Someone asked me whether I think Defkalion will succeed in shipping Rossi reactors, thereby saving the world. I said yes, I think they will succeed, but it may take longer than they plan. Reasons:
1. The scientific problem is solved; it is "just a matter of engineering." 2. They have a lot of money. 3. They are not fools. Engineers will not appreciate the expression "just a matter of engineering." But let's face it: scientific genius is rare and cannot be bought. Engineering talent is not so rare and it goes to the highest bidder. Engineering problems can usually be solved with money. Lots of money! Which is what they have. Money can buy talent and equipment, but it cannot buy time. So the schedule may slip. I have no knowledge of how far along they are in progress toward manufacturing. But, as everyone knows, when people set out to manufacture radically new technology, they are often delayed by unforeseen problems. I have thought a little about the problems they may encounter. It seems to me that with the 1 MW unit, they may have difficulty controlling 100 separate reactors. I am sure that problem can be addressed, but I can imagine it might take many extra months. Other glitches are likely to arise with materials. Ed Storms predicts the biggest problem may be batch-to-batch uniformity of the nickel catalyst. That has been the biggest problem with laboratory scale experiments. I believe that Rossi has made several of these devices but only the latest one works spectacularly well. I think he mentioned that the person who makes the nickel catalyst for him is elderly, in his 80s or 90s. If that person becomes incapacitated or dies, the project may be delayed. I am not predicting that the death of one expert can stop this project. There are ways to work around that, and my impression is that they have thought about this and are prepared. They have preserved samples of unused catalyst material and they plan to perform high resolution mass spectroscopy on before-and-after samples. Whatever knowledge that elderly person has, it will be revealed by such techniques. If he dies, others will figure out how to reverse-engineer his skills. That will take time, but mainly it will take money. Rossi said that even if he himself dies, he has ensured other people have the knowledge and skill to see the project through to completion. The thing is, most previous cold fusion breakthroughs starved to death mainly for lack of money. The knowledge of how to make Patterson's Pd-Ni light water bead-cathodes died with him. There were various reasons. He was not cooperative. No one knew how to make his catalysts. He was a chemist who made these things commercially for conventional applications. As far as I he himself fabricated the beads himself. No one else knew how. (Some people say they do, but I don't see any Patterson beads around, so I doubt it.) There was no money to pay for a careful analysis of the remaining material. There was no money to pay someone else to even try to replicate. In the 1990s Martin Fleischmann and I could not find the money to pay Johnson Massey to produce a kilogram of Type A palladium cathodes. It was $50,000 we did not have and could not raise. As far as I know, Rossi is not hiding secrets from the people funding him the way Patterson hid his knowledge from the world. Even if they do have difficulty reproducing reliable nickel catalyst I'm confident that eventually they will learn to fabricate it in industrial quantities. If they did not have €100 million, I would not be confident at all. Even €10 million might not be enough. Of course I cannot be sure they have enough, but looking at similar R&D projects, this seems to be in the ballpark. Actually, they have €200 million to work with, which inspires even more confidence. I believe they will pay €100 million to Rossi. But as I mentioned in a previous message, I am confident that he will reserve the money and put it back into the project if things become stalled. (Regarding that previous message, I sent a copy of it to Rossi himself. He did not confirm my speculation, but he did not complain either. He just wrote back "Thank you for your analysis." I take that to mean: "Yes, I will reserve the money just in case." It is hard to imagine he would spend €100 million overnight in any case. He is no Michael Jackson.) Reason 3 is they are not fools. Rossi is not, and I get the impression the investors are not fools either. I don't have much to go on, but the fact that they allocated €100 million is, by itself, a good indication they know what is required for a project of this nature. There have been large cold fusion projects in the past, such as Toyota's project in France, and the Japanese NEDO project. These suffered from many problems, but the biggest by far was: going in, they did not have a 15 kW nearly-ready-for-market prototype reactor. You can't beat that! Energetics Technology has a lot of promise but they don't have a 15 kW prototype either, so they are in second place. That does not mean they cannot catch up. Who knows what Mills has . . . but if he has no 15 kW prototype, he's back in the pack with Energetics Technology and the ENEA and the others. Toyota's cold fusion venture was brought down by internal politics after the project founder Minoru Toyota died. The NEDO project was destroyed by many factors, described by me at the time. It was micromanaged with too many layers of decision makers and too much complexity. It employed people who did not want to work on cold fusion and were dragooned into it. The people working on it would not have benefited personally even if they had succeeded; i.e. they were not looking at multi-million dollar payoffs. It was focused on commercialization at a time when that was premature. It used wet electrolysis instead of proton loading electrolysis or gas loading or some other technique that experts then and now thought more likely to become practical. There were various other problems, too depressing to recall. In retrospect it was doomed from the start by structure and lack of management skills. The lesson of the NEDO project was that just having a large pot of money is not enough. It is necessary but not sufficient. You need skill. You need genius. You need inspiration. You need a working 15 kW prototype! As I recall, NEDO had something like $20 million. That is a large pot of money. But nowhere near as large as Defkalion's. Much of NEDO's money was reportedly frittered away paying managers, paying for golfing vacations by managers in France, and buying loads of equipment that was not needed as a way to pump government money under the table into corporate coffers. A large fraction of Japan's national budget that is ostensibly devoted to research, construction, defense and other areas is actually a gigantic slush fund for corporations and gangsters. That is why the country is broke. That situation is not unheard of in other countries. I expect Defkalion will spend their money more wisely then NEDO did. I would be very surprised if they do what Toyota did, which was to get close to a solution and then turn their backs on it, because of corporate politics, petty jealousy and stupidity. Again, like the NEDO project, one of the reasons they did this is because the product managers in Toyota lacked motivation. They did not stand to gain hundreds of millions of dollars if they succeeded. All they would earn is what they would earn anyway, which I believe is pretty much the same whether you engineer the cup-holders in a Tercel or the most revolutionary technology in history. For them it was all downside risk, with no upside potential benefit. Whereas I assume that Defkalion will be run like a U.S. start-up venture, where the people who provide the capital, the top management, and the engineering talent will end up richer than the early Microsoft shareholders. Or like June Martino. She was the secretary to Ray Croc, who founded Mcdonald's. He sometimes paid her in stock in the early days, out of appreciation for her skill but also (I believe) because he sometimes found himself with more stock than cash. That often happens in start-up ventures. She ended up very wealthy. - Jed
