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A Cold Look at Cold Fusion Claims: Why E-Cat Looks Like a Hoax
In the past few days, several readers have submitted word of a paper published on Arxiv allegedly confirming the efficacy of Andrea Rossi's "E-Cat," a device Rossi says transmutes nickel into copper, producing cheap energy in the process. (Mentioned before on Slashdot.) Ethan Siegel of ScienceBlogs takes a skeptical look at the buzz surrounding this paper, and asks some seemingly obvious questions, pointing out various ways in which the cold-fusion / cheap-energy claims could be either confirmed or debunked. First time accepted submitter CdXiminez writes with a capsule of Siegel's points: "What would it take to convince a reasonable observer that you've got a controlled nuclear reaction going on here? Things not shown in the earlier report: Show that nuclear transmutation has in fact taken place; Start the device operating by whatever means you want, then disconnect all external power to it, and allow it to run; Place a gamma-ray detector around the device; Accurately monitor the power drawn from all sources to the device at all times, while also monitoring the energy output from the device at all times."
That quote is P.T. Barnum. If you are looking for a W.C. Fields quote for this article, I suggest "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull."
NASA is "looking into this": don't misinterpret investigation as validation. If it's not reproducible, more work needs to be done. If the process appears to violate the laws of thermodynamics, your first reaction should be "scam", not "how do I get in on this?". Your second reaction should be "how do they do it"? It's been many years since cold fusion and while there have been tantalizing hints that there may be something to it, nobody has been able to reliably reproduce the phenomenon for objective observers.
And mass is energy, in the amount of mass times the speed of light squared. This is what all nuclear science is based upon and why fission plants, nuclear warheads, and fusion bombs work. The system energy is not being increased, because the mass defect in the nuclear reaction is converting mass to energy.
When I read the original E-Cat stuff is sounded like total bullshit. The process I saw NASA examine and the new Rossi reactor that has been independently verified by half a dozen scientists from across Europe is actually pretty sound science wise.
In this case, the experiment puts hydrogen atoms into a tight nickle lattice, with hydrogen in the interstitial positions, then radiates it with terrahertz radiation, which forces inverse beta decay of the hydrogen due to the lattice pressures and radiation, the neutrons are then forced into the nickle atoms, which then beta decay to become copper. The beauty of this is that you don't have to overcome the coulomb barrier, but still have a nuclear reaction taking place. In fact, the reverse beta decay of hydrogen is much lower energy than the beta decay of nickle.
A while back I, as a total noob, looked at fusion and said "well, how would I get around the coulomb barrier?" instead of trying to get through it. I calculated that radiation in a swath of Terahertz range that is difficult to produce would make it possible to induce reverse beta decay in hydrogen. If this guy got it to work, the only surprising development is that he was able to produce the right kind of radiation easily. There is literally no other surprise.