Merged Cold Fusion Claims

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ben m said:
(Because it's nonsense. They're making it up and they're not doing it very well. Herb Kroemer said this once about the Jan Henrik Schoen case: it's hard to lie about physics. Physics is very tightly constrained, and anything you make up is unlikely to be consistent with *itself*.)
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Right on.

However, although I agree with your conclusion, I'm afraid you need to rethink your argument, at least in terms of consistency with Rossi's claims.

ben m said:
Not even that. You see, neutron capture on 58Ni doesn't make Cu, it makes radioactive 59Ni. So "10% of the 58Ni disappeared" would mean that your brick of nickel is now 0.1x0.68 = 6.8% 59Ni, i.e. it's hideously radioactive. (0.7 millicuries per gram.)

The actual claim must be that 10% of the 58Ni disappeared AND 99.9999 ... (etc.) % of the 59Ni disappeared as well. Huh. Lucky coincidence there. Where did the 59Ni go? Capture another neutron to make 60Ni? No, because that would *increase* the amount of 60Ni---if Rossi reports an unchanged isotope composition, he means that the 60Ni also went down from 26% to 23.4%. Oh, wait, no, it went up from 26% to 33% (from 58->59->60) and THEN went down to 23.4%. Well, we can imagine that Nature chose the cross sections just right so that these are the numbers. So 9.6% of the total nickel went from 60 to 61. But 61 is only 1%, and needs to go down to 0.8%, so 61Ni must have exactly the right cross sections so that one process bumped it up from 1% to 9.6%, and another process bumped it down from 9.6 to 0.8. Keep on picking those cross sections---to eight or so digits of precision in the radioactive cases, I think---all the way up the chain, and that's what Rossi's "isotope composition stayed the same" claim actually means.
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I appreciate your running the numbers, but as far as Rossi's claims go, they are irrelevent. Your basic assumption about the transmutation process is off. Go read the patent application. Specifically, it claims

"by so bombarding a nickel atom by a hydrogen atom, to provide a large atomic mass loss copper atom to be transformed into energy, based on the Einstein' s equation, plus a beta decay energy of the radioactive copper atoms."

Neutron capture doesn't enter into it. In some cases Rossi claims 5 successive proton captures (which you've got to admit is pretty astounding), but no neutrons.

And oh my yes, it does open the door to other questions, but that's for another day. Rossi's claims are garbage, but they are often clever garbage, and sometimes they possess a chutzpah that rather takes my breath away.
 
WhatRoughBeast said:
Neutron capture doesn't enter into it. In some cases Rossi claims 5 successive proton captures (which you've got to admit is pretty astounding), but no neutrons.
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My mistake, I was thinking of the Widom-Larsen thing where they try to turn the protons into neutrons first. It doesn't make a difference for the isotope calculations; for this particular list of nuclides, proton capture followed by inverse-beta-decay gives the same progression as p+e -> n followed by neutron capture.
 
BenBurch said:
Meanwhile, Polywell development is proceeding, and that already fuses hydrogen. If they ever get it above a few mW output, there might start being some applications for it.
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Sorry if I misread you, but do you mean a few mW above the input ?

For example 1kW input, 1kW+a few mW output ?
 
Aepervius said:
Sorry if I misread you, but do you mean a few mW above the input ?

For example 1kW input, 1kW+a few mW output ?
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No, a few mW total fusion output. Yes, that is small, but a large amount above conventional Farnsworth-type fusors. Bussard thought he was a few prototype steps away from breakeven, however, and subsequent work hasn't made him a liar yet.
 
I don't know, this is a real mystery. The conspiracy theory is about as far out as the proposed physics. At the very least professors Focardi and Levi and stremmenos from the University of Bologna would have to be involved. The other engineers and scientists that participated in the demonstrations were either duped or involved in the fraud. The people behind Defkalion Green Technologies would have to be crooks, and they all seem to have good reputations. They also claim to have the final production model in their possession and it works great. Pretty large group of crooks to put together and control.
 
Pretty large group of crooks to put together and control.
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That would assume that they understand what Rossi is saying and would care to correct a crank. Many scientists don't want to waste their time debunking cranks. It can be a full time job to debunk. Who knows, maybe they get grant money to do real work or keep their lab together in a recession.
 
unclep2k said:
The other engineers and scientists that participated in the demonstrations were either duped or involved in the fraud.
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Given that most of this thread consists of people pointing out the various obvious ways people could have been duped here, that's really not much of a stretch.

The people behind Defkalion Green Technologies would have to be crooks, and they all seem to have good reputations.
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Do they? Who are they? In fact, does Defkalion even exist? Their entire internet presence is a single page with no useful information, there appears to be no information on them provided by either them or Rossi, and they already seem to be involved in some rather dodgy practices - they're avoiding regulation by pretending that the power plant they're supposedly building is not actually power a plant because they just make heat and someone else deals with the power. Then there's this from Wiki:
Rossi says he will not be paid by Defkalion until the installation is delivered and works.
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Rossi has commissioned something to be built, but he's the one that gets paid? Huh?

See also the exchange starting here for some investigation others have done into Defkalion and Leonardo, another company Rossi is supposedly associated with that appears to have very little real world presence.

They also claim to have the final production model in their possession and it works great.
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And again, most of the thread consists of people pointing out that there is no evidence it actually works at all. Sure, they claim to have a final model and claim that it works great, but claims without evidence are worthless.

Pretty large group of crooks to put together and control.
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No, not really. There only appear to be a couple of crooks - Rossi, Focardi, and whoever runs Defkalion (Symeon Tsalikoglou and Andreas Meintanis are the only names I've found, although the latter may just own the website). Not exactly a huge group. Steorn involved far more, and apparently managed to make a lot more money off people than Rossi has, despite being such an obvious scam. Hell, Defkalion wouldn't necessarily need to be involved at all, it could be a perfectly legitimate company that has been conned by Rossi along with everyone else. A perfectly legitimate company that dodges regulators and gets involved in rather ironic lawsuits about trademark infringement before it's even done anything. Hmm. And even Rossi and Focardi aren't necessarily crooks at all, they could still just be deluded incompetents who genuinely think they have something, although that keeps seeming less and less likely.
 
Cuddles said:
Hell, Defkalion wouldn't necessarily need to be involved at all, it could be a perfectly legitimate company that has been conned by Rossi along with everyone else.
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This is similar to the case with Blacklight Power. They've announced deals with various real small-scale energy companies several times. The companies were all real, but nothing ever seems to come out of the arrangements.

It seems that, when energy prices start going up, some companies will take a chance on some "new technologies" that promise to lower their costs. Sometimes, there are conmen who use this to scam these companies. This should not be surprising to anyone.
 
I'm not sure one way or another on Rossi. Too much is not known.The whole lenr thing is a riddle too. You have very good scientists on both sides of the issue. Go to one scientific blog and all the brain power is saying there is overwhelming evidence for low energy nuclear reactions. No doubt at all. Then you come here and some very bright people argue it's absolutely impossible.
 
Sorry guys. You may be on the wrong side of this issue. Maybe your educations got in the way.
 
As you can see, creating hype and doing demonstrations
does have some value in itself. There are already
people who are paying money even without independent verification.
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Private demonstrations conducted in 2008 (over 2 years ago) where the apparatus was partially set up by the investors' technical people... if you actually read the article.
 
Crawdaddy said:
Private demonstrations conducted in 2008 (over 2 years ago) where the apparatus was partially set up by the investors' technical people... if you actually read the article.
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We did have a group of scientists here that understood exactly what was going on, and we helped actually set up the demonstrations.

Obviously we still don’t understand what’s going on inside, but he has something, and we believe that.
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Yes, that would be their technical people who "understood exactly what was going on", but who still "don’t understand what’s going on inside".


Oh, and:

You know, just because we’ve known Andrea for almost 15 years, we know what his capabilities are, and I knew he had been working on this, and one of the scientists that we had engaged had been working in this area, LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions), for 20 years. So they were real believers, and viewing all of this and just describing the science of it, they believed he did have something.
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...apparently they already believed in "LENR". So basically you have another group of believers who believe in this enough to...


Have you searched new funding?

Cassarino: Absolutely, we are in current conversations with some very large companies here in the US and South America, some investment companies,
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...try to get new investors.
 
Cuddles said:
Hell, Defkalion wouldn't necessarily need to be involved at all, it could be a perfectly legitimate company that has been conned by Rossi along with everyone else. A perfectly legitimate company that dodges regulators and gets involved in rather ironic lawsuits about trademark infringement before it's even done anything. Hmm. And even Rossi and Focardi aren't necessarily crooks at all, they could still just be deluded incompetents who genuinely think they have something, although that keeps seeming less and less likely.
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Rossi implies an association with a company called Leonardo Technologies, a genuine company involved in legitimate alternative energy systems, though his claim that one of the company's staff, Richard Noceti, in on the board of Rossi's fake "journal". In reality this is untrue; neither Leonard nor Noceti have any connection to Rossi.
 
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