One hundred years ago the sun’s source of energy was a complete mystery. The famous professor Svante Arrhenius is said to have asserted that the sun’s energy output could not be due to combustion and that there was no other explanation. Today our knowledge of physics allows us to explain why the sun can radiate energy for millions of years – hydrogen is transformed to helium. Regarding Rossi’s ”energy catalyzer” there are assertions and facts. If we combine these assertions and facts there is no known physics that can explain the amount of energy released the way the experiment is presented. It is asserted that nickel is transformed into copper and if so the energy can be released, but a transformation requires that the atomic nucleus in nickel is transformed into the atomic nucleus of copper. This transformation can be performed in a physics laboratory and is nothing remarkable. We ourselves have done similar reactions for many years and we know the conditions required. To use a hydrogen nucleus to transform nickel into copper requires a particle accelerator that can give the hydrogen nucleus energy sufficient to approach a nickel nucleus close enough for absorption. Putting nickel and hydrogen in a tube under pressure as described by Rossi does not create the conditions required for this nuclear reaction.
We know from Einstein’s equation that mass can be transformed into energy and if we compare the combined mass of a nickel nucleus and a hydrogen nucleus then we see that it is greater than that of copper. The energy that this difference in mass represents could explain the energy released in Rossi’s catalyzer. The only thing we know with certainty is that there must be a physical explanation for the catalyzer’s energy output. One hundred years ago it was possible to state that the sun is radiating more energy than could, at that time, be explained. Despite their ignorance of nuclear physics the scientists of that time could, nevertheless, make measurements to support that statement. As scientists we are naturally frustrated that we are not allowed to know all the details of Rossi’s experiment. Validation of a scientific discovery requires that an experimental phenomenon be reproducible by others when they are told how to perform the experiment. Verification and explanation are the next two important steps that must now be taken.
The term “cold fusion” spread like wildfire around the world in 1989 when researchers Pond and Fleischmann reported from Utah that an experiment using heavy water (that contains deuterium) and palladium released more energy than had been input. They also reported that they had measured increased neutron activity due to the phenomenon. Researchers around the world attempted to reproduce the experiment without success. At that time I worked in Studsvik outside Nyköping and in my experiments measuring delayed neutrons I used a very sensitive neutron detector. In our attempt to observe cold fusion our group was examining the effect of forcing deuterium into palladium, a metal that has the ability to absorb hydrogen gas. Since Pons and Fleischmann have reported the formation of neutrons we constructed an experimental apparatus in the centre of a very sensitive neutron detector. It took several hectic days of work to construct the apparatus and then, at around 6 PM, we were ready to begin the experiment. At first the neutron detector registered the low level of background neutron flux that always exists. We then gradually increased the amount of hydrogen in our palladium sample and, after about an hour, we noted that the neutron flux was increasing and this continued for about 6 hours. After midnight there was no further increase and by dawn the neutron flux declined. We had apparently seen an increased neutron flux but the question was whether this was from fusion of heavy hydrogen (deuterium) nuclei. The following day we could not reproduce the experiment. What had caused the increased neutron flux of our first experimental attempt?
Neutrons are formed when cosmic rays collide with the Earth’s atmosphere but the atmosphere also absorbs neutrons so the volume of air between us and the stars determines how great is the neutron flux that reaches us. If we are under an atmospheric high pressure system (i.e. there is increased air between us and the stars) then the neutron flux is lower than if we are under a low pressure system. When we reviewed the air pressure during our first experimental attempt we saw that, by coincidence, a deep low pressure system had happened to pass over us so that the increased neutron flux we observed could be explained as increased background radiation. The neutron detector had functioned as a barometer, but I must confess that that those first hours of the experiment were very exciting!
My experience above leads me to point out once again that Rossi’s experiment must be reproduced by other independent researchers and that, ultimately, a physical explanation must exist.
Fredrik Stal
May 16, 2011
The exciting life of a scientist! You probably have lots more interesting stories like this one.
There is a 60-minutes clip about “cold fusion” and at one point (at 6:10 goo.gl/iVg8S) they talk about effects that obviously could be accountable for due to weather. But they never mention weather. Instead they talk about coincidences in the preparation of the palladium.
Did you reproduce the function of the “neutron detector barometer” to verify that this was actually what happened?
Did you measure temperatures or just neutrons?
Cheers
aleklett
May 18, 2011
We didn’t reproduced the experiment with a new wether system passing. We mad a theoretikal model that could reporduce the neutron flus acording to the wether.
jouni valkonen
May 17, 2011
What if negatively charged hydrogen ion is associated with Nickel? Could it be possible that Nickel captures the hydrogen ion like an electron into its electron orbital but as hydrogen ion is about one thousand times heavier than regular electron it will quickly spiral close to nickel nucleus. Thus penetrating the Coulomb barrier. This way hydrogen ions would behave like muons in muon catalyzed fusion.
Can this idea be refuted theoretically? If not then this would imply that Ni-H fusion does not require new physics and Rossi’s secret catalysis would just ionize the molecular hydrogen.
(This is not wholy my idea but i read from internet this kind of speculations)
Ed Pell
May 18, 2011
Negatively charged hydrogen ion? You mean one proton and two electrons? What keeps the two electrons orbiting the one proton? It is not electrically neutral. I would think the coulomb repulsion would drive off one of the electrons.
Sven Lundblad
May 18, 2011
Hi,
How can negatively charged hydrogen ion be generated? The wikipedia site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_anion does not mention that. I’m not good at physics but to me it sounds too simple to work (but that is true for the whole e-cat too).
TPBurnett
May 18, 2011
I would point out that the sun still shined a hundred years ago even thought scientist could not explain why or reproduce the effect. Scientist and the U.S. Patent department have dropped the ball regarding this field of research. It is no wonder why Mr. Rossi has had to go with the direct market approach, with self financing and industrial secrets. Thank God that someone was in such a position.
Paul Fernhout
May 21, 2011
It’s interesting that you referenced historical issues about understanding if the sun, because there are alternative theories like the sun is a ball of nickel/iron and/or effected by an electric universe. We might find in the end that “hot fusion” is the thing that does not exist, as proven by decades of failure to duplicate it, and that cold fusion at the boundary of a mass of nickel is what powers the Sun, heats the Earth, and maybe heats the gas giants, too. That would be a big irony about the eCat discovery, to overturn all the dogma about hot fusion that has suppressed cold fusion work for so long. (See the book “Disciplined Minds” by an editor of Physics Today, Jeff Schmidt, for more on group think in the physics community and other parts of academia.)
A bigger issue though is that we need to rethink our socioeconomics from the perspective of abundance rather than scarcity. Robotics, cold fusion, 3D printing, AI, nanotech, networking and other innovations are all reducing the value of most paid human labor while makig it so there could be material abundance for all, but our economy is having trouble adapting to that idea. The eCat will only require us to think harder sooner about that issue — and human social problems seem much harder to solve than physical puzzles it seems.
Ivy Matt
May 25, 2011
“Hot fusion” (which might also be called “high-energy fusion”, or even “high-velocity fusion”) was first accomplished (by a human being) in 1932 and has been demonstrated many times since, including by high school students doing science fair projects. Achieving fusion alone is not the problem.
Whether mainstream science ultimately recognizes cold fusion as a real phenomenon or not, I see no reason to do away with what has already been learned about nuclear reactions that occur at high ion energies. Our understanding of them can probably always be improved, but there’s no good reason to doubt that they happen.
Paul Fernhout
May 26, 2011
Demonstrating an effect in a science fair project or even a hydrogen bomb, one which has a probable explanation of “hot fusion”, is one thing. Proving “hot fusion” really is what powers the sun, or could operate on a continuous basis, is another.
For a long time it was believed the sun was iron, until an alternative interpretation was found for spectroscopic data. Maybe we will find yet another alternative explanation, such as the spectroscopic results only show what is going on above the surface of the sun, not what is going on directly at the surface or inside?
That’s mostly what I meant by “hot fusion” ironically being the thing that does not exist. :-)
Sure, it seems hot fusion of some for exists based on H-bombs and probably sonoluminescence. Although, even for sonoluminescence, maybe things like the Casimir effect may prove to be an alternative explanation? And who really knows how H-bombs work?
In general, past military involvement with nuclear energy technology has really distorted priorities from a civilian point of view. Supposedly physicists saw how to make nuclear power safely using thorium in the 1940s. But precisely because it was safe and could not be used to make bombs, the military drove energy research in the direction of reactors that used uranium and plutonium instead. Only now are China and India forging ahead with thorium power (although I remain a big solar fan myself because it is more decentralized on the Earth).
Science is full of examples of things that were misinterpreted, or needed to be reinterpreted, with paradigms being overturned. It’s exciting when it happens, but there also is almost a religious resistance to overturning old dogmas — made worse by the fact that so many careers and salaries are tied to specific models those scientists have mastered being the dominant paradigm. Ultimately, we really need to rethink how science is funded (perhaps mostly by a basic income for everyone in the world rather than mostly by project specific grants to employ graduate students). See the writings of physicists like Freeman Dyson or David Goodstein for more ideas.
By the way, here is something by by me on the public policy implications issue that James Bowery raised May 5th in a comment to another article (“Rossi Energy Catalyst: A big hoax or new physics?”):
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
I’d post the link in a comment there but comments are now closed there. And in general, it also links to this notion of how you fund research that disagrees with the dominant socio-intellectual paradigm.
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
May 21, 2011
Pd-D cold fusion (Pons and Fleischmann type) doesn’t produce significant radiation; a very low neutron flux has been demonstrated, so low that it clearly involves a very minor branch or secondary reaction. What demonstrated that CF was, in fact, fusion by unknown mechanism was the confirmed finding that helium is being produced proportionate to the heat. So even though the experiments, probably because of extreme sensitivity to the exact structure of the palladium surface, were quite variable as to the heat produced, this very fact then demonstrates helium, because the measured helium correlates very well, at the expected value for deuterium -> helium; this was known by the mid-1990s. It’s a reproducible and reproduced experiment, see Storms, Status of cold fusion (2010), Naturwissenschaften.
The original report of neutrons was artifact. The recent reports are at levels vastly lower, but well above background. They tell us practically nothing about the mechanism for the main reaction. The biggest problem in the early replication failures for P-F’s results was the extreme difficulty of setting up the effect, it was far from simple. However, researchers did get much better at it, and by 2007 many groups were reporting consistent excess heat, in terms of finding *some,* but there was still great variation in the amount found. And then along comes Rossi, who pursued the Ni-H leads, with diligence, apparently. Others — most cold fusion researchers — were skeptical, for there are lots of theoretical mechanisms for D fusion that have been proposed, and, as you know, theory allowing Ni-H fusion is sparse.
It’s not going to be possible to really research this until the full operational details are available. Given what your friends have seen, though, it’s pretty unlikely to be fraud. As you know, it’s impossible to apply theory to “unknown mechanism,” that was the error made in 1989. You can’t calculate the fusion cross-section for something unknown.
Joshua Cude
May 22, 2011
> “because the measured helium correlates very well, at the expected value for deuterium -> helium; this was known by the mid-1990s. It’s a reproducible and reproduced experiment, see Storms, Status of cold fusion (2010), Naturwissenschaften.”
This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. A correlation between heat and helium is clearly an important and definitive experiment for cold fusion. And yet, in the referenced paper, the most recent peer-reviewed results used to demonstrate such a correlation come from a set of experiments by Miles in the early 90s. These were very crude experiments in which peaks were eyeballed as small, medium, and large, the small taken as equal to the detection limit (which seemed to change by orders of magnitude over the years). Even in the best of Miles results, the energy per helium varies by more than a factor of 3. Miles’ results were severely criticized by Jones in peer-reviewed literature. And although there was considerable back and forth on the results, and in Storms view (of course) Miles successfully defended his claims, that kind of disagreement and large variation simply cries out for new and better experiments. So what have we got since?
A very careful set of experiments looking for helium by Gozzi, which was published in peer-reviewed literature in 1998, concludes that the evidence for helium is not definitive.
The only results since Miles that Storms has deemed worthwhile to calculate energy correlation come from conference proceedings, and the most recent of those from year 2000. Nothing that Storms considers adequate quality in this critically important experiment has met the standard of peer review. And they’re not good enough to allow Miles results to be replaced; Storms still uses some of Miles results, one assumes because it improves the average. The error in the result, even if you accept Storms’ cherry-picked, dubious analysis is still 20%. On an experiment that removes the dependence on material quality. Heat, it is claimed, can be measured to mW, the helium, it is claimed, is orders of magnitude above the detection limit, and yet the errors are huge.
This is what passes for conclusive in the field of cold fusion. This is good enough that no measurements of helium-heat in the last decade entered Storms’ calculations.
An objective look at the heat/helium results does not provide even weak evidence for cold fusion.
Joshua Cude
May 22, 2011
>The original report of neutrons was artifact. The recent reports are at levels vastly lower, but well above background.
Presumably you are referring to the CR-39 results, but these have been observed by one group only, and the results have been challenged as to whether they are in fact above background, and/or caused by artifacts. A project led by Krivit with a number of groups involved, and pretentiously named the Galileo project, failed to confirm the CR-39 results.
So even these results, which in any case cannot explain the claimed heat, are far from convincing.
Cold fusion experiments simply never get past marginal, controversial, and dubious. There is not a single convincing experiment in cold fusion, period. And Rossi has not changed that picture at all.
Joshua Cude
May 22, 2011
So far, claimed evidence for excess heat in a Rossi apparatus has been observed directly only by people vetted by Rossi. First Levi, who was on Rossi’s editorial board, and the recipient of research funding from Rossi. Then Essen & Kallander who were on record as being sympathetic to the Rossi device. And lastly journalist/blogger Lewan, who was on record as being an uncritical Rossi groupie.
In experiments where more details are available to outsiders (mainly by photos or video), more contradictions and outright inaccuracies have been exposed. In the January experiment — the most public one so far — the claimed flow rate is not consistent with the pump in the video, the duration at 100C is 17 minutes according to the video of the screen, not 40 minutes as claimed; the average input power is 1 kW, but the brief reduction to 400 W is used to calculate the gain, even though there is obvious thermal mass in the apparatus.
Rossi is remarkably successful at choosing observers who do not ask any difficult questions, or request any embarrassing measurements. Such questions have been repeatedly pointed out in online forums from the first January experiment: check and *monitor* input flow rate; monitor the output flow rate; check dependence of steam temperature on input flow rate (in particular, why is it always pinned at the boiling point, when if it were dry, it would likely climb well above the bp). It seems impossible that the 3 Swedes could not have been familiar with these objections, and yet they made no attempt to resolve them.
Oddly, they measure the temperature every few seconds during the boiling phase, even though temperature isn’t expected to change during a 6-fold increase in power, but they don’t measure the flow rate of the output gas, which would actually change in proportion to the output power, thereby providing some evidence of the power increase. Instead they make one or two “visual” inspections of this far more critical metric.
So, the public has not seen any evidence that steam is dry, nor that the device is producing excess heat. Until critical observation is permitted by any interested party, there seems no point in trying to understand what they *claim* is happening.
And it is not necessary to reveal the contents of Rossi’s black box. Just allow critics — any critics — to measure in arbitrary detail the incoming and outgoing fluids and electrical power.
But the best evidence that the thing doesn’t produce excess power is the fact that it can’t power itself.
When a salesman comes to your door selling a new source of energy, and the first thing he asks is where to plug it in, be very suspicious.
Paul Fernhout
May 26, 2011
Joshua, You are right to be skeptical. I won’t be totally convinced until I hear the device has been replicated independently by reputable laboratories (or is for sale with happy customers) as is pointed out in the blog post. It is unfortunate that issues about our current socioeconomics is leading Rossi to hide details, something related to the patenting process that is all about creating “artificial scarcity”.
With that said, I am optimistic. The Swedes who investigated the effect seem pretty reputable, whether they were “sympathetic” or not. The demo was repeated another time without boiling water, IIRC, to address the valid concerns you raise. There is a lot of previous published evidence (admittedly sometimes of questionable quality) that cold fusion is a real effect published by many other researchers. Taken together, that is all promising.
Also, on your last point, a reason for the input power is supposedly to help control the reaction. If a salesperson comes to your door selling a new source of energy, maybe it is a good idea to ask if the thing has an “off” switch? :-) Supposedly the first devices were just loaded up with hydrogen and they heated themselves and there was no way to turn them off. So, that point, by itself, is not persuasive.
Is there still a chance this is a scam? I think it gets more unlikely every day, but yes, one can invent alternative explanations. If it was a scam, I think the most likely thing would be inductive heating caused from some sort of emitter nearby, either with magnetic inductance or more feasibly at a distance, microwave transmissions for heating. But with multiple public demos, I just think that unlikely. Still, until the devices have been independently tested in other labs where they just start with the device in a setup inaccessible to Rossi, that remains to me a possibility.
Ultimately, as in all science, the most definitive proof it works will be independent replication. But for that one needs all the details (like the catalyst that presumably keeps the hydrogen in a monatomic state?), or one needs to work from the sketch details we have and do a bit of science and engineering to fill in the gaps (like rediscover the catalyst).
If this is not a scam though, the biggest issue in science is generally that some effect exists, so I have little doubt others could duplicate it given enough time and resources. The biggest secret is generally that a secret exists. Once you know that, then it can become an area of engineering effort. The same was true of atomic weapons; once everyone knew they were possible, it was only a matter of time until they would be duplicated, whether the “secret” was stolen or not.
Anyway, I currently give it 50/50 chance of being real based on the history of the field and based on reports by scientists attending the demonstrations but limited by the lack of independent replication (so, yes, you may be right in the end it is a fraud). Others give it lower based on how they interpret Rossi’s past. Others give it higher based on their faith in past cold fusion research. But to me, even a 50% chance of being true is an enormous thing to think about.
I tend to interpret Rossi’s past related to his carbonaceous waste to oil conversion company more like he presents it — a guy trying to stand up against Big Oil profits and getting politically smacked down by politicians changing the rules after he succeeded, although coupled with the usual gotchas and SNAFUs about trying to do any new process on a large scale. One can google on Petroldragon and read a translation of the Italian Wikipedia page on that.
Rossi also was involved with another project, US DARPA funded, to convert waste heat to energy, which seems like a bit of a bridge to this one:
http://dodfuelcell.cecer.army.mil/library_items/Thermo%282004%29.pdf
A relevant section from that report from 2004 which could be seen as a parallel to what you suggest: “As part of a Department of Energy project titled, “Assessment of Efficiency Increases and Economics of Application of Thermoelectric Apparatus in Fossil Power Plants” (Task DE-AT01-98FE65489, TD No. 15), a small prototype TE Device manufactured by Dr. Andre Rossi was tested at the University of New Hampshire in 2000. This TE Device demonstrated significant power generation (100 watts continuous) and a thermal to electrical conversion efficiency of 16 percent. These results could not be duplicated during this effort.”
So, there was some failure to duplicate stuff there, related to a fire in a factory mentioned in the report, which one could interpret in multiple ways. One could see an obvious parallel to what might happen here, too, if it was a fraud. One could wonder about forces opposing his research. Or one could speculate on whether the factory fire was related to earlier cold fusion research, given Rossi has been quoted as saying that many of the early devices blew up? Or, sometimes a fire is just an accident that comes with the risk of working in new areas and using various manufacturing processes.
As someone who has made complex prototypes myself with robotics and software, I do know it is sometimes possible to get something to work once and then have a lot of trouble getting it work right again, because there may be 100s of parameters you need to get right, so you can easily get lost in a maze of those, even if you found a good set once.
So, one could read all that as Rossi having successive practice on doing scams. Or one could read all that as Rossi growing in engineering talent year after year, learning how to deal with technical hurdles, political roadblocks, environmental issues, and economic challenges, and finally triumphing. Admittedly, I’m sympathetic to the latter interpretation that he has triumphed, because I would like it to be true.
Again, I think you are right to be skeptical. As a rule of thumb, we generally should neither be so open minded our brains fall out or so closed minded we never grow. Still, I think there is a significant possibility this is for real, and is an example of someone who kept trying in an area for decades despite a lot of opposition, and someone who grew in ability along the way. Still, until the device is independently duplicated or at least independently evaluated, there is some small chance this could be an enormously well-orchestrated fraud. Either way, it would be impressive and a good story. :-)
The good news is, with progress on solar energy (e.g. Nanosolar) and wind power and other energy sources like geothermal or thorium reactors or even some other promising fusion devices, even if the eCat did not work out, there are lots of alternative energy solutions being developed to save us from fears about “Peak Oil”.
Joshua Cude
May 31, 2011
> You are right to be skeptical. I won’t be totally convinced until I hear the device has been replicated independently by reputable laboratories (or is for sale with happy customers) as is pointed out in the blog post.
I don’t think this is necessary. I think the claims he is making are sufficiently pronounced that an unambiguous, visual, and obvious demonstration could be designed that would require no experts to make and report measurements. For example, a completely self-contained device that could heat a 1000 L of ice-water to boiling would go a long way to such an end. If it could then boil the hot tub dry or to 1/2 its volume, it would be very difficult to dispute a new source of energy. (See the second picture in the “hot tub” article in Wikipedia for an example of how such a demo could be set up.)
> With that said, I am optimistic. The Swedes who investigated the effect seem pretty reputable, whether they were “sympathetic” or not.
Yes, but basing your confidence on a revolutionary result on the seeming reputation of 2 hand-picked Swedes is naive.
What’s more important is that even going by the measurements they report, there is no need to invoke excess energy. They claim the steam is dry, but they give no evidence for it. That makes a 6-fold difference in the claimed energy. Their “visual inspection” is simply not good enough, no matter their reputation. Especially when proof of dry steam is quite easy to provide.
> The demo was repeated another time without boiling water, IIRC, to address the valid concerns you raise.
Right. This one was done in private. They have not written it up, even on their own blog. All we have is 2nd hand reports given in interviews. That does not inspire confidence. The scattered information on the experiment also raises a number of questions:
1) If the power averaged above 15 kW in February, why in the previous two experiments in January and December did the steam temperature not exceed the boiling point? At the flow rates used, 15 kW would have heated the steam by many tens of degrees above boiling point, but in both experiments, the temperature was pinned to the boiling point.
2) The power output in February seems to vary between 15 kW and 20 kW, and briefly went as high as 130 kW. The control electronics simply supply resistive heat to the system, according to Rossi. How can 80 W thermal input control a system that is fluctuating by tens of kW? More importantly, why is the 80 W needed at all?
3) In the December experiment, a high flow rate from the tap is used to shut the reactor down. In the February experiment, a similarly high flow rate is used, but the system keeps going . The 1 L/s flow rate is curious in itself. If the temperature change is only 5C most of the time, they could reduce the flow rate by a factor of ten, without boiling the water, and get a much larger temperature difference. That would allow the possibility of increasing the flow rate to shut the reaction down, if necessary.
4) The 130 kW excursion is hard to understand. Rossi has on occasion mentioned an optimum operating temperature of about 400C. If this temperature provides the usual 15 – 20 kW, then 130 kW would require a temperature difference about 9 times higher; for water temperature of 30C say, that would correspond to 370*9 + 30 = 3360C, which is not plausible.
I don’t quite see how the 18-hour experiment can be treated as vindication anyway. Imagine a salesman comes to a town selling a device that converts lead into gold, but it has to be seeded with some gold to start with. The output is some molten mixture of the two, but the townspeople claim there is no more gold in the mixture than was put in, and no one seems to have the technology to separate them. A week later they come back and say it’s ok because back in their laboratory they produced pure gold. Would you buy their device from them based on that evidence?
> There is a lot of previous published evidence (admittedly sometimes of questionable quality) that cold fusion is a real effect published by many other researchers. Taken together, that is all promising.
But many of the advocates are saying that Rossi’s device is the long awaited LENR vindication, meaning all previous experiments give inferior evidence. If so, then finding insufficient evidence in Rossi’s demos automatically discounts previous less-compelling evidence.
> Also, on your last point, a reason for the input power is supposedly to help control the reaction. If a salesperson comes to your door selling a new source of energy, maybe it is a good idea to ask if the thing has an “off” switch? Supposedly the first devices were just loaded up with hydrogen and they heated themselves and there was no way to turn them off. So, that point, by itself, is not persuasive.
Yes, Rossi has claimed the input power is needed for safety reasons. But it only supplies heat. And the reactor itself supplies heat. So if it goes into a runaway condition, how would turning off less than 10% of the heat source stop it? It makes much more sense to use its own heat to sustain the reaction, and to control it with variable cooling, which could be provided by a battery powered solenoid valve.
But even if you accept Rossi’s claim that he needs input electricity for reasons he cannot divulge, then why doesn’t he use the output heat to generate the electricity? In the January demo, they claim an energy gain of 30. A heat engine operating between 100C and 20C could have an efficiency of 10% or so, which is plenty high enough to provide the needed input. And the waste heat can still be used to heat the water, so the ability to boil water is only compromised by the energy that is actually converted into electricity.
If the gain is too low to be practical to provide the input electricity with the output energy, as would be the case with Rossi’s latest promise of a gain of only 6, then I would argue the device will never be significantly more useful than a heat pump. Ground source heat pumps can already give a COP of about 5 to provide space and water heating. No one ever suggests heat pumps will revolutionize energy because they can’t in principle close the loop. Until Rossi’s device can, it’s just a slightly improved heat pump.
> Is there still a chance this is a scam? I think it gets more unlikely every day,
I’m amazed people think this. To me, his subsequent demonstrations are just as bad as his first one, and never answer the central objections being made. All of them (except the private one) fail to give evidence for excess heat, notwithstanding the claims of the experts. So after several equally bad demos, to me the probability of a scam gets more likely every day, not less likely.
> but yes, one can invent alternative explanations.
No invention is needed to explain the reported measurements.
> If it was a scam, I think the most likely thing would be inductive heating caused from some sort of emitter nearby, either with magnetic inductance or more feasibly at a distance, microwave transmissions for heating.
Not necessary. The scam is largely in getting people to believe that a mixture of steam and mist is pure steam. Some additional discrepancies in flow rate and input power can account for most of the rest. And no doubt, the reactor does produce some chemical heat. There is no need, based on the data available, to invoke exotic things like induction.
> Anyway, I currently give it 50/50 chance of being real based on the history of the field and based on reports by scientists attending the demonstrations but limited by the lack of independent replication (so, yes, you may be right in the end it is a fraud).
I suspect Rossi is counting on people like you to bet on those perceived odds.
But my point is not so much that Rossi is a fraud. Only that he has failed to give evidence for excess heat. And if the claims were true, a much more convincing demonstration is possible. Its absence suggests the effect is not real.
> Others give it lower based on how they interpret Rossi’s past.
This is probably enough for many observers. But, he could have a combination of Mother Theresa’s and Stephen Hawking’s past, and based on the evidence, I would still be skeptical.
> Others give it higher based on their faith in past cold fusion research. But to me, even a 50% chance of being true is an enormous thing to think about.
Yes. Even 1% is enormous to think about. In my view, the chances are orders of magnitude below that.
Bernhard
June 2, 2011
Dear Joshua.
Hopes are running high to find a “solution” out of peak oil. Have been for long time, we’ve been fooling ourselves and at this avoiding attempts for “true solutions”.
So if this is a scam, what would be the advantage they take out of this. Once scam uncovered they’d be “finished”. Or are they fooling themselves in desperately searching for some “solution”?
Joshua Cude
June 2, 2011
It’s not so easy to prove it’s a scam. Rossi can keep doing the same experiment, claiming setback after explosion, and keep stringing investors along. Randell Mills has been mining the H-Ni exotherms like this for 20 years, without a successful commercial product. Estimates of 60 M in investments have been reported. It’s because of the need for a solution to peak oil that suckers are born every minute.
James Bowery
June 2, 2011
JC writes: “It’s not so easy to prove it’s a scam. Rossi can keep doing the same experiment, claiming setback after explosion, and keep stringing investors along. Randell Mills has been mining the H-Ni exotherms like this for 20 years, without a successful commercial product.”
Boy is that reminiscent of just about every government technology development I can think of.
Well, except for the magnitude of the dollars poured down a hole.
Joshua Cude
June 2, 2011
You mean like NASA’s moon landing? Or the development of MRI imaging, the polio vaccine, or the eradication of smallpox? Or the development of the digital computer?
Most (or at least much) technological development starts in government funded universities with government research funds.
What examples are you thinking about?
James Bowery
June 2, 2011
The polio vaccine was privately funded. Smallpox was a matter of deployment, not development. The digital computer was invented, according to court precedent, by an agricultural school professor and his student in an attempt to simplify the mundane calculations required by class work, but which contributed little to actual learning. Even the first supercomputer was not funded by government, but was privately capitalized by lowly engineers and PTA members in the Minneapolis area. The government was just the primary customer once the Cyber 6600 was developed. The same is true for the Cray-1 that was an offshoot of the same team and financial resource.
You sure are doctrinaire.
While it is true that technologies developments that address imminent threats to the powers that be generally work — that is because they understand the power of incentives and use them when their own necks are on the line. That’s why the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project worked and even then, the only issue with those technologies was economics. All the scientific issues had been addressed. The powers that be don’t use their understanding of incentives when the real agenda of some “technology program” is special interest pandering — as it almost always is in civilian programs.
The political landscape is littered with botched “initiatives” in areas that were critical in the long term but not an imminent threat to the powers that be. Every one of those programs created a rent-seeking financial structure from Congress to the so-called “R&D” organizations that had but one incentive: Keep the money flowing as long as possible by giving excuses coupled with promises. And, yes, these structures do suppress real invention for the simplest and oldest of reasons: Protect the rice bowl.
Joshua Cude
June 2, 2011
> The polio vaccine was privately funded.
True. I got as far as National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, and assumed it was public.
> Smallpox was a matter of deployment, not development.
A bit of a quibble. It required public organization and funding and technical and medical proficiency.
> The digital computer was invented, according to court precedent, by an agricultural school professor and his student in an attempt to simplify the mundane calculations required by class work,
We’re talking about technical development, and I was thinking of ENIAC, which, according to wikipedia, “was the first electronic general-purpose computer. It combined, for the first time, the high speed of electronics with the ability to be programmed for many complex problems.”
I could have been more specific, but whatever ENIAC is, it represents a successful, government funded, technological development. Not 20 years of funding with no deliverables.
In any case, a large fraction, probably the majority, of R&D is publicly funded, and certainly the vast majority of Nobel prizes go to academics who are publicly funded. To suggest that just about every government technology development is similar to Mills’ Blacklight Power or Rossi’s ecat is a bit rich, especially when you have not yet given a single specific example.
James Bowery
June 2, 2011
If you don’t understand the difference between Research and Development then you’ll need to read this.
If you think the ENIAC was a great advance over the ABC then you need to read this.
If you think the government’s fusion program isn’t the con-game you describe, in spades, then you need to read this.
If you think I don’t know what I’m talking about with regards to the Shuttle program’s bad incentives, then you need to read not only my above-linked Congressional testimony, but this, this, this and this.
Now, I’ll admit, it is a bit of a stretch to say that fusion technology and space transportation are critical to an expanding technological civilization. I mean, after all, we all know that the “demographic transition” and Al Gore are going to save the planet even if NASA and the Tokamak program succeed in closing the space frontier and cut off viable energy technologies; and all those who differ should be kicked out of primary school fantasies and into public policy development.
We actually can be grateful for the scale and duration of the Tokamak and Shuttle programs as they are rather hard to toss down the memory hole compared to marvels like MCC, the HPCI, the Human Genome Project the Langley Flier…
Bernhard
May 27, 2011
Dear Paul. Your last break. I’d love to believe this. If it was possible to invent things to avoid a crash, still we had to adapt our behaviour concerning how we treat live, living things including ourselves in a way turning 180 degrees around? Can’t see any signs of this. The opposite – speed up in destruction of biosphere, including humans.
Sad and sorry to have to say this.
James Bowery
May 27, 2011
Intrade is a prediction market where people bet real money on predicting future events.
Please comment on my proposal to Intrade for a betting market for the Energy Catalyzer and get others to join in the debate there. Prediction markets are about the best we can do in terms of planning for future events given our lack of information.
Paul Fernhout
May 28, 2011
James, Prediction markets are very interesting thing to do in our society, I agree. But we also just have to think deeply collectively about trends, especially if they may entail moving beyond rationing. Fiat dollar wagered or won in prediction markets are something we may as a culture move beyond with cheap energy, for as Iain Banks writes, “Money is a sign of poverty.” Still, you use the tools you have now to build a better world hopefully — as long as the tools don’t stand in the way in the end…
Please see my comments here (originally posted on Andrea Rossi’s Journal site) on the public policy implications of the eCat if it leads to cheap energy:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
It also connects to Bernhard’s point on the need for zero emissions manufacturing and recycling and a respect for the rest of the biological world. (Bernhard, NIST has a program on that called Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing Program, btw.)
From the beginning of the part I sent to Andrea Rossi: “When Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made their original cold fusion announcement, I sent them a copy of the book “Midas World”. It is a collection of science-fiction short stories by Frederik Pohl on some of the socioeconomic implications of cheap fusion energy. It includes a funny satirical story called “The Midas Plague”, originally published in 1954. Wikipedia has a page on the book, which reads in part: “… in this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the ‘poor’ are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, so that the ‘rich’ can live lives of simplicity.” In that imaginary world, only the “rich” get to have small homes, eat plain food, and work a lot both to help other people and in their small gardens; the “poor” are condemned to living in mansions, eating vast amounts of fancy food, being entertained endlessly, and are not allowed to do meaningful work for others or themselves — all to make an old-fashioned scarcity-based economic model still work out in an age of cheap energy. :-)
In the last chapter of the book, there is a section quoted from the inventor’s diary on his bitter disappointment about how humankind used his invention. He had hoped cheap fusion power would liberate humanity for a life of contemplation, creativity, or even just loafing around (see also Bob Black’s essay “The Abolition of Work”). But instead that fictional world ended up with “a snowmobile in every driveway … and a dune buggy plowing up every patch of sand”.
The inventor said he was shut out by large corporations etc. from advocating positive ideas about the social issues relating to his invention of cheap fusion energy, and his aspirations for humankind’s social uplift. While he got a lot of money from the patents, the cheap energy soon made everyone rich in material terms, and so being financially obese did not mean much anymore. Fortunately, even though the inventor was pessimistic, humanity did expand into space habitats eventually in that fictional world (given room in the solar system for quadrillion of people in habitats built from asteroidal ore), and one could hope such a human proliferation (or even better robotics and AI) would bring some wider social diversity along with time for reflection by some individuals on a healthier relationship between consciousness and the universe.
I’d recommend reading that book just for some general insights into the social and economic side of cheap energy (and some laughs for stressful times). As it is a satirical novel, I’m not saying its predictions are going to be 100% true (I sure hope not), but it is a useful cautionary tale to read none-the-less. James P. Hogan’s hard sci-fi novel “Voyage From Yesteryear” is another good book on a similar topic, about the collision of a society rooted in scarcity assumptions with a society built around abundance assumptions and cheap energy.
In reality, there are many non-paying activities most people would like to do more of, things that take a lot of time. These are essentially voluntary things, like to be a good friend, to be a good neighbor, to be a good parent, to be a good caretaker for sick relatives, or to be an informed citizen. I hope material abundance through cheaper energy and other innovations could make it more possible for people to have time to do those essential humane tasks as well as they want to do them and are otherwise prevented from by the need to work just to get a basic subsistence income (even as meaningful productive work itself can be a very good thing in our lives, see E.F. Schumacher’s essay on “Buddhist Economics”). So, I can hope that we see a better future than the picture painted in Frederik Pohl’s “Midas World” (or from other directions in “The Pleasure Trap” or “Supernormal Stimuli”). James P. Hogan’s “Voyage From Yesteryear” is more optimistic. …”
James Bowery
May 28, 2011
Regardless of the scenario one believes will unfold in the event of a E-Cat economy, they have to be weighed against the scenarios one believes will unfold in a non-E-Cat economy. That weight is a number. It is finding that number I’m speaking of when I ask for assistance with getting Intrade to open a prediction market for E-Cat’s demonstrated success by the end of the year.
James Bowery
May 28, 2011
Aleklett, there is science to be done but the real science to be done is replication of existing experimental protocols that have been published in full. Guys like Rossi are not scientists. They become scientists when they publish the full experimental protocol.
If you know any grad students, they might try replicating this one:
Naturw 96(1):135-42 (2009)
Triple tracks in CR-39 as the result of Pd-D Co-deposition: evidence of energetic neutrons.
Pamela A Mosier-Boss, Stanislaw Szpak, Frank E Gordon and Lawrence P G Forsley
SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific, Code 7173, San Diego, CA, 92152, USA, pam.boss@navy.mil.
Paul Fernhout
May 28, 2011
“Guys like Rossi are not scientists.”
True. People like that are engineers and/or entrepreneurs.
Sergio Focardi is a (retired) scientist, but he has been presumably restricted by commercial issues both from access to data and maybe from talking about what he knows. It’s sad to see old scarcity paradigms getting in the way of really understanding abundant energy.
In general, more and more of academia seems compromised by financial pressures, a trend predicted by physicist David Goodstein in the 1990s here:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
“Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals.”
There is also a continual ping-pong between engineers noticing things about the world, and then scientists trying to make sense of them. Then when scientists have classified and clarified things, engineers can often make much better things, and maybe use them to discover even stranger things in practice, and so on.
It amazes me how often, in the mainstream media, “scientists” get the credit for improvements in our society’s technology when engineers (and entrepreneurs in private and public organizations) drive so much of that in practice. Still, since it is a ping-pong effect, the scientists make essential contributions to that too. But just not all of them.
I’d agree though that there are lots of experiments out there relate to cold fusion that people could try to replicate. And a better theoretical understanding could help us think about the life-cycle costs, as well as any risks of catastrophe from some rare failure mode.
I’m trying to remember the name of some professor at Princeton in the 1950s or so that wrote a paper related to cold-fusion-like ideas and excess heat…
Maybe experiments worth replicating go back decades? Probably, if this pans out, people will go back and reanalyze decades of statements and reports and find lots of stuff, as well as lots of anomalies that were just ignored.
From the Wikipedia page on Bruno Latour, a theorist in Science and Technology Studies: “In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy.”
James Bowery
May 28, 2011
It’s not peer review that makes valid science. It’s replication from published experimental protocols.
James Bowery
May 30, 2011
Speaking of peer-review, I’ve constructed a LENR bibliography limited to Journals accepted by Science Citation Index. This is for the benefit of those who require reputable peer reviewed journal articles.