Posted on 11/02/2011 2:31:43 PM PDT by Kevmo
The Peak Oil Crisis: Cold Fusion Redux
By Tom Whipple
Wednesday, November 02 2011 01:19:52 PM
There is a fascinating drama taking place over in Bologna, Italy involving an engineer by the name of Andrea Rossi and a physicist, Sergio Focardi, who say they have developed an entirely new source of cheap, clean, energy. This energy is said to be produced by fusing nickel and hydrogen inside a low-cost, table-top-sized reactor. Moreover, the inventors say this device is already in limited commercial production and is being sold to customers with the first delivery being made to an unknown American buyer this week .
Now, most nuclear physicists believe that fusing nickel and hydrogen is impossible this side of extremely high temperatures, so Rossi's device cannot perform as he claims and some sort of sophisticated fraud is taking place. The claim of unverified cold fusion naturally has become controversial with charges and counter charges being hurled across the Internet. The validity of the claim that an unlimited supply of cheap, clean energy is available now is apparently too much for the mainstream media which has been strangely quiet about the affair .
The problem with the "scam theory" is that for the last 10 months, the developers have been putting on demonstrations of their device before groups of learned physicists and selected members of the press in an attempt to show that their "energy catalyzer" actually works. When the reactor is heated up, so much energy in the form of steam is emitted that, short of fraud, the only answer seems to be that nuclear fusion is indeed taking place. The amount of heat being reported and apparently verified by outside observers is simply too much for any known chemical reaction .
Support for the position that this is a fraud comes from the fact that so far only the inventors and their closest associates seem to know what is going on inside the reactor. Visiting physicists can verify that heat is coming out and that there are no obvious signs of something untoward, but this is not the same as having independent laboratories with full access to the technology declaring that it is for real .
If you are interested in the details of all this, the account in Wikipedia under "Energy Catalyzer" gives a reasonably balanced version of the story thus far .
Cheap, pollution-free energy could, in theory, reset the clock on global warming .
Following the cold fusion furor of 20 years ago in which the scientific establishment declared that low energy fusion was not believable, scattered pockets of ill-funded scientists continued cold fusion research, while the world of big science continued working on multi-billion dollar fusion projects involving magnetic containment and lasers. From time to time those working on cold fusion reported observing abnormal amounts of heat being emitted when they attempted to fuse nickel with hydrogen, but as nobody could explain what was happening, scant attention was paid to their reports. Focardi was among the scientists performing and reporting on these experiments over the last 20 years .
Somewhere around 2008 Rossi, who appears to be more of an entrepreneur than a scientist, is said to have come to Focardi with an idea of how the fusion of nickel and hydrogen could be sped up to the point where a commercially viable, energy producing, reactor could be built. Three years later demonstrations of such a device began .
Last Friday the story got even better when a demonstration of a larger device designed to produce 1 megawatt of power was held. At the end of the day, outside consultants working for an American firm or organization declared that the test was satisfactory and the working prototype was immediately sold to the unidentified American "customer." Skeptics say this "test" proved nothing as the identity of the testers and the customer were unknown and could be part of the scam which they fervently believe is taking place .
Rossi says more reactors will be delivered shortly. We should not have to wait long find out if indeed a major breakthrough has occurred. Rossi says he will sign research contracts with the universities of Bologna and Uppsala to explore the physics behind production of so much heat .
As anyone who has ever seen the old movies of hydrogen bombs being tested can tell you, gigantic amounts of energy can be obtained from the fusion of atoms. What would be remarkable, if this story pans out, is how energy could come from such a simple device - a container, some powdered nickel, some sort of catalyst (which some believe is electro-magnetic energy), a touch of hydrogen, and a heating element. It should be noted that thus far, nobody has reported any sign of lethal radiation flying out of the reactor or radioactive waste resulting from whatever is taking place inside .
If this development is for real, and we will not know for a while, parts of our understanding of nuclear physics will have to be rethought for it seems there is much more in nature to learn about. Cheap, pollution-free energy could, in theory, reset the clock on global warming for if these devices spread rapidly, the transition away from carbon-based energy might just happen in time to save the earth. Cheap energy would allow for cheap desalinization of water, cheap transport, cheap food, and a lot of other changes .
Needless to say, major industries -- coal, oil, nuclear, green, etc. -- and economic relationships between nations would be upset by a rapid transition away from increasing costly fossil fuels. What happens to oil in all this is hard to say. Complete transition to nuclear fusion would likely take decades to accomplish. High costs for fossil fuels would be a major incentive, but simply re-provisioning 7 or 8 billion people would be a major job. This would suggest that higher oil prices will remain a factor in our lives no matter what happens with other sources of energy.
I disagree about the high oil prices. Oil prices are sensitive to demand, and relatively small changes in demand or supply can have large effects on prices.
One trend I'm seeing is conversion of diesel trucks to run on Liquified Natural Gas (which currently has a price equivalent to about $2/gal diesel). The big issue involves fueling stations: it's a chicken/egg problem where truck stops don't want to install NG capabilities if there's no NG-based trucks, and trucking firms want fueling capabilities there before investing in conversion. But the infrastructure is slowly being built up and may reach critical mass in the next one or two years along some routes.
Intellectually I'm very much in the middle of the road on the Ecat, but emotionally I find them constantly driving me into the opposite camp out of sheer antipathy to their attacks. So it takes discipline on my part to stay in the objective middle. I suspect they have a similar effect on the average reader.
Thus, I am tending to believe the seagulls like Moonman and Allmendream are secretly in the Rossi camp, maybe as paid supporters, to ramp up support for the Ecat and suck in investors and buyers. It's a less crazy idea than most of what they come up with, at any rate.
I hope not. We're in an interglacial period. If it stops being warm, we'll be on our way to being buried under a mile thick ice again.
Don’t worry, we can use ecats to bore holes through the ice.
Besides, ice is fresh water — lotsa problems solved right there. And it makes a good refridgerator.
I’m wondering the best play right now, since I don’t know who the customer is, would be to short oil somehow. I have seen the projections that oil price would go down immediately, but I’m not an economist and don’t know why that’s the case.
Maybe not, unless there's a plan on how to grow crops and livestock on the surface of the ice during conditions that denote non-growing seasons.
We can harness polar bears and use them to plow the...
well, I’ll get back to you.
Thought this might interest you.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/11/02/andrea-rossi-italian-cold-fusion-plant/?test=faces
A physicist in Italy claims to have demonstrated a new type of power plant that provides safe, cheap and virtually unlimited nuclear power to the world, without fossil fuels or radiation concerns.
The only hitch: Scientists say the method — cold fusion — is patently impossible. They say it defies the laws of physics.
Andrea Rossi doesn’t seem to care. He told FoxNews.com that his new device takes in nickel and hydrogen and fuses them in a low-grade nuclear reaction that essentially spits out sheer power, validating the strange science.
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“With low energy, it’s possible to give a heater a certain amount of energy and to get from the same heater a superior amount of energy,” Rossi explained. He claims he demonstrated the device, called an E-Cat, at the University of Bologna in Italy on Oct. 28.
People holding oil would try to sell immediately in anticipation of further price drops, oil producers would crank production to maximum in order to sell before prices dropped further, etc.
Make heat cheap enough, and you'll see greenhouses sprouting up in colder regions.
Why do you keep linking back you this post to you?
To: Kevmo
Knock off the personal attacks and seagull nonsense.
54 posted on Sunday, October 30, 2011 6:38:43 PM by Admin Moderator
“Intellectually I’m very much in the middle of the road on the Ecat, but emotionally I find them constantly driving me into the opposite camp out of sheer antipathy to their attacks.”
Uh huh ... See link for your lovefest thread ...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2790674/posts
Your best bet is to get in on the ground floor. IMMEDIATELY send Rossi a check for $100,000. Just make sure you get a receipt.
I think Rossi is intentionally leaving a trail of public evidence that he's incompetent and that the ecat doesn't work, so that he'll have an excellent legal defense when he's arrested (again).
I’ve posted quite a few threads on this subject, pro and con. One of my problems with the pseudoskeptics is they pick and choose what data to consider. You just gave an example of that.
Data is data. If you have a problem with the data, take it up with the author of the data.
K put up the Nobel Prize winner endorsement as ‘proof’ of a legitimate operation. I thanked him for bringing up the same guy that promotes his theory on water molecules retain their healing memory in homeopathic medicines. Then I told him how enlightening a google search of ‘Kevmo homeopathic’ was.
Great minds think alike!
I gave up on you across all LENR threads as far as I recall.
Last I recall, I gave up on you because you went off the deep end.
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