Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The long running Rossi E-CAT cold fusion saga may be about to collapse in a heap of lawsuits, with accusations flying, of intellectual property theft and fraudulent energy technology claims. The dispute appears to centre around the non-payment of an $89 million licensing fee, upon successful completion of a $11 million e-cat test. Industrial Heat claims E-cat does not work, and they are therefore refusing to pay any additional money.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE, N.C., April 7, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — We are aware of the lawsuit filed by Andrea Rossi and Leonardo Corporation against Industrial Heat. Industrial Heat rejects the claims in the suit. They are without merit and we are prepared to vigorously defend ourselves against this action. Industrial Heat has worked for over three years to substantiate the results claimed by Mr. Rossi from the E-Cat technology – all without success. Leonardo Corporation and Mr. Rossi also have repeatedly breached their agreements. At the conclusion of these proceedings we are confident that the claims of Mr. Rossi and Leonardo Corporation will be rejected.
Industrial Heat continues to be focused on a scientifically rigorous approach that includes thorough, robust and accurate testing of promising LENR technologies. Our goal remains to deliver clean, safe and affordable energy.
SOURCE Industrial Heat, LLC
New Energy Times, a news outlet dedicated to low energy fusion news, is scathing in its criticism of Rossi and his E-Cat.
Andrea Rossi, a convicted white-collar criminal with a string of failed energy ventures, is suing Thomas Darden, JT Vaughn, and their affiliated companies Cherokee Investment Partners LLC, Industrial Heat LLC, and IPH International B.V. for fraud. Rossi is accusing them of stealing his intellectual property.
Judging by all available facts known to New Energy Times, although Rossi and his Leonardo Corp. may have some patents and patent applications, there is no evidence that he has any working system that can produce commercially relevant amounts of excess heat based on what is contained in Rossi’s published intellectual property.
According to the complaint, Industrial Heat had paid Rossi $11 million for a license to what he calls his Energy Catalyzer, or E-Cat, an assembly of copper pipes that he says can produce 1 megawatt of commercially useful excess heat from low-energy nuclear reactions (LENRs). Attorney John Annesser, with the Silver Law Group in Islamorada, Florida, is representing Rossi. Annesser has been licensed for four years. Before that, he worked as a general contractor.
According to the license agreement, Industrial Heat was supposed to pay Rossi another $89 million after the successful completion of a one-year operating test in February 2016. Some of the accusations in the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, appear suspicious.
The full text of Rossi’s lawsuit is here (courtesy of New Energy Times).
The original Fleischmann cold fusion efforts were an attempt to produce conventional nuclear fusion reactions in an unconventional way – to use an electrically stressed platinum Palladium lattice to create the extreme compression required to ignite a nuclear fusion reaction.
There is an expected radiation signature of nuclear fusion reactions – emission of fast neutrons. Nuclear fusion production of neutrons is so prolific, that many commercial neutron generators actually use a nuclear fusion core as the source of radiation.
Although Fleischmann’s experiments were never satisfactorily replicated, Fleischmann’s original claim included detection of helium and neutron fusion products.
Rossi took his claims in a different direction. Rossi explained the lack of radiation from his E-Cat, by claiming he is harnessing new type of nuclear reaction, which uses the weak nuclear force (conventional fusion uses the strong nuclear force).
We all hope that one day nuclear fusion power plants will be possible (Nuclear fusion for other purposes, such as neutron generation, is already very possible, and has been for a long time). I am a fusion optimist – I believe the fusion power problem is on the verge of being solved.
Rossi’s exotic explanations about how his apparatus produces nuclear energy without radiation leave me cold. If I am wrong, Rossi will receive an abject personal apology, which most likely would be lost in the vast snowdrift of personal fan mail he would undoubtably receive. But at this point in time, I am very skeptical of Rossi’s claims.
Update (EW): The Fleischmann experiment used a Palladium electrode, not Platinum (h/t Steamboat McGoo)
This is for electricity which is only part of the energy picture. Takes a long extension cord for all those 18 wheelers traversing I-10, 1-40, 1-70, I-80.
It’s my understanding that the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project and others have successfully replicated the e-cat.
https://animpossibleinvention.com/2016/02/24/breaking-the-e-cat-has-been-replicated-hers-the-recipe/
It’s my understanding that the Memorial Project have successfully replicated the e-scam. What they are demonstrating is an elaborate network of paper pipes and obfuscation reactors through which money is channeled from the gullible to the mischievous and the deluded.
The x-rays are really hard to explain absent some sort of exotic LENR. More replication is needed, though.
Nope, x-rays are easy. Just need a large voltage potential with a gap – accelerate electrons across the gap, and watch what happens when they hit the positive electrode at high speed – they have to shed excess energy as high energy photons: x-rays. We used to have to add metal foil shielding to vacuum tubes inside televisions to keep the x-ray exposure rate low enough for the consumer.
Talldave2 there are no x-rays coming from Rosssi’s e-scrap. You are probably confusing x-rays with gamma “rays”. If Rossi’s junk was working at all there WOULD be gammas but there aren’t(he told Florida Bureau of Radiation Control this when questioned) and so it isn’t(there are many other things that also tell us that there are no nuclear reactions).
Rossi is a serial conman. Below is a small exerpt from a site with large amounts of material on the despicable operations of Rossi. Many people are proffiting from Rossi’s crime.
http://freeenergyscams.com/andrea-rossis-e-cat-project-began-with-intentional-false-and-misleading-statements/
I got suckered in by Rossi when he was demonstrating the dirt simple small unit at the University of Milan (IIRC) a few years ago… I was 90% there, just needed that promised demo. The claims were straightforward and he chose to demo in front of physicists… made big claims, but every simple demo was short, not steady state, and rather than actually demo the core technology (such as it was) every subsequent demo was more and more involved with more and more places to hide heat and make a precise calorimetry impossible. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
In his defense, it’s quite possible he fooled himself first and now just can’t let it go. As Barbie might say, “Calorimetry is hard!”.
No it really isn’t. When you examine the evidence it is clear that it was a knowing fr@ud right from the start. See scads of material at the links below.
http://freeenergyscams.com/andrea-rossis-e-cat-project-began-with-intentional-false-and-misleading-statements/
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://shutdownrossi.com/&gws_rd=cr&ei=G_IOV7K8MIan0ASo3qG4BA
MIt and JET energy have the NANOR.
It seems as though there rae many replication of the technology so I dont know what is up. Unless MIT is a fraud as well…
WHY COLD FUSION IS FALSE
Almost by definition, true nuclear fusion cannot proceed at low energies. Unlike uranium or plutonium Fission, Fusion is actually a specific nuclear reaction with a defined product. For example, one reaction favored for fusion is one isotope of hydrogen (deuterium, with one proton + one neutron) reacting with the nucleus of another hydrogen isotope (tritium, with one proton and two neutrons), in order to produce helium-4 and an 14.7 million electron volt neutron. Cockcroft and Walton won the Noble Prize in the late 1930s for using this reaction to produce energetic neutrons for research. This is about the lowest energy fusion-type reaction, but still requires over 100,000 volts to occur. (The temperature equivalent to 100 kv is a very high temperature.) Even this reaction between H-2 and H-3 is possible only because the quantum probability cloud about the protons extend farther from the proton than does the effective Coulomb (charge) barrier that repels the protons.
But Rossi’s E-Cat is not about cold fusion like Flieschmann claimed back in the 80’s; it’s about LENR. They are not the same.
You’ve got your figures somewhat wrong there. D-T fusion requires as little as 10-15kV of electrostatic acceleration. The main problem with electrostatic fusion is that the collision x-section is very small, thus the chances of an accelerated pair of ions colliding are too low to produce sufficient fusion events such that energy output exceeds electrical energy input. That is, unless you can devise a clever way to confine them, without losing kinetic energy, until they do eventually collide. If your confinement system bends the path of the ions though, you then have energy losses due to bremsstrahlung effects. The trick is to keep these losses under control whilst containing the fast-moving ions for long enough to produce a net energy gain.
Anyway. that’s hot fusion. LENR may work on an entirely different principle. Its mechanism is presently not fully understood, so it is pointless to assume that the rules applying to hot plasma physics must necessarily apply there.
Well the Physics Dept. I grew up in, actually had a 600 KeV Cockroft-Walton accelerator, and the used it to shoot deuterons, at a heavy ice target frozen onto a spinning Copper heat sink (for cooling). And we got plenty of 14 MeV neutrons, which were used by other researchers in polarized scattering experiments. I actually built a stilbene crystal scintillation detector to detect those neutrons, and discriminate between them and gamma rays (electrons) or alpha particles.
The proportional gas counters the other researchers were using, were insensitive to gammas, but very low efficiency for 14 MeV neutrons. My detector was 10^4 times as efficient for neutrons, but also counted the gammas.
I discriminated between the particles by simultaneously measuring the peak pulse height, as well as the pulse area, for every individual pulse. The area to pulse height ration increased with charged particle mass (electron for the gamma, knock on proton for the neutron, and alpha particle for those.
The photo-multiplier anode current pulse was integrated on a capacitor, to measure the pulse area, and an inverted smaller signal was taken from the last dynode with a fast pulse amplifier to measure the pulse height.
Analog electronics computed the ratio, and accepted only pulses with the correct ratio for neutrons.
So maybe if the D-T reaction works at 100 keV Deuteron energy, the D-D one would also work at 600 keV
G
Ian, the D-T collision may be low probability, But the D-D reaction using pure D2O (ice)for the target gives plenty of neutrons, at least for polarized neutron scattering experiments, but not necessarily for power generation.
G
There is a fusion approach using muons to replace the electrons in the reacting atoms. Because the muons are more massive than electrons, their spatial distribution has a reduced radius, allowing the nuclei to approach close enough for the strong force to push the fusion reaction. The problem, however, is that there is no practical way to regenerate the muons to sustain the reaction…but the process exists, and it is not “hot” fusion.
A cat can be either dead or alive, not some combination or partial thing.
With a lot of money to be made if “E-Cat” is alive Industrial Heat would not walk away.
They have walked away.
The cat is dead.
Beat me to it.
Industrial Heat was poised to make billions if this thing worked.
But what about Schrödinger’s cat
They opened the box.
And apparently found a dead cat, when they were expecting a live one.
I think we would all love to have the benefits of a true fusion reactor. Oil companies will of course be the villains that will be accused of “stopping” it. I wonder why that is though, wouldn’t the products we all live with on a daily basis such as plastics, not keep them financially happy?. I have wondered for a long time what it is that is stopping fusion from being advanced to the point it becomes viable. I for one hopes it happens sooner than later but scams ( as it appears this one is), will only slow down the development.
How long has the “big oil” suppression conspir@cy theory been running?
This has always been the favourite justification for marginalization and excuse for failure, from the innumerable “free energy” generator and engine run on water ho@xsters throughout probably the best part the last century.
And – now the global hockey-stick and alarm generator ho@xstards have picked up the baton and are manufacturing the same pisspoor groundless Men In Black, X-Files standard delusional tin-foilisms as an excuse for their crap statistics and the failure of their predictions.
Thank you for putting it bluntly.
and all the left objection to “big oil” financed by ……The Rockefeller Foundation?????
Of course, the gigantic flaw in any argument against oil companies is that their fuels ARE NOT USED TO PRODUCE ELECTRICITY THESES DAYS AND THEREFORE THEY ARE NOT IN COMPETITION WITH ELECTRICAL POWER SYSTEMS. Batteries, yes, but note that everybody and his brother is and has been trying to build a better battery for years, all without the slightest hindrence from the oil companies. Lithium batteries are NEARLY affordable at this point and I just read that GM’s Bolt all electric coming out next year will be able to recharge to 80% in FIVE MINUTES. If the price is right (the car will retail around $33K) that’s the ball game, gasoline lovers. Aside from battery issues, an electric car is far superior to a gas powered job in terms of cost to built, cost to maintain, cost to operate. Henry Ford’s wife always drove an electric car and if there had been a practical battery back then, no one would ever have created a gasoline powered vehicle, except perhaps for large trucks.
Electric cars are never going to be practical. It is a market for gizmo lovers.
I worked in the power industry and love making electricity. The power industry would love to take some market share. One nuke plant could replace gasoline for a million cars. Making electricity to meet demand is not a problem.
Everything arthur said is BS. How do I know I am not wrong? I am an engineer in the power industry. If the ICE was not superior for transportation, I would be driving an electric car.
This the same reason I know the E-cat does not work. If it worked, the power industry would be building them to replace boiler and nuclear reactors to supply steam to the turbine.
Good engineers understand the science behind their field of engineering. It is easy to dupe a general contractor. Modern (nuclear) physics is not something they understand.
To recharge to 80% in 5 minutes will take a HUGE current flow, somewhere on the order of 200 to 300 amps.
MarkW – April 8, 2016 at 10:09 am
To charge a 30 KWh battery to 80% in 5 minutes requires a delivery rate of 288KW. A 480 volt service would require 600 Amps. And that assumes no losses in the whole system – from the 480 volt line to the charge in the battery. Losses will drive up the amps required.
Even if the power supply were there, there is one heck of a cooling problem. LiIon charging is not efficient, and the loss is expressed as heat. Volt battery is 90%. Bolt is an evolved Volt pouch cell battery from LGChem with slightly higher energy density based on modified cathode materials licensed from Argonne. Rapid charging implies very high power density. That can be done (Saft built some for F1 hybrids) but they had less than 1/5 the Volt energy density. I suspect your 5 minute to 80% is wrong, unless the starting point is maybe half charged. No way from 10%.
I still remember claims about a 100-mpg carburetor that was sitting in the vaults of one oil company or another.
Here in 2016 we still have people being duped into believing that a gizmo that uses a cars battery to split water into O2 and H2 can increase mileage by then feeding the H2 back into the fuel mix as “free” power.
I had to talk to one of my own technicians a few years back when he was going to buy one, and he is no fool.
Just not schooled in thermodynamics and entropy and such related concepts.
That ones still floating around with some of the “chemtrails, man” types. Had one at work a few years ago and I just asked him if big oil is preventing me from plugging a laptop into my trucks EFI computer and changing it to get even better mileage than the 100 mpg carb. (I know I’d have to burn an EPROM but he didn’t) Actually might have gotten through to the one brain cell not completely marinated with THC, he seemed perplexed for a while.
All available evidence is that opposition to fusion comes from groups supporting wind and solar energy. Greenpeace for one have campaigned for fusion funding to be transferred to windturbine building.
The statistics are interesting. I have seen various estimates for the global expenditure on wind and solar, ranging from $200bn to a trillion USD a year. The cost of developing fusion would likely be only a small fraction of that amount. Once, not yearly. Yet, the expenditure on fusion research isn’t even in the same ballpark. In the UK, it’s next to nothing. That is why fusion is going nowhere fast.
Things are a lot less clear than you make them out to me. Two comments:
1) Rossi’s early response is at http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/04/08/rossi-responds-to-ih-statement/ be sure to to take it with many grains of salt, but what Rossi says is consistent with what he’s said since starting the partnership with IH.
2) http://news.newenergytimes.net/ is about as upstanding an outfit as realclimate.org is. Steve Krivit has had nothing good to say about anything related to Rossi for years, and Rossi has just about as little good to say about Krivit. Sure, Krivit may be right. RealClimate may be right too.
About the only thing that is certain at this point is that there’s a lot of popcorn to be popped.
RW, I wrote about this in The Arts of Truth. Rossi always was a scam. Original claim was cold fusion of hydrogen and nickel into copper. Supplied spent fuel for analysis. Whoops, wrong copper isotopes. Faked. Rossi switched to “LENR” when it was pointed out the absence of fast neutrons (proof, Rossi is still alive) meant there was no strong force fusion going on as he originally claimed.
LENR, on the other hand is a real lab level physics phenomenon now replicated reliably in various ways (sufficient heat to micro melt palladium and nickel, transmutations) at several labs. Even been a symposium at CERN. Based on weak force, not strong force. Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger intuited the mechanism back in 1993. Analog to sonoluminescence, which is very real. In 2007? Widom and Larsen published a paper fleshing out the details. Paper also explains why PF approach sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. depends on random microstructure wire defects. What is not known is whether it can be brought out of the lab to be anything useful. The NASA lab approach using laser induced phonons on a MEMS ‘defect’ surface is NOT scalable. Neither is the Navy approach using sputtering plus electric fields to produce dendritic ‘defects’.
Third of three examples in the Recognition chapter of Arts of Truth.
Looks like Industrial Heat paid Rossi $11 million to sue it. 🙂
Yeah, and when the counter-suing and counter-counter-suing etc is all completed – and they all check their pockets for cash, then they will discover that they became magically rich, as the money “flowed around the system”.
That is how free energy, pyramid/ponzi schemes and Keynesian economics work, isn’t it?
Yup. Plus many.
For the past several days we have been waiting for the big announcement. It was supposed to be a moment when the world changed. I am a bit disappointed, but not surprised. It was, after all, a real stretch that a system would work as claimed. Now we have the big announcement, and all we have is another lawsuit and allegations of fra*d and theft flying all around.
I agree with John F. – The E-Cat is dead, but not cold fusion. Although, given the history of this thing and the personalities involved, we may well see E-Cat re-emerge as a zombie or some other form of undead. It may well plague the lands for some time to come.
I would hate to see research into low energy fusion discontinued. Some very interesting ideas have emerged in recent years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroelectric_fusion
Au contraire mon ami. If the hypesters leave the field, involuntarily or not, that will open it up for those doing real science on a very interesting anomaly. One less over hyped project is not a loss. Letting some calmer heads do the talking like Dr. Peter Hagelstein and Dr. Mitchell Swartz instead of Rossi will do the field a world of good.
There is a massive heat spike that we can’t explain yet and maybe it will never be tapped into for a source of energy but there is much to be learned.
Well, the main reason Pons and Fleischmann’s work was discredited was that they published too soon, without having confirmation of their results. They have since been proven correct. Rossi may be a little premature in going industrial with the E-cat. From what I understand it does produce excess energy, but not continuously, and is a bit temperamental to get working. That kind of setup is of no use to industry, and therein lies the problem of going industrial too soon.
That’s part of it. The main problem was pointed out about six months after they announced their claims it was pointed out at a large physics conference in the US that their experimental setup was incapable of performing the necessary calorimetry. Instead of measuring total heat, they were only measuring hot spots.
Also remember that palladium forms one of the electromotive series. For two theorists with little experimental experience, this would have been an easy mistake to make.
” …to use an electrically stressed platinum lattice…”
That should be Palladium.
Updated, thanks.
Snake oil salesmen and charlatans have existed for all human history and prehistory, and will into the future as long as humans breathe and hope.
Our hopes and biases abett their very nature and permit their predatory existence. It is our weakness and also our greatest strength, to see beyond the obvious in hopes that just one will prevail. The movie series Matrix probed this curiosity of human existance.
Sometimes one person does find a path forward where countless others forged deadends. Much of man’s early knowledge of chemistry and metalurgy came from alchemists. They developed empirical protocols that made alloys and metals we still use today. Today we know the theory, back 400 yrs or more ago, they only “knew” fire, water, air, and earth.
But today we do know about nuclear structures, the standard model, and its proscribed forces for a nucleus and nucleons. So until we see high energy neutrons from supposed fusion events, …this is all a load of hooey.
That’s because they were observant enough to know when they had found something.
The best way to find important breakthroughs is a search for novelty. In other words, keep trying different things. The problem is that when you do stumble over a breakthrough, it will be different than you thought it would be. You have to be able to recognize what you have found. Here’s a list of accidental discoveries. The list of discoveries that have been missed is, of course, infinite.
Most people think that if they try hard enough they can reach the goal of finding some kind of breakthrough. In fact, the goal oriented approach is most likely to fail. The observant and the curious are more likely to achieve breakthroughs. Those breakthroughs won’t be what they were looking for in the first place.
We need much more focus on curiosity-driven basic research and less on mission-driven research.
So, you think John Kerry begging researchers for a huge breakthrough is not the little push that solar needed to make it into the big leagues?
I would bet against it.
Don Lancaster wrote about electronics and inventing for many years. He advised that, if people had been working on something for a long time, your chances of coming up with a groundbreaking invention were approximately zero. We have been working hard on renewable energy since the 1970s. The low hanging fruit has been picked.
My favorite renewable energy quote:
CommieBob- Exactly right. Your thoughts explain not only why we don’t have the a 200 mile range on a battery car, but also why we don’t have a cure for cancer despite spending years and millions on the “War on Cancer.” Most cancer research is funded by the National Institutes of Health which relies on peer reviewed proposals. The proposals that get accepted are for doing what everyone else is doing. So no one gets funded that is doing something “Different”. Very astute and timely observation, applicable to almost everything discussed at WUWT!
Yes, I agree with you Bob and O.E.
I suppose I should have included the /sarc tag on that one.
It is intuitively obvious to me that Kerry’s appeal is pretty much 100% guaranteed to be a waste of his breathe and our time.
old engineer – April 8, 2016 at 8:29 am
We have more than a few hints from petri dishes and animal studies that cannabis may be a cure for some (all?) cancers. So why aren’t they working that day and night? Big Pharma is a BIG contributor to “Drug Free America” and other such outfits. Without cannabis being rescheduled it is really hard to get proper research done.
All we have to go by is the petri dishes, animals, and copious anecdotes. Interesting but hardly definitive.
M Simon,
If this were true, it should take some very simple epidemiological studies to confirm.
There is no dearth of lifelong pot smokers in the world, or in the US, or in any particular place…and no shortage of cancer cases.
In fact given the large numbers of each of there things, it should be plainly obvious just by a cursory examination of cancer rates in various populations.
What is the supposed biochemical or immunologic basis of this belief?
I have a few hints from movies I have seen that sewer rat tastes like pumpkin pie, and yet people in filth ridden cities go hungry.
I was once asked to attend a presentation of a new technology to see if we should invest in it. Most of those present were salesmen, but the technology discussion came from the only technical person The invention involved improving a fuel by mixing it with water in a rather exotic way. The resulting fuel was to have a higher heating value than the original, unimproved fuel, violating the laws of physics. (Mind you, this was not improving combustion, the heat values used were all 100% combusted.) I asked a few questions and then finally asked where the extra energy came from. He said, “cold fusion.” I threw down my pen in disgust.
Menicholas. Smoking pot or inhaling any hot combustion by-product for that matter is a very bad idea. The field of CBD extract (oil) has very promising results given the limited testing. Some foreign countries like Spain have done some good research on humans. It is NOT “smoking pot” (THC).
A group of tribespeople come to the edge of the jungle and see two large cities on the horizon. One says that he’s heard it said that the people in one city can communicate with people in the other, with a kind of slim box they hold to their ear. Another retorts that his claim is pure bunk, after all a drum large enough for its sound to be heard at that distance would be so large that it would be beyond the combined strength of an entire tribe to beat the thing.
Moral: The fact that something is impossible within the framework of our current technology does not mean that it is ultimately impossible. Today we know the theory, we know that there are more than four elements, but it would be sheer hubris to assume that our puny little theory describes the entirely of the universe, and does so infallibly.
Arthur Clarke’s third law
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I had adopted a “wait and see” attitude about Rossi and his “invention”.
Some of the reported results, like the so-called “Lugano Report” (http://www.elforsk.se/Global/Omv%C3%A4rld_system/filer/LuganoReportSubmit.pdf) seemed pretty positive, and the researchers involved checked out for credentials and general credibility. Even so, the report had some markedly strange shortcomings that do not seem in character with the personages involved.
There were critiques of the report but nothing really damning. Still there was nothing really to rule out sleight-of-hand either.
And of course those were not fully independent tests. And I was not really aware of Rossi’s extensive history of subterfuge, which does put things in a more negative light.
There were also reports that the U.S. Navy and others had been experimenting with LENR involving nickel for some time. Which seemed to lend the idea some modicum of plausibility. I did not, however, give any credence to Rossi’s attempted “explanations” of how it was supposed to work, which struck me as just so much hand-waving.
Regardless: I believe in observable, empirical evidence and there seems little doubt it is lacking all around in this case, on both sides of the issue.
Obviously the burden is on Rossi to demonstrate that it works.
I do not consider lawsuits to be scientific evidence of anything at all. On the other hand, it would seem that in light of the lawsuit, if it did indeed work Rossi would be foolish not to prove it, publicly, once and for all.
While I certainly agree it doesn’t look good for Rossi, I’ll maintain a wait-and-see attitude. In my view, the only thing that even resembles real evidence to date, in ANY direction, is the Lugano Report, even though it was far from perfect and even very smart people can be fooled.
What were the observable, empirical evidences that IH saw lacking in Rossi’s ‘invention?’
I haven’t seen anything that would count, just vague legal claims. It’s all very strange, Darden seemed like a decent, though idealistic, fellow and spoke at a LENR conference last year. I wouldn’t have expected things to take a turn like this.
One thing I’m gathering is that the review of the year-long test was done by someone with close ties to Rossi and may have no details beyond energy in and heat out. After criticism of previous tests, I’m amazed that people didn’t go out of their way to get a decent team of truly independent people to do the analysis.
Doesn’t the fact that IH built the device used in the Elforsk experiment say anything to you?
The fact remains that evidence is lacking, all around. The closest thing we have to real evidence of anything is that report from Elforsk. All else is guesswork.
Rossi appears to have a well-earned bad reputation. That is not per se evidence of anything (although of course it tends to color opinion).
Lawsuits aren’t evidence. Evidence is what makes or breaks lawsuits. We’ll see.
The Lugano Report should have used a battery as its source of electricity, not a wall-outlet. That would have been more secure against fakery.
Rossi has definitely gone “all in” on this one. If he loses, then he will have to give back what remains of the IH money, including his Miami beach condos. He also risks losing his freedom and going back to the slammer for many years if he is indicted for fraud and convicted. Personally, I am rooting for IH and the authorities, basically because 8 years of bs without a single commercially viable device is just ludicrous. Lastly, his law firm (silverlaw.com) is less impressive than the Three Stooges.
One complicating detail is that any claim that Rossi’s device doesn’t work needs to take into consideration (or completely ignore) a recent claim that the E-Cat has been reproduced in a much more open setting. https://animpossibleinvention.com/2016/02/24/breaking-the-e-cat-has-been-replicated-hers-the-recipe/ says:
The home page for the MFMP is http://www.quantumheat.org/index.php/en/
This field is getting to have more players and more odd connections than climate science has….
makes it virtually impossible to say that Rossi does not have what he claims.
The doublespeak, it burns.
Rossi does not have what he claims.
See, only virtually impossible.
LOL.
You win the internet today!
Virtual means ‘not real’ doesn’t it.
A ‘virtual’ image doesn’t exist anywhere; no EM radiation passes through a ‘virtual’ image, It just looks like it is there, but it isn’t; you can’t project a virtual image on a screen.
G
For George:
Don’t get into the presumption that virtual images have no consequence. They are the things you see in mirrors. If I used a Cassegrainian reflective optic to image the output of a high-energy laser at you, you would see a virtual image of the laser source…at least for a few tenths of a second before you were snuffed out!
As for Rossi, right or wrong, he raises the implication that if we could control the rates of radioactive decay, the energy available through weak force reactions could ultimately be as plentiful as from fission. I’ve calculated the total energy available from completion of various isotope decay paths, and it arrives at a specific energy very comparable to uranium fission. It is worth contemplation.
Ric Werme, the quote: makes it virtually impossible to say that Rossi does not have what he claims
If the E-cat worked as claimed, Rossi could use his $11 million to buy a small yacht, install a “working” E-cat in it, and go around the world without refueling. He could have mounted one in a tractor-trailer and driven it back and forth across the country without refueling. Everything else except a working E-cat is available off the shelf for such demonstrations. He could have installed one (or a few) beside a Home Depot and supplied their electricity with no grid connection. He could have installed one beside any auto repair facility.
Sometimes the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. This is one of those times.
This isn’t that hard to figure out.
Exactly how does one turn a device that makes low pressure steam or one that gets hotter but hasn’t been designed for boiling water and used it to go around the world without refueling?
Besides the issue of bring along enough food, the E-Cat is unable to tame storms. Besides, Rossi isn’t interested in doing that. Why do you want him to do that? To get him out of the country and maybe lost at sea?
Ric Werme: Exactly how does one turn a device that makes low pressure steam or one that gets hotter but hasn’t been designed for boiling water and used it to go around the world without refueling?
rossi claimed at least 4 years ago that the E-cat put out excess power. Not quite like Lycoming’s original steam engine or the steam engine Dewitt Clinton put on a paddle boat, but in that league. The figure of 1.4kW is cited below. If I had a device that reliably produced 1.4kW of power, I’d buy a bunch of stuff at Home Depot, using my $11M, and attach the sucker to something that wanted that much power. But you are right: a Stirling engine powered by low pressure steam would work better on the “slow tractor trailer” than on an ocean going vessel. I apologize for the exaggeration.
1.4kW would power a bright multicolored LED light in Las Vegas. You could see it for miles and miles and miles. A series of them could power the emergency call boxes that are place along the highways between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It could power the air conditioning in one of the little diners in Baker.
Have you been to any high school science fairs? Give an award to the best use of a reliable, low cost, 1.4kW power source, and see how many designs you can come up with. With LEDs, it could light the whole auditorium. Did I mention powering the White House Christmas tree? Pumping the water for the strawberries in Ventura County CA.
It’s a shame HI lost an $11M investment, but you can see how much money can be made by selling a reliable stationary 1.4kW power source as described by Rossi in his promotional literature.
oops, it was Robert Fulton who put a steam engine in a paddle boat, not Dewitt Clinton.
there is plenty of evidence that LENR is a real effect. however, two identical experimental setups fail to produce identical results. like rolling the dice, it works when the dice turn up 7. the rest of the time, nothing. and no one knows why. so one group says it works, only to be unable to recreate their own findings the next time around.
sort of like dating women. same experimental setup, different results. no one know why.
We know why. There’s not a technology to create fusion because the energy constraints are too demanding.
Only amateurs and grant whores believe cold fusion is possible. I’m neither so I can tell the truth. Nuclear fusion, fission, etc – aren’t very complicated. They’re simply very very energetic.
Cold fusion isn’t going to be coming around next year, or in the next ten years, because people can’t do, what they’re all the time claiming they’re just about to do.
Failure to understand the equipment or operating design
How so? There were problems replicating the P&F results, but no one really knew what was going on at the time. There was another company that produced one batch of their fuel that worked well, but last I heard they had never been able to do that again.
A fellow I knew, Les Case, had a device that was quite replicable until he tried to scale it up.
The Rossi device was unique in that it was replicable and produced so much power that the exceedingly careful calorimetry P&F had to do wasn’t necessary.
Ric Werme: The Rossi device was unique in that it was replicable and produced so much power that the exceedingly careful calorimetry P&F had to do wasn’t necessary.
Yet here we are years later, and not a single installed working device. Just one or a few would be sufficient to light the MIT swimming facility, or the Caltech gyms. One or a few could power the computer lab of a small college like Harvey Mudd, or illuminate the tower at the Pomona College quad.
These fusion threads always take me back.
Sherman, set the WABAC machine to the 1970s.
There I was, a newly minted first year, first semester chemistry grad student. First course up, Inorganic Chemistry, taught by an outstanding prof. Part one was a grand slam tour of the Periodic Table. When we got to the Platinum group metals, things got real interesting. Pt and Pd are well known to soak up H2 like a sponge. They can soak up so much that the metal will actually deform. Now Pt and PD are not soft metals at all. They are hard and strong. Yet a 1 cm cube will take up so much hydrogen that it swells and the sides bulge out. The internal forces must be incredible.
Pt and Pd have been used as a catalyst for hydrogenation reactions since forever, and were well known even to undergrads. But this is different. We were cautioned to approach Pt, Pd/H2 systems with extreme caution. There is something very, very strange going on with this system. Nobody knows what is going on, nobody has even the start of a theory, nothing is reproducible. But something is going on, and it is weird. And there are reports from all over the place, going back years. So whatever it is, it is real enough. Here there be Dragons.
So we looked at fusion. How can a metal lattice force two H atoms so close, that they fuse? You would have to overcome the coulombic repulsion of the electron clouds to allow the two nuclei to approach to fusion distance. (Not to mention the repulsion between to two protons.) Nobody could think of how a metal lattice could do all that.
And this was all the way back in the mid 1970s.
Much later, we got Pons and Fleischmann with their electrochemical cell, with all the strangeness we had come to expect from a Pd/H2 system. Now we know that cold fusion is possible. The Farnsworth Fusor does that, and is used medically. So in a sense, what Pons and Fleischmann were doing, conceptually, was making a solid phase version of the gas phase Farnsworth Fusor. With luck, it might even exceed energy breakeven. But alas, it was not to be. Pons and Fleischmann got tangled up with the weirdness and Dragons that inhabit this corner of the Periodic Table.
In short, we still do not have the first clue what is going on with this system.
@TonyL April 7, 2016 at 11:15 pm, that being the case perhaps the new starting point should be Pt or Pd coated nano tubes made out of graphene?
The active surface area would be huge per unit area, plus graphene properties to boot!
@Steve Richards
I have no idea.
Current speculation is that the crystal structure arrangement of the metal atoms is what is doing the heavy lifting. Further, some thought is that when you start with fresh, pure materials, things are not quite right and do not work. After the Pd has been kicked around for a while, you get distortions and dislocations in the lattice. Some of the newly formed high energy sites have the “Goldilocks” property and that is where all the action happens. It is also thought that metallic impurities in the Pd may play a role for the exact same reason. All this is pretty mainstream for chemical catalysis stuff. Here, at least this speculation “explains” why the system does not work, and then it does.
Graphene nanotubes?
As far as I remember, thin metal films on a hetero matrix tend to be more amorphous and less crystalline. So there quite a bit different. Your chemistry is all about surface adsorbed molecules. Catalysts of Pt or Pd on a high surface area matrix are all about hydrogenation reactions and there has been a lot of work done.
So what this system would do, I could not possibly tell you.
“So whatever it is, it is real enough. Here there be Dragons.”
Funny. Really funny, considering that there never were any dragons, here, there, or anywhere else in between.
I believe this is true based on no evidence just like I believe CO2 is frying the planet based on no evidence.
Which is to say, not at all.
But I have no doubt that CO2 is really frying the planet in some people’s minds.
But that does not make it real.
When I want dragons, I switch on Game of Thrones.
The Farnswortrh Fusor is not a cold fusion device. You should have studied some physics. BTW Polywell Fusion is a magnetic version of the Farnsworth device. No one is willing to fund it. The Farnsworth device is not a net energy generator. Polywell might be.
If you want to fund Polywell – contact me – I’m not difficult to find and have extensive connections in the field.
SR1984, nanotubes are rolled up graphenes. Or, graphenes are unrolled nanotubes.
To roll, or not to roll, that is the question.
Btw, if you read up on the three chiralities of single wall carbon nanotubes you will also learn they can roll up in 3 ways, only one of whichmis ‘metallic’ conducting. Really.
This is why we should not be dismissive of cold fusion or LENR. This weird stuff has been observed going back to the 1920’s. There is something going on there and it is unknown physics.
Rarely are experimental setups identical. Outside of my freshman chemistry class I was rarely called upon to catalog the apparatus in any experimental setting upwards of sophomore year. When was the last time you read any paper that detailed the actual physical devices and went over the experimental procedure in sufficient detail that anyone with a decent high school education could follow the directions and get the same results? I’m going to guess “never”, and that’s just an estimate. And if you queried the “investigators” it’s likely they don’t have a clue either. It’s TA’s, post-docs, and work-study students that do all the heavy lifting.
I browsed the links Ric Werme posted above.
Seems Industrial Heat is a penny-ante operation as well. A couple of companies, a holding company all sharing the same phone number. A company which exists as nothing more than a filing of incorporation in the state of Delaware. A classic example of the legal Curly Shuffle, generally used to evade responsibility in the event of fully foreseen legal/criminal problems.
I am *not* impressed.
On the other hand:
If what Rossi says is even remotely true, He must have gained valuable experience advancing the dependability and reliability of the E-Cat. He should be able to demonstrate a working E-Cat to one and all, in a totally convincing fashion, a power production run lasting hours or days, not months or years. Turn it on, it works. Simple, easy to understand. Then he gets to name his own price, and to the industry majors. No more penny-ante operators.
I am still *not* impressed.
I was rather disappointed when Rossi’s partner turned out to be more of a holding company than an outfit that could crank out millions of devices for countries that don’t get bent out of shape over nuclear energy.
I’m sure companies like General Electric and Siemens are putting a lot more resources into LENR projects than IH could, even if their results are negative so far. They’re also a lot better than IH and Rossi at keeping their mouths closed.
“Startup” might (or might not) be a better description of Industrial Heat. One of my businesses, for convenience the registered office was the accountant’s address, on advice from the accountant. That way all the boring tax correspondence went straight to the person I paid to deal with it.
Rossi’s “ECAT” is the nuclear industry equivalent of the “KiteGen” in the realm of renewables. The only energy produced by these scammers is the hot air of their press releases.
By the end of 2016 .
Mr Worrell.
I look forward to reading your abject personal apology.
Will it be posted here?
If I am wrong about Rossi’s E-Cat, I will send Rossi a letter with my apology, and with Anthony’s permission post a copy here. Having said, I shall need to see some pretty compelling evidence, to convince me of what I believe to be an extraordinary claim, about “weak nuclear force” reactions.
What sort of evidence would I accept?
If say at least a dozen major cities build their own gigawatt scale E-Cats, and report good ongoing results, I will take that as compelling evidence I that was wrong.
And that is exactly the sort of evidence I believe we should see, if Rossi has what he claims he has – he should be in a position to mount demonstration after demonstration – e-cat powered “round the world” flights, which keep flying for months without a stop, e-cat powered ships, e-cat powered cars, e-cat powered toys – there should be no stopping the flood of high quality evidence.
With respect, I think that’s just a bit over the top.
The idea that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is fine for investors, but not scientists.
It requires just as much evidence as any other claim. No more, no less.
I see no reason many Gigawatt installations would be necessary to prove the device works. A device that produced 100 Watts of excess energy over a sustained period — with adequate verification — would do just fine.
The Elforsk experiment claimed over a Megawatt-hour of excess over a period of 30 days.
The problem we’ve had, obviously, is verification. That experiment was not adequately overseen, it wasn’t open enough, and there were gaps in the methodology.
So of course that still leaves us without sufficient evidence to say it works. But the same sort of experiment, properly devised, conducted openly by competent researchers of good repute, and then replicated in the same manner, would be adequate evidence for me.
Rossi’s explanation for the lack of radiation is an extraordinary claim.
@ Anne O
I am with you about over the top needs, and I ran the numbers. 1 Mwh over 30 days is 1.4 Kw sustained.
That is your Mr Fusion coffee maker right there. And that is your extraordinary proof.
Now I know the need to protect yourself. You do not need to tell people how it works, and you do not need to let people look in the reaction chamber, and you do not need to tell people how you built it.
What you do need to do is produce more power than can be generated by any chemical process for something of that size and weight.
The principles have an extraordinary device which does extraordinary things.
The principles choose not to demonstrate it where people can actually get a look at it. This is the only extraordinary thing about this whole affair.
The principles have an extraordinary device. Or Not.
All you have written and more I look forward too.
Though a device that would give me 100watts 24/7-365.
With COP of 50.
Would serve as proof for me.
Tony L: I am with you about over the top needs, and I ran the numbers. 1 Mwh over 30 days is 1.4 Kw sustained.
That is your Mr Fusion coffee maker right there. And that is your extraordinary proof.
The tractor-trailer and yacht I referred to would be moving kind of slow, but that would be more than has been shown so far. In the years that I have been reading about Rossi, he hasn’t powered so much as a Christmas tree or television. Everything that exists on Earth that could benefit from 1.4 Kw sustained power he has avoided.
How about the US federal government investing several billion dollars of taxpayer money in a company to develop the E-Cat — perhaps with Al Gore as CEO? That would make it legit, right? Stay tuned …
I am glad you at least covered this story. It is certainly strange that Woodward and IH stated they did due diligence in advancing money to Rossi. And they made such decisions ONLY AFTER having tested the ecat to their satisfaction.
I mean if tomorrow some company announces that global warming is real, then you post here and accept that as face value? That is quite much what you doing with this press release from IH.
I should also point out that the ERV gave monthly reports – that means:
Rossi tracked the power output on a daily basis
The Chemical Company tracked the power output for their purposes. It is quite hard to steal 1 million watts of power on a daily basis without them knowing – the ecat was inside the chemical plant.
The ERV tracked the power output.
So 3 parties tracked power inputs and outputs. And IH/Darden received a monthly report from the ERV.
For IH state they don’t have any validation of power and LENR is outright silly. They had reports for 12 months in a row.
I suppose it possible that the chemical company, and Rossi and the ERV all are in this scam, but that’s really stretching things. I mean, hiding 1 million watts of power consuming is not at all that easy.
And you have to ask why IH was taking out patients then?
As noted, many LENR replications have occurred since 1989 and P & F days. And most of the reasons as to why replications are difficult are known today (insufficient loading of H into the metal is #1 reason for past failures).
SRI has tested LENR devices from Beryllium and again they work – and run without radiation. So now SRI is fooling us too?
In a really great way, the science community selling us out on global warming is quite much the same for LENR. And if LENR is real, then the global warming movement is DEAD in the water.
I will however state that Rossi should provide a demo unit to some independent news organization. It really is that simple, and this remains a sticking point. However, just like the wright brothers, they often heisted to show their airplane to prospective buyers due to Wrights being over worried that such people were only interested to steal and copy their designs.
The story of the ecat is not yet dead. But Rossi simply has to deliver working units to end this controversy.
Regards,
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
…people are actually defending Rossi?
In a world smitten with climate obsession, anything is possible.
Mr Rossi actually has enough money to set up his own energy production facility – and the energy going into, and out of, the building could be measured. The fact that he chooses NOT to do so, Twobob, speaks volumes.
Rossi has very little money, that’s one thing that forced him into partnering with IH in the first place.
Before that (he says) he mortgaged his home to continue development, before that he made a 1 MW hot water system and sold that to a mystery purchaser who turned out to be the US military. It’s unclear if it was ever delivered, I suspect it was a bit of a deal to legitimize the Navy into giving him some of their research funds without having to get approval from some oversight committee.
I beg to differ. He has been paid $11 million by Industrial Heat alone, never mind what the US military has also paid him. He is a VERY rich man. $11 million will buy you an adequate energy production building in which to showcase a provable unit.
$11 million is not enough to start a new industry like this or build factory to produce a million units per year (a woefully small number for something that is supposed to change the world).
However, I take back my comment about his finances. In http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/04/08/rossi-says-brake-now-removed-production-will-be-accelerated/ there is this exchange:
April 8, 2016 at 6:24 AM
Dr Rossi, questions on ECW:
1) Is this legal case going to affect the production of E-Cat X or Quarks or whatever they are called?
AR: NO
2) Is the production and appearance on market delayed? By how much?
AR: it will be accelerated, because they were a brake
3) Does Rossi need new investors and money to get the production started?
AR: no
4) What obstacles other than remaining R&D are there now to get production and sales started?
AR: none, apart, limited to the domestic E-Cats, the safety certification
Ric Werme: $11 million is not enough to start a new industry like this or build factory to produce a million units per year
That would enough to start and earn a substantial profit, if the E-cat worked as promoted. Apple didn’t start by producing a million units per year, nor did Adidas. If he could make one per month he’d have more impact than what he has now.
I am glad to read that he has no impediments to manufacture, and that he is planning to ramp up production. How many has he built so far, 2? 4? I lost count. What became of that venture with the Greek electric company?
Rossi sued first for lack of payment and for IH seeking patents on e-Cat tech in various countries and via other companies IH made. Now IH has a counter suit. Neither one is proof of anything.
There was an independent evaluation of the one year test done by a PhD physics accepted to both parties (per their contract that is now published). We will know how the test went when the report is published and / or the customer is identified and talks, not before.
From what I’ve seen, it could simply be IH trying to void the Rossi contract, patent something closely based on his work, and save a $ billion of royalty payments. I’ve seen no evidence either side is pure and morally pristine.
So IMHO, we are still where we were before. NO clear evidence either way per the e-Cat, waiting for independant proof.
FWIW, I strongly doubt Darden would hand over the $10, 000, 000 after the initial $1, 500, 000 without the e-Cat having passed a basic “makes obvious heat” sniff test. The contract specifies how much excess is the target (over 6 with a reduced payment if nbetween 4 and 6 COP) so IH saying it didn’t work can just be a claim of under 6. But that is speculation.
The US Navy, via NAVSEA, claims to have made LENR work and has patents. Them I trust to have proven the tech works, though performance data is lacking.
“Cold Fusion” is just that: stone cold.
Darn filter is annoying, the word Bogus got me in there?
There is an old Yorkshire saying: ” You can’t get owt from nowt.” I am sure Einstein would have agreed.
You can’t get owt FER nowt . When where you last in Yorkshire? 😉
You can’t get out for now! No, I’ve never been
If IH have, as Rossi claims, appropriated his technology and passed it on to others, then perhaps it serves him right for claiming to have a world-saving technology but refusing to share with anyone, or cooperate with any bodies that could provide an acceptable report on whether it’s real.
On the other hand, if Rossi is a scam artist, then so are IH as they’ve conned other investors with ‘demos’ of the reactors.
This is an interesting read on the whole situtaion:
http://www.sifferkoll.se/sifferkoll/lenr-energy-blackswan-revolution-is-a-fact-ecat-at-cop-50-for-350-days/
That’s very interesting, it has information, claims and analysis that I am not at all familiar with. Thanks.
Phil: This is an interesting read on the whole situtaion:
Thank you for the link.
Phil, according to this link, a 1MW Ecat fits inside a standard shipping container. It looks from the diagram as though 2 1MW units could be put into a single shipping container.
http://ecat.com/ecat-products/ecat-1-mw
If that is correct, it could power a yacht or a tractor-trailer. If Rossi ramps up production, we ought soon to be seeing them all over the place.
Phil, from the link: Fabio Penon was the ERV responsible for certifying the IH Validations test in April 30th to May 3rd 2013. These tests consisted of two 24 hr tests with 30 E-Cats (1MW) and a 15 hr Hot-Cat test. All tests were obviously successfull achieving COP>6 since $10M was paid to Rossi. At the time of payment all E-Cat IP was delivered to IH.
…
The only sensible conclusion is that Darden only intended to get the plant for “personal” research and reverse engineering, and did not intend to test it according to the license agreement.
So, was “all E-Cat IP” delivered to IH or not?
Did anyone really believe this …even for a few moments?
Apparently so.
Color me skeptical in the extreme, and shocked at some of the credulity expressed above.
Turn on a TV camera, turn on the machine, make some water boil, or some other way of clearly demonstrate energy being produced.
“I can make rocks burn, but only in my garage while no one is looking” does not hold much water, IMO.
Sometimes works, and sometimes does not?
Funny how the times it does not work are all the times anyone is watching, and the cameras are running.
“Here be dragons?”
Bullshit…here be malarkey.
Until someone proves it aint.
I have seen zero proof. An article is not proof.
True. E.M. Smith has some good articles however…
“The US Navy, via NAVSEA, claims to have made LENR work and has patents. Them I trust to have proven the tech works, though performance data is lacking.”
See. https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/lanr-laves-metals-fusion/
and here https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/03/17/lenr-lanr-cold-fusion-you-can-trust/
Menicholas, you are going on a rip.
“Here be dragons?”
Standard grad student warning for any chemical system that was not well understood or just too damn hard to work with.
“TonyL – Whatever you do and wherever life takes you, remember. Stay Away From Colloid Chemistry. Colloids will never behave, they will make you mad” – a colloid chemist
“Bullshit…here be malarkey.”
Maybe. If anybody made any claim about anything.
The truth is nobody made any claim about anything back then. Just an observation that some people had seen weird things. Nobody was claiming fusion, nobody was claiming chemistry, nobody was claiming anything else.
Nothing to say Bullshit to.
Relax.
You seem a bit stressed, perhaps you need a vacation?
BTW, Rossi unfortunately has a poor character reputation, likely deserved, yet there are several others of better character reference and reputation, including MIT, operating in the field.
Here be Petrol Dragons…
Yeah Tony, that’s it. I am stressed and need a vacation.
Because your colorful observations as a first year grad student must not be contradicted, and your supposed status as a chemist by training makes whatever you say true, right?
“And there are reports from all over the place, going back years. So whatever it is, it is real enough.”
If this is your standard for determining what is and is not real, you are way to credulous.
Being trained in the sciences and thinking like a scientist are two different things.
BTW, as of today I am on vacation!
https://youtu.be/opk4x7jzRS4?t=3s
David A, thank you for the links to chiefio.
I am rooting for the teams, but to date what they have published is indistinguishable from random variation.
I’m sorry. If no-one knows how and why it works then it is just crap. Nuclear, fossil fuel, wind, PV, everyone knows how it works to the 6th decimal place. His crap is just a pig in a poke at the moment.
Like my wife’s grandmother told her after she drew something for her ‘come back when you have coloured it in , dear’.
We didn’t elucidate how aspirin worked until prostaglandins were discovered so people could discover aspirin binds to them. That was in the 1970s, so apparently people used that crap for a century or more before then.
There was actually a running joke in the 1990s that if aspirin (essentially a willow bark extract) had been discovered recently, it would never have gotten FDA approval, because we still didn’t know the details of how it worked.
Probably not true, Tall Dave. Most drugs work by mechanisms that are not very well understood.
Take every single SSRI, or any other psyche drugs, as examples.
It is known that SSRIs inhibit reabsorption of serotonin into the synaptic vesicles, but how this alleviates depression, or how and why this stimulates new synaptic connections between neurons, is very much a mystery. As is why they work for some people but not others.
For nearly any drug one can name, there are some mechanisms known but incomplete understanding of how the these mechanisms give the desired results, and why they do not in the cases where they do not work. And almost no drugs work for everyone who takes them.
I’m also sorry, but you are wrong. An observation does not need an explanation of WHY it is so to be an accurate observation. Mendel’s observations on genetics were true for many decades by our understanding of DNA allowed us to explain why they were true. For many years, master chefs made soufflés in copper bowls, because they said they rose better. Chemists of said it was nonsense, there is no way the composition of the bowl would matter – until a complex catalytic reaction between the copper and the egg albumin was discovered. A well observed fact does not need you or anyone to understand to be a fact. That’s how science works, find an observation that doesn’t have an explanation, devise an explanation (hypothesis) and then test it. But the observation is real, even if we don’t have a working hypothesis. So is there observable excess heat? If so then something is going on, and needs to be explored so we can understand it and use it. If not, then, “nothing going on here folks, move along”. I suspect the latter, but don’t have enough information for a good informed opinion.
I was going to say something similar.
While I do know why the sky appears to be blue, I don’t need to know that in order to observe that it is blue.
The Curies did not need to know how rocks clouded their film, in order to observe that indeed they did. In their case a theory was forthcoming presently but that has not always been the case.
I am amused by people who make claims to the tune of “it cannot be true because I do not understand it.”
You all know what I meant but decided to be obtuse about it by referring to medicine and the Curies.
So it’s a willful blindness, is it Alex?
Now as for me, I’ll doubt Rossi because he doesn’t seem to be trying to hard to actually prove he has what he claims. Not because what he claims seems unlikely. And I don’t expect him to ‘Fly around the world’ with what from all the reports sounds like a self heating water heater. All I expect from him is to produces more hot water then then you’d normally get from a wall outlet.
That shouldn’t be that hard to prove. ^¿^
OT
Amazing story of entrenched scientific orthodoxy. Could be rewritten almost line for line about climatology:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin
Ever look into how and why people came to believe salt causes or exacerbates high blood pressure?
There was never any studies done at the outset of this myth…it was all propagated by one person asserting it, and gradually everyone else came to accept it as “common knowledge”.
And even after exhaustive epidemiological studies proved beyond all doubt that salt does not cause HBP in 99% of people, several medical associations acknowledged this fact, but then promptly reiterated their position that everyone should avoid salt. In fact the studies showed an association between low salt diets and higher than normal blood pressure.
Once an idea becomes lodged in peoples pigheaded heads, it is difficult to dislodge.
Right mission, wrong players. Squabbling in any field or endeavor is exhausting and diversionary. The next effort should be designed upfront for accountability, transparency, and replicability…then proceed.
I’m surprised so many posters here at WUWT are dropping their sceptical attitude (the positive, enquiring scepticism, the Feynman kind) when it comes to subjects other than global warming. Rossi and his kind, they come in all shades from the the fraudster to the overeager researcher, have been making promises since the Fleishcman and Pons claims in 1989.
“Real labs” – like at major universities, research institutes and major corporations have failed to replicate energy release or anything nuclear. In well designed experiments watched over by a multidisiplinary staff they just don’t find anything that require fusion to happen and they never detect the tell tale high energy radiation.
For a lab set up to work with radiation this is easy to measure and categorize and would reveal the underlying process. Please don’t invest in anyone before they provide this kind of data.
Ask yourself:
If E-Cat is working why is Rossi not lisensing it to the likes of GE, Siemens, Kawasaki and Hyondai since his presentation in 20111?
With the patent process stalled outside Italy, why haven’t they able to documented it works to the satisfaction of the EU and US patent offices?
Many a good sceptic has looked into this and taken the time to explain what fails to come together in Cold Fusion in general and E-cat in particular. In the best tradition of the educationg scientis (think Judith Curry or Roy Spencer) they write things like
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-e-cat-cold-fusion-or-scientific-fraud-624f15676f96#.f7ykxitx3
Before you brand me a nattering nabob of negativism, please check out google, wikipedia or arxive.org for articles on Cold Fusion / E-Cat for relevant concerns from scientists that has looked into the matter and taken the effort to report their issues. They have no commercial gains from this but do it in the name of science because they see people can be misled by what is at best wishful thinking but possibly also a scam.
There is a difference between skepticism, and denial absent evidence.
Rossi’s behavior is not unique. The classic example has been the Wright Brothers, who wanted to profit from their invention and so did not display it to the public; they wanted to sell it to the highest bidder.
As a result, they gave very private, closed demonstrations. For years, the editors of Scientific American did not believe the Wrights had achieved what they claimed, for precisely the same reasons you give here.
I am not “credulous”. I am skeptical. I am content to wait for real evidence before making pronouncements.
The Modus Operandi of E- Cat was suspicious-sell first, research later. It had a fishy smell to me. Sounded too good to be true…….Still ,Rossi had plenty of limelight for these years. Been following it for several years-always seemed too good to be true.
We need a WUWT museum of fabulism. Items to be included-a hockey stick, suitably mounted up a backside of said inventor. Next exhibit-an original IPCC report that has not been used as toilet paper. Bathrooms of said museum will have IPCC report printed toilet paper, complete with UN logo. Do note, among the dishes served at the cafeteria- hotdogs with chilli and prune relish. Rusting burned (from catching fire) and rusted wind turbines complete with mangled eagles. A little library of books churned out by Mr Flannery for some “inspiration” at the bathroom if the hotdogs not one’s style.
It is funny to see people disbelieve climate science and fall for ecat scams on the same page.
Steve,
Ecat scat seems to be quite popular. I’m not eating it. I’m not buying it either.
Mr. Mosher…I think few disbelieve climate science, just like few disbelieve climate change.
It is “climate science” they are skeptical of.
Climate liar “climate science” most particularly.
Hell, I studied climatology for a few years in college.
I drink up real science as a salve for my soul.
Steven Mosher: people disbelieve climate science
Who disbelieves climate science?
Except several groups verified an effect before he ever sold it. For there to be nothing here a range of groups from several nations were all in on the scam, before he ever attempted to sell it for a paltry amount. Where mosher is surprised people think there might be something here Im rather surprised after reading the comments that most of the third party groups who tested this are not being referenced. If this is a complete scam it is a rather strange one when you go over the groups who verified an effect.
This seems like the last place in the world anyone should believe anything is true just because some other person said it is so.
We all know people will say and do anything…any…thing…if the price is right.
If I find out most other climate skeptics believe this stuff is true but just needs to right person to make it work…well…
Here is a far easier way of making money
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35994279
“Tata Steel made hundreds of millions of pounds selling carbon emissions permits given for free under a European Union emissions trading scheme, experts say.”
No need for cold fusion just play the green energy game.
We shouldnt forget the post from Anthony Watts back in 2011 regarding Rossi
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/27/andrea-rossi-and-the-magic-coffee-pot-reactor/
Personally, I think that’s one of Anthony’s more forgettable posts. 🙂
Ric Werme, What has been the progress in the last 4 !/2 years? One steam table running 24/7/365 at a single Denny’s would be more than what has been demonstrated. How about powering the traffic lights at a busy intersection in Los Angeles, Singapore or Beijing? How about for pumping water in the Imperial Valley or Torrey Pines Golf Course?
Per Rossi-related stuff the major progress has been:
Developing the Hot-Cat, something that runs hot enough to be able to produce high pressure steam. (The original E-Cat was limited to boiling water and similar process heat applications.) This is what ran in the month long test at Lugano.
Developing the “E-Cat-X” that can produce electricity directly. Rossi has said very little about this, but has said something about a test unit going to a potential customer in the UK.
Getting a better handle on controlling the devices, and getting them to run without external power.
Avoiding external demands to produce scientific papers to make the science establishment happy, or dealing with requests for traffic lights when there is a huge amount of R&D work to do. I find it odd you’re focused on public displays. You have a lot to learn about why most corporations keep new products secret until a few months before they’re released. (Rossi has a lot to learn in that area too.)
Non-Rossi stuff includes a greatly increased interest in the field, both among people interested in reproducing the E-Cat and among people interested in doing things differently. I’ve lost track of everything that’s going on.
Ric Werme: Developing the Hot-Cat, something that runs hot enough to be able to produce high pressure steam. (The original E-Cat was limited to boiling water and similar process heat applications.) This is what ran in the month long test at Lugano.
Developing the “E-Cat-X” that can produce electricity directly. Rossi has said very little about this, but has said something about a test unit going to a potential customer in the UK.
So it could power a yacht on a round-the-world voyage, should Rossi or someone choose to do so?
“something about a test unit going to a potential customer in the UK”? If he’d give me the unit on consignment, I’d test it for him. I’m a statistician enrolled at ResearchGate, and my published papers get downloaded and read from time to time. I’m small fry, but Rossi seems to have had trouble getting reliable partners. He could trust me not to halt the test when it became “boring” (that’s from a Rossi quote about an earlier test); showing that a device is working is never boring.
I do a binge read of Rossi-related stuff about every other year. I’ll be on the look-out for working installations of those devices. Think of all the school and municipal swimming pools on the look-out for cheap, reliable heating. And the strip malls, fitness centers, and homeowners associations that could use cheap, reliable electricity.
Ric Werme: I find it odd you’re focused on public displays. You have a lot to learn about why most corporations keep new products secret until a few months before they’re released. (Rossi has a lot to learn in that area too.)
that is based on his past pronouncements of imminent production and descriptions of how the units work, and descriptions of the tests that the units have passed. Reliable delivery of manufactured products has generally been about 2 – 3 quarters in the future. According to a quote above, Rossi is accelerating production now. According to his descriptions and accounts of his devices, he does not need to license the technology to produce whole units. He could buy the components and have them delivered to an assembly plant, and like the Japanese auto manufacturers, he could have multiple vendors for the parts. Only his fuel system is secret, and he could produce (as he claims to have already) sufficient fuel for at least a few manufactured units per week.
We can address a lot of these topics again when next I binge read in response to something here. If I am wrong, you and others will be rich from backing Rossi, and you can gloat over me.
This type of nuclear fusion does happen in the universe.
It occurs in the biggest supernova events for just a few minutes duration as the universe’s very largest stars end their lives. Not everyday supernovas, only the very largest ones.
Could it happen in a cold reaction chamber. Maybe? It you want to get rich, just prove that you can do it. You would be rich regardless of patents and everything else. Very simple demonstration that should be easy to set-up and you are a world hero.
That was always missing in this picture. We are only left with “maybe” when a simple demonstration was all that was required.
+ a whole big bunch
Perhaps to prevent world changing inventions from being held up by greed and the desire to corner a market, or fear of having them stolen by others who are faster to market, or better situated to take advantage of said developments , perhaps if there was some big automatic prize for the first person to demonstrate a technology that could lift the bulk of the world out of energy poverty (or whatever metric could be chosen for such breakthroughs), then we could all be spared the charlatans and hasten utopia on earth.
The sad case of Nikola Tesla comes to mind, who is almost surely the man most responsible for the electrical energy that powers so much of our lives, and yet whom died in poverty.
Lets assume the physics did work. There is still a huge step to an energy producer. One must convert the heat and protect against the neutrons. Highly nontrivial. Especially if you want it to be economical.
One of Rossi’s claims is no radiation from his ECat.
There is no known aneutronic fusion process that involves protons (hydrogen) + nickel into copper that does not involve the production of gamma photons.
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/05/the-nuclear-physics-of-why-we/
Production of such gamma photons would be strong evidence that the e-CAT is doing what Rossi claims.
Yet the results of the obvious experiment have never been presented
Rossi and his e-CAT were a fraud, to sucker the scientifically illiterate, from the start and continue to be so.
Rossi is a “con man”. Pons and Flieschmann were (Flieschamann has passed on) not con men.
The Electric Power Research Institute, through SRI Int. duplicated P&F’s claims, carefully and in detail. All availible on their webside. No really “good theory”. But also, no way to scale.
The paper is on the SRI International site, not the EPRI site.
You can read it, if you are not up to speed with your electrochemistry, it will make your head hurt.
Short story. They are doing calorimetry. Typical is 80 ma in to the cell, heat out equal to ~100 ma. So they see excess heat. They prepare the electrodes, get `60% of them show some effect. They compare the electrode grain/crystal structure to observed activity.
Is that millamps?
That is not a unit of heat, or even energy, or even power.
What is the voltage?
5 milliamps is how much current my brains sends to my wrist and finger muscles to type this.
E-cat is a scam. There are myriad ways by which the so-called videos could/would have been faked.
As for other forms of fusion – the reason it continues to be 50 years away, and why this gap has yet to close, is that the containment systems are fundamentally unstable. Many creative ways have been thought up, but so far that I have seen – none actually fix the problem of localized magnetic eddies causing instability which in turn causes unpredictable leakage – i.e. a constantly high possibility of localized environmental damage leading to catastrophic failure of containment.
The process of fusion in the sun doesn’t have to worry about this because containment isn’t an issue.
Cold fusion attempts to get around this via some arcane, chemistry like function, but yet again the problem is that even *if* fusion is occurring, it occurs as a quantum randomness function – i.e. unpredictable – which again is fundamentally unsolvable.
Now for the sanity check part of this comment:
Thus cold fusion theory isn’t a well understood quantum function like in Flash memory/Fowler Nordheim, but a very poorly understood and documented function more like Casimir radiation.
I’d also note that Fowler-Nordheim is not actually well understood in the physics sense, but is well understood in the engineering sense. There aren’t good physics-based explanations why Fowler-Nordheim tunneling is so predictable in a flash memory cell but not in pretty much all other situations other than the validation that electrons are indeed wave-particles rather than particles.
Cold fusion, on the other hand, is neither well understood in a physics sense NOR in the engineering sense. Pun intended.
It is very well understood in the *wink and a nudge* sense.
Polywell Fusion has an answer for the instabilities (oscillating beams). Can it produce net energy? It has never been scaled up enough to give a yes/no.
Polywell architecture is another example of a nice sounding idea. However, it still uses magnetic fields. As I note above, there are fundamental problem with magnetic fields.
There are also likely problems with wave-particles. Even should the target hydrogen, helium, deuterium atoms be controlled, the containment has to control all of the other particles that can result.
Thus far, it hasn’t been done – at least with any system that actually produces net power.
Maybe they will sell it to the Chinese like like Hillary did with A-123.
Sale of Michigan company to China may haunt Clinton
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/06/05/clinton-sale-michigan-china-gop/28525387/
WASHINGTON – National Republican Party officials are questioning why Hillary Rodham Clinton did not intervene in the controversial 2013 sale of high-tech battery plants in Michigan to a Chinese firm when she was secretary of State and could have done so.
At a campaign stop in New Hampshire last month, Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate for president, expressed concerns about the sale of A123 Systems — built with millions in government aid — along with those of other new energy firms, to Chinese investors, calling them “unfortunate” and a “serious” problem for high-tech industries in the U.S.
“That does concern me because a lot of foreign companies, particularly Chinese companies … are looking to buy American companies,” she said in response to an entrepreneur who mentioned A123’s sale while commenting that venture capital for new energy technology has largely fled overseas.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, in a statement to the Free Press, called Clinton’s remarks “lip service” considering that as the former secretary of state, her department had a “role in signing off on these sales,” including A123’s to Wanxiang in early 2013.
——
http://dailybail.com/home/links-chinas-wanxiang-wins-us-taxpayer-funded-a123.html
Secretary of State Clinton Announces 100,000 Strong Foundation
http://100kstrong.org/2013/01/24/secretary-of-state-clinton-announces-new-foundation/
Wanxiang, the University of Chicago, and the Paulson Institute Sign New 100,000 Strong Initiative Agreement
http://100kstrong.org/2016/01/26/wanxiang-paulson-institute-and-university-of-chicago-sign-new-100000-strong-initiative-agreement/
Read the article and the current comments–still don’t know what is going on with Rossi. I do not see how it could work and not produce neutrons–wouldn’t it require rare helium isotopes?
Cold fusion is, and always was, a crock.
Read Gary Taubes’ “Bad Science” for the story of incompetence, wishful thinking and hysteria surrounding the original cold fusion debacle.
There is SOMETHING moving around under Rossi’s cloak. It walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck. Rossi says it’s a swan. For years and years people have been paying Rossi to remove the cloak. For years and years, Rossi has taken the money and failed to remove the cloak, always with the excuse that the swan will fly into the hands of others. I find it incomprehensible that the man can still get up a crowd.
LENR explained:
https://youtu.be/lfrJzkpzCyg
This is the side of con-artists many don’t realize: They don’t care if they are outed as cons. They *want* *your* *money*. We see this demonstrated by the climate crisis hustlers, UFO pushers, etc. daily. Rossi is just being very blatant about it.
The only thing that Rossi has succeed in doing to-date is separating suckers, er, credulous investors from their money
The physics of proton + nickel aneutronic fusion:
scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/05/the-nuclear-physics-of-why-we/
Ra-ro (as Scooby would say).
The LENR effect has been demonstrated by MFMP in open experiment, Navy SPAWAR, NASA, and other independent sources. A few references:
http://www.quantumheat.org/index.php/en/
https://youtu.be/VymhJCcNBBc
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/sensors/PhySen/docs/IPAG12_Presentation.pdf
http://www.elforsk.se/Global/Omvärld_system/filer/LuganoReportSubmit.pdf
http://etiam.fi/files/Report_part5.pdf
Perhaps the physics of LENR has been explained by the Swedish Institute of Space Physics.
papers – Institutet for rymdfysik
The real issue is whether or not the 350 day test sponsored by Rossi and Industrial Heat that was reported to have been monitored by an independent evaluator approved by Rossi and IH, actually produced heat with a COP>6. There is a law suit involved, the report is not available.
Since Rossi and IH have been working closely together since 2012 and IH [not Rossi] was responsible for the E-CAT LENR experiment in Sweden with the resulting Lugano report , why did it take this long for IH to say “it doesn’t work”?
Considering there is a law suit disputing $89M, that IH sold E-CAT to the Chinese government, and IH convinced a big UK investment firm to invest $50M or so; if there is any truth to be found on the internet, it is buried in B.S. and guarded by lawyers.
There is simply far too much money at stake to expect the truth to come out except perhaps in the trial. I’m willing to wait to see if the real facts come out in the trial.
Well since I’m a big fan of “ideation” I suppose that IH could be one of those secret and abusive Gov. “front companies” that is attempting to suppress what would be a technology very upsetting to the established order (and it wouldn’t be the first time).
The simple test: Does energy out, exceed energy in? Get rid of the smoke and mirrors and the flubdubbing and gobbledygook, and answer that question directly. It usually works every time. None of these inventions/ devices, demonstrate the existence of surplus energy.
If I’ve learned one thing watching Rossi, it’s that no public demonstration will ever convince anyone. There is always some trick that could explain the measurements of excess power.
talldave2: If I’ve learned one thing watching Rossi, it’s that no public demonstration will ever convince anyone.
Rossi has never conducted a demonstration long enough to show that excess power was produced. If he could produce excess power, he could have been selling it for years.
In 2009 60 minutes asked the American Physics Association to find them an independent scientist skeptical of LENR.
He went off to a lab in Israel, and came back convinced. As noted, many papers show excess heat.
Here is the 60 minutes video:
I think much evidence exists to support LENR. The issue of Rossi is separate from LENR being real or not. All Rossi has to do is deliver a product.
Regards,
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
I think the lack of neutrons is a problem only if one accepts the name “cold fusion” with the stress on fusion. Looking at documented transmutation products example Ni -> Cu but probably several transmutation steps in Ni before producing stable Cu it looks much more probable that what we see is a series of transmutation reactions not “fusion”. Of course D is consumed but the expected fusion “ash” isn’t produced (He and neutrons).
What is the problem? If fusion products aren’t found it probably isn’t fusion. If transmutation products are found (wrong isotope ratios) then it probably is transmutation.
Sigh.
On another note, if one cares to look, AMOCO, and Shell both had successful CF experiments in the ’90s. Los Alamos as well, in fact one of the leading lights of this area of research is a retired LANL physicist.
People are using metallized carbon nano-tubes successfully, as well as dual lasers with a beat frequency in the Terahertz range to stimulate reactions. The probable reaction chains are being studied, and some of them discarded. Research into the interaction via Brillouin zones within the reactive materials is underway and showing results. There are many, many other research projects worldwide, Russia, China, Japan, India, Italy, US, Canada – all of them are looking, slowly uncovering the secrets of lattice-based nuclear reactions. The existence of tritium as a byproduct is essential to demonstrate that an nuclear reaction has occurred. No, Tritium, no nuclear reaction as far as most of the current researchers are concerned. There are reaction chains which don’t require cloud-like miracles to happen, and no the probabilities don’t favor them normally or they’d be a lot more common. There appear to be at least three different reaction types, one of them occurring biologically and well documented.
All this real progress has been overshadowed by the get rich quick artists. TANSTAAFL. It will still take years more research to get things to where we’ll be able to have H2-Ni, Pd, Pt, or Ti batteries/reactors.
For those who are interested, follow the ICCF meeting publications. For those who aren’t or simply think it’s nonsense, just ignore it. The Universe is what it is, it is knowable, but it doesn’t give knowledge away for free, it take effort, many times a very lot of effort. Willis is a very good example of someone putting in the effort to understand what the Universe is about in one small but significant (for us) area.
Followed Rossi with curiosity and bemusement for a few years. There are actually several companies in the nickel-fusion LENR niche; Blacklightpower was one of the first, with their crazy “fractional electron states” and “hydrinos” which never made much sense. Rossi was a better publicist and his theory made more sense, but he’s also been able to deliver a commercial product.
Peer review means very little in the physical sciences, replication is the only real validation. Many of these experiments show significant power, but they have not been widely replicated, either because the whole thing is measurement error or because no theory is adequate to properly prepare experimenters to consistently obtain the same results (these kinds of technical issues doom new products all the time, even in areas of physics that are well-understood).
It looks like there is something going on in these LENR experiments (NASA is looking at this with some level of seriousness), but so far no one seems to have a theory than can result in anything commercially useful.
*also been unable to deliver a commercial product
“crazy “fractional electron states” and “hydrinos” which never made much sense.”
And if you think that physicists have all the answers, well here is one of those with an overview opinion of the field:
“Nevertheless, as a physicist travels along his (in this case) career, the hairline cracks in the edifice become more apparent, as does the dirt swept under the rug, the fudges and the wholesale swindles, with the disconcerting result that the totality occasionally appears more like Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as dreamt by a modern slumlord, a ramshackle structure of compartmentalized models soldered together into a skewed heap of explanations as the whole jury-rigged monstrosity tumbles skyward.
It would be surprising if the strange world of subatomic and quantum physics did not lead the field in mysteries, conceptual ambiguities and paradoxes, and it does not disappoint. The standard model of particle physics, for instance (the one containing all the quarks and gluons), has no fewer than 19 adjustable parameters, about 60 years after Enrico Fermi exclaimed, “With four parameters I can fit an elephant!” Suffice to say, “beauty” is a term not frequently applied to the standard model.”
Following is “view all”:
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-man-behind-the-curtain/99999
Following is page 4:
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-man-behind-the-curtain/4
So instead of using /0 as the special ‘view all’ flag they picked an arbitrarily large number =99999 and test for that, breaking the special case where a document does extend to 99,999 pages. If that happens (depending on how it’s coded) either the 99999th page or ‘view all’ function would be unavailable. With miniaturization and embedded systems… some day our entire civilization could be dangling from a single shoddy assumption like this.
There is evidence that this has actually happened. We seem to have misplaced the whole 13th century.
That is like Enrico Fermi saying, “With four parameters I can fit an elephant. But five and six are OK.”
Was it Fermi who said that…?
Point being that physicists are generally an arrogant and incestuous lot that will viciously attack any idea outside their circle, unless they can somehow purloin it for themselves. Note the attacks that occurred to those “cold fusion” Utah chemists with data at MIT manipulated to prove the opposite. So I would not automatically shoot down R. Mills theory of “Hydrinos” or physicist’s grandstanding that hot fusion is the only viable process at this level of LENR.
90% of the universe is composed of something that may not even be in the standard model String and M theory? Not even wrong? Pond and Fleischman found something real and I think Rossi has too. With sharks like IH circling it’s no wonder Rossi keeps his cards close My understanding was that Rossi could get a device patent but not one to cover the operating principle as he did not have an explanation that conformed with known physics. This is why he has to be so careful. I have followed this for years and even wrote to Rossi and was directed to Leonardo for distribution info five years ago So far it’s just as well I didn’t have the millions they were looking for. Lol!
TANSTAAFL, you know.
If unlocking massive energy could be accomplished with so little energy so easily, the Universe would be one never ending scream of torment. [looks around] No torment! Only unhappiness.
Schrodingers E-Cat: Dead inside and outside the box.
I’m sure it’s hiding, right under that thimble… no, this thimble… OMG no, I mean that other thimble over there..
Hell, Rossi can get ten million more just by producing the cat:
http://41.media.tumblr.com/59zTzQzwEnl1hxf8s8omKo75o1_400.jpg
Mr. Worral, I too look forward to your abject apology for representing the WUWT group-think view.
The one year trial of the 1 MW LENR plant was to be judged by the ERV (expert independent evaluater) jointly chosen and paid for by IH and Rossi. His report is supposed to be be very favorable, showing the plant operated with a COP ~50. The contract calls for a minimum COP of 6. As you have not seen it your bias is showing. Rossi has sued IH for not paying up. You piece suggests it is IH who is the aggrieved party.
Mats Lewan lays out the story clearly in his blog Impossible Invention that also has links to the legal documents. https://animpossibleinvention.com/blog/ I recommend you read this before writing about something you know little about.
From the three statements from Rossi he attaches, these three points will need some explaining by IH.
1. IH built the reactors used at Lugano and then delayed the start of the 1 MW plant trial by a year. They also filed patents without Rossi’s permission including a co-inventor whom Rossi said invented nothing.
2. Rossi gave IH the full IP and IH used it to make E-Cats that they demonstrated to Woodford, that resulted in Woodford investing about $50 million.
3. Brillouin has always made only electrolytic reactors before their agreement with IH in in April 2015. Then Brillouin made a public demo in Capitol Hill ( Washington, DC) with a device that is the Copy-Cat. Strange coincidence.
ps. With your ability to hide the facts you might be able to get a job at the IPCC.
If you believe there is groupthink occurring here, you are either not paying much attention or are simply disingenuous.
Oh, Adrian’s paying attention all right and he doesn’t like WUWT at all. Probably for the free-thinking that goes on here. A newcomer to this site, or even one not paying much attention, would have no reason to attack. Maybe Adrian is a “progressive” professor at a University or one of those “consensus scientists” – we seem to get a few of those.
You only have to look at some of the later comments to see that I was right about group think. I have written about LENR at least half a dozen times over the last several years. Several of my comments have been censored. The few replies I have received are always negative, saying it was pseudo science. As they didn’t learn about it at school they think LENR is impossible.
A,D,Everard,
I have visited this site daily for ~10 years. I have been convinced the IPCC had got it wrong for longer. Saying Worrall could apply for a job with the IPCC was the worst insult I could think of.
As no one follows LENR here most don’t know about the E-Cat QuarkX that will supersede the old design E-Cat. This pencil sized device (100 Watts) operates at up to 1400C and produces electricity directly. I doubt anyone here will believe that either.
I think everyone here will believe it when they see it, and when someone is making and selling these devices, and the buyers are mailing power and selling it for a profit.
But right now we seem to be at the “give me money for this great wonderful think I claim to have” stage.
Anyone with only the knowledge that is available at this point who is anything but skeptical at this point is a dupe.
We all know of plenty of instances where a lot of sciency talk substituted for actual verification, and in a great many of such cases, it turned out there is no “there” there.
If it is for real that fusion can happen and cheap power produced in an apparatus which can be built by any reasonably handy mechanic, fantastic.
Let’s see it.
BTW, I myself see a wide range of views expressed here, from “it is real and anyone who is not buying it is close minded”, to “this is a total and 100% scam, a con artists hoax, it’ll never work no how no way”, and then many somewhere in between.
With some overlap across the gamut of opinions.
Talk to some warmists or faithful Democrats, who question none of the dogma of the group to which they identify, no matter how ridiculous or obviously misbegotten…that is groupthink.
Do you suppose people ought to believe it because someone claims it is true?
Backing up a bit, does the apology have to be abject?
No contrite apologies accepted, then?
Mr Worrel offered abject.
Then the offered word should be accepted.
There is nothing in present physics which precludes LENR.
There is a lot, however, that precludes LENR as a controllable, net positive energy source.
All the hand-waving in the world cannot make up for a lack of reproducible test data.
If so many people are working on cold fusion and it has been demonstrated successfully so many times, then why is everything so dependant on what Rossi does? If in the last 6 (or more) years Rossi has fiddled around with this, anyone could have beaten him to market. If of course all this other research and success is going on. That no one in 30 years and Rossi in however many haven’t been able to provide a convincing demonstration should be all you need to know.
Because Rossi appears nearest to commercial operation. He is hoping to have another 1 MW plant operating in Europe in the next month or two.
Adrian Ashfield: Because Rossi appears nearest to commercial operation. He is hoping to have another 1 MW plant operating in Europe in the next month or two.
Keep us posted. My prediction is for no more than another “successful test” followed by immediate shutdown and no useful sustained power output to any paying customer.
Adrian, Rossi has always had “another plant that he hopes to have operating….” as an explanation. It’s been 10 years or more, if he can’t produce something conclusive in that time, it’s a scam. His background says it all I’m afraid.
E-Cat, like wind and solar fall under the category of a solution looking for a problem.
So, what is the problem? The problem is sociological. Engineers are not going to solve it because like CAGW, the problem is in the heads of a few people.
Clearly, energy affords us many benefits. In a modern society, we have all food and energy we need. The power industry is not having a problem keeping the lights on.
We do not need an unlimited supply of power, we just need a finite supply.
So what do people do who live live in a wonderful time of plenty? They worry that we will run out. Thus energy has to be renewable or made with water via fusion.
This is why we have politicians, to solve the problems they invent. They solve the problems that engineers can’t. Obama gets his picture taken next to a solar panel or a wind turbine and proclaims he has saved us. Making people feel better, priceless!
LENR will likely replace most fossil fuel over the next several decades. It is not “looking for a problem.”
why do you want to replace fossil fuels?
I powerfully believe that LENR is going to be “a few decades away” much as hot fusion has been “a few decades away”…for 5 decades.
Unlimited free energy isn’t actually a perfect good. There is very much a defined limit at which the extra heat produced by energy use causes environmental degradation. However, this would be offset by being able to move to other planets and star systems.
Not holding my breath, though.
What wsbriggs said…
Rossi looks suspiciously like a charlatan to me, but I don’t know enough to say for sure, and there seems to be some indications that suggest IH could be dealing dishonestly, as per Adrian Ashfield’s post above. That will all play out eventually, but ultimately has no bearing on the reality of LENR.
There has been a *lot* of work done by a very diverse group of people, including many at reputable industrial or governmental agencies that have without question shown excess heat generation and in a couple of cases tritium production. It’s just that nobody seems to know how to replicate it, so it doesn’t count as science yet. We’re in the realm of phenomenology, akin to the chef’s secret of copper pots and eggs that Geoff Withnell mentioned above, or the fact that nobody knew why willow bark extract/aspirin worked as a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory for a century or so after it was discovered.
There’s absolutely no question in my mind that LENR is real (nor do I understand how there could be a question in anyone’s mind who’s read thoroughly on the subject), but we simply don’t know what’s going on yet. The fact that current theory suggests it couldn’t possibly be happening is simply an indication that whatever is going on isn’t covered by current theory, or at least by the way we’re applying it. Saying something can’t be happening because it doesn’t fit our theories makes about as much sense as claiming climate catastrophe is inevitable because computer models predict it.
Just because there may be hucksters and shady businesspeople who’ve latched onto the idea, or strikingly bizarre or inconsistent theories proposed to explain it doesn’t in any way invalidate that large numbers of respected researchers have seen excess heat and some evidence of nuclear reactions (the tritium thing).
I don’t want to start a flame war, so probably shouldn’t say it, but it’s more than a little mind-boggling to me that here of all places, we have people saying that something that’s been observed to happen couldn’t actually be happening because current theories (models?) can’t explain it.
A big problem with manufacturing a new technology is the learning curve in figuring out what you have and how to use it. Eric Worrall won’t be happy until there are GW electrical plants built by cities. (Heck, one is near enough to run all of New Hampshire.)
Little detail: the test E-Cat systems have either produced low temperature process heat, or have discarded the heat. The “Hot-Cats” should be usable to produce high temperature steam, but I don’t think they’ve been hooked up in a boiler yet.
Little detail: I think Rossi et al have had a lot of difficulty controlling the E-Cat. From what I gather, it’s almost a perfectly designed device if you want thermal runaway. In general you take fuel away from something and it stops converting energy. The fuel here is part of the device – nickel, lithium, and hydrogen. The main way to control it is to keep it cool enough so that the cooling system isn’t overwhelmed. I suspect it will be a while before anyone wants to be near a 1 GW E-Cat plant that could start producing 10 GW uncontrollably.
Before Rossi linked up with IH he was a lot more talkative and was quick to warn people keen on reproducing the effect to be very careful. They seem to have made a lot of progress in controlling the
beasts, but don’t expect the rapid scale up we’d like to see.
So it does not work yet. Like Eric, I would be impressed if it worked as well a wood stove in New Hampshire.
It will never work. Scam!
So if only there was a way to absorb a large amount of heat for a relatively short period of time… right. You know something to “sink” the heat in… A “heat sink” if you will… if only…
More weak-sauce excuses.
LENR has been replicated many times. See the links to ~1700 papers at http://www.lenrproof.com
A good introduction is Mats Lewan’s webinar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ3S3YMH96s&feature=youtu.be (That I have linked before)
Dave Etchells. Here, here.
Dave Etchells: I don’t want to start a flame war, so probably shouldn’t say it, but it’s more than a little mind-boggling to me that here of all places, we have people saying that something that’s been observed to happen couldn’t actually be happening because current theories (models?) can’t explain it.
I’d recommend some care in language and observation.
1. What has been reliably demonstrated is table-top (or bench-top) production of neutrons for making isotopes for biomedical research. Those devices are net consumers of electricity.
2. There is a much larger body of research “demonstrating” no consistency in heat or gamma radiation production. To date, those demonstrations are not reliably better than chance fluctuations in heat distribution and measurement error. It isn’t intrinsically more suspicious than the surprisingly large amount of non-reproducible research published in the medical and psychology journals, except that the rate of non-replication is much higher.
3. Rossi’s claims (and claims of a few other researchers) of consistent power production after an initial startup period. Had the claims been accurate and reliable over the last 6 years, there is no reason that working devices could not be in place all over, doing useful work. Now Rossi claims to be accelerating production units that produce either high temperature steam or electricity in 1MW amounts.
Nothing in class 1 suggests that class 2 devices are capable of producing net power beyond the electricity fed in during power up. Nothing in classes 1 and 2 combined supports Rossi’s claims of practical units any time soon. It would not take much to prove me wrong in the next 2 years. What I anticipate is increasingly baroque explanations of why the “successful” tests have not led to successful installations of power-producing units.
“There’s absolutely no question in my mind that LENR is real (nor do I understand how there could be a question in anyone’s mind who’s read thoroughly on the subject).”
Well put. Exactly so. Leave aside the Rossi saga for a moment and there is abundant evidence by now, cited in the 60 minutes video already posted and many many other places on the internet, much of it from experimentalists like Rob Duncan whose credentials are beyond reasonable dispute. Anyone who doubts this is either uninformed or engaging in groupthink.
What’s the latest from the Melvin Dumar Institute of Technology in Utah?
Is Polywell Fusion now a forbidden word? Because on of my comments up thread did not post. Or was it some other word?
M Simon, I wouldn’t be surprised. I have had several comments on LENR censored.
I would even think that it possible IH took a very large sum or promise from a government proxy source to tie this issue up in courts until a legislation platform can be erected to control the technology and monies and or taxes prior to its public release….
I don’t think it is possible to stop it now. There are other countries that have Rossi licenses. My guess is China will be the first because their pollution problem is so serious and their government can move faster.
The Chinese may be a lot of things, but they are not credulous suckers for these types of scams.
Here is a paragraph from a piece I’ve just submitted to my local paper.
“The Department of Energy (DOE) has failed miserably. Their record is a series of unmitigated disasters in renewable energy, the never ending clean up of the radwaste at Hanford, and major support for hot fusion projects whose success is always fifty years in the future. Even if the $25 billion ITER Tokamak reactor works it will never be an economical solution. It is supposed to run for up to eight minutes in 2025. DOE were largely responsible for shutting down research on cold fusion and have refused to look at recent progress. My letter of 7/7/2015 about LENR to the Secretary of Energy Dr.Moniz, carefully routed through the Director of the Office of Science Dr. Dehmer, has not been answered. DOE should be held accountable.”
Oh, try not to be so glum…I here there is one hot fusion project that is only twenty or thirty years away from possibly working. ( Albeit only as a proof of concept, not as a functional power plant. Since when does the Federal gubnamint decide on the worthiness of big money schemes by how economical or sensible they are. Sheesh!)
ps. They have lots of Worralls at DOE.
An interesting demonstration of excess energy must be distinguishable from a cheap magic trick. So far, nothing interesting.
Ric Werme April 8, 2016 at 12:50 pm
–
“The “Hot-Cats” should be usable to produce high temperature steam, but I don’t think they’ve been hooked up in a boiler yet.”
Hooked up to anything ever?
even walking on a tin roof would be proof
–
“Little detail: I think Rossi et al have had a lot of difficulty controlling the E-Cat. From what I gather, it’s almost a perfectly designed device if you want thermal runaway”.
So let one “runaway and stand back, heck a pile of molted metal would be fantastic proof!
–
.” The main way to control it is to keep it cool enough so that the cooling system isn’t overwhelmed.”
So if we control it we can never use it or prove it? Wonderful.
–
” I suspect it will be a while before anyone wants to be near a 1 GW E-Cat plant that could start producing 10 GW uncontrollably.”
How about starting with a 0.1 GW E-Cat plant that could start producing 1 GW uncontrollably.”
–
I had a mate who believed in that Irish scam of 3% interest a day on his $10,000 investment.
Lots of happy testimonials.
He was so angry with me for a week when I showed him it was a scam, much richer but still angry.
Ric, keep the belief up in some form of limitless power, who knows what the world holds, but throw this particular version under the bus.
Not really, chemical energy can produce enough heat to melt metal. Think thermite. More impressive was the Lugano setup that ran for a month and produced a lot more heat energy than could be done with chemicals.
Don’t be silly.
The Hot-Cat can run at red heat levels. It needs a production design that can be used in a boiler.
A correction I believe:
$11 million isn’t the cost of the 1 year E-cat test, it was the amount paid for a successful (in IH’s eyes) 24 hour test to obtain the IP license from Rossi, which is supposed to include all his intellectual secrets and the right to sell the technology in certain territories (as well as the right to sublicense the technology as much as IH wants, apparently). I don’t think any mention has been made of the costs of the 1 year test itself, other than the plant is supposed to be 1 – 1.5 million.
There has been much sloppy data strewn around in this thread. See science reporter Mats Lewan’s more comprehensive take here.
https://animpossibleinvention.com/2016/04/09/heres-my-hypothesis-on-the-rossi-ih-affair/
Lewan’s writing is worthless(and absud) conjecture, however there are quite a number of excellent comments below the lewan nonsense.
For example
Also excellent coment by
Thomas Clarke April 9, 2016 at 17:19
and more by
maryyugo April 9, 2016 at 16:40
This is the third major fr@ud, of which we know, that Rossi has carried out. Much more on the Rossi saga at
http://freeenergyscams.com/
Maryyugo? I haven’t been following the LENR comments at any source closely for a while. Maryyugo is one reason why. She reminds me too much of Anthony’s Sou.
Ric Werme what you mean is that you have absolutely nothing to counter maryyugo’s posts. Below is an exerpt from one of his posts at
https://matslew.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/will-lenr-reach-mass-adoption-faster-than-any-other-tech/#comment-4709
Everyting that maryyugo writes is incontrovertably correct; of course a true believer doesn’t want to read maryyugo’s truth telling.
We are now in the Q2 of 2016. Let’s meet back here during Q2 of 2018, and review the progress of the E-Cat devices. I am betting that there still will be no installed device providing reliable work to a paying customer.
If an E-Cat could reliably produce hot water at a lower cost than simply heating the water by electricity, it could power an ammonia/water (aka “gas”) air conditioner for a substantial building. Given the E-Cat, everything else can be made from off-the-shelf parts.
oops, I meant “given the E-Cat fuel”
Rossi’s statement to the court under oath has legal consequences. IH’s press release does not. Note IH did not say the 1 MW plant did not work. Apparently the 1 MW plant has been refueled and is again working without Rossi being there. Until you see the ERV;s report (that supposedly says the COP was close to 50,) the court charge is the only thing with legal weight. Anything else you see is hearsay.
“The Physics of why the e-Cat’s Cold Fusion Claims Collapse”
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/05/the-nuclear-physics-of-why-we/
It take a bit of effort to understand the physics of the claims being made,
however, the above article makes it clear why the e-CAT, so-called, is
obviously another fraud on the part of Rossi.
You should note that’s from 2011. Did they produce an update after the Lugano demonstration?
Not likely. The implacable critics of LENR rarely seem to update their conclusions based on new evidence. That’s why when someone like Rob Duncan does update his conclusions, it is so impressive. This writer maintains in 2011 that “In the past, claims of cold fusion have been unable to be scientifically reproduced under controlled conditions.” This was not true then (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VymhJCcNBBc), and it is even less true now.
I’m still waiting to make up my mind about the Rossi/IH dispute, but it seems highly probable whatever the outcome that the LENR revolution is now underway. There are too many other competent researchers in the field to stop it now.
Red herring.
The physics of aneutronic fusion has not changed in last five years,
just as it has not changed since atoms first formed in the universe post Big Bang.
Rather the correct question to ask is
“Has Rossi demonstrated gamma photon production by his setup which would lend credence to his claims?”
Or as the authors correctly noted,
“If aneutronic fusion is actually taking place in the e-CAT, then how come Rossi is not dead yet (from gamma radiation).”
The answer is that there is no aneutronic fusion taking place in the fraud that is the e-CAT built by the con man Rossi.
All that is being done is that the products are being “salted” in the mining sense with copper whose composition is that of the store bought variety rather than the products of aneutronic fusion.
If one understands the physics, then one can spend one’s time productively elsewhere rather than clutching at straws about news of such an obvious fraud.
No, Ignatz–LENR doesn’t require gamma ray production because the Low Energy Nuclear Reaction doesn’t obviously doesn’t work the same as “aneutronic fusion”. What you have done is added credibility to the existence of LENR rather than destroy it.
Are you one of those “theoretical nuclear physicists” that are so stuck in the paradigm of the past 100 years or more that something new is untenable and unfathomable? If so, you have antiquated yourself.
Correction: “doesn’t obviously doesn’t work” should be “obviously doesn’t work”.
Rocky road you clearly do not understand anything at all about nuclear physics or even language for that matter. If you understaood language you’d know what “aneutronic” means. Clearly you don’t. Rossi claims to be transforming nickel into copper by the addition of protons(the hydrogen). This is by definition “aneutronic fusion”. If fusion where taking place(and it isn’t) then there would be gammas.
Rossi is a serial fraudster. His first big one was Petroldraggon in Italy. Not a drop of oil produced. His next big one was perpetrated on the DOD/DOE with his Thermoelectirc generator. He collected a few million dollars for this one and none of the devices he delivered generated more than one Watt. Most generated nothing. None of them were constructed by Rossi. All were bought from a San Diego company and were junk of Russian origin.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://shutdownrossi.com/&gws_rd=cr&ei=jkcLV8PiOInQjAO536WoBw
http://freeenergyscams.com/
acementhead,
Please get you facts right. Rossi backed off the process being converting copper to nickel years ago. I don’t know of anyone who thinks that now except for you.
Unlike what you wrote, Rossi was aquitted of any wrong doing with Petroldraggon. He was cleared of any wrong doing with his thermoelectric contract too. I’m sure you won’t let any small details like that effect your libelous statements.
ps. Should you be interested (doubtful) you might start by following this link on Rossi’s history.
https://www.lenr-forum.com/old-forum-static/t-2384.html
AA My facts are correct. There is no such thing as “the ecat”. Rossi’s claims change all the time, as do the physical structures of his alleged “ecat”. The 1 Mw ecat is merely 102 of his original 10 Kw(claimed not actual) ecats cobbled together in a shipping container. The steam cat was claimed to convert nickel into copper. Originally Rossi claimed gammas but when questioned by Florida’ s Bureau of Radiation Control Rossi denied that any nuclear reactions were taking place
http://coldfusion3.com/blog/rossi-investigated-over-radiation-concerns-rossi%E2%80%99s-us-office-location-revealed
Whether Rossi was convicted or not is irrelevant, the fact remains that Petroldragon was a fr@ud. Rossi was unable to make oil from rubbish, as he had claimed to be able to do. Rossi was never tried for his Thermodynamic generator fr@ud. When the government idots throw away taxpayer money they are not keen to have their stupidity revealed in court, thus no trial for that fr@ud and thus no “cleared of any wrongdoing”. But again, conviction for fr@ud is irrelevant. Rossi claimed to be able to do something which he could not. He also claimed that he personally constructed the “generators”. He did not. That was a lie. They were secondhand junk for Russia.
Any site with ecat or LENR in the name is worthless. They are all fanboi sites where no dissent is permitted. Any post with criticism of Rossi or LENR is not published. The link below has an uncensored discussion. People may post in favour or against Rossi. I suggest you pop over and tell people such as ben m, a working nuclear physicist, that they are wrong and that Rossi does have the goods.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=288671&highlight=rossi+ecat
Adrian Ashfield April 11, 2016 at 12:46 pm
I am far more familiar with Rossi’s history than I should wish to be. I’ve wasted hundreds of hours, in the last 4 years, reading about Rossi and his various sc@ms. No site with lenr or rossi or ecat in the title is worth spending much time on as they all publish only comments in favour of Rossi. No criticism is permitted.
Below are links to site with unbiased information. The first site appears to be offline at present but the Google cache(link’s below) is functioning fine.
http://shutdownrossi.com/
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://shutdownrossi.com/&gws_rd=cr&ei=3jsMV4KMBM_kjwP-3LT4Bg
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://shutdownrossi.com/e-cat-science/hanno-essen-admits-recent-test-of-e-cat-not-science/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0
More information at Free Energy Sc@ms
http://freeenergyscams.com/
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://shutdownrossi.com/e-cat-science/hanno-essen-admits-recent-test-of-e-cat-not-science/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0
Didn’t Elizabeth Shue already demonstrate workable cold fusion?
RockyRoad April 10, 2016 at 5:28 pm wrote:
“No, Ignatz–LENR doesn’t require gamma ray production because the Low Energy Nuclear Reaction doesn’t obviously doesn’t work the same as “aneutronic fusion”. What you have done is added credibility to the existence of LENR rather than destroy it.”
I see. It’s special in that this one process can uniquely violate all know laws of physics.
Sounds like an investigation by the Roman Catholic church is more appropriate, as we are apparently witnessing a modern day miracle right in their own backyard.
Or the Amazing Randi.
“Are you one of those “theoretical nuclear physicists” that are so stuck in the paradigm of the past 100 years or more that something new is untenable and unfathomable? If so, you have antiquated yourself.”
😆 If ignorance is bliss, you’ve attained Nirvana.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
Rossi has what may be a well deserved terrible reputation. This is really not about him though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroelectric_fusion
No David A you are wrong. It is absolutely about Rossi Below I quote the Heading verbatim.
As Rossi is the only person who claims to have an “ecat” and Rossi is the only person who, two years ago, claimed to have sold all his IP in “the ecat” to Industrial Heat then this post is all about Rossi and nothing else. Well his ecrap too I suppose.
Pyroelectric fusion has nothing to do with Rossi’s e-CAT.
It is a novel method to perform standard and well understood D-D (Deuterium – Deuterium) fusion.
Note that the required experiments, 1/ detection of 820 keV helium-3 nuclei and 2/ detections of 2.45 MeV neutrons, were performed and reported.
In the case of Ross’s e-CAT with aneutronic proton + nickel fusion, the analogous experiments would be to 1/ look for back to back 511 keV gamma photons and 2/ analyze the copper products for their isotopic mix which would be different from naturally mined and refined copper.
As this is a simple fraud being perpetrated by the con-man Rossi,
both key experiments have been studiously avoided.
See
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/05/the-nuclear-physics-of-why-we/
Ignatz Ratzkywatzky, “I see. It’s special in that this one process can uniquely violate all know laws of physics.”
Well you make it clear that you are totally ignorant about the laws of physics. Obviously you haven’t read any of the many current theories of how LENR works, that don’t break any laws of physics.
The customer who was using the “test” process in an actual production facility in North Carolina for 352 days has now ordered 3 of these units for its’ facilities in Europe! That doesn’t sound like a failure of the process to me!
There is no “customer”. The President of “the customer” company is Rossi’s lawyer. It is just more Rossi lies and shenanigans.
Rossi has been lying about “the ecat” since the begining. He is still lying about everything.
http://freeenergyscams.com/andrea-rossis-e-cat-project-began-with-intentional-false-and-misleading-statements/