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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?"
No.
They'd probably achieve more than Adobe does.
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.
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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?
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.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
There's still someone talking about the eCat.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Hell, no.
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."
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
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.
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
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
A way to scam more people out of their cash.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
~X~
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.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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.
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.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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!
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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 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
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
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
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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