A team of Italian scientists claim to have found the holy grail of energy sources – Cold Fusion.
Cold Fusion is one of those things which exists quite happily as a mathematical formula but has failed to see the light of day.
The idea is that you can manage a near-room-temperature reaction in which two smaller nuclei join together to form a single larger nucleus while releasing large amounts of energy.
Every now and then someone hits the headlines saying that they have managed to do it, but everyone else seems to have difficulty reproducing their experiment.
Despite the intense skepticism from other boffins, a team of Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna announced that they developed a cold fusion device capable of producing 12,400 W of heat power with an input of just 400 W.
They demonstrated a nickel-hydrogen fusion reactor which they say will be .shipped as a commercial device within the next three months and start mass production by the end of 2011.
Rossi and Focardi say that when the atomic nuclei of nickel and hydrogen are fused in their reactor, the reaction produces copper and a large amount of energy. The reactor uses less than 1 gram of hydrogen and starts with about 1,000 W of electricity, which is reduced to 400 W after a few minutes. Every minute, the reaction can convert 292 grams of 20°C water into dry steam at about 101°C. Since raising the temperature of water by 80°C and converting it to steam requires about 12,400 W of power, the experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31.
On a large scale the boffins think that electricity can be generated at a cost of less than 1 cent/kWh, which is significantly less than coal or natural gas plants.
On the plus side it does not produce any CO2 or radioactive waste and will be economical to build.
The boffins are manufacturing a 1MW plant made with 125 modules. Although the reactors can be self-sustaining so that the input can be turned off, the scientists say that the reactors work better with a constant input. The reactors need to be refueled every 6 months, which the scientists say is done by their dealers.
One reactor has been running continuously for two years, providing heat for a factory. They provide little detail about this case.
However, Rossi and Focardi's paper on the nuclear reactor has been rejected by peer-reviewed journals. They published their paper in the Journal of Nuclear Physics, an online journal founded and run by themselves.
They say their paper was rejected because they lack a theory for how the reaction works.
No word on how much their reactors will cost. They published a paper here but the site is overloaded. We just hope that does not happen with their reactors.
Even a child has basic theory behind design.
They musta come across other works.
Surely you mean Adobe, if anything.
Of course anyone who thinks you can't come out with an "idea" (that has heated an Italian factory for two years) without a "theory of how its working" probably won't understand. Do you even know how your furnace or car works? Wake up: this is the biggest thing since fire. It will allow decentralized cheap power production that will allow people to settle practically anywhere on Earth.
Even if it's real, what really concerns me is that this thing will be turning nickel and hidrogen into cooper. We have plenty of hidrogen, but not so much nickel. In the end, we might deplete our nickel, then what?
Not to mention that such inexpensive energy could lead to over consuming.
On the other hand, they could fit a unit like that in a car, so we'd have to refuel it only every 6 months.
Of course this is italian BS, but we really should put some money for cold fusion research because pay-off will be so enormous. Hot fusion, that is actively researched is always as an engineering challenge more complex and expensive than current unlimited and clean power sources such as nuclear fission, solar energy and wind power. Therefore it just does not pay, even if we manage to put together working hot fusion plant.
But cold fusion should be plausible, and it really pays back if it is possible. In fact I calculated that it costs to world's economy about one billion dollars towards every hour that delays the commercial release of this product. Therefore it is Italian BS, because we have waited now for more than a week with no additional news.
2. Plants don't do nuclear fusion, which is what this is all about. Plants use normal chemical reactions.
3. Just because there is a forecast increase of research into low-energy nuclear reactions doesn't mean a damn thing, other than more governments are throwing money away on useless research. Think of it as welfare for the egghead class.
4. Yes, there is plenty of nickel around. We can use that other long-term energy source, solar, to power extraction of nickel from seawater.
Does "cold fusion" exist? Don't know. But these Italian boffins have to give us more solid proof. Let them turn over their reactor to third-party testing. Short of that, they are just scamming.
They say their paper was rejected because they lack a theory for how the reaction works."
Imagine the following situation:
Date: sometime during the early stone age.
Place: somewhere on earth:
A man stumbles upon a way of making a small fire by knocking two pieces of flint against each other near a patch of dry grass. He happily shows his "experiment" to the tribal elders who get confused. Some say that it will kill them all as happens when lightining strikes the forest following a dry summer and the forest catches fire and keeps on burning until the rains come; others are afraid that this discoverer of a new power will rise above them and become their new leader, others are afraid that the fire is the work of the bad spirits. So they call the shaman who after studying the situation, says that since he cannot understand how a few blades of grass can catch fire, so he has to ban such experiments, puts the discoverer to death and so saves the tribe from total anihilation;
and Man would thus keep on living in the stone-age for ever.
proved exactly nothing. This is made all the more
ridiculous because what they have in their reactor is
very similar to what is the NiMnH compound in batteries!
This confusion could have been eliminated by allowing
the reactor to run during the demonstration for just one
half hour longer. But I would prefer to have seen both
volume and weight energy density exceeding that of the
fueled process of a hydrocarbon fuel when provided
with external oxidizer, by an order of magnitude as a
proof.
Someone can’t take something seriously when proof of
claims are not provided, because the most likely cause
of this is that individuals are engaged in interpersonal
confidence games associated with a false processes.
:S:MarkSCoffman
http://lenr-canr.org/News.htm
The people conducting the experiment are professors at U. Bologna and experts from the Italian Energy Dept. They have published peer-reviewed papers starting in 1994. It is highly unlike that such are "engaged in interpersonal
confidence games." In any case, cold fusion has been replicated thousands of times in hundreds of major labs, and there is no chance that all of the scientists who reported it are fakers.
You will find ~1000 papers on this subject here, including the Defense Intelligence Agency report referenced above:
http://lenr-canr.org/
Every Ni58 atom would consome 5 H atoms by the time it went through the whole sequence of reactions detailed in the paper, producing roughly 3,300,000,000,000 joules/Mole Ni58 if all 5 stages are completed, or 963,000,000,000 joules/mole Ni58 (9.63E11 Joules)if only one stage is completed.
Humans currently use 5E20 J per year.
This means 30,000 tons Nickel per year could power humanity at present power levels.
at $52,300/ton nickel, this could power the entire world for around $1.57 billion per year, or about half what the U.S. currently spends on Gasoline per day....
There is actually so much Nickel on earth's crust that you'd run out of water(hydrogen) long before you depleted the Nickel in the earth's crust.
Since this uses only H1 hydrogen, there is enough hydrogen on earth to last for several hundred billion years, even if every person on earth had a copy of this device and used it non-stop forever...
Sincerly, Jesse Denson
One should explain me first why the continous heating (400W) required for a highly exotermic reaction?
Wouldn't it be nice to get out from under the Arab thumb, and all the insanity and trouble in that neck of the woods. They'd go back to being poor, backward nations that nobody cared about or could even recall where they were.
Of course, this would disrupt the richest and most corrupt industry on the globe - so even a non-paranoid would have to think that if it really did work it might quickly be discredited and bought up, with the discovers either being given their own island, or a trip to the deep six. That, or the Copper Combine will get them, since it produces excess copper ;')
And what in heck would we do with all that copper? I guess we could make a lot of bronze-age sculptures.
But when logic strikes - what is most likely - that this is a scam or that these guys just turned the world to a better place?