Jones Beene wrote:
No way... if it is a rock-solid megawatt demo - it'll be bigger than the seconding coming ... and Bob Park and Randi will be among those proclaiming "told you so" :)
I hope you are right. But I fear there may be no impact. For one thing, I gather Rossi does not intend to invite many people to see the thing while it is in Florida. He does not intend to invite influential people or reporters. He wants to keep a low profile. Don't ask me why, or what benefit that could bring . . . His business strategy makes no sense to me.
As far as I am concerned, the Feb. 10 demonstration was rock-solid. I am not sure a 1 MW demonstration would be more convincing. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but based on the industrial heaters I saw in operation at Hydrodynamics, my feeling is when you get up to 50 or 100 kW or so, it can be surprisingly difficult to grasp what is going on. It is not easy to measure how much heat the thing is producing. Even the water flow is challenging. We are talking about kind of flow you get from an open fire-hydrant. Try guessing how much that is! There is no easy or precise way to measure it. I guess you could let it fill a swimming pool. You need lots of wires and controls going into the machine. I expect even the control electronics power supply will be hefty. Rossi says this will be a water heater. Not a generator. There are no plans to make a stand-alone, self sustaining 1 MW machine -- and there should not be! At this stage, that would be dangerous. You want battery-backed up AC powered controls and monitoring.
Gene Mallove knew a guy who claimed there were anomalies with combustion heating in factory forges and the like. I don't recall the details, but I do recall that no one knew how to measure the heat from such large reactions to within 10%. The methods are surprisingly crude. If there were small anomalies they would be impossible to detect. Even 10 kW is harder to measure than 1 kW. If I were Rossi, I would not make anything bigger than what he has now. I would use it to convince General Electric to make 100 million of the things in a few years. But I am not Rossi, and believe me, I have no influence over him.
- Jed
