At the beginning of the 90’s, cold fusion was one of the world’s favorite topics. At the time, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons had seemingly obtained excess heat in an electrolysis experiment made with heavy water on the surface of a palladium electrode. They were attributing this to a fusion reaction.
During the ensuing years, the “cold fusion” process couldn’t be confirmed by other research groups and got a shady aura, and the people engaged with the experiments have been charged of scams and pseudo-science.
For some of them this didn’t constitute an impediment. Such is the case of Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi, who have been secretly developing, for several years, a device called “E-cat” (Energy Catalyzer). The E-cat generates energy through the insertion of heated hydrogen in a lattice of nickel atoms which get transformed into copper, in the presence of proprietary (secret) additives.
The Italians claim their cold fusion device outputs more energy than it is fed with by heating the hydrogen. Until recently, these claims have not been accepted by the scientific community, and Rossi has been denied the right to an international patent. He was instead asked to allow the evaluation of the reactor by an independent group of scientists.
Recently, the evaluation of Rossi’s cold fusion reactor has been indeed verified by an independent group of scientists formed by Giuseppe Levi and Evelyn Foschi from the University of Bologna, Torbjörn Hartman, Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson and Lars Tegnér from the University of Uppsala, Sweden and Hanno Essén from the Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm. The group published an independent study whose results can be checked here.
Their conclusions show that even in the worst case scenarios, Rossi’s cold fusion reactor generates 10 times more energy than any other source currently exploited by the human kind. NASA is also studying the same approach with its Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR).
The numbers show the E-cat has a power density of 4.4 x 105 W/kg and an energy density of 5.1 x 107 Wh/kg. This means that it generates 10,000 more energy than gasoline and has 1,000 times its power density. Nevertheless, Rossi’s critics are still continuing to ask for a new investigation, this time performed in an independent laboratory, as they say the tests performed could have been intentionally flawed by the inventor in his own location.
If the experiment will prove itself true, humanity has discovered something better than a gold mine. NASA says we only need 1 percent of the nicked extracted worldwide each year to power our entire planet with energy at a quarter of the price of coal (now the cheapest).
So, in the wake of electric car domination (hopefully), we can hope there’s a new source of energy that can power them besides batteries and fuel cells, and that is the long-awaited cold fusion.
Rossi’s efforts to send a cold fusion thermal E-Cat to Sweden makes perfect sense as the Swedes use “district heat.” Here’s a link to my post on this http://atom-ecology.russgeorge.net/2013/06/21/district-heating/
russgeorge2 Nice Article.
BradArnold, I have seen you around a lot, so I may be preaching to the choir. I am deeply impressed with the improbability of LENR, so I am very sympathetic to those who doubt. But I am more impressed with the evidence. We are standing at the brink of a New Humanity. You and I get to witness history, perhaps the greatest invention in the history of the world.
RogerBird
Th improbability of LENR is like the improbably of being species of cows…
Yeong E Kim recently explaine that to P gluck, and ithis is much better that what I was feelin for long as initiated to secmiconductor QM :
http://www.lenr-forum.com/showthread.php?38-Theory-Kim-Zubarev-Theory-(Bose-Einstein-Condensate)&p=5081&viewfull=1#post5081
“I clearly recognized that the conventional nuclear scattering theory at positive energies cannot directly be applied to nuclear reactions involving deuterons bound in a metal, which is a negative-energy bound-state problem. Quantum scattering theory describing the Coulomb barrier problem is applicable to scattering experiments with nuclear beams.When they were being criticized at the APS meeting, I was frustrated that I could not rebuke public criticisms by my nuclear theory colleagues, since I did not have an appropriate alternative theory, even though I realized that their theoretical arguments are premature.”
of course you have to be physicist and experienced to solid state QM to appreciate that text, but it is much better formalized than my instinctive engineer heuristic “in lattice, funny things happen”
AlainCo RogerBird
Cowbirds showed up in N. Florida around 1959.
IggyDalrymple AlainCo RogerBird I have a birdcow sitting on my shoulder. LENR is improbable, but TRUE. The evidence says so.
AlainCo RogerBird
We called them cowbirds but officially they are called cattle egrets. When I left for college, there were no cowbirds. When I returned……millions of cowbirds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cattle_egret_spread.svg
AlainCo RogerBird
A few years later, the authorities were urging everyone to get Bird-Flew Shots.
IggyDalrymple AlainCo RogerBird It is good to know that a sense of humor does not decline with age. (:->)
RogerBirdYeah, that is the hitch: people (in error) use the the reasoning that since, by their “intuition,” LENR is “improbable,” it must be severely doubted. Here is a webpage full of the same type of (faulty) reasoning by “experts,” which in retrospect seems silly:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/cannon20120807
What rational people (like you) do is weigh the evidence, not just throw the baby out with the bathwater because it is all so improbable. What is really missing from this debate isn’t LENR or Rossi’s “improbability,” but the benefits to our society if LENR and Rossi are correct and legitimate. It makes me cry the children growing up with dirty water and no food in grinding poverty while those more fortunate cast aspersions on a silver-bullet energy technology based upon their faulty intuitions and heuristics. It is a sin.
BradArnold RogerBird BradArnold, you must have misunderstood me since I am a Rossi believer. I was probably venting my feelings of how difficult it is to believe something like this. I have required 1.5 years of following this story and 3 independent tests for me to believe it. That is how improbable it is. If I read a story that astronomers have determined the atmosphere of a planet of a near-by star, I believe it immediately. I don’t doubt it for 1.5 years and require 2 other astronomical teams to confirm it. I think that I was trying to be sympathetic to a doubter.
My only comment is that LENR is about 5 orders of magnitude times as energy dense, and if you take the amount of nickel and hydrogen on this planet (i.e hydrogen is the main fuel, not nickel), you get WAY more than 5 orders of magnitude of available energy. This isn’t a correct, but a rational addition – LENR has about the energy density of nuclear, which is 5 orders of magnitude, and nickel is only the matrix for hydrogen, which is the real fuel (i.e. the hydrogen disappears into low energy neutrons, while the nickel is simply trans mutated along with the surrounding hydrogen). BTW, God bless you (there is no other adequate “blessing”) for recognizing LENR – most people are blinded by the too-good-to-be-true nature of this clean, very very cheap, and super abundant energy technology.
http://oilprice.com/Finance/investing-and-trading-reports/Why-Are-the-Big-Financial-Institutions-Selling-Oil-BIG.html
JNO I am a Rossi believer. I think those graphs are wishful thinking. I don’t see squat in them.
Interesting. But, again, less reliable because of the statement “Rossi’s cold fusion reactor generates 10 times more energy than any other source currently exploited by the human kind”. Please allways give exact data.; e.g. a 1 GWatt power plant produces more power. Probably the author means power-per kg or power-per-m3?
@criticalsource The author should have said “any chemical source”. If you look around, in particular at the test paper, you can see the huge disparity between the E-Cat and gasoline. http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3913 There may be better sites.
What is happening around LENR/cold Fusion is not new. This report in only the 3rd from a 3rd company by a 3rd tester…
This is the most formal papers, but all 3 test let the testers play as he like with the reactor…fraud would be too risky for the companies, because tester can test what they want…
It works, I choose Occam razor.
There is a group of various companies on the ramp, big, startup, inventors… I have made an executive summary for the newcomer:
http://www.lenrnews.eu/lenr-summary-for-policy-makers/
there is another article on scientific evidences linked inside.
About why “normal science” reject it, one should read Thomas Kuhn.
http://fr.slideshare.net/sandhyajohnson/the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions-thomas-kuhn-book-summary#
and then my article on evidences (cited in the summary)
— AlainCo the techwatcher of lenr-forum.