In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Sun, 11 Sep 2011 12:05:15 -0400: Hi, [snip] >That would be fine. Some people have suggested that the units should be sold >with individual electrolyzers, so that they could be loaded with water >instead of hydrogen. That would be a bad idea. [snip] I was one of those people, and I still think it's the ultimate goal, though clearly more development work is required to make this a safe and efficient procedure. Note that Rossi devices consume hydrogen at a very low rate, so electrolysis could run with low currents* and need store no Hydrogen in the device itself, but rather produce it under electronic control precisely as it is used (pressure sensor?).
This would effectively reduce the risk of explosion to zero as there would be no gas stored at all, particularly if the path between electrolysis cell and reactor core is kept very short. In fact they could easily be kept almost adjacent. It may eventually even prove possible to run an adaptation of a Rossi device on water vapour rather than Hydrogen. The energy released by the Hydrogen reaction should be at least hundreds of times that required to remove the Hydrogen from the water molecule. Of course this is assuming that the remaining Oxygen doesn't poison the reaction. * At 5 MeV / Hydrogen atom, an electrolysis current of 0.2 mA / kW thermal is required. However if the process isn't nuclear, but rather super-chemical, and the energy only about 500 eV / H atom, then this rises to 2 A / kW thermal. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
