At 05:38 PM 5/27/2011, Jones Beene wrote:
Terry - The situation with E-Cat does seem a bit more hopeful than MAHG on the demonstration end, since Naudin made those silly measurement errors (still not fully corrected on his website) but the problem is looming for Rossi since there are legitimate doubts our there. I seldom refer to MAHG as being proved overunity since that was never clear. The E-Cat may turn out to be the same, but as of now, it does seem much more hopeful.
No, this will never be the same. The kind of work that was found so disappointing was work where the apparent positive results could be artifact, rather easily, or not, but still no way was found to amplify the effect.
Rossi is real or Rossi is fraud. At this point, there is no longer any middle ground. I'm not aware of anything in the history of cold fusion that truly approaches this in scale and, if it is fraud, in the boldness of it.
Most of that hope comes from independent confirming results of others, however - including Brian Ahern's, which was posted today on another forum. I know of two others in addition, but nothing yet on the scale of kilowatts.
Rossi just blows every other story off my personal front page.... that may be unfortunate, in fact, but it's just the truth.
It may be tough for LENR proponents to swallow, but they better start getting used to the likelihood that this Ni-H effect is NOT nuclear.
That's way, way to soon to say. Speculating on mechanism is far, far premature. I'm with Dr. Storms in the economy of speculation: start first by speculating that there is some common cause or mechanism behind PdD and NiH reactions. That's just a reasonable place to start, not some kind of proof of something! And PdD most definitely is nuclear. Deuterium -> Helium, in short.
If deuterinos are involved, that would be a catalytic effect. Unless they catalyze fusion, deuterinos would not produce helium!
(I think it's more likely that BlackLight Power's stuff is Ni-H nuclear, mistaken as being due to hydrinos, and that the problem that BLP ran into was that their "reactors" ran down quickly. I.e., they worked, but not well enough, for long enough. That would explain the -- limited -- confirmation from, for example, Rowan University, and, then, mostly silence.... But maybe Mills will have the last laugh, and hydrinos are real.)
Ahern is getting zero counts above background and no transmutation, but with excess heat that would ordinarily indicate something non-chemical. Neither are others seeing any radioactivity. That is a mixed blessing.
It's simply what we should expect, as a default, by now, for cold fusion. It may well be that there is something about the process that takes anything radioactive to the end of the process, distributing the energy among many elements in the "reactive matrix," whatever that is, i.e., almost all of it ends up as heat, plus non-radioactive ash. That's about as far as I'd care to go with theory, beyond flogging Takahashi's TSC theory, not as anything complete, but as a line of approach that could be seen as dovetailing with Kim's BEC theory and the work of others.
Frankly, I'd rather leave the theory to the physicists, at least those among them -- like Takahashi -- willing to take up the challenge seriously.
The biggest problem, however, seems to be that the E-Cat units as presently being quoted by the two licensees - do NOT compare well, economically, with solar for instance. As of now the E-Cat will be sized at 2.5 kW, and thus will cost no less $5,000 each. Rossi says $2 per watt is his present goal, but it could be higher. That does NOT include installation. He quoted less initially, but this is recent (Monday) and probably represents an expected premium that early adopters may or may not be willing to pay.
Yup. I just used different figures, but it is what it is. However, the key here is "early adopters." The value of a $5000 E-Cat would depend entirely on how long it will run without refueling, and how much it will cost to refuel. At six months, this is way expensive, more expensive than buying power from the electric company. I'd suggest to Rossi, if he were so foolish to ask me, that those early adopters should be guaranteed upgrade to improved E-Cats with their refueling, and possibly to refueling for a defined period at a fixed cost. This would bring in immediate cash. Whether or not you'd want to trust Rossi/Defkalion/Ampenergo to perform on the guarantee would be another matter.
If the thing works, if you can produce 2.5 kW for a few days from a device the size of the E-Cat, and no additional fuel or significant electricity input, by comparison, it's stunning as a demonstration. That's not possible for chemistry. So would I pay $5000 for a convincing LENR demonstration in my house? Not I, but some might.
The only guarantees will be for 4,800 hours run-time - which is a little over six months of continuous use, and a COP of at least six to one (over electrical input). The cost to refuel is unknown but the reactor is sealed, so it will likely be a swap-out arrangement (at the consumers expense).
Cost to refuel is crucial. $5000 for 4800 hours run time is $1.04 per hour, or $0.41 per kWh, compared to $0.15 from my local power company. Is Defkalion losing money on every E-Cat but making up for it with volume?
A worst case scenario is that you may get no more than 14,000 kW-hrs of heat for your investment. At the average rate of 10 cents for the equivalent electricity that is $1,400 of heat for your up-front overhead - and don't forget the cost of electricity to run it, since you have to supply 1/6 the output as electrical input ... and when you include the installation cost, which could be high since it will need its own electrical controls, circuit breakers and a fireproof place to store hydrogen safely, the end user could really be only getting a guarantee of about a tenth of the original investment with professional installation.
I don't think you need to store a lot of hydrogen! I do agree that the economic numbers don't make sense. At least he's not behaving like the standard con, promising plenty for cheap! However, even with these numbers, there might be some applications that work.
At least that is according to the guarantee that they are talking about. And in a year, Defkalion or Ampenergo may be history.... pumped, dumped, and belly-up. Caveat emptor. It seems to me that most consumers, or businesses, would be better off with $6000-10,000 worth of solar cells. At least you get electricity instead of heat, and they have a proved history of an extended lifetime.
Yes. At those prices, I am not an "early adopter," for sure. Now, interesting question: why is Rossi backing off so greatly on the promises?
Bad thought: sure, these things run at, say, 50 to 1 initially, but, as they age, that ratio goes way down. What this would indicate to me is that much more rapid "refueling" would be called for, and the goal would be to get the refuel manufacturing cost down very low. Nickel is cheap, and so is hydrogen. The problem is the production of the active nickel, nanoparticle, perhaps, with specific characteristics, and, of course, the unknown catalyst. If it is a catalyst, even if it is fairly expensive, it would be recycled from the used E-Cats. (That could be one of the reason why an E-Cat is being priced so high. It includes significant catalyst cost, but this could be good news as to refueling cost. It does create a problem: theft of E-Cats for the catalyst, it's one of the things that convinced me that PdD water heaters were a Bad Idea.
Look, the obvious application for an E-Cat is for heating, if it's designed to heat water, and many heating systems do simply circulate water -- or steam -- for heating. So that's almost as efficient as direct electrical heating, the only losses would be in transmission of the hot water, i.e., in heating, say, pipes under a house instead of the house, but usually those get insulated.... The E-Cat is not designed, of course, to generate electricity, and the numbers would have to get a lot better before it would make any sense.
If we want a Really Bad Idea, we'd combine Rossi's E-Cat with a Rossi thermoelectric converter to make Really Expensive Electricity. Vertical Integration, eh?
