On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 5:04 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If you wish to disprove these claims, you must demonstrate by > conventional means that you can keep a reactor of this size at boiling > temperatures for 4 hours, while it remains too hot to touch. > There is no need to demonstrate this. It is patently obvious that a 100-kg device of that size can stay at boiling temperature for 40 hours without any need of nuclear reactions. The heat losses by radiation may be 50 W or so, and power required to bring water to boiling at the rate of Lewan's reported 0.91 g/s is about 400W. So to be generous, one kW power for 3.5 hours could produce what was observed in that experiment. That makes a total of about 13 MJ. The input power was about 3 times that. And storing 13 MJ is child's play, when you have 100 kg to work with. Fire brick could do it with less than a third of that mass. Using liquid sodium nitrate, you could do it with less than 20 kg, and you wouldn't have to heat it above 500C. And fuel. Energy density of alcohol is 30 MJ/kg. So, 400 mL of alcohol and a chemical source of oxygen and you're in business. Four liters of alcohol, and you could go all day. You can buy 3 kW propane heaters that are one tenth the mass of that thing and it can put out 3 kW for hours. And finding a source of oxygen and hiding the output gas is really a trivial problem compared to inventing a nuclear reaction that produces heat but no radiation at ordinary temperatures in non-radioactive material. He's producing 13 MJ with a 100 kg device for a .13MJ/kg energy density. Chemical fuel is in the range of 50 MJ/kg density, and commercial devices run for a couple of hours can give around 4 MJ/kg. (Of course, they approach the density of the fuel, the longer they run.) So, Rossi's device isn't even 1/10 as good as off-the-shelf commercial devices. And we're supposed to be impressed? This demonstration is so far from proof of nuclear reactions, it's not even funny. > Skeptics should confront the facts head on, instead of raising > petty objections to unimportant aspects of the test. If you seriously > believe these results are in error, or that this can done with conventional > stored energy or some sort of hidden chemical device, prove it. You claim > violates so many established laws of physics, you will win the Nobel prize. > You seem to have a double standard when evaluating cold fusion claims: You seriously believe these results come from nuclear reactions, and yet you don't demand that Rossi prove that he is using only Ni and a few grams of hydrogen by showing us the contents of the cell (not the composition necessarily). You don't demand that he explain the details of the nuclear reaction and why it doesn't produce gamma rays or neutrons. Yet, you don't believe that it could be a chemical reaction or thermal storage unless the exact reaction or method of storage is demonstrated and explained in detail. The whole claim is based on energy density, but the fact is that the energy density is completely consistent with either nuclear or chemical energy sources. Beyond that the evidence for nuclear is no better than for chemical. On which planet does that constitute proof of a nuclear source?
