which point if it stays, you have containment. Then you milk the elixir carefully. You take the precious oil and can now sell it. Of course, I'm talking about trapping a snake, milking it, and selling the snake oil. Of course, you are buying something in a bag, and you can't look in before hand to see what you are buying. Its like buying computer software without being able to examine the source code. Unveriifyable tests? Black box? SNAKE OIL!

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[c6gunner]

There is vastly more published evidence *for* those reactions happening than against them, no matter what the theories might say.

Nonsense. After 20 years of research, they still only have measurements that are barely statistically significant, occurring irregularly, primarily amongst "researchers" who already believe there's an effect. If you're going to call that evidence, then you have to conclude that "psychic powers" are real, also, because we've been getting the same kind of "evidence" from the "psi-researchers" for a couple decades now. It's nonsense. It's a perversion of the scientific method - sifting through noise until you find something that looks like a pattern, then using publication bias to reinforce your presuppositions, and sticking them in your conclusion. It's a waste of time and money, and it's a shame that so many people can't see that kind of "research" for the scam it is.

The real questions

[bhlowe]

The real questions are:
Q: Are transmutations taking place?
A: Hundreds of peer reviewed experiments show transmutations taking place in low-temperature ( Q: Are these nuclear reactions exothermic? If so, how much so?
A: Many scientists have reported anomalous heat. Sometimes a few watts, sometimes much more. Rossi and Defkalion report significant heat that can be useful.

Q: Do these reactions produce hard gamma radiation?
A: Unclear. Rossi claims 150keV (soft gamma) radiation and no harmful radiations have been detected while his reactors have been running.

Q: Can these reactions be controlled?
A: Unclear. It seems that a lot of engineering work is still required. Additional engineering work from the likes of NASA, GE, Honda, National Instruments, etc. may be required.

All this means is more research and engineering work is required. The dummies who say this is pure snake oil have not done their homework.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[cynyr]

Well I don't trust labels on black boxes... If it worked he would be willing to submit the device to a third party for testing. He would also be willing to explain the device to others with knowledge of how these things work (or don't), under an NDA so they could then say "yes it works". or at least something better than "Trust me it works great".

ingenious devices to prevent reverse engineering

[Peter Harris]

The most ingenious device used to prevent reverse engineering is that it doesn't fucking work.

Remember, Rossi was going to have a 1MW fusion plant working in October last year. My lack of surprise about that not happening is so overwhelming I can't even bother to

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[newcastlejon]

So the real electrochemists working on the problem don't claim to know *what* is causing the excess heat, but from a power generation standpoint, it kind of doesn't matter.

I'm no electrochemist, so I've no idea what's causing excess heat either, but when it comes to certifying equipment for public use (nuclear or otherwise) having a theoretical basis for understanding how said equipment works really does matter.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[cold fjord]

There are plenty of ways "anomalous" heat can be generated during chemical/mechanical processes without jumping right to the conclusion that it must be two nuclei fusing

If only there was some organization that had large numbers of people that might have the training and equipment to gain insight into such phenomena. If only.....

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[jamstar7]

To get investors, you need to have a pitch. To make a successful pitch, you need money to buy the PR flacks. This is just him scamming the cash to buy the PR flacks to buy the influence to get the government grants to buy the campaign contributions to get the funding to do his studies. Rinse and repeat, it makes a great career.

"What Happened to Cold Fusion?" by Dr. McKubre

[drgould]

If anyone is interested, here's a talk given by Dr. Mike McKubre from SRI on the state of Cold Fusion as of October 2011.

This is Slashdot, not the National Enquirer

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, pathetic. I am shocked. This is Slashdot, not the National Enquirer. I would expect commenters to be able to distinguish between x and dx/dt. Watts is a rate of energy (work) delivery. Watt-hours/KWH is the total work delivered. Just as battery capacity is amp-hours, battery amp ratings being simply the maximum amps deliverable for a short time, not a battery capacity rating.)

If this isn't obvious, go back and take HS physics before posting on Slashdot again. If you must post in the meantime, try the National Enquirer.

Divide vs. Multiply

[mosb1000]

kW is a measure of power. Energy is power times time so it can be measured in kW*hr or kWh, which is what you pay for.

Joule (J) is the si unit for energy and a Watt (W) is a Joule per second. You're basically claiming that energy is measured in J/s^2 which is nonsense.

Re:Divide vs. Multiply

[Courageous]

I know this. The "/" was inadvertent. You can tell this from the $0.01 in the shown calculation, which is more properly $0.017, which is $150/8760 hrs in a year.

Theory and testing

[ModelX]

Proponents of low-energy nuclear reaction research seem to believe Widom-Larsen Theory describes what might be going on in some of the so called "cold fusion" test devices like the one claimed by Rossi.

It shouldn't be too difficult to check the isotopes going in and out, and measure radiation (gamma, neutrons...) with sufficient accuracy to determine if there was any nuclear reaction and compute whether the result is above statistical noise. But I can't find any papers doing rigorous testing.

Here's what Brian Josephson thinks on it

[wytcld]

A video lecture on the topic from the man who gave us the Josephson junction, who is certifiably smarter than any of us here and as good a physicist as we have on the planet. That doesn't mean he doesn't have some peculiar ideas. He most certainly does. Walks funny too. But some of his most peculiar ideas have paid off big time, and were contrary to "everyone's" intuitive sense of how things work in reality.

Re:Here's what Brian Josephson thinks on it

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that Brian Josephson also believes in "Yogic Flying" and ESP, right?

Re:Here's what Brian Josephson thinks on it

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't understand the example of the rocks falling in air and in water but I liked the example about using a very tiny nozzle

What I want to know is why did the university of cambridge make such a weird video and, at the end it says by the end of 2011 he'd have delivered a 1MW reactor to someone, in October, "or some serious difficulties will have surfaced"

So what happened? Did one get delivered?

Actually, the short answer is: He is John Galt.;-)

[D4C5CE]

"Tesla energy in a device that crumbles to dust when hacked" might ring a bell? (Don't miss the Paul Krugman quote ;-))

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[gweihir]

If the guy could demonstrate effectiveness in reasonable demonstrations, he would already be rich. He cannot. If he could even give a reasonable explanation, the same might be true. He cannot. That is why he invents numerous reasons why such demonstrations and explanations cannot be made and does elaborate misdirection.

Standard con-artist approaches really. And the stupid line up to be defrauded. Also standard, I am afraid to say. The stupid form a sizable part of the population, and, suprisingly, a tech education does _not_ help. A scientific education can help, but not always. Most people see what they want to see, not what is. I have absolutely no pity for the nil-whits that will lose their money here.

If anything, this guy is a little less successful than the normal con-artist. But he thinks big. If he can get pre-orders for, say, 100'000 of his "home units" at $1500 a pop, he can run and then hide with a comfortable $150 Million. And there are still states that do not extradite for fraud, especially if you grease the right palms.

Cognitive dissonance

[ztexas]

He's a fraudster. Name one other case where an invention or useful implement has preceded the theoretical framework to explain it. Oh wait...
I don't know whether Rossi has found something novel and commercialized it. Neither do you. Time will tell. AFAIK he hasn't been taking prepayment for delivery of the devices, even though it would be rather trivial to setup the infrastructure to accept $100 payments to be "first in line" for later delivery of home units. If/when he does this, I will be first to suspect fraud.

Re:Cognitive dissonance

[Paul Fernhout]

"Name one other case where an invention or useful implement has preceded the theoretical framework to explain it."

Fire? :-)

Although it's been suggested somewhere that Rossi has taken money from a bunch of Greek-nationality investors who are now in Canada? One can take money from individuals even if not ask the general public.

I agree, only time will tell at this point. See my other comment to this story for what the catalyst might be related to though, connected to a previous research report from 1994.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Nethemas the Great]

Perhaps. However, I have to wonder if cavemen upon being shown fire and its use by another caveman demanded to know the physical principals at work before accepting it as reality and using it as a tool. Maybe Rossi is a poor excuse for a scientist, maybe he isn't the best businessman. But, at some point soon, if this guy isn't peddling legit hardware he will be found out. To be more specific, he will be found out as soon as any version of his device is purchased, installed, and attempted to be operated. In the mean time what are you people trying to achieve with your undergraduate physics education and many words?

Real Canadian Fusion Company

[northerner]

Has anyone looked into this company that is working on "more conventional" fusion reactors (i.e. not cold fusion)?

What do you think of their approach? They is a mechanical-acoustic means of compressing the plasma.

http://www.generalfusion.com/

From their web site: General Fusion is a Canadian venture capital-backed company led by a team of experienced physicists and technology development experts. We are working with government, institutional and industrial partners and consultants to develop a full-scale proof-of-concept fusion generator to demonstrate a net gain in energy within four years – something that traditional approaches have never achieved. Commercialization would take place before the end of the decade. Image of a Plasma Injector

“The closest to a potential reactor scheme is what General Fusion is proposing.” —R. Kirkpatrick, Los Alamos National Laboratory [Popular Science, January 2009]

Excellent points on why to be open

[Paul Fernhout]

And here are some more reasons I sent to Rossi: http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
"The key point here is that breakthrough clean energy technologies will change the very nature of our economic system. They will shift the balance between four different interwoven economies we have always had (subsistence, gift, planned, and exchange). Inventors who have struggled so hard in a system currently dominated by exchange may have to think about the socioecenomic implications of their invention in causing a permanent economic phase change. A clean energy breakthrough will probably create a different balance of those four economies like toward greater local subsistence and more gift giving (as James P. Hogan talks about in Voyage From Yesteryear). So, to focus on making money in the old socioeconomic paradigm (like by focusing on restrictive patents) may be very ironic, compared to freely sharing a great gift with the world that may change the overall dynamics of our economy to the point where money does not matter very much anymore. ..."

Others calling to open source the eCat:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2011/11/open-source-the-e-cat/

By the way, the catalyst may be some variant on Potasium Carbonate:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf

Mentioned here by "Sojourner Soo", with the abstract from 1994:
http://ecatnews.com/?p=1144
"Anomalous heat was measured from a reaction of atomic hydrogen in contact with potassium carbonate on a nickel surface. The nickel surface consisted of 500 feet of 0.0625 inch diameter tubing wrapped in a coil. The coil was inserted into a pressure vessel containing a light water solution of potassium carbonate. The tubing and solution were heated to a steady state temperature of 249 C using an FR heater. Hydrogen at 1100 psig was applied to the inside of the tubing. After the application of hydrogen, a 32 C increase in temperature of the cell was measured which corresponds to 25 watts of heat. Heat production under these conditions is predicted by the theory of Mills where a new species of hydrogen is produced that has a lower energy state then normal hydrogen."

In the 1950s (or maybe 1930s) a Princeton physicist was talking about some similar things (forget his name offhand).

Rossi could have ended almost all dispute by just running two eCats side-by-side, one with the catalyst and one without. Or even just one with the hydrogen and one without, where people picked the one getting the hydrogen. That would rule out many things. (Maybe not all, but a lot.) The fact that he has not done that, which would be relatively easy, makes me more suspicious that it really works (although people have invented explanations for why he has not done that).

What has been said by Steven Krivit is the suggestion that LENR (cold fusion) does work, but not as well as Rossi suggests it does (and he has been still trying to get it to work well).

Still, it is so hard to be an innovator in our society, that I could cut Rossi a lot of slack. Just maybe not a check yet. :-)

But sooner or later we will get cheap energy, one way or another, so many people are working towards it. Even just from solar:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

Or thorium, or hot fusion, or geothermal, or whatever...

But the eCat would be a great mobile power device.

Of course, if it does work, it is only one more reason we need to rethink our outlook on nature, technology, society, and economics:
htt

Re:Excellent points on why to be open

[c6gunner]

Yeah, that about sums it up. Limitless clean energy would be a complete game-changer. "Voyage from Yesteryear" does an excellent job of exploring some of the possible ramifications, though I thought it was far too idealistic in many ways. Either way, Rossi's attitude about the whole thing makes him look like a ego-maniacal paranoid douche at best, and most likely a quack or an outright fraud.

Re:Excellent points on why to be open

[fatphil]

"""
Rossi could have ended almost all dispute by just running two eCats side-by-side, one with the catalyst and one without. Or even just one with the hydrogen and one without, where people picked the one getting the hydrogen. That would rule out many things. (Maybe not all, but a lot.)
"""

Total tosh. Let the two identical black boxes contain the following mechanism:

If(we got hydrogen) { use internal battery to output power }
else { don't }

You've not proved that hydrogen is involved in the energy generation process at all. Rest was tl;dr.

Maybe not...

[DG]

The patent system has within it an underlying assumption; that your Better Mousetrap TM (pat pend) provides some degree of benefit that people are willing to pay for rather than steal.

Not counting the international counterfeiting issue (where international laws and the difficulty of enforcing one nation's laws within the borders of another compound the problem) the decision between "pay or steal" comes down to this:

1. How much does the patent holder intend to charge for use of the Better Mousetrap?

2. How much benefit does using the Better Mousetrap provide?

3. What are the costs of defending myself against patent infringement lawsuits likely to cost me?

If the benefit provided is smaller than the cost to buy plus the penalties for stealing, then you buy it.

But if the benefit is so large that it can offset both the cost and the penalties - you steal.

If (and that's a whale-choker of an "if") this thing works, it has the potential to save so much in energy costs that it becomes worth it to steal. In fact, it could theoretically finance the kind of graft and corruption needed to make the patent problem go away.

DG

Re:Maybe not...

[fatphil]

"""
The patent system has within it an underlying assumption; that your Better Mousetrap TM (pat pend) provides some degree of benefit that people are willing to pay for rather than steal.
"""

Quite the opposite. It assumes that people will want to steal it, and so provides you some protection if that happens. It says nothing about the legitimate licensing case, only about the stealing case.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[deadbeefcafe]

Watch the SRI talk linked in the comments above. I'd hardly call 90 sigma "barely statistically significant".
link

Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nonsensical drivel that is easily debunked.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/11/andrea-rossi-pressure-and-boiling-point.html

and you are still both wrong

[roman_mir]

both of you are still blind to the facts.

I left a comment in this thread, no need to repost.

Trade secrets are a much better way for everybody involved to deal with inventions/innovations rather than any patents and copyrights, it forces the society to work more and to produce more and it doesn't let anybody have a government created monopoly.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[this great guy]

You are wrong. The anomalous heat detected in some experiments is statistically significant. Just one example: in a 1998 experiment, Focardi had set up a cell that ran continuously for 278 days and produced an excess power of about 900 megajoule: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/FocardiSlargeexces.pdf

The problem is that this experiment, and many others, despite providing very interesting results, have been mostly ignored by the scientific community purely because of the stigma associated to Cold Fusion research. This is frustrating!

The submitter is also incorrect when saying that Rossi provided no details about how his reactors work. He explained that (a) he processes the nickel powder to create tubercles and enhance its contact surface with hydrogen, (b) he uses 2 nickel isotopes to enhance the reaction, (c) he splits molecular hydrogen (H2) into atomic hydrogen (H1), (d) he uses high pressure and temperature to initiates the reaction, etc.

I used to think that Rossi's E-Cat was a scam, but after researching deeply the subject, I am now convinced this guy might be onto something, see this post I wrote explaining many Cold Fusion experiments that seem to support Rossi and that have been ignored by the community at large: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61

ONE post that might convince you Rossi is for real

[this great guy]

http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61

This covers 20 years of research of "anomalous heat" coming from nickel-hydrogen cells which is the basis of Rossi's technology. Did you that numerous prominent Italian scientists believe Rossi is onto something? Did you know that a former Greek ambassador to Italy and scientist became involved with Rossi to manufacture the E-Cat via an independent company (Defkalion)? And now this company claims to have reverse engineered Rossi's device, and is on a race to ship something before Rossi?

I have been following very closely the whole story around Rossi's E-Cat device for 3 months, and it is so much more complex and fascinating than what you all think...

Would you believe ...

[dbIII]

So long as the nuclear fanboys start with a lie and then give way a little bit on the lie after they get caught out I'm not going to take them seriously. To make things worse they are stuck in the 1970s because they believed the "too cheap to meter" and "nuclear waste doesn't exist" crap so they are unaware of the cool new technology to deal with such problems.
The "Would you believe ..." routine is fun but is even older than "Get Smart", so it gets a little old in discussions here.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[FatLittleMonkey]

Pedantically, Cold Fusion and LENR are two different things. The reason is a dispute within the field over the cause of the "heat anomalies". Pons and Fleischmann, and their faction, believed it was true hydrogen fusion (ie, hydrogen/deuterium into tritium/helium/unicorns). Another faction believed the hydrogen fused with the test metal (originally platinum, more recently nickel) in some way that-physic-does-not-yet-understand, and they use the name LENR to brand their faction.

For people who think it's all crap, it's The South Philadelphia Cat Society vs The Cat Society of Southern Philadelphia.

Re:ingenious devices to prevent reverse engineerin

[genx_walt]

The device is so simple DIY'ers are working them already using what was submitted for patent. Also the 1MW E-cat was sold after the customer performed their tests. See here : http://pesn.com/2011/10/28/9501940_1_MW_E-Cat_Test_Successful/

What does NASA have to do with this though?

[Born2bwire]

The worst thing about this summary is that it attempts to link Rossi to the far more legitimate research being conducted by NASA. The linked NASA materials make no reference to Rossi from what I can find. But it is this repeated implied associations that Rossi relies on to get people to buy in on what only screams snakeoil.

Re:Security devices to prevent reverse-engineering

[genx_walt]

Is NASA bullshitting too? In the last video on the post NASA said "It (LENR) has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy, cleanly, without hazardous ionizing radiation, without producing nasty waste.". If it is demonstrated enough for NASA to post a video about it, calling it a game changer... I don't think it is bullshit. Why would a Chief NASA scientist come out and say this if it was a fraud?

Also in the Oct 6th E-cat test Rossi dismantled a E-Cat to prove there were not batteries in his device. http://peswiki.com/index.php/News:Photos_of_the_October_6,_2011_E-Cat_Test --- And a summery of the test, http://pesn.com/2011/10/08/9501929_E-Cat_Test_Validates_Cold_Fusion_Despite_Challenges/

Wet Steam vs Dry Steam

[FatLittleMonkey]

For anyone who's curious, the whole "wet steam" vs "dry steam" thing sounds bizarre and petty.

The issue is the way Rossi measures his output. He measures the flow rate of water going into his device, then takes point measurements on a thermocouple somewhere inside his device. If he gets a reading above 100C on the thermocouple, he assumes 100% of the water was turned into steam. So he multiplies the input flow rate by the energy required to turn each 1L of water into steam, and assumes that's his devices output.

The problem is if only some of the water is turned to steam, then his calculations can be wildly inaccurate. In fact, it may be the dumbest way to measure the output of what is, basically, just a water heater.

The best way to do the measurements is just to heat up a container of water. Not boil. Just measure how long it takes to heat it by, say, 20C.

Re: Ghostbusters

[Anonymous Coward]

If he were operating an unlicensed nuclear device in New York City, Walter Peck would have him arrested, and hijinx would ensue!

"Things were going along just swell until dickless over there shutdown the containment unit"
"Is this true?!?"
"Yes, this man has no dick"

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold on, you actually think people at the top of the social heirachy are reputable?

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Tim C]

I tend towards a more cynical or pragmatic attitude when it comes to parting with my or the public's money

Never mind money, I tend to be sceptical when someone is claiming such a radical departure from accepted scientific knowledge. That doesn't automatically make it a con (huge advances are made in surprising directions from time to time after all), but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof - and so far, I've not seen that proof.

This is actually impossible

[David Gerard]

Adding hydrogen to nickel to make copper is a reaction that is so ridiculously unfeasible it doesn't even happen in any star we've ever observed. Not even a supernova can do what Rossi claims he can do in a lab. The entire enterprise is made of lies and bullshit.

Re:This is actually impossible

[Tanuki64]

On the on hand you are right, on the other hand we know thousands chemical compounds and reactions, which do not exist or happen in nature. So just that this reaction does not happen naturally, it is no prove that it is impossible.

A Great Business Model

[bigdaisy]

For years, Slashdoters have been trying to apply a three-step business model where the third step is "Profit". Rossi has shown the world an alternative template for a business model that is likely to be much more successful:

  1. Customers buy your device.
  2. Profit!
  3. ....something....

That's worth a (US) patent in its own right!

I hope Rossi is right because..

[WaffleMonster]

I want Rossi to produce working e-cats because he looks like a crackpot, has the historical baggage of a crackpot, makes extraordinary claims and does not appear to give two shits about the theoretical basis for his work.

Everyone who fell over each other dismissing Pons and Fleischmans sloppy work with sloppy reproductions of their own deserve to be strung up and publically ridiculed by a character like Rossi even if he turns out to be the crackpot he seems to be.

Why would anyone sell it that way?

[Anonymous Coward]

So then, all safety concerns aside, doesn't that mean you're paying up front for a lot of fuel you'll never use? I'm not sure I'm seeing the bargain unless the TCO of a micro nuclear reactor is somehow just that much cheaper than an internal combustion engine + fuel.

I mean, why would companies sell more expensive reactors that last longer when they can save money against the competition by reducing the fuel load to something that would have to be replaced just past the time the average customer keeps a car? (i.e. just under 5 years)

It just doesn't make economic sense.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Anonymous Coward]

1) The fact that SOME real research is being done means someone takes this seriously.
2) SOME research is also performed on psychic phenomenon but it doesn't make that any more likely.
3) Just because MOST scientists dismiss this as a hoax doesn't mean there isn't a way to get energy out of LENR
4) Just because you can get a tiny amount of energy out of something doesn't make it a viable energy source.

Rossi is a scam artist. He cherry-picks the facts and presents them in a way that appeals to people weak on logic. This is rain-making. It is snake-oil patent fairy dust medicine at it's very best and with a great floor show to go with it. In the end, when this thing can go no further, Rossi will either escape to a country without extradition to Italy or spend a few years in jail for fraud and come out a millionaire. Either way someone will be out for his scalp and he will spend the rest of his life fighting civil claims. Until then it's Lamborghinis all the way down.

This is a notice published on Wired

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/29/rossi-success

More details on NASA's research

[uigrad_2000]

NASA's research is based on the Widom-Larsen theory, yet the video never gives credit to them.

Joseph Zawodny (who works for NASA at the Langely Research Center) used to give credit to Widom and Larrsen for this theory, but rcently has been trying to take credit for it by himself. This video by NASA is the result. It never once mentions Widom or Larsen.

Here's an article about this whole thing from Larsen's perspective: LENR Gold Rush Begins at NASA

No

[Anonymous Coward]

No..

Can we please stop giving him attention?

[Bugs42]

Seriously, why are we wasting our time with charlatans like Rossi? The best thing we can do is ignore him and hope he and his ilk go away. Every bit of news coverage lends him undeserved credibility.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[DaveV1.0]

Has anyone been able to replicate the 1998 experiment's results? If not, then it does not look well for the claims. You see, in order for a result to be considered scientifically reliable, it needs to be reliably reproducible.

You say "anomalous heat detected in some experiments is statistically significant", yet fail to say in how many experiments. Has it been detected in most of the experiments, or just a few. You also only gave a single experiment and an excess power value, but didn't say how much power was input into the system.

Also, do you have a non-biased source? You have provided an obviously biased website and a personal website. Why should either be trusted?

Bet your balls

[Baldrson]

Since there are so many guys, starting with Koonin, Lewis, Taubes and Huizenga, who are so certain that there is no such thing as the Fleischmann Pons Effect (aka cold fusion aka low energy nuclear reactions aka chemically assisted nuclear reactions) that you are happy to see funds cut off from the area, it should be no problem for you to promise that, if it turns out you were dead wrong, and you have collectively delayed the solution to the energy crisis by 2 decades, that you'll at least give yourselves vasectomies if not cut your balls off.

Its the least you can do for humanity.

NASA not Rossi

[gpronger]

What is most impressive of this dialog is how well versed most of the commenters are in the LENR = Cold Fusion = Snake Oil. The mentioned research is not from Rossi (and this is an area not worth arguing, but simply waiting to see if he brings a product to market) but from NASA's website, generally considered a fairly reputable organization.

Could the issue be that we have had instances of "Cold Fusion" where the researcher did not understand which aspects of his experiment were critical and therefore did not define them for subsequent researchers to be able to validate the result? The level of visceral response on the topic in general is ill-serving the debate as a whole. Starting at the "beginning", could Fleischmann and Pons measured a LENR event, but did not understand the parameters which allowed the reaction to take place.

Post-Its!

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently this guy hasn't seen The Saint. Whoever discovers the way to create energy with cold fusion is supposed to do it on Post-Its, photo them, and then post it on the internet for the world to use after sleeping with Val Kilmer.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Baldrson]

Ignoramous.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Baldrson]

Ignoramous.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Baldrson]

Ignoramous.

Re:now called 'low-energy nuclear reactions'

[this great guy]

You really ought to read my blog post. It is not biased because it merely quotes and links to other trusted external resources (such as NASA) referencing similar successful experiments.

The single experiment I quoted (900 extra MJ) was run over 278 days. That corresponds to 37W of heat produced continuously, in addition to the heat produced by the input power which varied from 149.6W to 94.3W. All this info is in the PDF I linked to.

Even today, the NASA scientist interviewed in the video referenced by TFA re-stated that "production of excess energy has been demonstrated": http://ecatnews.com/?p=1868

It is time to stop saying "I won't believe in it until it has been reproduced". It HAS been demonstrated/reproduced. We can't explain the phenomenon. So it is time to pour research effort into LENR...

Open minded view

[Anonymous Coward]

I felt the same as most on here about Cold Fusion, but having followed things since October last year I’m prepared to give it an open minded view and see what happens.

Re:now called 'low-energy nuclear reactions'

[c6gunner]

You really ought to read my blog post. It is not biased because it merely quotes and links to other trusted external resources (such as NASA) referencing similar successful experiments.

Nice. You link to "ecatnews", and, as if that weren't bad enough, you skip right over the bit where the NASA guy says "While I do work for NASA, I do not speak for them". This is the exactly the kind of jackassery that leads rational people to dismiss "cold fusion" nutters out of hand - you can't even be trusted to quote others, let alone perform real experiments of your own.

As for this nonsense:

The single experiment I quoted (900 extra MJ) was run over 278 days. That corresponds to 37W of heat produced continuously, in addition to the heat produced by the input power which varied from 149.6W to 94.3W. All this info is in the PDF I linked to.

That's exactly the kind of garbage that Rossi is claiming. I reject these claims for the same reason I reject his claims - no legitimate confirmation, a dearth of third-party observations, and no reproduction. It's just another quack pumping electricity into an gizmo he slapped together, and claiming he's getting energy back out. Sorry, no. That's exactly the kind of nonsense I was referring to in my original comment. As long as that's the only kind of "evidence" you can present, expect to be ridiculed. Come back with some quality studies published in reputable journals and reproduced by numerous credible scientists, and we'll talk.

Not that I expect any of these words to mean anything to you or the other Believers; no matter how obviously fake something is, there will always be people willing to defend it with stories and anecdotes. But if we don't keep ridiculing you, you'll suck in more and more of the unsuspecting credulous public, so I'll speak up for their benefit, if nothing else.

Re:now called 'low-energy nuclear reactions'

[this great guy]

Give me a break, "ecatnews" just happened to have the best quote from this NASA engineer. His quote remains nonetheless correct.

Come back with some quality studies published in reputable journals and reproduced by numerous credible scientists, and we'll talk.

You do realize it is impossible to reach this situation if everyone had your mindset... You have to have people "crazy enough" to remotely believe in the possibility of LENR to study it and eventually prove it or disprove it. Your behavior is exactly what has been holding back LENR research for 20 years. Instead of bluntly rejecting it, you should be open-minded and support the current research, even if you currently don't believe in it.

For the record the Focardi report was published in a peer-reviewed journal (Il Nuovo Cimento).

Thermacore (DARPA contractor) reported anomalous heat in Ni-H cells: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf

Very recently at the WSEC 2012 conference, Celani also reported excess heat: http://www.22passi.it/downloads/WSEC2012%20Present.pdf

So, technically speaking, I agree with you, no one can unambiguously prove LENR today. I am just pointing out research and experiments that indicate there are datapoints that current theories cannot explain, and that we may be at the verge of finally proving LENR.

Re:now called 'low-energy nuclear reactions'

[c6gunner]

You do realize it is impossible to reach this situation if everyone had your mindset... You have to have people "crazy enough" to remotely believe in the possibility of LENR to study it and eventually prove it or disprove it.

They're never going to disprove it. It's an unsinkable rubber ducky. Just like any other pseudoscience. The more negative evidence accumulates, the more they'll cling to their "anomalies" and the more they'll whine about the eeeevil establishment not taking them seriously and trying to suppress their work. The semi-rational ones who are only doing it out of curiosity will eventually move on to greener pastures, but the crazy core will always be there. Hell, we've still got people claiming they can build perpetual motion machines by throwing together a bunch of wires and magnets; evidence doesn't faze crazy people and/or scam artists.

Your behavior is exactly what has been holding back LENR research for 20 years. Instead of bluntly rejecting it, you should be open-minded and support the current research, even if you currently don't believe in it.

Uhuh. I'll get on that, just as soon as you throw your full support behind my project to find Santa. I need help raising funds for my expedition to the north pole. I've got lots of pictures of Reindeer. And back in '98 I was able to see his workshop from my back yard for a whole 200 days (atmospheric phenomena). My neighbor Bob saw it too, so it was repeatable. And we have LOTS of anomalous reports of Santa being spotted at local malls. Yet for some reason, despite all that evidence, none of those silly scienticians will take me seriously. So whaddaya say? Us Alternative Science guys gotta stick together, right???

So, technically speaking, I agree with you, no one can unambiguously prove LENR today. I am just pointing out research and experiments that indicate there are datapoints that current theories cannot explain, and that we may be at the verge of finally proving LENR.

Yes, I know, I hear the same thing from creationists, ESP fans, "UFOlogists", "cryptozoologists", HIV deniers, and so on and so forth.

"Well, science can't explain this, so you have to keep an open mind! We just need more money, and then we'll get you LOTS of evidence!"

In a word, NO . First you have to show there's actually something that needs explaining. You have to do so in a clear, unambiguous, well documented and reliably replicable way. Even once you've done that, it doesn't mean you get to run the old god-of-the-gaps argument and insist that your explanation is true. Just because I can't explain a glint of light in the sky doesn't mean I have to accept your claim that it's a massive spaceship transporting kidnapped humans for consumption by our reptilian overlords. Cold fusion "research" hasn't even met the first requirement, yet you're already throwing in your "explanation" and demanding that others take it seriously and throw funding at it. In two words, FUCK NO . You're no better than any of the other pseudosciences I've listed off; you provide the same quality of "research", make the same damn excuses, and use the same tired old complaints when everyone calls you nuts. It's pathetic. If I were to take your arguments seriously, I may as well start popping homeopathic pills while a gypsy reads my palm.

That is all.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps. However, I have to wonder if cavemen upon being shown fire and its use by another caveman demanded to know the physical principals at work before accepting it as reality and using it as a tool. Maybe Rossi is a poor excuse for a scientist, maybe he isn't the best businessman. But, at some point soon, if this guy isn't peddling legit hardware he will be found out. To be more specific, he will be found out as soon as any version of his device is purchased, installed, and attempted to be operated.

You're discounting another possibility: he's a good businessman, of the confidence trickster variety.

Free energy and other types of technology scam artists do not want their devices to be purchased, installed, and operated. The name of the game is to do controlled demos and extract "investments" from the marks, promising that everyone will be rolling in the cash as soon as a few final engineering problems are solved using the investors' money. This is milked as long as it can be. Which can be decades, if the scammer is good at BSing his way out of providing a return on investment (usually with a neverending series of made-up engineering problems which always need more money to overcome).

If at any point there is too much pressure to prove the claims with working machinery subjected to independent testing, the inventor will disappear and investors will be left with nothing. Or, in some cases, the inventor will stick around and allow the test, inventing an array of excuses which keep the more gullible investors happy.

In the mean time what are you people trying to achieve with your undergraduate physics education and many words?

Expose scammers? How dare we! Can you and your presumably-better-than-undergrad-physics-education do anything more productive?

Re:now called 'low-energy nuclear reactions'

[this great guy]

I give up. I gave you links from multiple independent research groups who show something needs explaining but you keep ignoring them... Read again from Thermacore, the CERN, Piantelli, Focardi, the Italian ENEA (equivalent to the US Dept of Energy). All are linked from http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61 You have to read the research papers yourself and then make up your own mind.

Re:now called 'low-energy nuclear reactions'

[c6gunner]

No prob, since you're so certain that you're right, put your money where your mouth is. Nice small bet, say $5k. You give me a timeline for when we'll have unambiguous commercial use of nuclear fusion - if it happens, you get $5k, if not, you pay up. Deal?

Wassat? More excuses?

Thought so.

Re:now called 'low-energy nuclear reactions'

[DaveV1.0]

What part of "reliably" did you not understand?

One engineer has an opinion and it could be a false one.

I won't believe until it can be reliably reproduced by independent researchers. Until then, it doesn't deserve to be believed. Until I can build one and have it work, it isn't real.

Re:now called 'low-energy nuclear reactions'

[this great guy]

Believe it or not, I am willing to bet $5k that Ni-H cold fusion is real! We can use longbets.org Contact me at this.guy.from.slashdot@gmail.com

Perfect opportunity for the HE nuclear people to

[Anonymous Coward]

Dump all over cold fusion again and thus protect the $5B/year budget for Tokamak and other approaches that will, 30 years in the future, produce cheap energy.

This despite the voluminous evidence that nuclear phenomena that are not accounted for by standard theory actually exist.

The DOE's analysis in 2004/2005 had serious scientists saying that 'this is a normal stage in the development of science, where it is difficult to replicate the results."

This book gives a good example of that stage of science :
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (New in Paper) by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (Aug 15, 2011)

There is a real phenomena. HE Physics doesn't want its research budgets hurt, so they deny it. We taxpayers suffer as a result of this corruption.

Re:now called “low-energy nuclear reactions&

[gl4ss]

all he would need for a successful pitch would be a device that makes 10kw of power electricity and sells that back to the grid.

hell, if his devices worked he could get into ceramics industry or whatever.. and make a boatload of money to seed his stuff.

Re:now called 'low-energy nuclear reactions'

[this great guy]

It's more than one engineer for god's sake... You too need to read the research papers!

We are just starting to be able to understand how to reliably reproduce it. See the table starting on page 16, more than a dozen groups have reproduced it: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2012/2012Celani-WSEC.pdf