Posted on 05/05/2011 7:47:16 AM PDT by Free Vulcan
I spend much of my time debunking the free energy fantasies of my less technically competent friends. Wishful thinking makes many believe that cars can run on water after seeing a brief youtube video. Lately, however, I have been undergoing an exciting paradigm shift.
Remember the “cold fusion” fiasco of 1989? Well, I have come to realize that it wasn’t what it seemed at all. Denial, groupthink, dirty tricks and easily manipulated media combined to create an historical injustice. Two decades have been wasted virtually ignoring this game-changing discovery. Today’s environmental disasters, expensive energy and oil wars could possibly have been avoided. I’ll say more in a moment about what really happened in 1989, but first, let me tell you what got me started reexamining what I thought I knew about cold fusion.
You probably think that 4700 watts of clean, radiation-free power from a three cubic inch reactor sounds like yet another impossible hoax. But this was a third iteration demo, designed to satisfy skeptics of two previous demonstration at the prestigious University of Bologna. Attending the third demo were two Swedish scientists. One was chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society and the other was chairman of the Energy Committee of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science. They were both allowed to freely examine the entire setup except for the contents of the tiny, 50cc reactor chamber.
Their written report ended with: “Any chemical process for producing 25 kWh from any fuel in a 50 cm3 container can be ruled out. The only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production.” They also noted that you would have to burn 3 liters of oil to produce 25 kWh. There has since been another confirmation.
The inventor, Adrian Rossi, is very accessible on his blog and has said that more than one hundred of his 4.4 kW reactors are running in four countries. He plans to ship a larger unit in October that produces one MW of hot water. It consists of hundreds of the small reactors in series/parallel mounted in one 2 X 3 X 3 meter box. It weighs two tons. The proprietary nanopowdered nickel fuel will be replenished every six months. Everything has been financed using Rossi’s own money and the customer will pay only when satisfied.
Rossi is an inventor and businessman who decades ago noticed excess heat effects while working with a nickel catalyst to synthesize fuel from hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Using Edison-like experimental techniques, he soon learned to control the heat production. He even kept his factory heated for two years with a prototype reactor. More than two thousand prototypes were built and destroyed in refining the design and learning how to control and scale up the reaction.
Researching the science literature, Rossi soon found Dr Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna, who had regularly published work on nickel-hydrogen reactors since 1994. Using his own money, Rossi contracted with Dr. Focardi and the university to help him understand and develop the technology as a product. By January 14, 2011 they were ready for a public demonstration of a 10 kilowatt desktop reactor.
The press reaction was muted in Europe and nonexistent in the U.S. Skeptics accused him of hiding a battery inside the reactor so another, longer, demonstration was held, using calorimetry that heated but didn’t boil water to answer other critics. The 18 hour demonstration produced 18 kilowatts average over the entire 18 hours. The U.S. press was still silent and skeptics were still suspicious so two more demos were held.
Still, the silence from the U.S. media was deafening. Rossi announced that there will be no more demonstrations until October 2011, when the million watt heating plant will be shipped to a customer in Greece. If he succeeds, be prepared for a repeat of the Sputnik shock of 1957 when the US woke up to find that they had fallen way behind in science.
Nickel is plentiful and cheap and so is hydrogen in the tiny amounts used. Nickel is so plentiful that energy becomes virtually free. Rossi’s reactor is very simple in principle. Powdered nickel and a catalyst are simply heated to about six hundred degrees centigrade in a stainless steel chamber filled with pressurized hydrogen. At a certain point, the gradual heating starts accelerating due to nuclear reactions in the metal lattice. The heating resistor is backed off to keep the reaction going at a steady state, with about 15 times more heat output than input. Much higher ratios are possible but can be unstable and dangerous. This is why the 1-MW plant will be built using hundreds of smaller modules.
The reactor is enclosed in a lead shield because some radiation is, unpredictably, produced during operation. However, the spent fuel is not radioactive but contains copper that has transmuted from nickel in the nuclear reaction. The lack of dangerous radiation drives hot fusion experts crazy, but clearly there are things happening that are not covered by the equations used in hot fusion. Obviously, quantum mechanics needs to be rethought to include these reactions.
There are many proposed theories. Biological processes have been found to produce transmuted isotopes without radiation. Also, tritium sometimes comes out of volcanic vents from unknown reactions inside the earth. Clearly, the physicists have more to explain if they will just open their ears. Here is an equation they should study carefully:
Groupthink + Denial = Environmental Disaster + Expensive Energy + Wars
Groupthink can make us totally irrational. The dot-com bubble and the housing bubble are examples of renowned experts becoming completely blind to facts that are now obvious in hindsight. Making a lot of money tends to blind us poor humans to clear evidence that we are living in a fantasy world. The consequences can be terrible.
Nuclear physicists in 1989 were riding a bonanza of tens of billions in government research money for the development of hot fusion reactors. After several decades of hard work, they were still far from achieving break-even, where output energy exceeds input energy. Just as the next round of appropriations was assured, Fleischmann and Pons came along with the announcement that they had already achieved excess heat output without government support and on an inexpensive desktop setup.
Denial was immediate. MIT and Caltech, who had been leaders in hot fusion work, immediately went to work “trying” to replicate the experiment. In just five weeks Caltech announced negative results. At a May 1st 1989 APS meeting in Baltimore, two thousand physicists gave a standing ovation to the Caltech team’s presentation. A lynch mob mentality, combined with denial, turned the exciting discovery of cold fusion into an enemy.
MIT helped set the tone by arranging a front page story in the Boston Herald on the day of the meeting with the headline, “MIT bombshell knocks fusion “breakthrough” cold.” The story was an interview with leaders of the MIT fusion lab that accused Fleischmann and Pons of fraud. The charge was later denied but tapes of the actual interview confirm what was said.
MIT further disgraced itself by altering data in its failure to replicate study. This was discovered two years later by MIT employee Eugene Mallove, who found copies of the July 10 and July 13 drafts of the paper. The July 10th version had a graph that clearly showed excess heat. In the July 13 version the graph was redrawn to show no excess heat. The atmosphere at MIT, as shown by a “Wake for Cold Fusion” party (before the data was analyzed) and t-shirts and mugs offered by the plasma fusion lab, was hardly impartial.
To this day, denial reigns among most of the guilty parties of this travesty. The Department of Energy, Nature magazine, Scientific American, the American Physical Society, the U.S. Patent Office and many of the world’s top physicists still cling irrationally to the belief that cold fusion is junk science. Of course, this is how denial works: We protect our belief system by quietly stepping around the “elephant under the rug.” As long as a majority of our group backs us up, our view of reality remains grossly distorted to preserve the group-think consensus. Global warming deniers do this every day.
The Fleischmann-Pons announcement should have been the start of a new era of cheap, clean energy that would have saved us from the financial and environmental disasters and wars caused by fossil fuel energy. Instead, denial and dirty tricks caused us to waste 23 years and tens of billions of dollars on failed nuclear projects as though nothing had happened. The Presidents 2012 budget includes $2.5 billion for such projects. The first DEMO hot fusion plant is currently scheduled for 2033.
A surprising natural process was discovered in 1989 that can provide us with clean, essentially free energy. It clearly conflicts with the current consensus understanding of quantum mechanics that works nicely for hot fusion reactions. It seems reasonable to try to improve the theory to accommodate this new reality, but denial has instead tricked many good scientists to try to “shoot the messenger.”
The time has come to admit the mistake and get busy trying to improve our understanding so that we can perfect this amazing new technology. We have spent $20 billion and 55 years trying to reach break-even with hot fusion. Time to give cold fusion a chance.
There have been many painful scientific battles in the past over paradigm changes, but truth has a way of prevailing eventually. Cold fusion work has continued under the radar using the more accurate term “Low Energy Nuclear Reactions” (LENR.) Shunned by the establishment, supporters of LENR have created their own journals and meetings. Much progress has been made.
The reasons for the initial difficulty in replication of excess heat have been identified and the amount of excess heat has increased. By 1995 there were 21 published replications showing excess heat of up to 205 watts. Strangely, the press lost interest after the initial media circus. The media’s face-saving denial has left most people with the impression that cold fusion is still dead. In 2009, 60 Minutes broke the silence and did an excellent update. But the rest of the media simply ignored it and focused instead on less risky reports on newsworthy items like rising gasoline prices.
Annual conferences have continued. A weeklong working demo of LENR was included at the tenth ICCF conference, which was held in 2003 at MIT. The power output was 2.3 times the power in. The most recent meeting was held in San Francisco in 2011 under the auspices of the American Chemical Society. The number of presenters at this meeting have quadrupled since 2007. The results this year were so enthusiastic that the American Institute of Physics refused to publish the 370 page proceedings. The cancellation of the publication contract was a last minute decision, clearly ordered by someone at a high level. This attempted blackout of a new technology will backfire in the long run as results get stronger and stronger.
By using nickel and ordinary hydrogen, several researchers have significantly increased energy output and reduced costs. In 1992, Thermacore, a U.S. military contractor ran a cell for nearly a year with a 50 Watt output and 3X excess energy. In 1996 Dr. Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna in Italy described an experiment using nickel & hydrogen that produced an average excess power output of 39 watts continuously for 278 days. There are a dozen competing theories to explain how nuclear reactions can produce so much energy without emitting dangerous radiation. Theories are helpful but not necessary. We still don’t really know how permanent magnets work, yet we use them every day. Practical applications can be developed experimentally, just as Edison developed the light bulb.
Now that Rossi and Focardi have shown what can be done, expect to see a flurry of new announcements. New technologies tend to take forever to totally debug, so it won’t be surprising if the October delivery is delayed. There are several other companies such as Lattice Energy LLC, Blacklight Power, Brillouin Energy, and Energetics, who have announced product plans to the press and then gone silent.
Silence is not necessarily a bad sign, as the Bloom Box demonstrated. My bet is that we will have some amazing surprises within a year that will be a wake-up call, just as Russia’s Sputnik launch was in 1954. This moment could have come ten years ago if only we had listened to Fleishman and Pons in 1989.
It has been bumping around on the internet for years. He hasn’t produced a working ICE yet but it really buzzes along on compressed air.
Maybe this will be his niche.
MrEdd
please add me to your Rossi ping list
Thanks
Lurking’
Deuterium is one isotope which definitely has a biological effect. Heavy water is toxic. It disrupts fundamental biological processes. The reason appears to be that the presence of that extra neutron slightly increases the strength of the hydrogen bond, which in turn upsets reactions essential to cellular activity.
However, the bond energy effect of slight atomic weight differences decreases as you go up in atomic weight, to the point to undetectability. So, centrifuge are far more likely to be hacked or blown up by the Mossad than to be displaced by vats of bugs genetically engineered to concentrate U235.
The other thing that make this interesting is that the Byprodut is Copper. So you might spend $13 dollars for the zinc and get $30 for the copper.
They use nickel, not zinc, and nickel costs more than copper. Copper is currently trading around $4/lb, nickel at $13/lb. Then again, the process uses up a relatively tiny amount of nickel relative to the value of the energy produced. The capital costs (producing nickel dust of the required granularity, making an e-cat unit to hold it, high-pressure boilers, turbines, generators, etc) are going to dwarf the price of the raw nickel.
Rossi Cold Fusion Italian patent granted:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ufficio_italiano_brevetti_e_marchi
I haven’t located an actual news article yet, but thought y’all would be interested. There’s some discussion at the link below, but FR’s auto-link scripting is dropping the last piece of info, so you’ll have to copy/paste to get there:
http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-
If/Once Rossi’s process is scientifically studied in some depth, I would be “very” surprised if there don’t turn out to be other systems that will do the same thing.
The original Fleischmann and Pons cold fusion setup used palladium. I have no doubt that there are multiple ways to make Low Energy Nuclear Reactions work.
For those who are concerned about this making a dent in our nickel supply, the reaction gives off 8Mev per nickel atom undergoing transmutation (in contrast, a U235 atom undergoing fission is 200 MeV). Still, that's a LOT of energy. A mole of nickel contains about 6×1023 atoms, and weighs about 59 grams. 6 MeV per atom would mean that 59 grams would produce 3.6 ×1024 MeV, or 6 ×1011 joules or 1.6 ×105 kWh (thermal). That's a lot of energy per pound of nickel.
(If somebody could double-check my math, that would be appreciated)
The us patent application contains this statement..
[0060]A practical embodiment of the inventive apparatus, installed on Oct. 16, 2007, is at present perfectly operating 24 hours per day, and provides an amount of heat sufficient to heat the factory of the Company EON of via Carlo Ragazzi 18, at Bondeno (Province of Ferrara).
http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=84vwAAAAEBAJ&dq=US20110005506
This fits with the historical tidbits Rossi has mentioned....that he first discovered (or re-discovered) the anomalous excess heat with just hydrogen and nickel.
For anyone interested in the technical end, I compiled an energy balance worksheet. It’s difficult to determine from comments by various personalities, how much nickel is consumed per unit energy released with any great confidence.
It’s not necessary to know the reaction paths or means in order to do this, assuming that Ni transmuted is Cu.
I obtain an energy density figure about 10.1 times that which is reported.
Would anyone like to check my work?
Nickle at $11/lb is a lot cheaper than oil at $100 a barrel. I’m hoping for the best and this is where the despicable Muslims and turds like Hugo Chavez loose their grip on America and other civilized nations.
Islam is NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING without the oil riches that make us cater to these desert rats. That allows them to develop nuclear weapons. That finances mosque building in civilized nation. FU Islam I’ll go for cold fusion. I’m praying this pans out
I love that! Of course, after a while, copper would be so plentiful it would cost pennies.
For those who are concerned about this making a dent in our nickel supply, the reaction gives off about 8.2 MeV per nickel atom undergoing transmutation (in contrast, a U235 atom undergoing fission is 200 MeV). Still, that's a LOT of energy. A mole of nickel contains about 6×1023 atoms, and weighs about 59 grams. 8.2 MeV per atom would mean that 59 grams would produce 4.9 ×1024 MeV, or 7.9 ×1011 joules or 2.2 ×105 kWh (thermal). That's a lot of energy per gram of nickel.
(If somebody could double-check my math, that would be appreciated)
Please sign me up to your ping list. Thanks
Thanks for the ping.
Here is the latest on Rossi’s US patent application. Below is an excerpt I mined out of it. This is getting interestinger and interestinger.
[0038] Considering that about 10,000,000 tons nickel for year are produced through the world and since, as it will be disclosed hereinafter in Table 1, 1 g nickel would generate an energy amount equivalent to that produced by 517 tons oil, thus the yearly produced nickel amount, assuming that only 1/10,000th generates nuclear processes, will provide 1,000,000,000,000*517110000-51,700,000,000 (oil equivalent) ton per year.
[0039] And this without considering the fact that the yearly nickel production could be easily increased, depending on demand, and that, like mineral oil, nickel can be recovered and remelted from nickel scraps of steelwork and electronic applications.
[0040] Actually, nickel is one of the most abundant metals of the Earth crust.
Recently, the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), the energy-monitoring body of 28 industrialized countries, also trimmed its 2011 world oil demand outlook, citing the impact of persistent high prices and weaker economic growth for developed economies. IEA predicts that global oil demand would increase by 1.5% (or 1.3 million barrels per day) annually, reaching 89.2 million barrels a day in 2011 from last year’s 87.9 million barrels a day. The energy agency’s current estimate for 2011 is lower by 190,000 barrels a day from its last report, issued in April 2011. (From results of World Oil Demand search - Jim)
American oilmen usually reckon quantities of oil produced, moved or processed in barrels per day (bpd or b/d). The loose but simple rule of thumb for conversion is that a barrel a day is roughly 50 tonnes a year (approx. 55 U.S. tons), but the relationship varies according to density and so according to product. (From oil industry conversion chart - Jim)
According to my figures (89.2 million bbls per day of demand x 55 U.S. tons yearly each) current oil usage should amount to 89.2 x 55 = 4906 -— or 4.9 billion tons annually. In [0038] Rossie seems to be saying that 1/10,000th of the current annual world production of nickel, if diverted to LENR usage, would amount to over 10 times (51.7 billion tons) the present annual energy equivalent of oil usage. That is simply astounding! - Jim
I have my flame suit on. If someone can blast my figuring to smithereens I will stand corrected. To see patent go here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RossiAmethodandaa.pdf
See #138.
IIRC nickle is a tricky metal in that it is often the byproducts of other mines. So if a lead mine makes 10% of earnings off nickle byproduct.... Then whether it does more exploration or mining is dependent on the lead price not the nickle price
Silver often has this problem. It is often the byproduct of a mine, say a copper mine.
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