Merged Cold Fusion Claims

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The rough rule of thumb for solar heating or roof insulation is one toaster per square yard (or meter, the numbers are close enough for job estimates either way) or about a kilowatt.
 
Meadmaker said:
I was really surprised to read that extremetech article.

Here's what I'm wondering. Those independent verifiers have names, and jobs, and presumably reputations. Who are these guys?

Are they part of a fraud scheme?

Have they been duped?

On the surface, this has the appearance of something that could be legit. Independent verification by a team of experts. It must be true, mustn't it?

The fortunate thing is that if it turns out to be true, we all reap the benefits of it even if we didn't believe it when we read about it. If he has really discovered something worthwhile here, we get cheap power and he becomes filthy rich. In some ways, that would be the boring case.

However, there's just a slim chance that maybe the world is not on the brink of an energy transformation just yet. If that's the case, I just have to wonder how he digs up these independent experts to verify the claims.
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usually they can't ask questions, touch anything or verify anything.
:)
 
jsfisher said:
I think you may be off on the sunlight power figures. I believe it is closer to 1 kW of power per square meter.


ETA: Oh, I think I see what you did. 137 mW/cm^2 is the correct figure for optical power reaching the Earth (unimpeded by atmosphere). cm^2 -> m^2 requires multiplying by 100*100. Looks like you multiplied by just 100. You should have been at 1.37 kW/m^2, then the atmosphere brings it down to about 1 to 1.1 kW.
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Yes, my apologies! Oddly, I also got the Watts to kiloWatts to MegaWatts conversion wrong, so my final number was a bit better, if still wrong (so 1 kiloWatt in sunshine would require 1000 sq meters of solar cells?). I kept thinking something was wrong in my calculations, but I had other things going on and I stopped thinking about it.

In any case, this is really discussing how many angels can dance on a pin. If one wants to claim impossible power coming from a implausible nuclear event that should, but doesn't generate radiation, then technical concerns as to photocell conversion are the least of one's problems (in fact, using the heat to make steam to drive a generator might be more efficient in theory).

I would be genuinely happy to discover that either of these miracle power sources really work. It would be a true revolution on this planet, and would eliminate many of our concerns related to fossil fuels or current day nuclear power. I would embrace it, and "eat all the crow" necessary! But I would not bet on it, particularly with my money.

As to academics "confirming" anything: remember just how many academics there are in the world, and that one can usually find a few that will support almost any idea. And notice that there were severe limitations in the published test as to what the academics could examine, and what they could not. As Randi points out: academics generally are not expecting someone to deliberately try to fool them; magicians are.
 
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Dancing David said:
usually they can't ask questions, touch anything or verify anything.
:)
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Rossi can. It seems that it was he who placed the magic isotope powder into the device, and removed it after the run. This has been criticised, reported in very poor translation thus.
We agree that what is reported is amazing. But we believe that it is surprising is that the authors and Elforsk are so naive that they uncritically swallow something that would set the entire nuclear physics on its head; in a gram of “fuel”, consisting mainly of nickel, the proportion of the isotope Ni-62 in the “fuel” through some type of nuclear processes have increased from 4 percent to 99 percent. And this without any radiation emitted, either during operation or in the resulting “ash”. An equally spectacular nuclear transformation must have been of a proportion of lithium in the fuel powder. This goes against all the accumulated nuclear physics knowledge collected over the last 100 years. But rather than rewrite the textbooks, we believe that you first have to thoroughly investigate if there are other, simpler explanations ... [Then the translation goes a bit wonky.] For apparently thinking Elforsk not seriously if researchers simply may have been deceived by an inventor proposals. The drastic isotope enrichments that should have been accomplished during the operation of the E-Cat can be quickly purchased from several different companies. The inventor Rossi has what we can understand of the report dealt with the fuel itself both in terms of replenishment and withdrawal.
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See http://www.e-catworld.com/2014/10/11/rossi-responds-to-swedish-professors-critical-of-e-cat-report/ The "simpler explanation" would be that Rossi "salted" the sample when removing it from the device. Or indeed inserted a pre-"salted" sample in the first place. It clearly was not emitting any radiation in spite of the transmutation that had allegedly occurred within it. For no precautions appropriate to the handling of radioactive material are reported, so far as I can see, as having been taken in the course of this procedure.
 
Didymus said:
The last few posts show a little confusion between two quite different devices and their associated claims.
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This issue isn't how they claim to be doing it, I just found it amusing that BLP seems to have seen Rossi's ridiculous claims to incredible poser densities, and pretty much just copied them. It's like they said to themselves, "Man, people are buying that? We've got to get in on this!"



Giordano said:
In any case, this is really discussing how many angels can dance on a pin. If one wants to claim impossible power coming from a implausible nuclear event that should, but doesn't generate radiation, then technical concerns as to photocell conversion are the least of one's problems (in fact, using the heat to make steam to drive a generator might be more efficient in theory).
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The point of these discussions is to point out that they're not just making one incredible claim, they're compounding it with other incredible claims, without even realizing that they're doing it. Now we not only have to accept an incredible advance in nuclear science and technology, we also have to accept incredible advances in the materials science behind solar cells, and probably a few others if we stopped to think about it.
 
It's always the same with this kind of thing though. If you make one incredible claim then other incredible things have to happen to make it work.
It's not just Rossi guilty of this.
 
Its almost sad to read the link in the OP.

They also claim to be going into production, with the first units expected to ship by the second half of October of this year, with mass production commencing by the end of 2011.
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Rossi seems to be a bit late with that target.

Rossi also says that they have had one reactor that has run continually for two years, providing heat for a factory. It reduced the electric bill by 90%.
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Wow, sounds ready to go. I wonder what the delay is?
 
What I cannot figure out is why he hasn't been given the titanium bracelet treatment yet?

This scheme has played out longer than I could ever have imagined.

This is exactly the same as the 100 mpg carburetor. Nobody is going to buy it to shut it up! People are going to buy it to get the 17 (20?) year head start a worldwide patent would give you.

Because the world really would have beaten a path to his door by now.
 
The Moog said:
Its almost sad to read the link in the OP.



Rossi seems to be a bit late with that target.



Wow, sounds ready to go. I wonder what the delay is?
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It just gets sadder as you read the thread, and watch as he wooshes past every deadline he's ever set, and yet, the TrooBleevers never let that phase them. Yes, this time when he said it would be ready in six months, he really meant it, and you skeptics will be eating crow for sure this time! Every. Single. Time.
 
Craig B said:
Does this Hot fusion claim sound more credible? I know it is in principle because fusion does indeed take place. But practicable? or is Lockheed doing a Rossi?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/15/lockheed-breakthrough-nuclear-fusion-energy
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The news report itself has an interesting omission - no mention of the technology being used for the fusion! But it looks like a tokomak in the image. The Lockheed Martin press release is Lockheed Martin Pursuing Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Concept
This looks plausible - once you have fusion working then shrinking the reactor should be a matter of engineering.
 
Craig B said:
Does this Hot fusion claim sound more credible? I know it is in principle because fusion does indeed take place. But practicable? or is Lockheed doing a Rossi?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/15/lockheed-breakthrough-nuclear-fusion-energy
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Well, it's fusion, so it might be hype. But there's nothing that leaps out as being fundamentally impossible. For comparison, here's a site with pictures of a Pressurized Water Reactor that produces on the order of 900 to 1,600 MW, so about 9-16 times what they describe, and while it's bigger than I would put "on the back of a truck", if you were to scale it to the 100MW they are claiming, it would be about that order of magnitude in size.

These guys are claiming a system "seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck". Define "large". Let's say 40 feet for sake of argument. That's 7x10x40 = 2800 cubic feet. At the power levels that Rossi and Blacklight are claims, 10MW per cubic foot, a similar sized reactor would produce 28 000 MW. So they're claiming a power density something on the order of 280 times this new hot fusion reactor, and probably a similar factor compared to traditional fission reactors.

If they really did have that kind of power, it would be obvious. You wouldn't need subtle and complex experiments that would be subject to slight errors swamping the data you hope to find. Your biggest problem would be to keep it from melting your lab!
 
The "10 years" part raises a red flag for me. No one plans that far in advance, that's the kind of number you give when you haven't worked out some major details yet.
 
phunk said:
The "10 years" part raises a red flag for me. No one plans that far in advance, that's the kind of number you give when you haven't worked out some major details yet.
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It would worry me if they claimed to already have one and still wanted ten years. But they haven't built it. Everything to date has been in simulations, with some experiments on the side. And they want 10 years for a production model, five years for a prototype. From the Aviation Weekly article:

“We would like to get to a prototype in five generations. If we can meet our plan of doing a design-build-test generation every year, that will put us at about five years, and we’ve already shown we can do that in the lab.” The prototype would demonstrate ignition conditions and the ability to run for upward of 10 sec. in a steady state after the injectors, which will be used to ignite the plasma, are turned off. “So it wouldn’t be at full power, like a working concept reactor, but basically just showing that all the physics works,” McGuire says.

An initial production version could follow five years after that.
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