Guest post by Ric Werme
Six months ago I posted, with Anthony’s consent and misgivings, Cold Fusion Going Commercial!?. It’s time to take a look at how Dr Rossi and his Energy Catalyzer are doing. In a word, Wow. There’s a huge amount of information and blogish speculation on the web now despite there being still very little in the mainstream press. There’s a new blog that looks pretty good, other new blogs I haven’t checked out yet, existing blogs have a lot of information, and it may be quite a while before I get back to teasing information out of Rossi’s blog.
First, a quick summary. Andrea Rossi, associated with the University of Bologna, took research from Sergio Focardi and scaled it up with a nanostructured nickel substrate and an undisclosed (but supposedly inexpensive) catalyst that fuses hydrogen with nickel releasing heat and some gamma rays. A demonstration unit in January took 400 watts in and put 12 kilowatts out, boiling some 8.8 liters of water in 30 minutes. He says units have run for months heating his laboratory, designs that don’t need a continuous source of input heat can be built but are unstable and difficult to stop. The reactor produces copper, but it’s still unclear just how hydrogen is overcoming Coulomb repulsion without needing particle accelerators or pressures akin to the center of a star.
In January Rossi announced that a 1 MW reactor was going to be the first commercial development. That is proceeding. Manufacturing rights have been split between Defkalion Green Technologies S.A. in Greece and AmpEnergo Inc. in the USA The former gets Europe, Asia, and Africa; the latter gets the Americas and Caribbean.
Defkalion is building the 1 MW reactor based on an array of small modules similar to those used in the January demonstration. Ampenergo may use a similar approach, but may not be producing modules yet.
Let me do the rest of this in a question and answer format:
Umm, what is this good for? What am I supposed to be excited about?
Ah, a very good question. I’m going to take a very conservative approach to the answer, i.e. squash the hype. First and foremost, all the usable energy this produces is heat. The major limitation of this is the maximum temperature the reactor can run at, Rossi says they keep it at no more than 500°C. Modern power plants can produce steam at 600°C and a pressure of 250 bar. While this is unobtainable from from the Rossi device, it could be used in a two stage boiler – an E-cat stage to get the temperature up to several hundred degrees and a conventional plant to finish it.
So the E-cat device by itself would have to run at a lower temperature and the laws of thermodynamics mean that the E-cats alone will have to run at a lower efficiency than conventional plants. Let’s assume for now that the E-cat device can’t heat water to a point where it can be used efficiently in a steam power plant. Let’s ignore that lower efficiency may not preclude it from being cost effective. Let’s also ignore combined heat and power systems.
So then all we have is something that produces a lot of something that the existing power plant operators would call waste heat. Portable heat at that – the 1 MW pilot reactor will fit in a 20′ x 40′ container (6 x 12 m). What’s that good for? Industrial-sized space heating for one. A long time ago I read that genetic engineering would have a greater impact on the agricultural business than on human medicine. Ever since then, I’ve looked at the Ag business as really big business. One big consumer of propane is drying grain post harvest for shipping, storage, etc. A little corner of the AG world in New England is maple sugaring. Typically 40 units of maple sap is boiled down to 1 unit of syrup. Some processors do it the old fashioned way with wood fires (usually scrap maple!) or the not so romantic oil burners. There are reverse osmosis systems for removing the bulk of the water, but it has to be finished (and cooked!) in a boiler. Why not have nuclear powered maple syrup?
Patios, sidewalks, driveways are sometimes heated to keep them snow free. Some airports and cities have big melters that pay loaders dump snow into and propane heaters turn it into water to dump down the storm sewers.
There are a whole lot of things you could code that would fry the arch-conservationists, like heating entire roads or keeping open air swimming pools open through the winter.
My favorite idea is small scale, but incredibly practical – Antarctic research stations need to stock up on enough fuel oil during the summer to keep warm during the winter. A heat source that is refueled once a year would thrill the physical plant personnel.
Energy production needs energy, and the E-Cat could fit in to some current applications (assuming the applications are still viable). Distilling ethanol from the biological fermenters used to convert corn to ethanol is one. Another providing the hot water used in oil sand and oil shale extraction. Currently that’s provided by burning natural gas, and there may be plenty of that associated with the source that it’s remains the sensible heat source.
So, the answer is that simply heat is well worth getting excited about.
Yeah, but what about me?
Rossi is concerned about keeping some of the intellectual property a trade secret. That, and concerns about shutting down the reaction made me assume that the home heating market would be the last to develop, but Defkalion is planning a small box that can hold 1-6 5 kW modules for a combined heat and power application, including residential use. If I recall correctly, a typical residential oil burning furnace burns oil at the rate of one gallon per hour. That’s 40 kW, so yeah, If the fears for some brutal winters come true, Defkalion may be very busy!
Dude, what about the US, you keep talking about Greeks!
Well, living in New Hampshire, I’m pleased to report that Ampenergo is located in NH. The principals are Karl Norwood, Richard Noceti, Robert Gentile, and Craig Cassarino.
Robert Gentile was the Assistant Secretary of Energy for Fossil Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) during the early 1990’s. That’s okay. He is/was President of Leonardo Technologies Inc., an Ohio company that may have been set up by Rossi and is related to the Leonardo Corp in Bedford, NH. The links are weird, I haven’t figured them all out.
Richard Noceti co-wrote a paper titled Synthesis of Hydrocarbon Fuels using Renewable and Nuclear Energy and is listed as National Energy Technology Laboratory and LTI Associates. That’s good.
Karl Norwood is the President of The Norwood Group, a large real estate company based in Bedford NH. Hmm. His Linked-in entry says “Karl Norwood’ss [sic] real estate experience is multi-faceted, from multi-family to office and industrial properties. In business for over 40 years, he has been actively involved in all forms of commercial brokerage, negotiating on behalf of both landlords and tenants.” Whoa, shouldn’t we have a few manufacturing folks here?
In January, I went looking for the Leonardo Corp and was surprised to find it shared the same phone number as Norwood Realty. So I stopped there one day in January and the receptionist gave me Craig Cassarino’s phone number and said he was in Brazil that week. I eventually called him a month or so later. He knew little of cold fusion history or other research that went on in New Hampshire, he’s more of an international business consultant. Exportnh.org says “Craig Cassarino has spent decades focused on sustainability of resources in both New Hampshire and Brazil, so it’s very fitting that now, as New Hampshire’s Commercial Consul for Brazil, he is serving as a resource for Granite State businesses interested in doing business in Brazil.” Oh my.
So it sounds to me as though Ampenergo will be a middleman between sub licensees and Rossi. I’m sure they have lots of contacts to work with. Frankly, I expected to find something like a General Electric throwing hundreds of engineers at designs of all scales and dozens of scientists to build higher temperature devices, better heat flow management, figure out the nuclear physics, etc. Perhaps GE is, but are doing so quietly. At any rate, look to Defkalion for early results, perhaps Ampenergo can get factories set up throughout the Americas (or just in Brazil) later. I think the modules for the 1 MW reactor are being made in Florida.
How about producing electricity with thermocouples?
A “classic” thermocouple relies on the relative ease of moving an electron from one metal to another in a heated junction. They’re used in gas fired boilers, temperature sensors, etc. To get a decent amount of power requires a lot of wires. Something I wasn’t very familiar with until I started researching this is semiconductor thermocouple that uses lead telluride. Recent research has improved its output by adding some dopants that produce points where it’s easier for heat to knock off an electron. Rossi is very interested, but I suspect that there may not be enough tellurium to go around. I have a small thermoelectrically powered fan that you put on a wood stove. It also serves as a good guess about the smoke stack temperature, as the hotter the stove gets, the faster the fan spins.
Cute device, pretty pricy. I’m sure there will be good applications, but overall I don’t think it’s thermocouples are efficient enough, inexpensive enough, and raw material plentiful enough.
I hear it’s a scam.
Well, suppose it is, we’ll find out soon enough. I think it’s likely for real, but there are several other opinions and red flags worth keeping in mind. If it is a scam, it’s a heck of a complex one.
The obvious opinion is it’s all been faked or that Rossi, et al, are seeing what they want to see and it’s all a fantasy. Early LENR devices had so little excess heat that it took painstaking measurements to find it. The device Rossi demonstrated produced so much heat that there’s simply no question it was producing heat. Even the input power, supplied by a piece of lamp cord, is nowhere near the 12 kW that was being produced. (On a 230 VAC source, that lamp cord would have to carry 50 amps to bring 12 kW into the test device. 50 amps generally requires AWG 10-11 gauge wire.) Other parties, including Swedish nuclear experts have concluded the device is real and is too small to provide the demonstrated energy chemically.
There are detractors, primarily science journalist Steve Krivit. He’s a longtime follower of the cold fusion/LENR scene and is quick to point out it’s not “real” fusion. He visited Rossi et al in Italy, burning bridges along the way. There’s a personality conflict, I think Krivit was looking for a science discussion about how it works and if it works, while Rossi was taking time out of another busy day building a 1 MW reactor expecting it will work much like his smaller modules, because they’re using many of them.
Krivit’s trip to Italy left both sides annoyed with each other. From that page, follow the subsequent posts to the actual interviews and observations of the system.
Krivit states “Thus far, the scientific details provided by the E-Cat trio have been highly deficient and have not enabled the public to make an objective evaluation.”
Rossi retorted later, “Mr. Krivit has understood nothing of what he saw, from what I have read in his ridiculous report.”
Krivit’s focus is on the boiling water test, and thinks that the output steam flow was “wet” – that water droplets cam out with the steam. Rossi set up another demonstration with much higher water flow to stay with liquid water, and measuring the flow and temperature gain. The results showed more heat release than before.
What sort of “red flags” should I be aware of?
Here’s a list, some are holdovers from cold fusion history:
- It sounds too good to be true.
And therefore requires extraordinary results.
- Scientists have come away impressed, but scientists are lousy at spotting fraud.
It would be nice if James Randi would take a look, there are a number of doubters on his discussion board. However, so much energy comes out of the device that it can’t be powered from the wall outlet, can’t be battery power, can’t be burning hydrocarbons (that second test released the equivalent of burning 7.9 gallons of gasoline). There’s not much else it could be, e.g IR lasers or microwaves.
- What’s with Rossi’s legal problems in the past?
I haven’t read too closely, but Rossi was involved in a trash to oil project that didn’t get very far, but some accounts point to corrupt Italian officials shaking down a company that was beginning to make money. (I’m shocked!) Those issues may be one reason why Rossi is working with Defkalion, a Greek company.
- And how about Ampenergo in the Americas?
I’ll contact them in a while. They’re going to have to move and move quickly. At least they didn’t spend much time on a name. 🙂
- If Rossi were a real scientist, he’d describe the catalyst.
Yeah, but he’s an inventor/entrepeneur. He’s focused on getting a product out, one that he wants to protect until things are more established. He may talk about it more in November after the 1 MW reactor is shipped.
- And how expensive is the catalyst.
Rossi says it’s cheap. There’s some other work that used palladium on carbon, I wouldn’t be surprised if the nano structure is from nickel on carbon fibers or even just charcoal. It may be his biggest advance is increasing the surface area of the nickel.
- This converts nickel to copper, which isotopes?
Uh, can I get back to you on that? Sergio Focardi says that what is produced does not match natural copper. Physicists from Sweden say “the used powder is different in that several elements are present, mainly 10 percent copper and 11 percent iron. The isotopic analysis through ICP-MS doesn’t show any deviation from the natural isotopic composition of nickel and copper.” If the copper produced has the natural percentages of 69.17% 63Cu and 30.83% 65Cu, that’s a big red flag and and means either the result is contamination with natural copper or that the processes that make copper in the E-cat are similar to the natural processes, which should involve exploding supernovae.
On the other hand, if the ratio is different, then that’s very strong evidence that copper is being produced through nuclear chemistry.
No one seems to be talking about the iron. Iron is a couple steps before nickel, and that suggests alpha particle emission, but that’s more common with very heavy elements.
I’m still reading, I want to know more!
A remarkably amateurish but informative video was created by Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson at the University of Cambridge. I think it exists because there just wasn’t a decent video introduction. Is it an appeal to authority if the authority is yourself?
A blog dedicated to Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer has appeared as http://www.e-catworld.com/. It’s run by Frank (admin). I think I know who Frank is, but he never replied to my query. I think it will be a good source of information.
In a July post from Pure Energy Systems, there’s a list of Web sites focused on the E-Cat device. I’ve only had a chance to look at a few. (The last is one I found elsewhere.)
An interview with Sergio Focardi gives a really good background on developing the E-Cat. Focardi doesn’t know what the catalyst is, but suspects it’s involved in splitting molecular hydrogen into atomic hydrogen (ordinary hydrogen is a molecule with two atoms).
Wired had a good summary of LENR research in 2006. One person referenced, Les Case, was a solo researcher in New Hampshire and longtime acquaintance of mine. He died of natural causes a year or so ago.
What’s next?
The next big step is the completion, testing, and delivery of the 1 MW reactor. After that, Rossi might have time (or might be surrounded by reporters) and be willing to talk more about what’s inside.
I’m just amazed that the mainstream media haven’t picked this up. I don’t know how much of it is bad memories from the science by press conference days of Pons and Fleischman, and how much is pursuing more important stories, like which celebrity is entering or leaving rehab. When they do pick it up, they may overhype it, but it’s easy to show that maintaining a high standard of living requires access to cheap energy.
While the E-Cat device will not supplant many current uses for petroleum products, it doesn’t have to. It wouldn’t take much of a demand reduction to chase the speculators out of oil, and it could help reduce the cost of producing products from crude oil to refined fuels.
Whatever happens, our “interesting times,” as the Chinese curse goes, are about to become more interesting.
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“The physics of fusion is sufficiently well understood so as to rule out
the possibility of room temperature fusion by sticking electrodes in
water.”
Oh really? Says who? The same scientists who are knee-deep in hot fusion funding? The same scientists who’ve spent their life preaching a particular model that may need to be changed? The ego is a powerful thing. Do not underestimate it.
Ric Werme,
The claim of converting nickel to 30% copper by hydrogen fusion has done it for me. At this percentage you have to be converting the most common isotopes: Ni-58 at about 68% natural abundance and Ni-60 at about 26% abundance. Add a proton and you get Cu-59 and Cu-61, both of which are highly radioactive (81.5 second and 200 minute half-lives respectively). These are both positron emitters and quickly decay back to nickel (Ni-59 with a 76,000 year half-life and Ni-61 which is stable). Of course the positrons will quickly combine with electrons to produce the gamma rays that are claimed to be seen. The apparatus would be highly radioactive while running. Is it? To get stable copper you have to convert Ni-62 at 3.6% and Ni-64 at 0.9% abundances to produce stable Cu-63 and Cu-65, but this will not get you to 30%. No doubt an ad-hoc and highly dubious sequence of proton captures could be postulated to counter all criticisms as each new isotope captures a new proton, conveniently stopping at a stable copper isotope, but all this is physically unlikely if not downright silly. And why stop at copper? Surely we should produce a whole zoo of isotopes beyond copper (e.g. Zn, Ga …). Of course, nickel will be claimed to be special and part of the catalyst effect. It occurs to me that if chemically induced nuclear reactions are as easy as claimed they would also occur naturally and the earth’s crust (mantle, core?) would be constantly undergoing bizarre transmutations. I don’t think that it is. If I don’t seem to be taking this seriously, you are right.
Whilst I have very, very serious doubts about Rossi et. al. (put simply, there is no clear experimental validation as yet, and at least a couple of contradictory results – Copper isotopes and gamma rays – besides questions over funding and the fact that Rossi has been in prison in the past for what some might regard as a “scam”), I’m glad WUWT is willing to publish these sorts of stories (where there is already considerable interest from a few serious people), so that a discussion can be had. I don’t think this is “tinfoil”, though it is highly controversial and may (in the end) turn out to be a scam.
However, just because there may be good reasons to think that it is a scam, doesn’t mean it can be treated as such without evidence, though some of the detractors in this comment thread seem to think otherwise: the critical responses have been particularly tart.
What we have seen with AGW is that some people have become so prejudiced that no true discussion is possible. I’ve seen much the same thing in other fields. Seemingly, some feel it’s their duty to dissuade the gullible from falling prey to a con (a noble motive); but almost invariably they refuse to talk about evidence and cite their own premises instead – as if that were enough.
And personally, I wouldn’t invest a nickel (pun intended) of my own money in Rossi’s company, so I’m glad words are cheap 😉 That said, and with that in mind, science is about risk and not about safety, hence I have a fundamental objection to anyone who refuses to discuss controversial ideas as if they have something to lose by doing so.
With Cynica I slept, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking;
I drank and danced all night with Empirica, and found her a virgin in the morning.
@William Howard Sears:
“has been“, not “could be” 😉
I read E. E Smith’s science fiction in the 1940s. He was big in the 1930s, and as the only known writer with a PhD, was known as ‘the Dean of Science Fiction’. He was actually a dough chemist, working for big bakeries, and knew a lot about the mathematics of doughs, which have unusual physical properties. He had interstellar and even intergalactic space ships in 1937 (‘Grey Lensman’), and pioneered many sf ideas which later filled mainstream sf.
While Its healthy to remain sceptical of the LTFR until proven, I suspect it may be genuine.
The reasons are simple.
1/In a scam you make every effort to come off as reputable, yet Rossi has a slightly dogey rep and is building a plant in greece of all places. A scam would pay off a reputable scientist with a love tropical islands and set up shop in switzerland.
2/Rossi has declared his motivation for doing this is to make money, not some crap about making the world a better place or saving the environment. Again the opposite of what a scam would do.
3/There is no way I can put my money on the line and invest. Clearly this shows the companies involved are confident and want to keep the profits for themselves.
4/The main controversy in the scientist surrounding LTFR is not whether or not it works, but whether Rossi ripped off someone else’s design!
>> Peter Brown says:
August 5, 2011 at 1:14 pm
WUWT and Mr Werme,
Wow, I am rather disappointed in you having this article up on WUWT. It is one
thing to point to e-cat and say wow this would be big, 🙂 if it were real. But the
writer gives it legitimacy it does not deserve. <<
Just because something is posted on WUWT doesn't give it legitimacy. It allows the topic to be critiqued in a way that a blog like RC never would allow. If you haven't noticed, most of the comments from WUWT regulars are skeptical of E-cat and point out numerous flaws in the claims. William Sears 4:20 PM comment is pretty-much a slam-dunk refutation.
E-cat provided an interesting discussion, as would an article about the Himalayas melting by 2035.
Lubos is right. This is a scam. When the deadline passes there will be all sorts of excuses.
The web continues to teach skepticicsm. What did Vernor Vinge call it “the web of a million lies”?
Complete waste of time. The time to take notice is when there’s a commercial device here. There won’t be.
This unlike Bussard’s Polywell which is founded on known physical priciples and doesn’t violate any of them although I’m not aware of a disproof of Rider’s objections to the feasibility being disproven at this time.
Re the Patterson Power Cell, that ABC-TV story was quite a while ago. What’s happened since? He had a patent, and others were interested. Did it not work as claimed?
Note Patterson did not say it was ‘fusion’ of any kind, cold, hot, or lukewarm.
/Mr Lynn
just a small point – regarding the forthcoming delivery date I’m reminded of the hype a few years back regarding the orbo – remember them? or before them the MEG so the fact that they have drawn a line in the temporal sand that is still on the future side of the collective delusion we call time does nothing to validate the claim until they deliver – Oct? I can wait…
Rick Werme,
Thanks for the response.
You seem to have the right mix of skepticism and open-mindedness.
I hope this turns out to be for real but “cold fusion” rings all the wrong bells to my jaded old scientist’s ears.
I will also keep an open mind.
Dude. Are you kidding me? 500ºC is 932ºF. Thot of a typical pressurized water reactor is around 610ºF. So, you would be able to produce power much much more efficiently than over 20% of US electricity production.
But, it’s a scam. It’s easy to get 12 kw of steam out of something that only has a few kw going in. It’s called stored energy. Open a valve on the outlet and lower the pressure above the saturated liquid and it will boil off at any rate you would like. His demos are just fooling people by releasing stored energy.
I have to ask: Why does Anthony disallow discussions of conspiracy theories like “chemtrails” yet allows pseudo-science cold fusion crap like this? I think this topic would be better placed in “Free Energy Times” or “Above Top Secret” or related nutball backwater of the internet.
@Lance
Gamma rad is not really a bad by-product. It is easily shielded. If this device can be scaled up, maybe we can use it to irradiate our food, which would make us all healthier and less likely to die of food poisoning.
Ian Rons,
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of this link, which goes into more detail then I have. I would also look at the spatial distribution of the copper-in-nickel sample as this may show signs of tampering. As far as the heat goes, Aleklett implies an open system. Good luck calculating a meaningful energy balance with that. Forget the power even if calculated as an average. There is too much slight of hand in an average as who knows what the raw data was?
This topic belongs in the trash with the other pseudo-science nonsense.
Rob,
Are you saying that the topic of CO2=CAGW also belongs in the trash? Because there is no more evidence that CO2 causes catastrophic AGW than there is that cold fusion has been demonstrated.
Actually, there is more evidence [flimsy as it is] for cold fusion than for CAGW. To be consistent, are you suggesting also trashing the pseudo-science of CAGW? Just wondering.☺
Let’s just say I’m a skeptic by nature. That’s why I follow this site. A couple of red flags…
1) If it’s too good to be true, it proprably isn’t true
2) An “unmentioned catalyst”. Sorry folks, “secret ingredients” are an extreme alarm bell.
If it was true, it would easily solve the energy crisis. Coal/nuclear/natgas-fired electricity generators all use steam from heated water to spin a turbine, connected to a dynamo/alternator/whatever. Not only could it replace central generators, but you could probably have one in your own home. With a decent UPS, you could go entirely off-grid. And electric-powered cars might make sense.
Like I said, too good to be true.
Quoting James Bowery from here (on May 8, 2011 at 9:54 pm) since he says it better than I can:
A good discussion BTW can be seen at:
http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/rossi-energy-catalyst-a-big-hoax-or-new-physics/
.
More entrenched Hot Fusion advocates?
Arash Saeidihaghi on April 18, 2011 at 1:32 pm cites a couple of articles that make the case by his estimation:
.
Take a look at this paper:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/OrianiRAenergeticc.pdf
Now a few questions for all you “oh so knowledgeable” types out there.
1. Do you know what an Alpha particle is?
2. Do you know what a track etch device is.
3. Do you have any IDEA what happens when you put THORIUM NITRATE on top of CR-39 in a thin layer for a day?
4. Do you know what “orientation” the tracks have for the ThNO3?
5. Do you know why Oriani analysed to find a “central origin” for the source.
6. Do you have any idea of the PREVIOUSLY UNOBSERVED NATURE of a 170,000 particle burst.
7. Would you know that ORIANI is SHARP ENOUGH to have his LAB surveyed for contamination. The swabs sent to a local friendly NUCLEAR PLANT for a fully sintillation count.
8. That ORIANI RAN BACKGROUND CHECKS?
9. That there IS no known nuclear source to create this effect.
10. That Oriani admits the effect is “probabalistic”?
That this represents a window into something SO IMPORTANT IT WILL REVOLUTIONIZE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF MATTER?
Really!!?? ‘Flimsy’?
SRI International (of Menlo Park, California) flimsy?
Below was extracted from a Presentation by Michael McKubre
Title: Director of the Energy Research Center, Principal Staff Scientist in the Materials Research Laboratory
SRI International, Menlo Park, California.
Presented at the APS meeting, Denver CO, March 5, 2007.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusion.pdf
Year 2000 Status
Q4: Nuclear ash correlated with the excess heat? Yes!
Q5: Uncorrelated nuclear products? Yes!
Compelling Evidence:
• 4He closely time and quantity correlated with excess heat
• 3H observed in some cases only. Not quantity correlated with excess heat ( ~ 3 – 4 O.M. down)
• Isotopics effects possibly at very low level
• Charged particles: , p+ possibly at even lower level
Results:
• Correlated heat and 4He.
• Unequivocal evidence of Tritium production.
.
In a star like our Sun, you don’t get iron forming, you get helium from hydrogen and a few more light elements. What’s more, at a mere 15million deg C at the core, even with the extremely high pressures present, the rate of fusion energy production isn’t enough in a cubic meter to power an LED flashlight. Hot fusion takes much higher temperatures which is why you don’t hear about 15 million deg C fusion projects.
The problem is the coulomb repulsion. Given a catalyst though, one can have the situation where the distance between two hydrogen nuclei less than what the pressure and thermal energy for the solar interior can deliver. You’ll note that iron has more protons inside its nucleus and hence more repulsion than does copper. There is no reason to think that an absence of other elements is some sort of proof that there is a problem with the whole deal and that it must be a fake.
Also, this is not a perpetual motion machine if significant fusion is going on.
It is very much boiling down to the fact that either it is a criminal fraud being perpetrated or it is the real thing. There isn’t a problem with the notion that ‘cold’ fusion (T< millions of deg. C) but rather whether the rate of the fusion reaction can be such that much more power is produced than is required to generate that power.
[Reply: iron has the atomic number 26. Nickel is 28 and copper is 29. The positive energy release comes from fusing with hydrogen. -Ric]
Rob says:
August 5, 2011 at 5:51 pm (Edit)
It took me a bit of effort to convince Anthony to let me post my January article. Even after carefully crafting the first paragraph to make clear that the topic would be controversial, Anthony still added his own disclaimer.
I wanted to write the first post to let WUWT readers know about something they might be talking about as soon as the mainstream media picked up the story. (Boy, that prediction flopped.) Reasons for this post included looking around beyond the demonstrations, trying to set reasonable expectations, and to let WUWT readers know about something they might be talking about as soon as the mainstream media picks up the story when the 1 MW reactor is installed. (Okay, that prediction will likely flop too unless we have a cold October.)
I won’t answer for Anthony why he allowed these posts but not chemtrail posts. The reason I wrote posts about Rossi’s device is that the data supporting LENR is stronger, more people have studied it with appropriate tools, some of them are quite respectable scientists, and if true, it will have a bigger impact on society.
If you don’t like it, it’s just two posts to ignore. Possibly a third in October. Sorry.
Smokey says:
“Are you saying that the topic of CO2=CAGW also belongs in the trash? Because there is no more evidence that CO2 causes catastrophic AGW than there is that cold fusion has been demonstrated.”
Smokey: Don’t go there. I made a simple post expressing my disappointment in Anthony’s allowing a cold fusion discussion on what I consider to be an otherwise respectable blog, and you have pigion-holed me as a warmist. Don’t do that. You don’t know me.
The fact is, cold fusion and all it’s variants have been thoroughly debunked. But hey, you don’t have to take my word for it. Just keep waiting for this magic machine to go commercial. I’m sure that will happen any day now.