On Mar 24, 2009, at 8:35 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
Kyle Mcallister wrote:
--- "Stephen A. Lawrence" <[email protected]> wrote:
[Robin von Spaandock wrote:]
I suspect not. CF (or LENR) is finicky, and no one
is yet certain of the precise
requirements (though there are now a few claims of
complete replicability).
Those who can achieve it have been trying for
quite a while to get it right.
Even then, I think a reasonably well equipped lab
is a prerequisite. It's not
something you can do in your garage, and expect to
work.
Saying it can't be done in a garage is going a bit too
far. It depends on /what/ one has in his/her garage.
Yes, indeed. I think I've heard Ed Storms does some of his work in a
(very well equipped) garage.
I hate to burst this myth, but I'm in a very well equipped but crowded
laboratory. The cars are safely in the garage upstairs. The SEM even
has a room of its own.
Ed
People are building fusors in their garages. It takes
brains, determination, cunning in designing with what
you can scrounge, someone to listen (hard to get), and
motivation.
There is something else as well.
There are some reproducible, repeatable experiments which work, if
not every time, then a good fraction of the time. But reliability
is not what stands in the way of making a tea heater. There are two
other problems with making a gadget which does something useful.
OK. Exactly how do we set up the reproducible
experiments, what specific (read: NOT unobtainium)
substances were used, etc.?
I'm not an expert, but two come to my mind which seem worth pursuing:
See the SPAWAR experiment replication, with which Steve Krivit was
involved, seemed reasonably successful. There should be a lot in the
Vortex archive on that, but in any case here's a relevant link (this
is
*not* to a complete paper, just something with references):
http://www.newenergytimes.com/Library2/2008/2008Krivit-CurrentScience.pdf
Also see the recent gas phase experiments by Ed Storms et al; a
paper is
here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEdetectiono.pdf
There was a wet-cell paper posted to Vortex recently which claimed
20/20
runs produced positive results, and 0/20 control runs produced
positive
results. That seems worth pursuing too but I don't have the link
off hand.
Why do we not concentrate
almost exclusively on that which we KNOW works, and
expand upon that? Make variations of this one setup
that demonstrates excess heat, eventually using
materials from different sources, testing equipment
from different manufacturers, and so on, and then toss
that into the public eye?
Second, and more important, the same bugaboo that plagues hot
fusion is at work here: The best of the wet-cell CF experiments is
nowhere near breakeven.
It's as bad as all that?
What, the breakeven problem? Yes, it certainly is. Hot fusion, cold
fusion, or fusor-fusion, you've got the same problem: energy out is
smaller than energy in, and if you count the cost of the equipment in
the energy budget, energy out is *much* smaller than energy in.
It's almost like we're initiating the fusion reactions one at a time,
grabbing individual pairs of atoms with a tweezers and bashing them
together, and it's very hard to ramp that up and get something useful.
The Sun, or an H-bomb, does it en masse, and the results are very
different.
Here's a rule of thumb: If you need a calorimeter to tell whether
your
reactor is working, you can be quite sure it's not producing a useful
amount of energy.
Why the hatred towards hot
fusion by the cold fusioneers? Seems neither is doing
well. The late Bussard's group a possible exception, I
am watching that one with great interest.
I think the initial extremely negative reaction of hot fusion people
to
reports of cold fusion has a lot to do with the bad feelings.
I will say this: an army of willing amateurs is
nothing to sneeze at.
--Kyle
