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Posted on 07/11/2012 10:18:43 PM PDT by Kevmo
Cold Fusion Is Hot Again - Tuesday, July 17th 9p | 12a ET "A report on cold fusion - nuclear energy like that which powers the sun, but made at room temperatures on a tabletop, which in 1989, was presented as a revolutionary new source of energy that promised to be cheap, limitless and clean but was quickly dismissed as junk science. Today, scientists believe that cold fusion, now most often called low temperature fusion or a nuclear effect, could lead to monumental breakthroughs in energy production."
The short answer is that "cold fusion" offers the needed safe containment, because it is driven by quantum mechanical effects that bypass the "brute force" approach used by "hot fusion" (tokamaks).
"Hot fusion" DOES try to build a "virtual sun" and has all the attendant problems of trying to do that. Which is also why "hot fusion" is has not "delivered" a working reactor after fifty years of research and $250 billion spent.
Cold Fusion is a movie starring “ The Saint”.
Thanks for the info. Thus if hot fusion is not containable and cold fusion is the alternative, then am thinking I must learn more about cold fusion. I would love to see fusion work. Would eliminate the waste for one thing and the waste is a problem. Spoke recently with someone in the field of fission. I asked one question. Had he read anything which would make him think fusion was possible. He did not know, and stated his side of the equation was fission. Had a professor once and in his class his comment was, We went the wrong way. Should have gone the fusion route. So I asked a question. Which was the easier for containment, fusion or fission? The answer was long from him. He did say fission was more possible because containment was possible. At the time fission containment came to be there was no containment possible for fusion. Fusion (imho) offers limitless energy, if containment can be found. Soon I hope for fusion to be contained. I believe fusion is the energy of the future, if containment is found. It will take a better mind than mine to find the piece to the puzzle.
We created that problem ourselves. If we had gone the route of breeder reactors, we wouldn't have this issue. Look at the French nuclear program. They have a tiny fraction of the waste we would have for an equivalent program.
If Rossi can show that, to an independent, reputable tester, preferably at the tester's lab, then I'll be very interested.
Until then, I'll wait for test results. Whatever happened to the customer that Rossi sold the e-Cat to last year?
"Hot Fusion" is REALLY DIFFICULT (and has not yet been practically accomplished even after fifty years, by any of the MANY routes that have been tried. And depending on the particular fusion fuel mix, it is not without its own problems with radiation and waste disposal. True that the reaction itself generates no waste, but the "easiest to burn" fuel mix generates lot of neutrons, and the structure of the reactor itself slowly becomes radioactive. At the end of the life of the plant, that radioactive material also has to be "disposed of".
Disposal of wastes from both processes are overblown in the public mind, and tainted by leftover propaganda from the Cold War. Waste disposal CAN be done, but is being prevented (at least in the US) from being done by the eco-nuts.
If you want to start learning about "cold fusion", I suggest starting with Edmund Storm's on-line (free) introduction "A Student's Guide to Cold Fusion". He expands his coverage in his book "The Science of Low Energy Nuclear Reaction" (this is intended as a college science text and is not cheap....on the order of a hundred bucks on Amazon..but you can get your local library to borrow it for you through Interlibrary Loan.
I also suggest looking through the LENR/CANR.org Website.
No, seriously, if the science and observations are all valid, then why have they not been able to demonstrate anything on a larger, easily-observed scale? They'e had 20 years to move from "scientific claim" to the next step of irrefutable proof, and they can't do it. They can't even explain the "why" of alleged excess energy production.
So I'm still betting on Dumbledore.
Sure, after that, you need to string wires everywhere, get people to put phones in their homes and businesses, and set up billing structures to fund telephone companies -- there would be plenty of work left to do. But you'd know that the telephone works.
Fusion? I used to have hopes but it just seems like one scam after another. No public demonstration. No "Mr Watson" moment. They just keep dangling the promise in front of me.
I say it's a con.
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Largely because the science effort in LENR has been stifled/impeded at every turn by some of the dirtiest science politics I have ever seen in my almost fifty years of "doing science", and includes actual science fraud on the part of some of those who claimed "not to observe" the effects. These efforts continue today, and are well documented, especially by Steve Krivit.
"They'e had 20 years to move from "scientific claim" to the next step of irrefutable proof, and they can't do it.
FYI, "they" have "done it", at least according the the normal standards of scientific proof. EVERY facet of CF has been replicated, often multiple times.
"They can't even explain the "why" of alleged excess energy production."
"Why" is largely irrelevant. Replicable scientific results are all that is needed. The problem is not "not enough theory" the problem is "too many (competing) theories". But make no mistake......physics is "still" an experimental science, and replicable results "still" trump any theory.
Nope. The evidence is there. That you refuse to look at it means zip. Plenty of qualified witnesses, victims, and investigations. VERY well documented.
See Nobel Lauriate Julian Schwinger's personal testimony about how his attempt to publish a theoretical paper explaining cold fusion was rejected. Schwinger being one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th Century, I would think he would have been worth hearing from.
The only "horse hockey" around here is in YOUR head.
Sorry, but that is just incredibly unconvincing to me. Surely there is at least one interested and wealthy entrepeneur, benefactor, etc., who could fund them to build something of a larger scale. Just one. And in more than 20 years, nothing. That speaks of a far more fundamental problem than just a skeptical scientific community.
FYI, "they" have "done it", at least according the the normal standards of scientific proof. EVERY facet of CF has been replicated, often multiple times.
No, they haven't. If they truly did, and on a scale and with sufficient repeatability (there's the real rub), then the debate would be over. All we keep hearing about are lab experiments that sometimes work, and sometimes don't.
You know every time I see that repeated I just want to ask "Has anyone made a piece of toast or something with it yet?"
I'm not sure it's a con, but the lack of public demonstrations suggests that whatever they think they've got isn't what they've actually got, so attempts at replication don't work consistently.
I'm not sure it's a con, but the lack of public demonstrations suggests that whatever they think they've got isn't what they've actually got, so attempts at replication don't work consistently.
The problem with Rossi is Rossi.
He said he was going to let the market decide, so let us see what the market decides. If he’s got the things working at 600C for 45 days at a time, great.
Then where’s my Mr. Fusion?
***You are utterly, 100% right. The hot fusion boys have spent $250B of our money, and the best we have to show for it is 6MJoules of output for a few seconds. In the meantime, hundreds of LENR experiments have generated thousands of MJoules for less than a thousandth of the cost — almost all of which is private money to begin with.
So for hot fusion, we’ve got maybe a total of 10MJoules for $250B, which comes to $25k/Joule. For cold fusion, we’ve got maybe a total of 100k MJoules for $250M, which 25cents/Joule.
Like you say, where is my Mr. Fusion, from the hot fusion boys?
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