Peak Spoilers

Peak Spoilers
December 4, 2011
tags: Energy Bulletin, Peak Oil
by Ruby Carat
Palms – so narrow and closed in – have been
poured over people’s limbs. But countless
worthless things keep crashing in, blunting their
cares. During their lifetimes they see such a
little part of life and then they are off:
short-lived, flying up and away like smoke,
totally persuaded by whatever each of them
happened to bump into while being driven
one way, another way, all over the place. And they
claim in vain that they have found the whole.
Like this, there is no way that people can see or
hear or consciously grasp the things I have to teach.
But as for you:
because you have come aside here, you will learn.
Mortal resourcefulness can manage no more.
Empedocles 450BC
translated by Peter Kingsley in Reality
When Robert Hirsch and his team came out with their report Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management [.pdf] in February 2005, it was clear that we were well past mitigation.
Peak Oil would hit without a backup plan.

From the February 2005 report The Peaking of World Oil Production
Personally, mitigation would mean doing more with less. For communities, banding together to create sustainable local economies with a small energy footprint was the task at hand.
And that’s still a good idea – as well as being careful and conscious stewards of our environment, treating wildlife, farm animals and all life with dignity, and learning to live with each other in peace – all things we must do, and do now, to successfully continue as a species.
But Peak Oilers have trouble looking past the gloom.
Antonio Turiel‘s No miracles in science: The story of the “energy catalyzer” on Energy Bulletin echoed uber-doomer Michael C. Ruppert‘s sentiment when we answered his Nine Critical Questions to Ask About Alternative Energy.
Mr. Turiel, a physicist working for a marine institute in Spain, felt that after “reading and studying in order to prepare [his] post” he had the capacity to judge the two-decades-long body of experimental science that is just now emerging as a technology, and validate the doom-and-gloomers continued interest in collapse with a C’est impossible decree: “there are no miracles in science”.
From personal experience, studying cold fusion for a year-and-a-half, ferociously, is not even enough to understand the subtleties that obfuscate understanding of this science.
His statement that “the promoters have never been able to demonstrate that nuclear reactions take place inside the device and not even that it can produce useful energy” reveals he needs another afternoon at it.
I myself was “overcome by a feeling of nuisance, of tedium, of waste of time” to quote Mr. Turiel, from his pontifications on conventional theories of nuclear reactions.
Conventional nuclear reactions are modeled completely by twentieth-century theories. They dictate that separate atoms can only join together under extreme conditions, such as under tremendous high-pressure and temperatures similar to that inside stars. In these environments, atoms may be forced together, strong-armed into overcoming the Coulomb barrier, the intense force that keeps the positively-charged protons at the nuclear center apart.
Last century’s theories of nuclear science also fully account for the workings of fission processes, like the kind occurring in dangerous radioactive fuels at today’s nuclear power plants, not to mention weapons of mass destruction. These technologies use chain reactions, in which neutrons released by atoms splitting apart cause more atoms to split apart, releasing more neutrons, and so on.
But is this it? Is that all you got?
Is there no other possible way that two atoms can interact on an intimate, nuclear level?
Nuclear is a word referring to the “particles” sitting at the center of the atom, as well as a description of the interactions of those particles. Of course I use the word particles out of habit, and out of convenience for communication. A proton is not so much a nuclear particle as a wave, if you’ve learned your quantum mechanics, and the wave may be a string of energy, if you are aware of string theory.
Condensed matter nuclear science describes the experimental evidence for the central portions of atoms interacting inside a material that is not a plasma, in particular “anomalies in metal deuterides and hydrides”.

Matter may actually be vibrating "strings" of energy too small to see. Preposterous?
Is that so hard to imagine? After dark energy, 10-dimensional space, parallel universes and faster-than-light particles?
Don’t worry. You don’t have to imagine it.
There are labs around the world that have been researching this phenomenon loosely described as “cold fusion” for over two decades, continuing to document excess heat well over chemical energy possibilities, and transmutations, whereby one element transforms into another.
And this year Andrea A. Rossi, an Italian inventor who has spent decades working in alternative energy introduced his breakthrough technology, generating a high amount of excess heat, on demand, by combining hydrogen and a powder made of the metal nickel.
The only surprise was that Mr. Rossi was a relative outsider in the cold fusion community. But Mr. Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer, or E-Cat, did not just appear spontaneously from nothing. There is a long history of research in Italy, and collaborations with scientists around the world.
Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment ENEA
Read Cold Fusion The History of Research in Italy 2009 [.pdf].
He is only the first. Courageous scientists like those in Japan, still hurting from poly-disasters, have been researching since Tadahiko Mizuno’s initial discoveries. China, India, Russia, Ukraine, Australia – just to name a few – have labs of intrepid individuals deserving of recognition who have labored long and without the benefit of coordinated funding or acknowledgement from “peer-reviewed” journals.
Only one Peak Oiler so far has publicly given this world-changing clean-energy technology a fair review, Tom Whipple of the Falls Church News-Press. He’s been writing about the issues surrounding Peak Oil for years, and has some of the best commentary and insight in the news.
Mr. Whipple’s piece The Peak Oil Crisis: Transitioning to Cold Fusion keeps an open mind, and takes the time to corroborate the E-Cat news with Dr. George Miley’s research.

University of Illinois Fusion Studies Laboratory
A Professor Emeritus of nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois, Dr. Miley is with the Fusion Studies Laboratory and has successfully reproduced the work of James Patterson, an early cold fusion technologist who developed the Patterson Cell. He spoke about his successes at the recent World Green Energy Symposium in Philadelphia, PA as part of Cold Fusion Energy, Inc.
Mr. Whipple was certainly not “”overcome by a feeling of nuisance, of tedium, of waste of time”. Realizing “We could be witnessing the early stages of one of the greatest scientific discoveries in human history”, he ends his article
“If the current experiments are repeatable and the technology is viable, cold fusion is likely to go viral very quickly with thousands of laboratories and corporations around the world rushing for a piece of the next Internet. The next year or so could tell us a lot about the course of civilization in coming decades.”
There’s plenty of eyeballs looking for doom. It’s easy to find.
I forgive Mr. Turiel, as I have been forgiven myself. My mistakes have been gently corrected by kind individuals who have helped me to understand my incorrect assumptions, inaccurate blunders, and misplaced conclusions, helping me to learn along the way.
Besides, you don’t have a right to be bothered unless you’ve spent two decades fashioning a revolution, and then been dismissed single-handedly as a “nuisance”.
Supporting Links
Thanks REG.
Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management by Robert Hirsch, Roger Bezdek, and Robert Wendling from Department of Energy February 2005
Antonio Turiel’s Crashoil blog
Institut de Ciencies del Mar Home
Colin Campbell: “We’ll be happier after oil” by Ruby Carat Cold Fusion Now November 9, 2010
Condensed Matter Nuclear Science Electronic Journal Home
Cold Fusion The History of Research in Italy 2009 from Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment ENEA .pdf
Reviewing DoD interest in cold fusion by Ruby Carat Cold Fusion Now November 25, 2011
Bryn Mawr Classical Review of Reality by Peter Kingsley reviewed by Gregory Shaw
Transcript of ABC-TV Good Morning America segment on James Patterson from Infinite Energy

http://coldfusionnow.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/peak-spoilers/

The Cold Fusion Ping List

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/coldfusion/index?tab=articles

-------------------------------------------------------------- http://ecatnews.com/?p=1144

After reading your long discussion, has there been one e-cat plant built and successfully producing electricity? If not, is there one being planned. If so, when will it be built and when will it start producing electricity?

The only string theory I am getting is being strung along with this thing and not seeing anything.

"After reading your long discussion, has there been one e-cat plant built and successfully producing electricity?"

No.

"If not, is there one being planned.

Yes.

"If so, when will it be built and when will it start producing electricity?"

Depends on who produces it. Defkalion says "very soon" (which I interpret as "early next year"). Rossi says "two years". There are other "non-e-Cat" players in the game as well.

But "producing electricity" is a bogus point of judgment. We already know that the E-Cat produces steam at 104 degrees C. Given that fact, and the existence of MANY low-temperature "non-aqueous" power cycles, we know that the existing device WILL produce electricity....period. It won't do so as efficiently as a higher temperature, but if fuel and maintenance costs are low enough, that lower efficiency won't matter (other than to some greens who would worry about the excess "waste heat").

As discussed in earlier threads, even if all it can do for the first few years is produce mild steam for heating buildings in the winter and producing hot water, that’s still a big thing and a significant portion of mankind’s energy use.

I started looking at the links. VERY interesting stuff, particularly the part about the nano-structure of the material being important for the reaction. It would explain a lot about the lack of reliable reproducibility of the early Pons-Fleischmann work.

"As discussed in earlier threads, even if all it can do for the first few years is produce mild steam for heating buildings in the winter and producing hot water, that’s still a big thing and a significant portion of mankind’s energy use."

Heh....I think about the budget saved on Antarctic reasearch from just that aspect. EVERY BTU of heat/electricity has to be imported....ain't no oil wells in the Antarctic, and unlikely to be for quite a while.

"I started looking at the links. VERY interesting stuff, particularly the part about the nano-structure of the material being important for the reaction. It would explain a lot about the lack of reliable reproducibility of the early Pons-Fleischmann work."

Indeed. I have long thought that the laws of physics are going to prove VERY different for highly-ordered small scale structures. There are quite a few examples....high temp. superconductivity (in things that are normally INSULATORS, no less....buckyballs and buckytubes and variations on that theme.....and probably many more I haven't heard about).

One CF critic (rightfully) characterized the electrochemical systems as "witches brews". WAY too many variables to get control of all at once. I think it was telling back in the "early days" that only the most experienced electrochemists (Pons, Fleischmann, Bockris) were able to get positive results in such systems.

I have long thought that the laws of physics are going to prove VERY different for highly-ordered small scale structures.
***Same here. Of course, extracting something useful out of it is a huge challenge, but it is doable.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.