Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> It's clear you can, in a simple way, scale up the Arata effect. If so much > material generates so much energy, presumably more material will generate > more energy. That's scaling up. Yup. It is. And I'll bet with 100 g of the stuff you could run a small thermoelectric device. > But has any such experiment recovered all the energy used to set it up? What does that have to do with it? Anyway, yes, that has been done, at the NRL. Put a cell in a Seebeck calorimeter and you recover every joule. Put in a flow calorimeter and you recover 95%. What difference does it make? Making the thing into a practical source of energy is an engineering job that any of a thousand industrial corporations could accomplish. > And then produce a positive return, more productive than alternatives > *considering the investment*? > It will pay off a million times over. Better than inventing semiconductors, railroads or the Internet. > Jed, I know that you know that when someone shows the necessary conditions, > venture capitalists will be falling all over themselves trying to rush to > the head of the line. I haven't seen it yet, and, apparently, neither have > they . . . I have talked to venture capitalists. So far, I have only encountered two kinds: 1. Those who do not yet believe that cold fusion exists, because they are like Taubes; they do not understand the ABCs of science and technology. 2. Those who are only interested in a near-term sure thing. A proven technology or an Internet venture that someone else is already making boodles of money on, where they hope to grab some market share. Sooner or later an investor will come along with real money and real guts, who will see the wisdom of doing cold fusion. All it takes is one investor. Others will soon follow. > It's not a long shot in the sense of the field being a known blind alley, > it's a long shot in the sense that any particular investment is very risky > at this time. And cold fusion is particularly risky compared to what? Can I interest you in commercial real estate? Stock in AIG or GM? How about the Chinese stock market? > Because what is clearly open and needing funding is basic science, that -- > most likely -- won't *directly* create a commercial opportunity, we should > be pushing for academic and public funding of basic science. I have heard that for years, but frankly, I don't believe it. I do not think that Arata or even Kidwell has any grasp of the basic science, but they are making tremendous progress toward a practical device. More progress in the last year than the previous 19 years put together. > We need more and better understanding of LENR processes before the > *engineering* can kick in. Apparently not. > Depends on the goals of the investor. Right now, in my view, a sensible > investor will be parsimonious. If I had the money, I'd retain some experts > to watch the field and look for opportunities. Low-cost, relatively. There are people who have billions of dollars burning a hole in their pockets, and nothing much to invest in. Some of the biggest advances in practical technology such as air conditioning and dishwashers were made in the 1930s because the money had nowhere else to go. > The nanoparticle approach uses less palladium than others. A nanoparticle >> cold fusion device capable of practical levels of energy generation would >> use no more palladium than an automobile catalytic converter. >> > > Jed, you hope so. I know so. > Got any evidence to back that up? That's what the people making the stuff told me. It is easy to confirm with a back-of-the-envelope calculation. And they are nowhere near the limits of power density. Plus they say high temperatures will not be a problem. 200 or 300 deg C would be fine, and at those temperatures Carnot efficiency is high enough to do just about anything you like, short of aerospace applications. > The basic problem I've seen described by experts: the reaction disrupts the > lattice, and the reaction energies are such that preventing this disruption > may be impossible. . . . Maybe the Arata approach will work, it depends on > how long the material continues to function. If your auto catalytic > converter only worked for a few days or weeks, even though the palladium > could be recovered and reprocessed, it would be quite impractical. My point is that there is no evidence for that with nanoparticles. That's what I have been saying. Arata's cells have run for weeks with no diminution in power. Kidwell degassed and re-gassed the same samples time after time, hundreds of times, and they kept working, and producing the same output. > "Theory" is a poor term for what I'm talking about. Rather, "models" would > be more like it. I'm an engineer, Jed, basically. If I don't have some model > for what to expect from a variation, it could take me way too much time to > discover what works well enough to be practical. You know the history of > this field: worker finds effect. Tries to increase effect through process > variations, but every variation kills the effect. And sometimes the effect > disappears, presumably because it was dependent upon an unrecognized process > variation. So far, with nanoparticles that has not happened. On the contrary, Kitamura's s/n ratio is better than Arata's and more robust; Arata has improved his experiments a great deal; and Kidwell is way better than both. One of the problems with this field is that we are so used to failure, we don't recognize success when we see it. We don't take "yes" for an answer. > Politically, I apparently disagree with you, Jed. Cold fusion was oversold. > It was oversold by our beloved Martin, whether he intended it or not, as > easy. I say Undersold. Way Undersold. If people had the slightest inkling how much good cold fusion will do, and how many benefits it will bring, and how close it is to fruition, the Mall in front of the Capital would be filled with hundreds of thousands of people demanding that the government launch a full-scale Manhattan Project to develop it. I mean that literally; I am not exaggerating. If it becomes generally known that cold fusion is real, and powerful people at Exxon Mobil or someplace like that try to stop it, hundreds of thousands of people will turn out and they will demand the research be allowed. The research is not funded properly because the researchers have been hiding their light under a bushel for 20 years. They have understated and undersold the results far too long. This is the biggest thing in the history of technology. There is every reason to think that it will lower the cost of energy by a factor of 1000 and eliminate global warming, and not a single reason to think that cannot be done. They should shout out and be bold, the way McKubre was on "60 Minutes." He was 100% right and fully justified. He and I may have been the only ones at ICCF-15 who said that during the discussion period, but I said it then, I stand by it, and I darn well support him with all my heart. > The difficulty wasn't emphasized, it should have been. The difficulty has been over-emphasized, to the point where even experts overestimate how long it will take and how difficult it will be. They resemble Orville Wright in 1901, who sincerely believed it might take 50 years for man to learn to fly. He was the world's #1 expert on that subject. He and his brother knew *far more* than everyone else combined. And yet he did not see where his knowledge was pointing to. The pessimism and anti-cold fusion mania that infects scientists has even affected the minds of experts in the field. They are so used to working on a shoestring with inadequate, obsolete instruments and no assistance, they imagine that is the only way the research can be done. They are elderly, and they have forgotten how quickly a 20-something PhD can learn and innovate. If you were to throw a few hundred talented young people and $50 million or $100 million at this problem, they would make more progress in a few months than all the world's researchers have made in 20 years. Fleischmann, Pons, McKubre, Storms, Arata and a few others have already done the hard part, and discovered a way to make a practical device. The rest is straightforward. Even ignoring Arata, for crying out loud at IMRA Toyota in France years ago they got bulk Pd cathodes to work nearly every time, and to produce 50 to 300 MJ, at over 100 W. The problem was *solved*. The thing was *done*. Without a drop of theory, they got the thing to work a levels high enough and with sufficient reproducibility to accomplish any research goal, if not enough to make a practical device. Those were smart people at IRMA but not extraterrestrial geniuses. They were stopped by politics and greed, and because their sponsor died, not for any technical reason. That's what Martin told me, and I believe him. What can be done once can be done a million times. They proved it could be done. If people would pay attention and cut a deal with Johnson Matthey, they could be doing that experiment right now in a thousand corporate and university labs worldwide, and measuring helium and tritium, and theory-mongering to a fair-thee-well. The forces stopping the rapid development of cold fusion into a practical source of energy are 90% human nature and politics, and 10% technical difficulties, lack of theory and so on. Here is how I predict the theory bugaboo will play out. I may have said this before, but: Assume that many dramatic replications occur and everyone agrees the effect is real. At that point, the bigwigs of physics will hold conferences and frantic meetings. They will come up with a theory. Whether the theory is actually right or not makes no difference; they will agree it is right. They will award whoever comes up with it a Nobel prize that same year. This theory will provide a fig-leaf to manufacturers who want to begin commercial production. "See, we know how it works, and we are sure it is safe." Again, whether that is true or not is immaterial. > For now, it's hard enough to spread the realization that LENR is quite > real, quite well-known to take place, verified, validated, and just plain > undeniable, I'd say. It is hard mainly because the people who have the proof refuse to show it to others, publish it, or allow me to upload it to LENR-CANR.org. I sometimes think that only Steve Krivit and I are trying to get the word out, and just about as many researchers are trying to stop us as help us! That's an exaggeration, but not by much. For the most part, the researchers are not to blame for the cold fusion political fiasco, or at least they are more sinned against than sinning. But the general public remains ignorant of the facts to a large extent because several researchers like it that way. Funding has not come into the field because -- in some instances -- I could not persuade researchers to tell venture capitalists how much money they needed, or what they planned to do with it. They would not provide even minimal information! At one of the ICCF conferences years ago, when the organizers announced that no members of the press were in attendance and none were invited or expected. The audience applauded. I was appalled. I still am. - Jed
