Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
I bet the only thing you can actually *buy* at this point is shares in some enterprise the inventor is associated with. What do you want to bet?
Unfortunately, and wrongly, unlikely.
It is throttled in the US Patent Office,
and by key powerful ancient physicists clinging to their
last century physics. Similar to fossilized Lord Kelvin
giving his talk at Kodak, there claiming that atoms
don’t exist.
A Mr. “Ponzi” was a notable Italian inventor, too.
The greenies will not like a cheap source of energy if this is proven verifiable...
I would say a true test would be for this thing to pump it’s own water and split it for fuel... Plus producing excess energy to be fed into the grid...
The government and oil companies are gonna have to call out of retirement those folks that destroyed the 100MPG carburetor back in the 60’s.
Seriously, if everything in this article is true, it would completely destroy the status-quo, sending the worlds economy/cultures into absolute chaos. I think most world leaders prefer incremental change/improvement to the point that they will do anything necessary to keep this sort of thing from becoming a reality, no matter how real it may be.
The problem is energy companies and rich people make these things or people disappear.
Univ of Bologna was founded 923 years ago and may be the oldest university in the world. One of there retired esteemed professors who wrote over 800 papers was one of the first to say GW was total BS. Fermi was there, Copernicus, Dante, Thomas Aquinas. They have had a medical school for 841 years.
The point is I doubt these guys would risk their and the U of Bologna reputation on BS.
Compare that to Penn State, Univ of Virginia and other who perpetrated the GW fraud. Bologna has a lot better reputation then most Ivy League schools who train our elite gangsters and banksters.
It’s starting to look like God threw up his hands and said, “Well, let’s change the direction of things.”
Hold on. The claim is that they have “fused” hydrogen and nickel to form copper. Nickel (58) is the most stable isotope. Adding a proton would give you Copper (59), which is unstable and decomposes by a series of beta decays (emission of a neutron).
If no neutron emission is detected, then only stable isotopes of copper would have been produced. This means that the only nickel isotopes involved in the “fusion” would be 62 and 64, giving copper 63 and 65.
Unfortunately, these nickel isotopes have nuclear spin 0, hydrogen has nuclear spin 1/2 and copper 63 and copper 65 have nuclear spin 3/2. For this reaction to be occurring, a lot would have to be happening to two nickel isotopes with a total mole fraction of about .03.
Unlikely.
Deployment of commercial generation using this process is the real test of its viability. If they can generate 37 times the input energy, and do so in the labs of independent observers, then that’s pretty conclusive. Even if it doesn’t generate high enough temperatures for electric power, if the units can be made inexpensively enough they can be used for heating and hot water production in hotels and apartment buildings.
So Al Gore would need, what--about 50 of these to power his compound, Rancho del Megajoule...?
So, they’ve run it for “several hours” at a time, and it produces 1kw of output per 5L. Let’s be generous and say that “several” is 5, so we get an even 1kWh/L. That’s 3.6MJ/l. Gasoline has an energy density of about 35MJ/l. Just ignoring the energy that they input while they’re running it (which is where they’re getting this “gain” factor from), if this thing is starting out with even 1/10th the *chemical* energy of gasoline, that explains everything.
Their nuclear reaction proposal makes no sense for several reasons. Esp. since they’re using normal nickel, since adding a proton to Ni-58 means you get radioactive Cu-59, which distinctly isn’t happening. Their shielding explanation makes no sense either, since while lead will block all alpha, and most beta, it won’t with gamma or neutrons. Copper is an exceedingly common contaminant by the way — it’s in the wires they’re using, the tubing, it’ll be found as an impurity in the nickel, and you find copper dissolved as a contaminant in tap water (due to copper piping). Finding copper means absolutely nothing.
Want to know what’s most likely actually happening here? Their “treatment” process for the nickel is most likely making it reactive in some way or another. For example, if their “treatment” process involves electricity and water, they’re probably loading it up with hydrogen (making nickel hydride), which is being released as they heat the nickel and either burning or catalytically decomposing. This would also explain the explosion they reported — if they outgas hydrogen too fast and it accumulates rather than steadily burning, you’ll get an explosion when it does ignite.
Nothing to see here.
Oh, and if you want hope for an economical fusion power plant, your best place to look isn’t random quacks with aluminum foil “reactors”. It’s HiPER (the HIgh Power laser Energy Research facility). It’s an ICF approach (Interial Confinement — I.e., “it takes time for things to accelerate, aka, explode, and matter can still fuse during that time” — I.e., “compress a fusion target enough with lasers, fast enough, and it’ll fuse”. However, unlike NIF (the National Ignition Facility), they’re not driving the fusion solely by the laser compression pulse (which requires a ton of energy and super-expensive lasers). Instead, they have a weaker pulse (which “only” compresses the pellet to 30 times the density of lead, instead of 100x), but then have a second “heating” pulse to superheat the high-density target as well, significantly increasing its fusion rate.
HiPER is, of course, a demo plant, not a power plant. It’s not designed for A) rapid reloading/refiring, B) capturing the heat output for power generation, and C) continuous operation (for example, durable breeder shielding). But these are simpler, more traditional engineering challenges. The key is that HiPER is predicted to produce a 100-fold fusion gain at a construction cost of $1B, using known, conventional physics. That’s really critical, because that’s easily a high enough gain to overcome system losses, and for a fusion demo plant, that’s a really down to earth budget.
The big physics unknown for HiPER to test, and the reason we can’t just start building fusion power plants based on the design now, is how effective the heating pulse will be when directed at a target with those densities. We know how normal density matter heats from ultra-short laser pulses, but not something 30 times the density of lead. The whole system and process needs to be well quantified before you can start commercializing it.
Old School Science would say the final proof would be replicable results.
It would indeed change the rules of the game.
As one commented upwards, it looks like God himself has had it, and decided to make an end to the actual state of things...
it looks like a broken leg...
bflr
