Anything New in the Cold Fusion /LENR World?

Don't look for any cold fusion powered cars or water heaters. However this is an excellent article about one theory that purports to explain what LENR is and how it supposedly produces excess heat.

The article deals with some of the background infighting over the spoils that come later.

This is last part of the article and I think the most interesting: (Bushnell is a NASA scientist)

"Unless Bushnell wants to suggest that he is privy to classified information, his suggestion of a slow-acting LENR experiment with extremely high-heat production that would melt windows is not believable. Bushnell also does the field a tremendous disservice by repeating the claims made by a few wayward researchers and would-be entrepreneurs who have claimed excess-heat in the hundreds- to thousands-of-Watts range in recent years. There are no heat effects in the magnitude they claim. In one example, George Miley, a retired professor from the University of Illinois, claimed that his latest experiment was producing 300 Watts of excess heat continuously. But when I interviewed him, and pressed him for supporting data, he admitted that the only data he could show at that time was for 8 Watts of excess heat for 100 seconds. Bushnell also continued to promote Andrea Rossi and his fake LENR device even after two of Bushnell’s colleagues, Jim Dunn and Michael Nelson, and a potential investor, John Preston of Quantum Energy Technologies, observed Rossi doing suspicious things while demonstrating his Energy Catalyzer for them"

As you recall in your extensive survey of the alternative energy field it is necessary to stick some huge whopping batteries in the line between a windmill and the grid. This does two things ~ smooths the power flow and in case of an outage keeps the power on line while switching systems elsewhere get a chance to bring up other units ~ maybe a gas turbine or something.

These large scale iron hydride batteries are something special because they can operate at a relatively high rate for about 5.5 hours.

The folks who market them have numerous advertisements on the net if you want to read about them Even laymen can understand just how useful these batteries can be.

All of the folks who continue to snip at Rossi's heels claiming he's a fraud missed entirely the fact that his big demonstration involved a standard trailer or box used by numerous manufacturers to house the large iron hydride batteries that moderate the current from windmills. Even his equipment cases were identical to those used on the racks to house the anodes.

Shortly before his big demo ~ June of last year ~ the big windmill companies in Europe were shutting down because the governments were eliminating the enormous subsidies for windmills.

The first thing they put on the market were the batteries!

I don't know if Rossi simply went out and bought one because it could release power for 5.5 hours ~ in a 5.5 hour test ~ or that his set up was a koinkydink, but FUR SHUR, people plinking at very minor issues in the way Rossi conducted his test BIT on that battery box and the anode cases with apparently no understanding at all of what they'd just seen!

I"m still laughing my A.. off.

Subsequently a researcher demonstrated that you could construct an iron hydride anode a thin layer at a time and increase its responsiveness to current demand by a large factor. We discussed that on FR. Others have been playing around with those anodes trying to figure out not only how to build them better, but to figure out what they do to store all those spare electrons! In and of themselves the newer designs are a technological wonder ~ even if we don't yet know how they work.

So, did Rossi do something to improve performance? He'd been deeply involved in energy recovery over the years ~ had a good reputation in the field (Re-read that Army contract or a moment critics ~ that's the guy's field and that demo looked like an application of earlier science).

Seriously, anybody in the business of power generation would know something about the big line batteries ~ so why don't the claimants here know about them?

They are all over the place ~ plus articles about them ~ and there are details on the internal wiring systems.

There are two conclusions you can draw about Rossi's demo ~ (1) he played on the widespread ignorance even among scientists of what modern line batteries are all about ~ and got away with it, or (2) he actually knows something about those big line batteries not generally understood ~ to wit, there have been other reports about anomalous energy production ~ which might have something to do with what goes on with electronic charge levels inside a really dense environment.

Could be both ~ 5.5 hours was the giveaway for me, and at the time I posted pictures of line batteries that looked just like the one he used.

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.