Sounds like it becomes self sustaining at a certain point in the reaction.
With nuclear reactions, that's generally not a happy-making thought...
From what I've been reading, there's probably some other stuff going on inside the e-cat to set up the electric fields needed. You want something that generates energy, but which you can turn off when you want to.
Sounds like it becomes self sustaining at a certain point in the reaction."Powdered nickel and a catalyst are simply heated to about six hundred degrees centigrade in a stainless steel chamber filled with pressurized hydrogen."I have no science or physics background outside of a college geology course, but maybe someone who does can clue me in. You can heat something to 600C with existing power sources, but what happens when the power goes off? It sounds like this is not a self-sustaining reaction, and even if the input can be backed off, it can't be totally removed; or can it? 23 posted on 05/05/2011 8:32:38 AM PDT by JimRed"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"
Apparently the design would be unstable if made bigger, so that it would reach a critical point where it was self-sustaining. If it were "self-sustaining," how would you turn it off?I saw a FAQ web page about the device, and that claimed that the maker intended to offer a generator for electricity (a steam turbine, presumably, driving a generator). It appears that the upper (Carnot cycle) limit on the thermal efficiency of the unit would be 600/(273+600) assuming a heat sink of 0 deg Celsius. You would actually get far less, of course . . .Not that thermal efficiency is crucial if you have a source of virtually free energy . . .