If such levels of energy conversion and transmutation exist within the reactor, how is it no one has been inadvertently fried by hard radiation in performing similar experiments with nickel and hydrogen? Some unexplained deaths should have been reported by now, one would think. I asked that question elsewhere, and received no response.."
Heh. You don't know the half of it.
When I offered my bet to Crawdaddy, I suggested that he had not considered the implications of Rossi's process.
Assuming the e-Cat works as advertised, the claims of the patent application concerning energy transfer must be true: gamma radiation. 2 cm of shielding implies energy of (about) 100 KeV or less.
Now let us consider a clever little device. It consists of a small pressure vessel containing a stolen reactor capsule from an e-Cat and a resistive heater (with. of course, the heater connected directly to the capsule), and has been charged to 25 bars with hydrogen and then sealed. In the demo that has been discussed, 300 watts for 10 minutes was enough to initiate the Rossi-Focardi process. Since the device under consideration has no cooling, it must require less power. Arbitrarily, let's assume 200 watts. 200 watts for 10 minutes equals less than 35 watt-hours. This is well within the range of a laptop battery.
So. If this device is driven by a laptop battery and left somewhere crowded, let's say an airport terminal, a train station, a sports stadium during a game; and the location is selected so lots of people walk past it. What will be the consequences?
Hundreds or thousands of radiation casualties. And most of them won't even know it until days later.
To put it simply, the Rossi e-Cat will form the basis of the most cost-effective tool for terrorist weapons of mass destruction yet known. And by quite a margin.
Hence my condition in the proposed bet concerning Draconian government regulations. The e-Cat may be cheap by itself, but what will the required nuclear-weapons-level security procedures do the system economics?
The energy levels he is talking about are on the order of magnitude of converting rest mass directly to energy. Elsewhere, the claim was that 30,000 tonnes of energy equivalent (from crude oil) could be had from 58 grams of nickel. This is 1.26x10^15J. Fusion cannot do this.
You're not the first to wonder. From Rossi's site, contributed by Tony
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=473&cpage=5#comment-34517
"1 tonne of crude oil (6.841 barrels) is 42 GJ (Wikipedia)
That means 58gNi transformation is the equivalent of 963/42 or 22.93 tonne or 156.8 barrels of oil.
The patent stated 30,000 tonne of mineral oil."
Rossi's response was notable for the deafening quality of its silence.
You might want to check the math yourself.