Posted on 07/14/2012 5:44:08 PM PDT by Kevmo
Cold Fusion: Progress Report
By Brian Westenhaus | Mon, 09 July 2012 21:57 |
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Your humble writer has been watching for the news out of the International Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Symposium, ILENRS-12 held at The College of William and Mary Sadler Center early last week. At long last, after years of little available event news we’re getting some interesting bits out.
The process of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) or Cold Fusion or your choice on an array of ideas on what to call it, have required the element palladium as a catalyst, that isn’t consumed, but represents an expensive initial outlay. Current commercial efforts use nickel instead, because it is plentiful and cheap and works almost as well.
The fuel of choice has been “heavy water”, which is non-radioactive and can be recovered from ocean saltwater. Four ounces of heavy water today costs about $50 and contains enough energy when converted to electricity to supply the average American with electricity for a lifetime. The commercial efforts are focused on plain fresh water, some with a hydrogen gas flow, now.
A LENR start is dramatic and unmistakable when it occurs – much more heat is released than any conceivable chemical process could generate. Such heat can be used for industrial processes, space heating or hot water, or it can be converted to electricity.
Today’s remaining problems concern reliability and control.
Whatever it is that makes LENR work, the phenomenon seems to have a mind of its own, and decides when to turn itself on and off. The commercial work that seems closest to a resolution of these problems are holding their cards close to their chests, hoping to be first to enter a huge and lucrative market.
A bit of background is in order because for LENR or cold fusion news isn’t appearing in papers published in major scholarly journals – a point we need to keep in mind. The story – very briefly:
Along with government censorship, which we can expect in proper circumstances, political censorship in an effort to not unduly alarm the public in the mainstream media there’s a wall still up of scientific censorship for LENR. The Internet is putting a foundation out for specialty and niche news, blogs and social networks that are exposing more information.
LENR has occupied a scientific backwater now for 23 years. Demonstrations have been repeated again and again, a great deal of know-how has been acquired and shared over the Internet. Scientists who stuck with it have been vindicated to those who are in the interested in the field.
In 1989, Martin Fleischmann, a scientist at the top of his field, with Stanley Pons told the world they had ran a LENR in a test tube. Within a year scientists from prestigious labs around the world spilled announcements they had tried to duplicate what Fleischmann had reported with no success. The results were un-reproducible. Cold Fusion was to become a joke about junk science.
About a year and a half back an Italian entrepreneur named Andrea Rossi demonstrated a cold fusion boiler, and announced the taking orders for 2012 delivery. The following months have brought a lot of others from the personal labs and quiet private researchers out into view.
Mr. Rossi has made a lot of web traffic and the first thing we see from the Symposium is the estimable Jed Rothwell who operates the prime scientific source for the field, LENR-CANR.ORG, starting a forum thread that became a worthy look at Mr. Rossi from those who know him. With subjective understanding a better objective view of Mr. Rossi and what he has going on is covered in the forum thread.
Before one begins a click through to the thoughts on Mr. Rossi his technology and business acumen lets note a fundamental problem – that government censorship.
So far the patent ability for LENR isn’t coming. The US Patent Office has a backlog of dozens of applications on which it is not acting, demanding cumbersome and expensive on-site demonstrations in addition to the usual paper filings. It’s not much better overseas. This puts the inventors in a very unusual spot. With no intellectual property rights, whatever is offered can simply be taken with poor grounds for compensation.
That plus the prospect that whatever works and is verified will become the top media circus in all of mankind’s history. Whatever we have, as reasoned and responsible as we try to be, what we’re getting from the commercial effort is so clouded, confused and in organizational disarray as to be without credibility.
Still, out in the real world, LENR science is in better shape. Italy, Japan, Israel and Greece are the current world leaders. China is suspected to have a major LENR program. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are quietly pursuing the pot of gold, isolated and in secret, avoiding the heavy hand of the US government, which might be a very good thing when commercial prospects get to market.
But the “news” is in a whole new arena. We won’t be getting papers and studies that can connect to existing technology for a long while. The commercial folks are working in a world more primitive than a “Wild West” situation and every bit as likely to go into a cold war framework or legal battles just as soon as someone seems to be making money.
The stakes are huge. Something dramatic is bound to happen, and a lot of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists and academic administrators will be gravely embarrassed – its essentially too late for them already. Yet, they will claim that they were simply surprised, that they could not have seen this coming.
But we aren’t and are looking forward to the future.
By. Brian Westenhaus
Unless you use 0.196 M hydrogen peroxide. Then you have plenty of chemical heat.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2905533/posts?page=72#72
Not government. A bunch of physics professors who are already sucking on the government tit. To the tune of $250 Billion.
Those physics professors are smart people who read stories like this about elderly scientists making cold fusion claims they can't back up. They don't want to see money wasted on cranks and a pathological science. It's not a conspiracy. It's sound judgement.
Maybe if the cold fusion cranks repeat it enough times then it will be true.
So, then all the 14,700 times that LENR has been replicated, it was due to H202 at the input?
If we discard all the times it’s been proven to be used as the input, how many LENR experiments have been replicated? Feel free to prove your assertions.
Not necessarily. You're confusing the energy per mole with the rate of reaction. If the reaction runs slowly enough, with only an infinitesimal percentage of the atoms fusing per unit time, then you can have useful energy without blowing up your setup.
That said, I'm still waiting for a LENR demonstration of significant duration ( > 24 hours, minimum, week preferable), done at an independent testing facility.
Just as a reminder, your 14,700 number comes from an obscure Chinese journal and as far as I know there's been no attempt to determine the quality of any of those experiments, which is much more important than quantity.
And remember that when you post in the open, you post to everybody.
Just as a reminder, your 14,700 number comes from an obscure Chinese journal and as far as I know there's been no attempt to determine the quality of any of those experiments, which is much more important than quantity.
And remember that when you post in the open, you post to everybody.
Post the list of all 14,700 and I'll let you know.
Please stop stalking me.
No you won’t. Even if I went to all that trouble, you’d just deliver crickets, you wanker.
Name just one experiment out of the 14,700.
You won’t even go to the trouble of providing the source of the 14,700 claim.
LENR could do the same thing ~ make everything that passed before so irrelevant that in a couple of centuries no one will understand the past.
Newton actually got it wrong ~ in the local system the error is not enough to worry about for most things, but you branch out to considering things in the local group, you have to reference Einstein and others since Newton.
Well, that deadline passed ~ now they're into a scam aren't they?
Since your basic high energy on line storage battery/capacitor system holds about 5.5 hours of juice, you really want to run any test with any equipment that looks kind of like those high energy devices for a much longer time than 5.5 hours.
Like George Miley?
How many decades do we have to carry these guys before somebody gets wise.
Please stop stalking me.
Yes, 14700 times. Jerks like you keep coming up with bowlsheet arguments that draw from clasic fallacies, over and over and over. Is that an example of your ability to reason critically? Scientifically? You’re totally full of bowl sheet.
Jing-tang He
• Nuclear fusion inside condense matters
• Frontiers of Physics in China
Volume 2, Number 1, 96-102, DOI: 10.1007/s11467-007-0005-8
This article describes in detail the nuclear fusion inside condense matters—the Fleischmann-Pons effect, the reproducibility of cold fusions, self-consistency of cold fusions and the possible applications
http://www.boliven.com/publication/10.1007~s11467-007-0005-8?q=(%22David%20J.%20Nagel%22)
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