I allowed Ric Werme to post a couple of entries on the E-Cat “power reactor” by Andrea Rossi in the past, mainly to spur debate on whether this idea had any merit at all. I shut down comments on the last E Cat thread because it was getting out of hand. I expressed my doubts then that this was a viable energy source.
I think even less of the invention now after reading this essay over at Luboš Motl The Reference Frame. Follow the Joules. Excerpt:
So what Andrea Rossi has achieved was to use the electricity from the power outlet to heat the water right beneath the boiling point at a 75 percent efficiency; something that a good housewife should be able to do in the kitchen at least twice a day. If Mr Rossi has a genuine reactor, a simple way to disprove this description of the details of his stupidity (or his naive magic) is heat the water/steam to 110 °C instead of 100.1 °C using the same gadget. 😉 This is not too much to ask for: typical steam generators in nuclear power plants are pressurized at 60-160 atmospheres and the temperature of water and steam is 220-315 °C.
Maybe the E-Cat might be useful to Starbucks, but as for net positive power generation, it doesn’t seem even remotely plausible. Maybe Mythbusters will take it on for entertainment.
It is my thinking that, if you ppl would ‘get out more’ and actually DO things ‘topics’ as you mention would not be such mysteries; it seems like it is only the adolescent, stuck in his mom’s basement in search of thrills and something outside themselves (validity for their existence?) that propels those subjects (for instance, the high school crowd that sourced the ‘movie’ about 9/**) …
So, to that end, get a ham license (practical application of EM theory and join some of us on-the-air!), get a degree in the physical sciences (learn physics, units of measure for force, the composition of the electron!), or at least spend an hour a day absorbing some of the scientific open coursework offered by MIT: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
Video learner?
MIT Physics lectures on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmJV8CHIqFc
.
Quasicrystals can’t possibly exist can they?
Just ask any Scientist.
That is why Dan Shechtman of the Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel was awarded the Nobel prize for Chemistry, it is because they do exist.
The one thing everyone needs today is an open mind, cautious yes but “open”.
Scammers have peculiar thought processes to be sure, so applying logic to unravel their motivations may be, illogical. It could simply be that a scammer intends to continue on enjoying the money and celebrity until their death, at which point proof and personal integrity no longer matters.
History can be a useful guide, read the details about something that actually happened in the 19th century …
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/keely/keely.htm
Anthony, thank you. And be a little bit more careful next time. Your blog and your reputation is to important as to give time and room for scammers.
What’s all this then?
All I saw in the video was an electric boiler fitted with a pair of thermocouples (in a naïve attempt to do calorimetry). The Gamma-Scout radiation meter and the hydrogen gas (which was NOT connected!) are purely misdirection – stagecraft, if you will.
His gadget is drawing as much grid power as 12 60-watt light bulbs to boil about 2 gallons of water an hour.
Move along now, there’s nothing here to see.
Just curious, are you familiar with what Rossi has gone through in the past 40 or so years?
.
Asmilwho says:
November 27, 2011 at 11:17 pm
If you wish, I call it an engineering issue, not a spherical cow issue. One of my first climate related web pages is more than half a defense of the Scientific Method. My gripe is three fold and I think I mentioned them:
1) Luboš is agonizing over steam at 100.1° from a non-demonstration shown an interested party. He should look at the Oct 6 demonstration (heat measured from water in, water out), and the Oct 28 demonstration (steam at 104.5°C).
2) He completely ignores the difficulty in measuring 0.1°C. This is obvious to engineers, I guess it’s a temperature domain Luboš doesn’t work in.
3) The steam production and condensation is far more important and measurement errors (mainly eyeballed steam and water) far exceed the thermometer accuracy.
Steve Krivit is sort of Rossi’s Richard Muller – both expressed interest in the researcher’s work, both got access to it, both went off and drew conclusions from incomplete data.
Frankly, I’m amazed that Luboš has embraced Krivit’s claims. It’s a pity Sir Arthur C Clarke is dead, he’d be amused to see a retired scientist (Anna V) saying there’s a slight chance Rossi has something there versus the young upstart staunchly defending the physics as understood in his lifetime. (And also Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson is a staunch supporter of Rossi’s claims.)
EJ says:
November 28, 2011 at 1:23 am
Not unexplained, see above. However, the only statement about it comes from Rossi, but so does the 470kW claim. Please read the comments above.
And the resistive heaters to get things running. Please read the comments above. The earlier modules needed some 600 watts, the one in the Oct 28 product were smaller, I don’t know what they needed. There’s some 100 modules in the unit, so figure 60 kW startup energy consumption. Figure factor of 2 margin to make sure the generator can handle the load (he really didn’t want the demonstration to fail), rent/borrow the next size up. Yeah, it would be nice if he had used a smaller unit, but the customer left happy and the sale made.
re Blade.
Thanks for the great Keely link.
There seems to be a big difference between Keely and Rossi though, in that Rossi makes products, and prototypes for the buyer to evaluate and test before buying.
While Keely only experimented perpetually.
Dont trust mainstream media on this, many powerful men want Rossi and his e-cat to “go away”.
Oh, and I have a link, sorry I didnt post it right away:
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3303682.ece
There is nothing wrong in covering interesting stories like this, if it is a scam it will be known and only through media interest can hoaxes be unveiled.
I too was disappointed with this post. I have been following this matter online for a year or so.and I am very sceptical of Mr Rossi’s claims, but Mr Rossi is not trying to scam money from investors. Quite the contrary he is investing his own money and trying to sell his technology to others. If it works they will buy and Mr Rossi will become rich. This is exactly how capitalism and science is supposed to work. Good luck to him.
And if I was him the only person who would have full knowledge of the process inside this private commercial device would be me and the file in my bank safe deposit box.
No Bjorn, it is a private commercial venture. If Mr Rossi is selling a product that doesn’t work the commercial world has it’s own method for ferreting out bad science. Mr Rossi put his own money in and he will go broke. If it works he will become rich. Capitalism is beautiful thing.
I want one for my Zamboni …
Some people seem to be under the impression that “cold” fusion is a myth or hoax.
Actually, it’s U.S. Patent 3,386,883 — 4 June 1968
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
If you believe that it doesn’t fuse nuclei, then you’ll be perfectly safe standing unprotected next to one while it’s operating, as hoax fusion throwing out imaginary neutrons will not harm you. Let me knows how that turns out.
What nobody has yet been able to achieve is “above break even” energy, i.e., you get net power – more comes out than you put in.
So the Farnsworth fusor, and similar devices, are useful only as neutron sources,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_source#Moderately-sized_devices
or as science projects to wow your teenage friends with.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2007/03/high_school_stu
If it is a scam, it worked already, because the people of ampenergo paid Rossi an undisclosed amount of $$$. see here.
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3179019.ece
If it is real, as a lot of seemingly honest people were led to believe, I’m looking forward for the next sunny day, when I’ll happily go for lunch in the closest Andrea Rossi Square, while lots of ITER people update their CVs.
In the meantime, to pump up a little suspense and tension into your emotional investments, a link from your neighbourly defkalion-men:
http://defkalion-energy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3939&sid=80b2d432c8c49091b27192dad15f7565#p3939
This is FUN! And only two days are left!
From the reports I’ve read from several sources, the output temperature of the steam was ~110 C for the October 28th test.
I think the information in this post is highly out of date; but there is a lot of “facts” flying around about this, which makes it a messy subject to try to disentangle and analyze.
Still, the “essay” mentioned in this post is by far the worst of any I’ve written, and not because of its slant.
“_Jim says: November 28, 2011 at 5:20 am
‘get out more’ and actually DO things ‘topics’ as you mention would not be such mysteries;”
No mystery to me. I just like to read things on dozens of topics to come to my own conclusions rather than having someone else do my thinking for me. Besides I’m married so that is already covered 🙂
I not only get out lots (love outdoor stuff), I do volunteer work and play chess960, study various subjects (curriki.org) and build things (some actually work).
Please try to become informed, over a 1000 scientific
papers have been published verifying the excess production
of heat in experiments similar to Adrea Rossi’s.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
This does not prove that the E_Cat really works,
but to limit the discussion to the E-Cat is to be very
uninformed.
Some say it is “Cold Fusion”, a nuclear reaction
like that seen in our sun, but at room temperature.
Others say it is a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, and finally
some of the greatest scientists of all have said that
Zero Point Energy may be the solution.
Right now Brian Josephson, a Nobel laureate in quantum
physics, says that not only is Zero Point Energy real
but the E-Cat is real.
If you do nothing else at least watch this video
by Dr. Brian Josephson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8eIhth8Iw8
One hundred years ago
Einstein discovered Zero Point Energy,
So Einstein certainly thought Zero Point Energy was real.
One hundred years ago scientists thought that there was no
energy in a vacuum. When temperatures were reduced close to Absolute
Zero -459.67 °F. it was thought that all the energy would disappear.
Einstein said, “No, there is always something never nothing,
empty space is an illusion”.
His answer was the simple equation that at absolute zero
Energy E = hf/2; h – a constant (Plank’s constant) and f – frequency.
Zero Point Energy and Einstein’s discovery, see text link at end
Richard Feynman a Nobel Laureate, a quantum physicist,
one of the ten greatest scientists
of the last century,
said not only is Zero Point Energy Real, but it has 10^80
times as much energy density as there is in the atom.
So Richard Feynman certainly thought Zero Point Energy was real.
Zero Point Energy Video – click on the highlighted link:
http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/31796-science-of-the-impossible-zero-point-energy-video.htm
So what this is saying is that
this energy is all around us, it is infinitely more powerful
than anything we have ever imagined and we do not have to dig deeper
and deeper into the earth, we do not have to go to the bottom
of the ocean or thousands miles into space. No, right in everyone’s
home or car or wherever they may be, the energy is there and it is enormous
and relatively free.
Therefore it would be nothing for the reaction in the E-Cat
power plant to tap into the Zero Point Energy field,
and pick up the necessary extra energy needed to invoke a nuclear reaction.
But at present this is just a theory, still, there are many other plausible
explanations for the extra-ordinary amount of heat being produced by the E-Cat,
so to dismiss the E-Cat outright, is to be very uninformed.
Even, if somehow Andrea Rossi proves to be a fraud, that does
not discount the hundreds of scientific labs around the world (MIT included),
which have combined to publish thousands of papers, where they have demonstrated
they are producing more heat than would be expected by the amount of electrical
current that they are inputting to start a reaction with simply hydrogen
and nickel or palladium etc..
More than 1,000 original scientific papers have been published.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
We may not know the deep physics behind this process of excess heat
production, but “Nature” has given us at least one way and probably many more
ways to produce clean, green energy that is at least one hundredth the cost
of oil and gas and there may be solutions that are one trillionth the cost of oil and gas.
!!! Please forward this to as many people as you can,
because this energy solution revolution can save the planet.
The only thing that can stop it is if nobody knows about it.
!!! Einstein discovered ZERO POINT ENERGY ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO
AND YET HARDLY ANYONE HAS HEARD OF IT. HAVE YOU HEARD OF
IT BEFORE.
!!! Please forward this to as many people as you can.
Additional information and links and videos:
Just this last week Brian Josephson, Nobel prize winner for physics in 1973,
highlights the UK energy department (DECC) interest in Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat
(letter)
Dear Andrea,
It appears that the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC),
unlike its US counterpart, has an open mind regarding your reactor,
http://www.focus.it/scienza/e-cat-and-cold-fusion-open-letter-to-andrea-rossi_C12.aspx
On the hand the various Defense Departments have said the following:
“legitimate experiments by reputable
researchers worldwide continue to demonstrate excess heat production“.
“Low energy nuclear reactions are showing some remarkable progress with respect to energy (excess heat)
While Department of Energy ignores the civilian applications of cold fusion,
military and DoD interest in cold fusion is strong.
Funding has come from at least the Naval Research Lab and DARPA,
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Assessment reports
from DoD agencies are optimistic and recommend further research.
reference link;
http://coldfusionnow.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/reviewing-dod-interest-in-cold-fusion/
interview with Andres Rossi and the new e-cat song from Tom and Doug
http://tomanddoug.com/podcasts/TDShow331.mp3
60 minutes – longer more in depth video on the history of “Cold Fusion”
Animation explanation of cold fusion –
It is important to know that Deuterium is
the chemical name for a certain type of water.
Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen (h2O), but normal
hydrogen, the simplest element on earth,
is composed of one proton in the
center or nucleus and one electron surrounding
it. Deuterium is still water, h2o
and so it is composed of hydrogen and oxygen
but the hydrogen is composed one proton and
one electron and also one neutron. It is
the neutron which makes the water slightly
different. All water contains this
special type of water. There is one Deuterium
molecule H20 (extra neutron) in water for every 6000 normal
water molecules H2O (no neutron only proton and electron).
long in depth discussion about the E-Cat with various Italian Scientists
Dean Stockwell 8 minute clip excerpted from longer video starts with MIT FUDGE
OF DATA and then shows various research showing unexplained source of heat.
Andrea Rossi Talks eCat To Mass State House
November 22, 2011 | Author: admin
http://www.e-catworld.com/
Zero Point Energy and Einstein’s discovery, text link at end.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
From John-X on November 28, 2011 at 9:14 am:
Which says:
Compare this to what is traditionally known and loved as cold fusion (Pons-Fleischmann type):
The Fusor is undoubtedly using hot fusion, the energy required for the fusion reactions is provided. Cold fusion, at least what they call that without definitive proof that any fusion is occurring, invariably involves a cheat, trying to achieve fusion without providing the needed energy for a fusion reaction, using “tricks” like packing palladium with hydrogen atoms so tightly that somehow the normal repulsive forces are overcome, or have a special catalyst where somehow a hydrogen atom nucleus (1 proton) can “slip into” a nickel nucleus (28 protons) to produce copper (29 protons) despite the incredible repulsive forces…
Thus the Fusor in no way should be thought of as “cold fusion.”
Dang, I may have missed things.
Excerpts from
http://bostonglobe.com/business/2011/11/28/hope-skepticism-for-cold-fusion/w7FgGyI9Zx432chxuD5BEL/story.html
Hope, skepticism for cold fusion
The Italian scientist who says he has developed the world’s first cold fusion reactor – a claim that has been hotly contested in scientific circles – visited the State House last week to explore the prospects for developing and manufacturing the device in Massachusetts.
Andrea Rossi made the trip at the invitation of the Senate’s minority leader, Bruce Tarr, a Republican from Gloucester, and met on Tuesday with representatives from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts.
Rossi, an engineer, has been trying to resurrect the idea. Last month, he conducted a test of a small cold fusion power plant in Bologna, Italy, for an unnamed customer, who he said was impressed enough to purchase the unit.
Rossi said he has received orders from 12 more customers.
Access to the demonstration by outside scientists and observers was severely restricted, which did little to allay the reservations of skeptics who say that room temperature nuclear fusion is a scientific impossibility.
Tarr, who is active in alternative energy legislation, said he invited Rossi to put the state in line for hosting any prospective development of cold fusion.
“My thought process was pretty simple: If it works, I want this technology to be developed and manufactured in Massachusetts,’’ Tarr said.
Robert Tamarin, dean of sciences at UMass Lowell, attended the meeting with Rossi.
“Knowing the reputation of cold fusion, I went in with a very healthy level of skepticism,’’ he said.
“It was a roomful of skeptical people. Senator Tarr was also skeptical, but if it does work, he wants Massachusetts to benefit. If it’s successful, no wants to have to say later that we walked away from it.’’
“Rossi said he was not ready for a full academic investigation of his technology because he doesn’t yet have full patent protection,’’ Tamarin said. “That’s consistent with it not working, but it’s also consistent with it working very well.’’
After the meeting, Rossi, who paid his own way to Massachusetts, was enthusiastic about a possible partnership with the state.
“Massachusetts has the density of technology and the customers we need,’’ he said. “Also, it does not have the bureaucracy that we have in Italy.’’
Rossi said he would also like to develop smaller household cold fusion power generators in Massachusetts.
“I’m already planning to come back soon,’’ he said. “We are all hoping to get something started in a matter of weeks, not months.’’
>>Blade
>>History can be a useful guide, read the details about something that
>>actually happened in the 19th century …
>> http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/keely/keely.htm
A nice story, of the fraudster Keely, and well worth reading.
It is interesting to note that the scientist sent to check out Keely, found him to be honest, and that Keely had discovered some new force. But this is only to be expected.
I think it was Randi who tested scientists, and the one thing that they could not detect, was fraud. They never suspected that someone would deliberately try to decieve them. But in the AGW fraud, we have a double imposibility – now scientists are having trouble believing that a fellow scientist is deliberately trying to defraud them. How will they ever uncover that one? Sorry, but it is down to the sceptics and the likes of James Randi to pull the fraudulent rug from under them.
.
The people behind “hot fusion” have bigger, nastier teeth, than the AGW team. We need to be positive that “hot fusion” is NOT actively suppressing LENR possibilities. We need to know that our current energy providers are NOT suppressing LENR possibilities. These are the things we need to know. How many can answer this without nagging doubt?? GK
From william wooten on November 28, 2011 at 11:33 am:
Do you understand what Zero Point Energy really is? It is a consequence of the physical laws, one of those things “that must exist.” When you remove all possible energy from a system, aka achieve Absolute Zero (which we can’t do), there must still be some remaining amount of energy.
This is akin to emptying out the contents of a Tupperware container, cleaning it to the plastic, declaring it empty… Then some physicist points out the container still contains air. Big whoop. You’re not going to be able to pull your lunch out of that air.
That energy has to be there, period, zero point energy is the energy that’s there when there’s no other energy. You’re not going to be able to extract that energy unless you can establish a gradient, a difference in potential energy where that energy can flow from a higher potential to a lower one. The boulder has rolled to the bottom of the hill, there’s no place lower that it can roll to. So now you have to find a hole you can drop the boulder into, maybe even dig one yourself. Can you find a state where there is less potential energy than having no potential energy available at all?
Ric,
You are a dupe. If the thing worked, Rossi could convincingly demonstrate it. After several alleged demos, it is still a mystery. Doesn’t that give you a clue?
Factoid you can impress your friends with (those that have an inkling with regard to what a Mega and a watt are)
The spent fuel pool at the OPPD nuclear plant just north of Omaha gives off 30 MW of heat,
continously, and it is all thrown away. It too is a low grade heat, and would be wonderful for heating homes, and a lot of them. Somewhere along the line it was decided that using nuclear anything to heat a home was a bad idea. I think the gas company came up with that theory.
Go figure.