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Cold Fusion Rears Ugly Head With Claims of Deuterium-Powered Homes
szczys writes: Ah, who can forget the cold-fusion fiasco of the early 1990s? Promises of room-temperature fusion machines in every home providing nearly-free energy for all. Relive those glory days of hype with this report of Deuterium-Based Home Reactors. Elliot Williams does a good job of deflating the sensationalism by pointing out all of the "breakthroughs," their lack of having any other labs successfully verify the experiments, and the fact that many of the same players from the news stories in the '90s are once again wrapped up in this one. I'm still waiting for the neighborhood E-Cat to arrive ...
So, either Leif Holmlid is a lying, attention-seeking media whore ... or he's really made a revolutionary breakthrough.
But if he can't demonstrate that it works in such a way as to be repeatable by someone else, then he must be a lying, attention-seeking media whore.
I know which one my money is on.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Just get solar inexpensive enough and I'll be perfectly happy. It sure isn't there yet.
For me it would be, if the goddamn electric utility would set fair rules.
If the utility is going to charge me a grid-tie fee, make that fee the same as all of the subscribers. IE, any house with approximately the same service type (200A 240V Single Phase with Neutral) should have the same grid-tie fee as I as a solar user would have.
As a power producer, they should pay a reasonable amount of money for my power to them during peak hours. They should not be allowed to only reimburse me the rate they charge for middle-of-the-night lowest-demand time, which is something like 10% of what they charge during peak hours. I understand that I'm not going to get 100%, that's not the issue. I do expect to get more like 50%, especially if they itemize all power customers' grid-tie separate from their usage fees.
As they want it now, they want to benefit from my power production when they have the most demand, and to charge me for the privilege of supplying them with that power.
My argument in favor of my position is that during peak hours (I live in a hot desert climate) my production means that they do not have to supply as much power from on-demand power stations that are more costly to operate than their base-load power plants. They don't have to burn natural gas or propane or diesel to keep up with all of the air conditioners if enough solar customers are selling power back to the grid. The solar customers also put power back on to the grid locally, which reduces amperage across the higher current distribution portion as local power in a local section is being produced.
As they have it now it's a racket, and there is no reason for it to be so.
And yes, I am well aware of danger to linemen if there's a general outage and a residence is still supplying power. I would put in a transfer switch capable of intentional islanding and some form of intelligent grid AC resync and reconnect if I were to do this.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Just get solar inexpensive enough and I'll be perfectly happy. It sure isn't there yet.
Bingo. Solar would go a long, long way to solving the energy demand if it was inexpensive enough and/or efficient enough.
A solar cell with 50% efficiency would revolutionize the whole industry (I think 22% or so is the current record, and I believe that's still in an experimental stage as far as I know).
A less expensive solar cell would be almost as good, maybe better in some cases. I think solar is now about ~$3 per watt installed, but bring that down to under a dollar and it would suddenly become waaaaaaay more attractive and practical.
I love the idea of cold fusion but so far it still seems genuinely unobtainable. For all the research I've seen there's still no real, definitive example of it actually being feasible or even possible. (I know a lot of people will disagree with me, perhaps vehemently.) Quite a few claim to have done it, but I don't know of any indisputable examples.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The weakest link in the solar equation is the diffuseness of the solar energy. Yes the solar constant is 800 W/m^2 at North American and European latitudes. But you have to multiply this by the efficiency of the solar panels. Right now about 16% is standard, which would give you 128 W/m^2 (why these panels are usually advertised as 125 or 130 W/m^2). If you go with the higher 22% announced in a recent /. article, you get 176 W/m^2.
Then you have to multiply that by capacity factor, which takes into account night, angle of the sun, weather, etc. For the U.S., that averages about 0.145, with the desert southwest hitting a max of about 0.185. For northern Europe (UK, Germany, France) it's about 0.11. So even using 22% efficient panels you're down to 25.5 W/m^2, 32.6 W/m^2, and 19.4 W/m^2 respectively of equivalent constant power generation.
Then you have to multiply by the efficiency of the battery charge/discharge cycle. Typically this is about 0.6-0.85. If you go with the higher 0.85 figure, say half of your generated power is stored in the battery for later use, and try to replace, say, a 1000 Watt (1.3 hp output) generator, you need an average of 42.4 m^2 of panels in the U.S. on average, 33.2 m^2 of panels in the desert southwest U.S., and 55.7 m^2 of panels in northern Europe.
If you use the lower bound of these numbers (16% efficient panels, 0.6 battery charge/discharge efficiency), these numbers are 67.3 m^2 of panels for the U.S. average, 52.8 m^2 of panels in the desert southwest U.S., and 88.8 m^2 of panels in northern Europe. Just to replace a relatively tiny 1000W generator.
Not sure why nut-jobs focus on easily detected fusion scams when Thorium is clearly the way to bridge us from our current reliance on fossil fuels to actual REAL fusion.
LFTR technology and the Thorium fuel cycle can be done now, and can help us clean up the mess that the Uranium fuel cycle has left us with (all those 'spent' uranium fuel rods become initial fuel for a Thorium fuel cycle, and are converted in the process to perfectly safe low level radioactive elements that we know how to dispose of with ease).
Toyota had a dedicated lab in France that worked with cold fusion for two years! There are countless other groups that have done so as well.
The biggest problem is that the results are not predictable. Many groups can get excess heat from water, but not consistently. We need to know how and why it works before it can be marketed. We need to know how and why it works so it can be reproducible 100% of the time. Even if we don't really figure out how/why, if we can get the numbers up to 90% reproducible...it can be marketable. But no one can.
There is a huge missing piece that no one has figured out. Major companies and universities have invested a large amount of time and money into this. But I have a feeling this will come down to a group or individual having an eureka moment and discovering the missing part of the equation. The potential for energy is staggering. It would literally change everything.
I hate the tone of the Slashdot article because it makes this seem like a stupid/lost cause/hoax situation when it's anything form that.
Watch "Fire from Water." It's a bit sensational, but it's a decent documentary that does accurately portray the cold fusion debate.
Looked it up:
They replace an electron in a hydrogen atom/molecule - but are heavy so the resulting muonic atom/molecule is much smaller, allowing the nuclei to come within fusion distance.
H2 (D-D, D-T) molecule.
The fusion kicks the muon off and it repeats the process. [...] The problem has always been that it takes a lot of energy to make a muon and it has a tiny lifetime - long enough to do maybe four fusions before it decays.
Actually the muon lasts a couple microseconds which is a LONG time at molecular and nuclear speeds. But in addition to decaying it has maybe a 1/2% to 1% chance of sticking to the helium and getting lost until it times out. So it only catalyzes maybe 100 to 200 reactions. You need somewhat more than 300 to break even for the energy used to create it in an accelerator (maybe times a factor of about 2.5 to make up for the accelerator efficiency).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way