Replies

The piece by Joe Shea is just a rehash of some dated publicity pushed out there by “KevMo”. The following is a comment on the posted piece by Joe Shea.

“...which now has been replicated at least 2,000 times. “
Half correct and totally dishonest. The majority of the runs were FAILURES. A small minority of the runs showed excess energy. What the likes of “KevMo” are suffering is called Confirmation Bias: the failures do not register with them.

“...but never on the same scale. His name is Dr. Randell C. Mills, “
Incorrect. The scientific community looked at Mr Mills’ hydrino theory and found it lacking in mathematical consistency and physically inconsistent. To paraphrase the late Wolfgang Pauli, Mr Mills’ theory is incorrect and - what is even worse - it is not even wrong! It is irrelevant. The arguments for Mills’ irrelevancy was given in a previous posting of mine.

Let us compare Mr Mills’ situation with that of an obscure worker at the Swiss Patent Office by the name of Albert Einstein. His theory of special relativity was disruptive to the scientific community. The german scientific establishment condemned this “jewish” science. Mr Einstein was unfazed and said the arguments of 1 person or experimental results suffice to disprove him. What is more pertinent, Mr Einstein was not “married” to his theory whereas “KevMo” and Mr Mills are so “married” to the hydrino theory. Soon, predictions made from special relativity were confirmed by experiments. In the case of General Relativity the picture was a little bit different: many complicated models of Mercury’s (the planet) had a better experimental fit than Einstein’s 2-parameter model. However, for other astrophysical behavior, Einstein’s theory fit much better the experiments than the many-parameter models of others. Applying Occam’s rule, slowly Einstein’s theory was accepted. This not the case with Mr Mills’ model.

“But the Pons-Fleischmann claim was more immediately and profoundly threatening to a group of well-funded physicists whose careers were buttered with tens of billions of dollars in federal funding for their fruitless hot fusion projects, such as the Tokomak reactor. “
Moonbat theory. First of all, the British (in 1995) went BEYOND the break-even point with the Tokomak reactor. The key point: the fuel used was tritium gas. The american scientists grumbled with envy. But tritium is much more expensive than even deuterium and tritium-based methods are not commercially feasible (too expensive). So talking about “fruitless hot fusion projects” is so much nonsense. The above statement by Shea reflects some kind of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory.

“To date, none of this funding - perhaps $50 billion worth so far - has produced a working hot fusion reactor,”
Incorrect. Read the above paragraph.

“Instead of the lengthy times needed to allow ....”
Half correct and totally dishonest. The Pons’ electrolysis went on for an average of 10 days before any remarkable heat surge occurred. So one had a large energy input and a large output. Most of the time the output was less that the input. Here Shea and “KevMo” show symptoms of Confirmation Bias. Although not mentioned in Shea’s piece is the account of a lab explosion. The accounts I read about this explosion remind me of UFO accounts: “ the extent of the damage was so extensive, it cannot be explained by a chemical reaction... BLAH. BLAH. BLAH.” Yep. You are producing hydrogen gas for days on end and no venting/ventilation system is perfect. The experiment which exploded was run by a graduate student. A similar explosion occurred at SRI and the account of that incident sounds like a UFO account.

“Later, when a new patent had already been published in the Gazette of the U.S. Patent Office, a “poison pen” telephone call from Bob Park to friends at the patent office got the patent grant to Mills reeled back in and then denied. That had apparently never happened before. “
Incorrect. First, many issued patents have been annulled before. And for Mr Mills, his patent applications have been denied in England. Mr Mills appealed several times and lost every time.

“But Mills has not sought government funding or Wall Street equity money, and has raised $71 million on his own. “
Good for him! So far, no tangible results. With much less funding, atomic energy was demonstrated in Germany in the early 1930’s, well before the Manhattan project. Think about it: if one subscribes to the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory, the Coal and Oil industry would have suppressed Nuclear Energy.

“As impressive as they are, the Energistics results from a cold fusion process pale in comparison to those from Mills’ hydrino reactors. “
A lot of hyperbole. Please quantify “pale”. Here, one enters the Twilight Zone. Recently, General Electric had a EcoImagination competition where individuals and companies compete in the areas of Energy (green preferably), Energy Distribution and EcoHomes. Personally I kept a lookout for any suggestions made by “KevMo” and his ilk. None and “KevMo” missed a great opportunity since GE promised a minimum of 100K investment which can grow to $200 million at the commercialization stage. However there were submissions based on such “wingbat” ideas like the Searl effect generator. Hundreds of people voted for the Searl Effect General and other submissions advocating Perpetual Machines. The Hydrino scheme is at the same level as the Searl generator.

“But Mills already has 20 working 50- and 75-kilowatt reactors at his plant in Cranbury, N.J”
Half correct and totally dishonest. The reactors produced at 75-kilowatt for 1 or 2 seconds. And then go dead. And this after considerable energy input. Produce a 75-kilowatt reactors which run continuously for, say, 24 hours and then talk.

“The latest came from a sprawling Italian multinational, the RadiciGroup, which ordered a 750MW hydrino reactor to power all the Group’s industrial and corporate facilities in a deal announced on March 19, 2010. “
One way Mr Mills raised his 70-odd million dollars is to sell the snake oil and collect the money from the suckers, uh, investors. Selling vapor generators is a good but temporary business.

The rest of Shea’s piece is so much boilerplate snake-oil sales pitch.

Let us take a high-altitude look at things.
First, the CalTech electrochemists did not run weeks-long electrolysis. But the Japanese and the Italians did: no confirmation of Pons’ results. Other scientists have submitted palladium (and other palladium alloys) under high pressure deuterium for weeks, even months before using such treated palladium in an electrolysis machine: results are mixed: many failures, few successes. Other scientists have treated the high-pressure (palladium-deuterium) mixes under low frequency EM: the issue is that under electrolysis, there is a small non-zero electric field INSIDE the electrode and this field helps the diffusion of deuterium ions into the body of the electrode. High Pressure deuterium helps in the diffusion and the low frequency EM treatment produces non-zero electric fields inside the electrode. The intensity of the EM treatment changes such that diffusion into the electrode is faster than diffusion out of electrode. The results were mixed: many failures. few successes.

Second, the NSF have looked into the cold-fusion issue and found that the hydrino hypothesis has no grounding in reality and the Low-Energy-Nuclear-Reaction (LENR) has some merit. Most nuclear experiments are done in the high-energy regime, thus one has a good picture of high-end of the internuclear potential but gain little detail about the neighborhood of the bottom of internuclear potential well.

Third: The physics of hot fusion has been demonstrated by many experiments by many different teams. The physics of hydrinos have not been demonstrated: at best SOME cherry-picked results may suggest hydrinos but always there is a convention explanation (some of these explanations are given in the previous posting).

Fourth: what are the engineering difficulties for hot fusion and cold fusion?
hot fusion: reactions go quickly but: the plasma density is too low, the plasma residency time is too short. cold fusion: LENR reactions go VERY, VERY, SLOWLY. And the density of the reactants (usually solid form) may be too low: very high pressures (about 1,000,000 atm) may be needed.

I hypothesize that the first-general fusion machine will be a fission-triggered cold-fusion set-up. The steady-state of the machine will be a combination of hot- and cold- fusion regimes with a plasma core (hot-fusion) surrounded by a high pressure liquid-inner mantle, with (perhaps) a solid outer mantle. To prevent the plasma core (20 KeV temp) to make contact with the reactor shell, the liquid mantle will be manipulated by time-dependent EM fields (similar to what is done today in conventional metallurgy)

Now that I have given you the God-given truth, please send me my royalty checks.