I should have posted this here first, instead of below, so here it is.

For the benefit of all those OilDrum readers, who would like better answers,
"IF" this device can be replicated by other people, we can then make it much easier to find answers to many questions.

I am interested in "trying" to replicate the device to see what happens.
If there is anyone else who is interested in trying to do this also, and would like to share informaton in the development attempt, please contact me.
docscience at hotmail.com .

Our chances of success may not be high, but accept for an unknown ingredient, this device is not that complicated.
You will need some engineering or physics skills.

And a link to a 2009 interview with Gary Taubes:

http://www.thedailybell.com/604/Gary-Taubes-Good-Calories-Bad-Calories.html
Gary Taubes on Cold Fusion, Good Nutrition and What Makes Bad (and Good) Science

Daily Bell: Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion (1993) ...

Taubes: This was about the erroneous claim in 1989 of cold fusion by two scientists at the University of Utah and the firestorm that followed. I ended up interviewing some 300 people involved, and described how and why it came about, and how it played out among the scientists, the politicians and in the press. Cold fusion was a non-existent phenomenon. It was the product of wishful thinking and very, very bad science. The catch is that it promised salvation – cheap, clean infinite energy – which is what made it so enticing. As I predicted at the end of the book, that kind of promise would lure people to it long after it became obvious to any reasonable scientist that it was simply wrong, and so interest in the subject would keep going indefinitely, although it would asymptotically approach zero as the years went by. Twenty years later, that prediction was dead on. . .

Daily Bell: You think the inventors of so-called cold fusion are bad scientists. Can you tell us what makes a bad scientist and a good one?

Taubes: In a commencement address that Richard Feynman gave at Caltech in the 1960s, he said that "the first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool." So the simplest way to think about it is that good scientists are the ones who are most aware of this fact: how easy it is to be fooled by their data and to fool themselves. They're the ones who are most skeptical about their own work, not just the work of others. They're also aware that the only way not to be fooled is to work relentlessly to try to disprove your own pet theories, not try to confirm them. Bad scientists do one experiment, get some interesting result, decide they've discovered something new, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to somehow prove that they did. Again, science doesn't work that way. You have to put more faith in negative evidence than in positive; you have to put more effort into trying to refute your own beliefs and hypotheses, rather than trying to prove them. If you fail to refute them, then you can begin to take them seriously. And, yes, the inventors of cold fusion were bad scientists. . .

Daily Bell: Explain the term "pathological science" if you don't mind?

Taubes: It is a term invented by the Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir to describe what he called "the science of things that aren't so." Cold fusion is a classic example of pathological science: it doesn't exist. It's a non-existent phenomenon, but that didn't stop dozens, maybe even hundreds of researchers from studying it or publishing papers about it, etc. And those researchers, as Langmuir put it, were mostly the ones who "are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions." You can find Langmuir's original essay on line.

Note: I started reading Taubes' work after Leanan recommended it.

this is not a case of ET's.

If you put 100 watts in and get 10,000 watts out for days on end, that is extraordinary evidence to me.

I bet it won't be replicated. It's a black box, with "secret catalysts." Apparently, he's willing to sell licenses, but I bet they'll come with restrictions that require secrecy.

That Terawatt thing -

Interesting demonstration of resonance... but can this thing actually create energy?

Isn't that fun!
The reflexive answer is to invoke the sun's neutrino flux.

But, hey!, let's get Tesla in on this:
http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3283

Does anyone remember "Scalar Waves"?

The first comment up top links to a "Coast to Coast" interview. Coast to Coast is part of the great dumbing-down of America. It is carried on the monopoly-owned radio stations in every area, along with "The Phil Hendrie Show; both being complete wastes of electrical energy to transmit. They fill the night with aliens and specters and a mindless Punch-and-Judy. These broadcasts truly displace any reasoned public dialog.

What did Ugo Bardi's friend see?

Well, your reference is to the relevant work by Fischbach et al "Time-Dependent Nuclear Decay Parameters: New Evidence for New Forces?", Space Sci Rev (2009) 145: 285–335, http://www.springerlink.com/content/nm71615v85777272/
The underlying physics can be found in few references provided by the authors themselves, especially
Y.A. Baurov et al., Experimental investigation of changes in β-decay rate of 60Co and 137Cs. Mod. Phys. Lett. A 16, 2089–2101 (2001)
and
Y.A. Baurov et al., Experimental investigation of changes in beta-decay count rate of radioactive elements. Phys. At. Nucl. 70(11), 1825–1835 (2007)
Following other basic works by such last author, another interpretation could emerge, that no nuclear reaction such as fusion could occurr, rather the the mass change of other elementary particles (namely electrons) in short lived intense currents (e.g. in some plasma) along some toroidal-shape circuit. That's to be one likely explanation, provided there's any reality around R&F's claims, which to me is doubtful.

The preponderance of the evidence would seem to suggest we are looking at what your guy Taubes (excerpt of interview up the thread) called "Pathological science."

This is supposedly the George Kelley that is on the board of "advisors"

http://www.nist.gov/el/building_environment/gkelly.cfm

Guest: Who is Prof. George Kelly (University of New Hampshire, USA) is
on your board of advisors? (The university doesn’t seem to know him).

Rossi: I do not know him well. I met him ten years ago when I made a
test of a Seebeck Effect apparatus in the UNH. Anybody can enter in the
Board Of Advisers of the Journal Of Nuclear Physics (Rossis egen
websajt, reds anm) so far he wants to make for free (the Journal pays
nobody, is based only upon voluntary free work)a peer reviewing.
Everybody is free to enter and to go out when he wants. It is necessary
to be a University Professor in Scientific matter. Prof. Kelly is
specialized in Environmental Engineering, as I remember.

It seems to turn an unstated amount nickel at $17/pound into iron at $5 per ton and copper at $4/pound and produces $1.2 worth of electricity(12 kwh?) minus $.4 kwh of 'energy input.

It's also interesting that the creators provide no explanation of how this 'cold fusion' works.

And if this process does take Nickel and makes Iron/Copper - then basic research will have to be done to explain it.

At one time no one understood how maggots sprung from meat left out. Eventually, after observation, it was explained. If the process noted actually works - then great, it'll get explained. 3rd party verification is possible without showing the magic of the configuration of the Nickel.

Rossi and company claim a scaled up version sometime in a year or so. Hitting such would seem to show reliable repeatability - something lacking in other efforts. At that point someone will have to be able to take their instructions and replicate.

Others have claimed repeatability - EEStor, Blacklight Power and even Stirling Cycle engines mass produced cheaply. The "acid test" will be a ship date on a unit that can go into your back yard bunker and power your home/provide hot water for the home.

I am not as brushed up on my physics as I used to be, but before they produced the first fission reactor the science was reasonably well understood. To my knowledge there is no good theory into how cold fusion would happen. I assume that all cold fusion stories are frauds, until I see solid, independent evidence from multiple sources to the contrary.

I tend to put this at least one step further down the plausibility ladder than space based solar, large scale algae oil, and hot fusion. My hopes for any of these aren't big, but they are significantly higher than cold fusion.

Producing something in the lab is very different than making something on a commercial scale.

Perhaps the reason the creator (Focardi) doesn't know why it works is that he has devoted his entire time an energy since 1994 when he first published a paper on Ni-H exothermy into getting it from the shaky lab demo stage up to a level where he could successfully and reliably demonstrate it in front of a large group of largely sceptical peers, including his boss, and a physical chemist guy equipped with weighing scales, thermo gauge, radiation monitor and flow meter etc. In all that time he has been invariably ridiculed whenever he went public, even within the small and rather bitchy cold fusion community. The guy shows real guts. Rossi I don't know about, but quantum solid-state physics I do, having done a doctorate on it at Oxford University.

If this isn't a scam, does anyone know how much nickle it would take to power the average home for a year?

I'm also assuming there would be enough nickle to go around and the price wouldn't jump if there is the chance of shortages?

http://www.zappworks.com/battery_specs.htm

In case one wants "American made" batteries.

Here here. We'd torch the place. No question.

We're not smart enough as a species to handle anything but contemporary solar -- and often not even too good with that.

This is an unlimited energy source and there are no downsides. How can the people of earth handle this disaster?

I have no comment on "heavy surface plasmon polariton (SPP) electrons", but another qualm I have about that theory is that an "inverse beta decay", in isolation, costs energy. In other words, a hydrogen nucleus (even when confined within the metal) is an isolated proton - i.e. it has no nuclear neighbors. Combining it with an electron to form a neutron costs energy, of the same amount that is produced when a neutron decays into an electron and a proton. A proton plus electron has less mass than a neutron. While it is possibly true that even more energy would be released when the neutron combines with a much larger nucleus, there remains the problem of how to get over the first energy bump of 780 keV with the electron and proton at hand (both sitting happily in the metal).

Surface plasmons are well known, as are surface plasmon polaritons. Energies of a few eV. See:

http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/novotny/courses/OPT463/plasmo...

However "heavy surface plasmon polariton (SPP) electrons" only seems to show up in proported mechanisms for cold fusion.

For a good summary of nuclear decay modes, see:

http://mightylib.mit.edu/Course%20Materials/22.01/Fall%202001/decay%20me...

Even within the narrow confines of the cold fusion community, Widom is something of an outsider, and very few give credence to his theory, mainly because its prediction of He3 runs counter to all the mass spectroscopic evidence of He4. His theory, although very imaginative, contains a big error ( it depends crucially on a coherent surface oscillation mode that simply doesn't / can't exist ). In view of the almost 100% scepticism exhibited here, I appreciate that this is a pretty irrelevant arcane academic point anyway.

I'll take that as a comment.

My conclusion was that it was worth researching, and worth funding, but that I had too many lower risk things to study that I think will have very good gains for society -- so instead, I am researching catalysts to improve the efficiency of the chemical industry as a whole. I think that the fusion stuff is worth looking at though, although I would probably sooner direct funding towards alternative hot fusion topologies (besides the tokomak) before spending more than a pittance on LENR.

The good thing about this claim is the amount need to prove it, is a pittance, and someone else has already fronted with the funds.

So we can simply wait, and watch.

Moreover, if I stumbled upon such an effect in my own halfassed doings, I'd think long and hard before giving it to the human race. I still see "peak energy" for humans as a feature and not a bug.

Still, if this thing DOES work, I'll try building one.

Of course you will—and then be sorely tempted to capitalize on it—which perfectly illustrates why we should hope it doesn't work (not that it's likely).

Even the most trustworthy humans can't be trusted. ;^)

I'm still a big fan of 'bubble fusion.' Despite the story arc of a researcher with extrodinary claims that noone could reproduce (Rusi Taleyarkhan), the early theoretical ethusiasm for posibility of acoustic inertial confinement fusion from sononluminescence remains compelling to me (Star in a Jar!). I've taken some baby steps in that dierection as General Science undergraduate which I show here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44jttXgZwn0 Serious people are pursuing bubble fusion: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20550245 I've had a peek behind the paywall at this paper. The reactor and most of the researchers come from a company in Califorina, Impulse Devices, which pursues sonofusion. They cavitate heavy water and deuterated solvents in this study, and claim to have observed the most extreme cavitation events yet recorded.

Nickel powder and hydrogen gas at a set pressure (10bar) and temperature (1000C). Well that is easy enough. Has any one (other than Rossi) tried it?

Surely the best way to find out if this thing works is to ask Kjell Aleklett. From what I have been reading about Rossi is that he has sent a couple of retorts or what ever you call these things up to Upsalla university for testing. Kjell is a Physicist if he not? I am very sceptical but what I did notice that the catalyst is nickel like that used by Black light which seems more than just coincidental so there might just be some form of LNER reaction that we do no know about, or cannot comprehend. I reserve my judgment until later this year.

What did get my interest a couple of years ago was the video on Google tech talks by the late Dr. Bussard now this Guy is no run of the mill physicist. It is a fascinating talk completely Bullshit free and well worth watching. The firm Emc2 was rejuvenated after Buzzards Death and has just received a second round of funding from the American Government for the testing of the WB-8 Polywell Device so somebody must think that there is something in it.

Here by the way is the Google video, don,t miss it the Guy is in his 80s dying of cancer and still as sharp as a button

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606#

It also includes the opinion of the examiner, which is that the application doesn't merit having a patent granted.

According to the patent this thing is has enough lead around it to capture all the gamma radiation that it is producing. This doesn't equate with what people are saying about it being a small piece of kit.

The borated water was what gave me the biggest laugh though.

This whole subject reminds me of something an old guy of my acquaintance used to say when controversial subjects came up.

He always compared unlikely stories/ concepts/ideas to the sport of "wrasslin", his points being that although the whole "wrassling" business thing is pretty much just show business, the guys who do it do quite frequently get hurt on the job and that they have to be pretty good athletes, in pretty good condition, just to fake it.

His argument was that where there is so much smoke, there is usually A fire, of some sort, although just what the nature of that fire might be is open to question.

Evidently these cold fusion guys have managed to create a "fire " of some sort or another;maybe they have stumbled upon a novel chemical reaction, or maybe they have out Houdinied Houdini, and managed to fake out the creditable observers who have see thier demonstration.

I know next to nothing about nuclear physics, but speaking as a generalist,I can say that at least once or twice in a lifetime, you can expect to see the truly unexpected happen, or see some idea formerly considered to be sci fi turn into sci fact.

Personally I believe the nature of knowledge and knowing is such that we will never possess an ultimate theory of physical reality-new facts will be discovered, so long as serious long term research continues, and existing accepted theory will necessarily have to be modified, expanded, or possibly even thrown out , to accomodate such facts.

We can only know THINGS in terms of OTHER THINGS- regardless of the nature of the THINGS under consideration.

In this case, I would remind any body who asked me to remember that while the contest may not always be to the strongest, nor the race to the swiftest, that's still the way to bet.

I suppose it would be perfectly reasonable to bet a thousand, or ten thousand, to one that these guys are wrong.

HOWEVER, if any body wants to offer me a million to one long shot , I am willing to risk ONE DOLLAR on the possibility that they are onto something profound.

I was delighted to hear that Ugo tried to replicate the experiment back then.

As helpful as reputation or personality might seem to be, the scientific method is never a bad way to go. Duplicating their experiment and looking for helium was a way to reality-check a testable prediction. The fact that it failed to make an appearance was a success for the method.

In an interview, Gary Taubes suggested that the principal benefit of claims such as cold fusion discoveries is that it allows one to quickly identify, with a fair degree of confidence, who the charlatans are in a given profession.

http://www.science20.com/seth_roberts/interview_gary_taubes_part_1
Interview With Gary Taubes (part 1)
January, 2008

GARY TAUBES: Well, I’ve spent over 20 years now writing about controversial science. In the mid-1980s, I lived at CERN for ten months, the big physics lab outside Geneva, watching physicists discover non-existent elementary particles. Then I wrote a somewhat infamous story about prions, the supposed causative agents of Mad Cow Disease. I wrote a book about cold fusion: I got obsessed with this question of how it happened, because it was so obviously wrong. After all that, I developed what I believe is a very good feel for who’s a good scientist, and who’s a bad scientist, just by talking to them. There are certain ways that good scientists describe their data, describe the caveats, and describe the conditions by which they may or may not be right. I had also, obviously, with cold fusion, interviewed some of the worst scientists in the world.

I used to joke with my friends in the physics community that if you want to cleanse your discipline of the worst scientists in it, every three or four years, you should have someone publish a bogus paper claiming to make some remarkable new discovery — infinite free energy or ESP, or something suitably cosmic like that. Then you have it published in a legitimate journal ; it shows up on the front page of the New York Times, and within two months, every bad scientist in the field will be working on it. Then you just take the ones who publish papers claiming to replicate the effect, and you throw them out of the field. A way of cleaning out the bottom of the barrel.

I had been thinking about the promise of the Kitegen, you know, if it were to work as promised it would give us a lot of cheap electric power. The kitegen has the advantage of working on known physical principles but it is not obvious that we know all the physical principles that exist in the universe. So, suppose that we have cheap electric power in abundance; maybe the kitegen, maybe this thing by Rossi and Focardi, then what happens?

Well, supposing a BAU scenario, the simulation has already been performed in the first edition of "The Limits to Growth" in 1972. We grow, we grow, and we grow even more. And then we crash as the result of pollution, just like bacteria in a Petri dish. It is a much worse disaster than the one where we crash because we run out of energy.

Personally, however, I don't think the future will be this kind of BAU. The development of cheap electric power would give us that window of a few decades that will be enough to replace human beings with artificial creatures - it is already happening on the battlefield and it is not going to stop there. I think we won't have a chance to destroy the planet - we will be replaced much earlier.

I forgot to add this which might interest in particular US readers:

Energy catalyzer gets U.S. partner
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3179019.ece

Andrea Rossi, the energy catalyzer inventor, has reached an agreement with a new company in the United States. The agreement builds on several years of contacts with people linked to the U.S. Department of Energy [...]

Euan,

You should read a little bit more details of the story, the 1 MW plant is not a power plant but a factory that runs on 1 MW of electrical capacity by these E-cats (at least that's the idea). The choice of Greece is because of the political connections (backing by the government) through professor Stremmenos. It is not build in Italy because of the history that Rossi has with the country with the company Petrol Dragon.

R.

From the various interviews, Rossi now contends that the Cu-63 and Cu-65 isotopes are formed from Ni-62 and Ni-64 respectively (rarer isotopes), adding a proton to each nucleus. From Kjell's calculation, the only way to get the amount of Copper in the spent powder analyzed in Sweden is to start with enriched Ni -- which Rossi claims, although there is no confirmation of this by the Swedes.

EROEI, step back, EROEI.......

Psychologically, electricity that only works when it is light out doesn't provide for when we need light.

That, and people want to believe in infinite, easy to access energy.

I have watched less savvy people fall for the old magnetic coupling fraud, this one is at least more sophisticated.

Actually, China installed 29 GW of solar hot water capacity last year (more than 3 times as much as the entire rest of the world):
http://www.ren21.net/Portals/97/documents/GSR/REN21_GSR_2010_full_revise...

And China installed almost 19 GW of wind power last year (more than North America and Europe combined):
http://alturl.com/kqznn

Just because the US ignores this giant hot fusion machine, doesn't mean that others do too.

Difficult to say, you need to restate that to why would Rossi (as he is the only one who fully knows what goes in the reactor, specifically one of the few thousand catalysts he tried according to him). I think he is afraid that without a patent of the catalyzer he will receive almost no revenue, and is interested in making many tens to hundreds of millions with his invention.

The thing that gets me is that they're basing the power output on the amount of water that passes through and is turned into steam. However, they're not being clinical enough about measuring the steam IMO.

There was a video demonstrating the apparatus - the steam outlet was a hose that led into a bucket to collect 'drips'. Steam was being emitted but there was also a lot of liquid water in the bucket. They said this was due to condensation, but it was a lot of water. It could be that some of the water was 'pumped' through the box into the bucket. They would have then erroneously counted this as output energy because they're claiming that it converted the liquid water into steam whereas it would have done no such thing - merely moved it to a different place.

Anyway, the proof will be in the pudding - if they can rig the 1MW plant up to provide useful energy in Oct/Nov then we'll know one way or the other!

it could only be FISSION

I was also thinking along those lines.

Applying Occam's razor at every step, here is the simplest possible explanation of what might be going on:

1. Rossi has a history of energy scamming (Petroldragon). The other characters, Levi from the University (sole witness to the longest test) and Focardi are financially connected to Rossi, directly or indirectly. Therefore according to Occam's razor, this reactor is also a scam.

2. Continuing with the scam presumption to see where it might lead, we know from the experiments that:

a - there is plenty of radiation-inhibiting lead and water in the apparatus
b - gamma ray spectroscopy was forbidden during experiments
c - so was looking inside the black box
d - the trigger for the large heat release is an electrical reistance heater
e - that much energy output from so small a reactor volume is not chemical but must be nuclear in origin

3. Working within the constraints of points a - e above, and staying with the scam presumption, the reactor may be housing some kind of radioactive heat source whose level of activity is somehow significantly moderated by water and lead, and the function of the electrical resistance (which is turned down after the reactor "ignites") could be to melt lead inside the unobservable reactor core, resulting in a reconfiguration that would cause or permit large scale radioactive heat release into the now-circulating water via a heat exchanger. How could a man such as Rossi get his hands on radioactive material? No idea, but there are Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials (pdf)

4. All other parts of the apparatus not necessary for the operation of the above design serve the function of smoke and mirrors.

From the interview:

Cassarino: Obviously we still don’t understand what’s going on inside, but he has something, and we believe that.

I guess we could call this faith based science, or more precisely in this case, faith based investing.

I am reminded of Bernie Madoff's magical black box investment approach. People didn't understand how he achieved his claimed investment returns, but his investors chose to believe him.

So he is asking for money after all.

So, IF this thing is real, this company will have to get it "approved" to use in the US. Since it involves a nuclear process, I assume that the NRC will be the approving authority, and I imagine the pathway to get from here to market/implementation will be neither straight nor smooth, - nor fast.

It's not like you could just sell this thing at Home Depot.

NiAl:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NanoFoil
http://www.indium.com/nanofoil/
http://atmsp.whut.edu.cn/resource/pdf/7992.pdf
"The reaction occurs in solid and liquid phase only, without releasing any gas."
"The energy released is approximately 1200 to 1300 joules per gram."

Who knew?

CuNi doesn't seem to evolve heat. Cupronickel:
http://www.copper.org/applications/cuni/txt_properties.html

Pumper Nickel... not on Google Translate... would have been fun!

"How can 30% of nickel in Rossi’s reactor be transmuted into copper?"
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=473&cpage=4
With bland replies by Rossi... "Warm regards".
The site is a Rossi fan-club.

The gadget's chamber is copper pipe.

I'm afraid Unkleal is off his meds again.

I hope you get the credit you deserve for your discipline here, Alan. While such credit is limited to what I refer to, above, as "actuarial purposes", that value is still very high compared to other analyses that have wide-spread implications.

Thank you.

At the present, the unusual production of heat and the transmutation of nickel have not been independently demonstrated. In the absence of this, it is reasonable to question the results claimed as well as any theories proposed on the basis of current scientific understanding.

@AlanF777

Thanks for doing the analysis, it's great stuff and thoroughly done.

Rembrandt

Keeping the design secret seems counter-productive at this point. There has been enough publicity and there is a patent issued, so nobody can steal their work.

Additionally, as soon as there are public deployments, somebody is going to peek and the secret will be out anyway.

In the past when this sort of secrecy has been invoked by inventors with improbable energy technology it has always been to keep people from looking closely enough to see what was really going on long enough to get an interesting amount of money. It might be different this time, but would you be willing to put your money down on it?

Well I am from Missouri - and wonder just how much it would cost to "show me" the new cold-fusion process.

I really am too ignorant to offer an intelligent comment - but if someone could entertain me anyway I would appreciate a reply.

First of all - how is it or why is it - that theoretical or laboratory physics studies seem to be so damn far away from any applicable role in commerce. In other words, where and when would this latest cold fusion process be applied in a real-world manner that return$ dollars on its implementation? SHOW ME the profits!

Second - since science is supposed to be so analytical - why is it there is no agreed upon global protocol to submit theoretical concepts and experiments for well-funded scrutiny amongst the world's best available resources.

Why is it that research seems fragmented and collective collegiate platforms for experimentation are supported in piecemeal fashion?

Finally - for what it's worth - my own theory is that human civilization is already past that point of no return in terms of "dirty" energy consumption. And as hydrocarbons of lesser energy densities are increasingly employed by larger populations across the globe; negative-global-feedback-loops will set in motion irreversible climate change that will render the Earth's atmosphere resembling that of Venus. (perhaps by 2200)

So it's not like there is any time remaining to decline any possible alternatives - but i digress.

@Greyzone

That makes a lot of sense what you say, and it is more or less my modus operandi in a rational sense (as far as that is possible). The proof is in the pudding. We'll see whether we have to alter our reality in a number of months. So far as I understand there will be the following more detailed tests:

- Isotope test of the compounds that came out of the reactor after 2.5 months of operation (by Sven Kullander, Royal Academy of Sciences)
- 12 months rigorous tests by the University of Bologna that probably started in January 2011??, paid for by Rossi (500.000 euro)
- Tests to be done by the university of Uppsala (Kullander) who is supposed to receive an e-cat somewhere in the next months (possibly end of June)
- Startup of factory in October/November in Athens, Greence which would be a showcase with 300 of the devices operating (250 continuously, 50 on back-up).

That may be the muon-catalyzed fusion noted by Ugo. I recall when the article on that came out some years ago in Scientific American.... I think muons used to be called mu mesons....

Not much on meson:

Highlights of Papers Presented^ the
Workshop on ColdFusion Phenomena
Santa Fe, New Mexico
May 23-25,1989
http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/5589838-LEK1WB/5589838.pdf
the paper from Meson Science Laboratory, University of Tokyo (UT-MSL) Hongo, Bunkyoku, Tokyo, Japan

Interesting stuff:
14th International Conference on
Condensed Matter Nuclear Science
and the
14th International Conference on
Cold Fusion (ICCF-14)
10-15 August 2008
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/NagelDJproceedinga.pdf

Getting a charge out of dark matter
http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v41/i8/p2388_1
"If there are stable integer-charged baryons or mesons (or even "nuclei," i.e., ... not to mention providing a catalyst for low-temperature fusion." But the article costs money.

"In particle physics, mesons (pronounced /ˈmiːzɒnz, ˈmɛzɒnz/) are subatomic particles composed of one quark and one antiquark. All mesons are unstable, with the longest-lived lasting for only a few 100-millionths (10−8) of a second."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meson

"The muon (pronounced /ˈmjuːɒn/; from the Greek letter mu (μ) used to represent it) is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with a unitary negative electric charge and a spin of ½. Together with the electron, the tau, and the three neutrinos, it is classified as a lepton. It is an unstable subatomic particle with a mean lifetime of (2.2 µs)"

--> Muons were previously called mu mesons, but are not classified as mesons by modern particle physicists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon

Lots more on muon:

http://www.wbabin.net/science/shrair1.pdf
Developing an Efficient Low-Temperature Nuclear Fusion Reactor

"Note that in muon catalyzed fusion concepts for low temperature or warm fusion, a single muon might catalyze as many as 1 million fusion reactions before decaying. The muon can catalyze fusion because it has a mass of 207 times that of the electron and therefore can approach nuclei much closer than an electron."

"The existence of the muon was confirmed in 1937 by J. C. Street and E. C. Stevenson's cloud chamber experiment.[3] The discovery of the muon seemed so incongruous and surprising at the time that Nobel laureate I. I. Rabi famously quipped, "Who ordered that?""

_____________________________________

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muonium

@Mec-Eng

The number of times that the device has been demonstrated and allowed to be tested by different scientific groups, and potential importance IF this turns out to be real warrants a post.

You haven't looked in-depth and are a priori concluding that this is a scam, while there is insufficient information to conclude whether it is or not. You can take a look at http://lenr.qumbu.com/ for more details on that.

I believe it has been discussed in the past in drumbeats - it does seem to lack a Front Page Post.

Any of the biological systems have to be kept a monoculture and to get the high yields you need a 100% CO2 source to make the bio-based product.

Having a 100% CO2 source and making a "Fuel" just kicks the can down the road as the "Fuel" will just be burned in most usage models.

Photons -> biology -> energy is not the best photon conversion path.
Photons -> pv -> energy is better
Photons -> heat energy (passive solar, evacuated glass tubes, et la) is the best Man can do.

Yeah. Maybe the best way for us to determine if there's anything there would be to forget the physics and find out who has agents lurking in corners wherever Rossi and Focardi go.

@notanoilman

Have you ever spoken to someone from a large electricity, or oil & gas company?

Probably not otherwise you wouldn't be putting out such nonsense.

As a small side note, you and many others may not be aware that DARPA has been pursuing cold fusion since the original cold fusion episode. There have been rumors within the defense community of some sort of breakthrough there as well. This is all third hand information so take it with a large grain of salt, but apparently some very bright (and well funded) people have been pursuing this non-stop for about 2 decades now.

With allmost free engergy to heat the house and fuel the electric cars, we can afford 500$ oil to make high-tech and other stuff, so the grandchildren of the Saudi may also be happy.

Instead of the http://TheNickelDrum.com I would consider http://TheWoodenNickel.com as more appropriate. Note that the latter domain name is already taken.

@GreenPlease

This is more or less comparable to the invention of Haber (of the Haber and Bosch process to produce Ammonia) who tried approximately 8000 substances before finding out the required catalyst. I don't believe the tens of thousands and at another point he says thousands (Rossi is not very precise in his statements, he's not interested in science but in inventions). So probably a number of thousand

That is good. Could you you provide some simpler explanation of Hagelstein's work?

As an engineer, I spend lots of time deconstructing theoretical work by mathematicians and physicists to make it somewhat practical. This is often hard because even after I deconstruct it and try to present it in a simpler or more informal setting, lots of people still don't understand it. But you can always give it a shot, because it may be at a level that at least some of the tweeners (inhabiting that realm between physics and engineering) can grasp.

Although most people doubt it, if hydrogen can react with the nickel, maybe some hydrogen is also turning into helium. When the device is opened, they would lose all trace of helium.

This is getting weirder and weirder. Each proton (hydrogen atom) would release on the order of 6MeV when (and if, a very big if) fused with a nickel isotope. A gram of hydrogen would produce about 0.6TJ of energy, so at a gram a day that would make it around 7MW. Even if half of that disappeared down some neutrino rat-hole, it would still be one helluva lot of power for a tabletop apparatus that's not turning itself into molten slag. Not remotely enough hydrogen consumption for a chemical basis; way, way too much for a fusion basis.

One problem with the original palladium-based "cold fusion" thing IMO was that calorimetry can be much more difficult in a practical sense than investigators starstruck with fashionable modern quantum theory and the like, and correspondingly disdainful of old-fashioned (quasi-) classical stuff, sometimes may imagine. So I wonder whether history is repeating itself.