The Gaming Den

so, i just found an article about one Andrea Rossi with his E-Cat ELNR/Cold-Fusion Device for Home-Owners . .
And after some more Research found this, which is the only link on google without ecat or something like that in the link . .
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/201 ... si-roundup

What does one make of this now?

I don't put much trust in Rossi and his e-cat, but the other stuff does not sound quite as bad . .

Got to expect the dude's a con man. The thing is, cold fusion is so amazingly awesome that people have to quietly and unofficially check his bullshit with proper consideration, and they won't talk about it up front because the media will go crazy with this story and then piss on them all for being wrong again (even though they were just checking, which they kinda have to).


Cold fusion? Fission you get the energy hill climbed with the impacting neutrons, but the energy hill for fusion is ever so much larger and not really suited to anything but brute force. You can't really electro-chemically catalyse your way up that sort of requirement, it really is A-bomb concentrations of energy needed, and specially focused at that.

Professor Ugo Bardi of the University of Florence, noting contradictory claims made by Rossi regarding the emission or non-emission of Gamma radiation, the location of a supposed factory – in Florida, or not in the United States at all – and the fact that some of his most vehement supporters are apparently deserting him, said "...the E-Cat has reached the end of the line. It still maintains some faithful supporters, but, most likely, it will soon fade away in the darkness of pathological science, where it belongs".

Rossi is basically a classic scam artist. He already filed a patent, so if his shit works, he should be able to let independent observers test it. He isn't, so obviously his shit doesn't work. It's really that simple.

As for Cold Fusion in general: there's no particular reason to believe that it isn't possible. Fusion is an exothermic process and thus by basic thermodynamic principles it happens spontaneously in nature. The problem is that without the heat and pressure of a fucking star, it spontaneously happens at a rate that is so slow that it's almost unmeasurable - and certainly useless for any industrial purpose. Were such a reaction to be catalyzable under any circumstances, it would continue to happen spontaneously and occur at much quicker speeds.

But if you have a catalyst, this is very likely to be a chemical soup rather than any sort of "machine". And of course, just because you find a fusion catalyst doesn't mean it's useful for anything. If you make fusion happen spontaneously at room temperature a thousand or even a hundred billion times faster than normal, that would still be industrially worthless.

The guys talking about tiny amounts of anomalous heat very likely have some kind of catalyzed reaction. I would be surprised if that catalyzed reaction was "nuclear fusion" and not "metal tarnishing", but in either case there is no obvious method to convert what they have into anything resembling power generation.

-Username17

Stahlseele wrote:so, i just found an article about one Andrea Rossi with his E-Cat ELNR/Cold-Fusion Device for Home-Owners . .
And after some more Research found this, which is the only link on google without ecat or something like that in the link . .
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/201 ... si-roundup

What does one make of this now?

It certainly takes me back to the 80s. But... no, no cold fusion for you.
When someone pulls out something that is verifiable and testable by a large portion of the scientific community, then you can talk about the possibility of it in the near future. Without testing by people who know what they are talking about, it isn't science, it is crap.

There are tabletop fusion reactors, like the Farnsworth Fusor, that genuinely and reliably produce fusion reactions. They just don't come remotely close to generating net power, so they're primarily used as a neutron source or an expensive hobby rather than, like, changing the world.

And there are real alternatives to the enormous (and enormously complex) tokamaks that get the bulk of the funding that might work better, but they aren't cold fusion. The Polywell guys were up to 15keV plasma a few years ago, and that's 170 million Kelvin. Their reactor was just so small that the total amount of heat wasn't much.