<http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-sun-rossi%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9denergy-catalyzer%e2%80%9d-and-the-%e2%80%9cneutron-barometer%e2%80%9d#comment-5906>Joshua
Cude said on
<http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-sun-rossi%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9denergy-catalyzer%e2%80%9d-and-the-%e2%80%9cneutron-barometer%e2%80%9d>The
sun, Rossis energy catalyzer and the neutron barometer
I'm not responding there, not yet anyway, since
the blog owner seems irritated by CF discussion
taking over. He tells a remarkable story, see the
previous
http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/rossi-energy-catalyst-a-big-hoax-or-new-physics/,
which Joshua Cude may not have read, since he
roundly sticks his foot in his mouth.
May 22, 2011 at 7:51 am
In response to aleklett on May 16, 2011 at 3:45 pm:
One hundred years ago the suns source of energy
was a complete mystery. The famous professor
Svante Arrhenius is said to have asserted that
the suns energy output could not be due to
combustion and that there was no other
explanation. Today our knowledge of physics
allows us to explain why the sun can radiate [...]
So far, claimed evidence for excess heat in a
Rossi apparatus has been observed directly only
by people vetted by Rossi. First Levi, who was
on Rossis editorial board, and the recipient of
research funding from Rossi. Then Essen &
Kallander who were on record as being
sympathetic to the Rossi device. And lastly
journalist/blogger Lewan, who was on record as
being an uncritical Rossi groupie.
Cude is correct as to observers. But, ah, those
people! Cude will point out avery factoid he can
find that might seem to impeach evidence, this is
what he's done for a long time. When the January
announcement came out, I pointed out that when
the possible economic impact of something is as
great as this, fraud that might be normally so
impractical, as to be preposterous as a
consideration, might not be. People can be
bought, and people can also be fooled. I pointed
out that we won't know *absolutely for sure*
until there are multiple fully independent replications or verifications.
This isn't like ordinary cold fusion, where the
experiment was very difficult to set up. If this
thing works or doesn't work, it will be obvious.
It is to the point, already, where "fraud" is,
first of all, the only possibility besides "it's
real," and "fraud" has become so remote that
*believing* it is a fraud is insane, hanging
one's hat on something quite unlikely. But not
yet impossible, and if I were about to write a
check for a hundred million dollars, I'd
certainly want to see more than has become
public! Frankly, if, as seems quite possible from
the announcements, these things come on the
market by the beginning of next year for a few
thousand dollars, I wouldn't be the first on my
block to write a check. But .... maybe the second!
Cude is just tossing mud to make his correct
initial statement mean more than it does. This is
an invention, not yet clearly well protected by
patent, and Rossi, if we assume this is real, has
many sound reasons to keep it very private. As
far as we can tell, so far, he hasn't solicited
funding, except from Ampenergo, a reputable
company in the U.S., formed by people who have
long worked with Rossi, they know him well. Rossi
does not need other investors, apparently.
We know from Aleklett's previous blog post on
this that he personally knows Kullander, the
"person" whom Cude so cavalierly dismisses as if
he were some shill. From his blog:
First I would like to mention that Professor
Sven Kullander who is chairman of The Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences Energy committee,
since the beginning of the year is also a
professor emeritus in my research group at
Uppsala University. He sits in the room next to
mine so Rossis experiment has come up every
time we have met in recent weeks. I always try
to be as critical as possible, but at the same
time it is exciting to be pretty close to the
center of something that is either a hoax or
something new and exciting. There are scientists
who criticize Sven for associating himself with
the experiment, but also many that think he is
doing the right thing. As scientists we have a
responsibility to investigate whether a reported
phenomenon is real or a hoax. Svens involvement
is quite natural since he is chairman of the
KVAs energy committee, but if anyone thinks
that he has simply accepted the results then
they are completely wrong. By attending and
examining the experiment, he also has the
opportunity to confirm or reject. As a
researcher, you want an explanation for what is
happening and right now there appears to be no
suitable explanation with the knowledge we
currently have in chemistry and physics. This
means that it may be entirely new physics that
must be explained or it may be a scam that must be explained and exposed.
And Cude's comment on Mats Lewan, the Ny Teknik
reporter (highly qualified and professional), is
simply an evidence-free cheap shot. I've seen
nothing but professional work from Lewan, but
Cude, anonymous, can say whatever he likes, and
it won't fall back on him. If Lewan screws up,
it's his livelihood. Cude is a coward, hiding
behind his anonymity. I have a suspicion who he
is, but .... I don't know that for sure, not yet.
Cude continues:
In experiments where more details are available
to outsiders (mainly by photos or video), more
contradictions and outright inaccuracies have
been exposed. In the January experiment the
most public one so far the claimed flow rate
is not consistent with the pump in the video,
the duration at 100C is 17 minutes according to
the video of the screen, not 40 minutes as
claimed; the average input power is 1 kW, but
the brief reduction to 400 W is used to
calculate the gain, even though there is obvious thermal mass in the apparatus.
In examining a body of evidence and comparing it
with reports, it's always possible to find
apparent contradictions. Obviously, the more
evidence is available, the more exposure there is
to error and inaccuracy. I'm not examining all
these specific claims, but I'll note that many
have been over this evidence with a fine-tooth
comb, and Cude's interpretations certainly are
not as accepted and obvious as he'd like us to
believe. "Brief reduction to 400 W"? This is what the physorg.com report has:
The reactor uses less than 1 gram of hydrogen
and starts with about 1,000 W of electricity,
which is reduced to 400 W after a few minutes.
Every minute, the reaction can convert 292 grams
of 20°C water into dry steam at about 101°C.
Since raising the temperature of water by 80°C
and converting it to steam requires about 12,400
W of power, the experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31.
Cude has it backwards. The input power, which is
initially used to raise the temperature of the
reactor to operating temperature, is scaled back
to 400 watts for the remainder of the
demonstration, not "for a few minutes." See also
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MacyMspecificso.pdf
and other reports on the January demonstration.
The January demonstration was, indeed, the "most
public," but in other demonstrations, observers
were allowed much closer access to the device and
the setup. The January demonstration had some
obvious shortcomings, as to possible fraud
mechanisms, and other demonstrations addressed
these. It has been pointed out that a fraud could
use different mechanisms in different
demonstrations, and, in my view, there is no end
of this possibility, until and unless fully
independent verification is possible. I see no
way that Rossi can avoid this happening before
the end of the year. If something comes up and he
can't deliver, my opinion, he'll be forced to
provide evaluation units, which are already
claimed to exist, in order to survive. He's
following what is, for him, Plan A, the delivery
of a 1 MW assembly of individual E-Cats by October.
What Cude is betraying is his own severe bias:
he's *certain* that this is a fraud, and how can
he be certain? It's because he's bought the
common nonsense about cold fusion, that it is,
that by established physical theory, it's
*impossible.* That is a religious,
pseudoskeptical belief, it's not a rational or
skeptical one. Cold fusion is claimed to operate
by an "unknown mechanism," all that is known for
Pd-D cold fusion is the main fuel (deuterium) and
the main product (helium), not the mechanism by
which deuterium is convered into helium. And
theory cannot predict a fusion cross-section for
"unknown reaction," not without making some
unwarranted -- and, in the past, unstated --
assumptions as to reaction mechanism.
Aleklett is showing us the response of a
phyisicst, a genuine skeptic, who knows that he
doesn't know everything. "Show me!" is his
approach, and he's willing to look. Cude is not
willing to look, except to look for "flaws."
Whatever he can find to justify sitting in his secure smugness.
Rossi is remarkably successful at choosing
observers who do not ask any difficult
questions, or request any embarrassing measurements.
Rossi has been asked difficult questions by the
observers, how could Cude know that he hasn't?
The physicist-observers have said that Rossi's
theory doesn't make sense. They are't buying it
at all. But they are also not denying the
evidence, and, yes, Rossi probably is not
selecting people who might pull a Feynman.
(I sat with Feynman at Cal Tech, and love the
late physicist, but he made a horrible mistake
one day. He was witnessing a demonstration of a
claimed energy device, and he surreptitiously
pulled the plug, attempting to show that the
claimed energy was coming from the mains. The
thing exploded, and a man was killed. Recent news
can give us a clue as to the hazards of removing
power from the control mechanisms in an energy device. It's called Fukashima.)
Such questions have been repeatedly pointed
out in online forums from the first January
experiment: check and *monitor* input flow
rate; monitor the output flow rate; check
dependence of steam temperature on input flow
rate (in particular, why is it always pinned at
the boiling point, when if it were dry, it
would likely climb well above the bp). It seems
impossible that the 3 Swedes could not have
been familiar with these objections, and yet
they made no attempt to resolve them.
Cude thinks he's cute. Lots of variations have
been proposed, but a central problem here is that
Rossi really doesn't care whether he proves this
thing or not. That must drive some skeptics up
the wall! The best test approach, to my mind, was
where the flow rate was increased so that the
water didn't boil, thus avoiding the whole wet
steam/dry steam issue. Quantity of water
vaporized is a very simply calorimetric
technique, but when we are trying to rule out
fraud (which wasn't the goal of the January
demonstration), there are lots of possible
problems. Reducing the flow rate, so that all
that is being measured is temperature rise in a
known volume of water, is much cleaner. That was
the February test, which was witnessed only by
Levi. It was a stunning result, in fact, but, of
course, we are depending on Levi not colluding with Rossi.
My view is that "fraud" can't be completely ruled
out. But it's getting preposterous as a claim. Kullander? Come on!
Oddly, they measure the temperature every few
seconds during the boiling phase, even though
temperature isnt expected to change during a
6-fold increase in power, but they dont measure
the flow rate of the output gas, which would
actually change in proportion to the output
power, thereby providing some evidence of the
power increase. Instead they make one or two
visual inspections of this far more critical metric.
He's talking about one demonstration as if this were the whole banana.
So, the public has not seen any evidence that
steam is dry, nor that the device is producing excess heat.
Except for expert testimony. What Cude expects
absolutely won't be available for quite some
time, unless Rossi changes his mind, and he's not
likely to do so. This is one very persistant man, however we slice it.
Until critical observation is permitted by any
interested party, there seems no point in trying
to understand what they *claim* is happening.
Now, here, I'm going to agree with Cude.
Speculation on the mechanism by with the Rossi
device generates power is, to some extent, a
fool's errand, since so much information is
missing. We may have some better analyses of the
fuel and ash soon. But that evidence might also
be withheld, since the "secret catalyst" is crucial proprietary information.
On the other hand, I do know that many LENR
researchers have changed course and are now
investigating Ni-H reactions, which, before
Rossi, were considered an unlikely bypath, even
though there were reported results (Focardi and Piantelli).
And it is not necessary to reveal the contents
of Rossis black box. Just allow critics any
critics to measure in arbitrary detail the
incoming and outgoing fluids and electrical power.
Well, that's been done, actually. Cude should
become more familiar with the full range of
evidence. It will, however, always be possible to
make up some fraud mechanism, until there are so
many independent replications that it becomes
completely impossible. If I have an E-Cat rated
for, say, 10 kW, and I can buy it and use it to
heat water in my home, for a few thousand
dollars, it will either work or it won't, and if
it works, given the apparent size of these
things, it's nuclear. The really big issue is
going to be safety, and Cude completely misses this:
But the best evidence that the thing doesnt
produce excess power is the fact that it cant power itself.
But, apparently, it can. The problem is that
controlling it, fully self-powered, is very
difficult, they have not engineered it for that
yet. There is only one access, at this point, to
reaction control, which is controlling the
temperature of the reactor. If you allow the
thing to self-power, what controls the reactor
temperature? Apparently the reaction rate
increases with temperature, at least over some
range. So my guess is that the control
electronics heat the reaction chamber to below
the self-powering range, it needs a few hundred
watts of power to maintain the reaction rate, so
that when you turn off the power, it shuts down.
This raises a host of safety issues!
(The other control mechanism would be to control
the hydrogen feed. How well that would work is
far from clear to me, without knowing the
mechanism! But experiment would provide the
evidence. Rossi almost certainly knows this, and
it's in his interest at this point to be several
steps ahead of the crowd that's dogging him.
Believe me, his big worry isn't the skeptics,
they can go jump in a lake as far as he's concerned.)
(And if he's a fraud, this will all be over, I
predict, by the end of the year. It won't be possible to maintain.)
When a salesman comes to your door selling a new
source of energy, and the first thing he asks is
where to plug it in, be very suspicious.
If a salesman comes to my door selling about
anything, I'll be suspicious. But, Joshua, what
about Fukashima? Do you think that the reactor
there needed to be "plugged in" -- for safety --
meant that the energy produced was doubtful?
If the salesman can demonstrate a volume of hot
water heated, showing 12 kW of power being
generated (repeated buckets of a certain volume
at a certain temperature, fed with tap water at a
certain temperature), and this thing doesn't blow
fuses, I don't care if it's plugged in. Yeah,
there are still a few things to check.
But no salesman is knocking on my door or Cude's
door, selling E-Cats. If one came today I'd toss
him out on his ear. This is all polemic, designed to ridicule. Typical Cude.
An analogy to Cude's objection. Someone comes to
my door to sell me a portable gas stove, I can
use it, he claims, to cook and heat water while
I'm camping. To demonstrate it to me, he asks me
for a match, he left his at home. I toss him out,
since, if it needs a match, it must be a fraud.
