Daniel Rocha <[email protected]> wrote: And I imagine that the secret sauce is just a combination of specific > procedures, not the composition of the powder.
That is probably true. For conventional chemical catalysts that is usually the situation. Hydrogenation catalysts such as palladium on activated carbon have been around for a long time. I doubt they are covered by patents. Everyone knows what is in them. The manufacturer specifies the Pd percent of content. They are protected by trade secrets because other companies do not know how to fabricate them. (Les Case used hydrogenation catalysts in cold fusion experiments.) I believe there is a limited market for hydrogenation catalysts and it would cost a lot of money to reverse engineer one, so that trade secret is probably safe. The Rossi Ni powder, on the other hand, will have a huge market, and there will be tremendous incentive to reverse engineer it, so that trade secret will be less safe. My point is that "trade secret" in the 20th and 21st centuries does not refer to a product sold with mystery components inside; that is, secret elements or chemicals. Such things are not allowed. They used to be. I do not think there is a law that says you have to list the ingredients of something like a Nicad battery on the battery itself, the way food ingredients are listed. But there are laws and regulations that say: The UL and other organizations have to know the full set of ingredients. If there is anything toxic inside, you have to warn the customer, even though no one is likely to smash open a Nicad battery and eat it. Another huge change from the past is the ready availability of mass spectrometers and SEMs, which quickly reveal the make-up of objects. Such things were not widely available until the 1970s. The latest generation, described at ICCF16, seemed like something out of science fiction to me. The capabilities are astounding. You cannot hide things even if you want to. - Jed
