Another point, Bob - the low amount of fuel is consistent with the main patent claim for the use of an enriched isotope of Ni-62.
An enriched isotope would be expensive, even if Rossi has found a way to enrich it himself. If he had bought .6 gram from Goodfellows it would have set him back at least $10k for purity which is probably not needed. From: Bob Higgins Kudos to A. Rossi for this huge step forward in validation of his work! One thing in the report that I find incredible was the amount of fuel that was "measured" by cutting open the inner cylinder and dumping out the catalyst-fuel - supposedly only 0.6g. This is a tiny amount of nickel powder. Carbonyl Ni micro-powder has a bulk density of about 3.6g/cc. Thus, the volume of powder that came out would have been only 0.17cc from a containing cylinder of 3cm x 33cm. I don't think it is possible to adequately conduct that much heat from 0.17cc of loose powder - that much heat would have caused loose powder to melt if it were the source. Instead, I suspect that the HotCat must have the catalyst-fuel powder coated/bonded on the inside surface of the cylinder like a thermally conductive paint. Then, only what had come loose would have been measured when they cut the cylinder open. Of course, this will make the Ragone estimate off by an order of magnitude, but the real number is likely still orders of magnitude more than that of chemical sources. Maybe what came out was a small amount of a metal hydride that was the source for the H2 in the cylinder.
