At 09:49 AM 10/18/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Premature promotion of the energy generation possibilities of cold
fusion may play into the skeptical position.
There is copious evidence that the effect is likely to be useful,
such as the fact that small cells have run for days producing 100 W
or more. I do not know of any evidence that it will "self poison,"
chaotic, or that it cannot be scaled up, or that it will not be
useful for some other reason. I don't give a damn what the skeptical
position is or whether we "play into it." Telling people about
practical prospects for cold fusion is the right thing to do. I
agree with McKubre about that.
Practical possibilities, yes. Practical prospects, well, iffier. I
think we can all agree that research is needed, and I'm sure that
McKubre agrees that trying to engineer a more reliable, beefier cell,
could be a money sink. Isn't this what happened with Technova?
"Results were not as they expected." I.e., they knew that CF was
real, but they found that getting it to work more reliably was *hard.*
Do you know anyone, Jed, who knows how to make such a small cell and
get it to run 100W *reliably*, so that it does it every time? I've
not seen a report of that. It's always been that, in a series of
cells, one cell does something like this.
Now we might think that all we have to do is make all the cells
exactly the same. That may be impossible, literally impossible, if
this is a chaotic system.
There may still be a path to commercial application, with a device
that incorporates hundreds or thousands of cells. The reaction could
be pretty unreliable, for each cell, and still the total power
generation could be reasonably reliable.
However, there is a problem that you have ignored. I called it "self
poison," which may not communicate effectively what I'm trying to
say. The reaction doesn't continue. There is still fuel, but it
stops, after a time. Something changes. Perhaps the possible NAE
sites have all been activated, and the reaction destroys them. A
delicate arrangement of palladium atoms, and whatever else is
involved, that is just right for fusion, when it gets hot enough to
vaporize palladium -- isn't that happening? -- tends to be a bit changed, eh?
First things first. What is NAE? Exactly? Until we know, trying to
engineer this is a stab in the dark. You might hit something, but
chances are, not. This cannot be overemphasized. We need cooperation
between theoreticians and experimentalists, the theoreticians should
be making verifiable predictions, standard scientific stuff. And then
they should be tested.
After all, there have been efforts for twenty years to find a way
to make the reaction usable for practical purpose, to what result?
And, yes, I'm fully aware that the question is unfair.
Since it is unfair we should dismiss it.
Nope, because it is not *entirely* unfair. The point I make with it
is that just trying more of the same isn't smart. What's happening?
Until we know, it could take centuries of hit or miss work to find
something that truly works.
Or maybe tomorrow. That's the tantalizing hope, eh?
Look, my cells, if I find a way to quickly determine that NAE has
formed, could be used to cheaply explore the parameter space, at
least for codeposition like what I'm doing. I won't have
sophisticated equipment to monitor what's going on, but others might.
With a lot of basically identical cells, except for a controlled
variable, exploration can become more rapid, and can be shared among
multiple groups.
I'm not tossing all the eggs into one basket, the "prove the theory"
basket. I don't really know what will come first.
The chicken or the egg?
I'll be doing some things that, as far as I know, nobody has tried
before. Simple things. For example, I'm going to replace the
radiation detectors during the experiment. I'm working dry (films not
wet, outside the cell, looking only for neutrons), and I've designed
a detector stack where it's easy to pull and replace the LR-115
films. *When* are the neutrons emitted? If it is early on, it may not
be necessary to run the thing for three weeks, perhaps the cycle
could be reduced to a week or less. Faster turnaround means more
experiments can be run.
But I'll also be looking for visible light, remember when I asked if
anyone had done that? With a microscope, in the dark? I'll also have
a piezoelectric sensor attached to the cell. So maybe I'll get lucky.
Light and sound won't prove "nuclear," but I don't care. If I can
show that sound and/or light are *associated* with the reaction, I
then may have a way to determine that the reaction is taking place
without waiting for film to be exposed and developed.
