At 06:19 PM 11/16/2009, Horace Heffner wrote:
On Nov 16, 2009, at 1:57 PM, Esa Ruoho wrote:
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assesses with high confidence
that if LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions) can produce
nuclear-origin energy at room temperatures, this disruptive
technology could revolutionize energy production and storage, since
nuclear reactions release millions of times more energy per unit
mass than do any known chemical fuel.
Note the word "if"in the sentence above.
Absolutely. The report does have "if" in there, but the overall sense
of the report is that the science is real, i.e., there are low energy
nuclear reactions, but that the technological feasibility of
*practical* energy production has not been shown. I gloss that
sentence to mean that.
I.e., they *do* produce "nuclear origin energy at room temperatures,"
though the temperature increases locally and substantially (I mean on
the submicron scale and transiently), but the condition in the
sentence really means "can produce ... energy ... at practical levels
and in a practical way." Suppose a lot of energy is sometimes
produced, but the amount isn't controllable, the process is too
chaotic. Oops. That could make it impractical. Or suppose the
supplies and energy invested are too expensive, and the payoff is low
efficiency. I.e., you always get excess heat, but unless the excess
can be produced at a high enough level, the only utility would be
some extra heat, and the process and materials and investment might
be too much. An Arata cold fusion hot water heater would work, saving
energy, but the cost of the palladium would be fierce, and how often
would the material have to be reprocessed? You'd get nearly all the
palladium back and hearly all of the deuterium, but there are
significant costs associated with these actions....
I do not consider it a demonstrated thing that practical LENR
applications are known; the most likely candidate could be nuclear
decontamination, not using what the reprort implies, but biological
agents as reported by Vyosotskii. So right away, if it was up to me,
I'd make sure that Vyosotskii's work was replicated. I'd send
representatives to Russia to work with him. He's credible, even
though what he reports is incredible. I find it remarkable that the
report mentions Vyosotskii's search for magnetic monopole involvement
in LENR, which strikes me as much more speculative than his work with
biological transmutation and decontamination (acceleration of nuclear decay).
If LENR is real, there is no reason to believe that proteins couldn't
manage to catalyze it, particularly if there is a reasonable
experimental report indicating it. And there is. That damn Mossbauer
spectrogram, got me in lots of trouble at Wikipedia. It's conclusive,
you have to understand something about such spectrograms to
understand why that is such a spectacular result.
