Peter Gluck wrote:
I wish you are right here but the problem of reproducibility is a
bit more complicated.
It is about what kind of reproducibility we are speaking- and it is
obvious that it is about
scientific, qualitative reproducibility-in-principle. See e.g. the
results in Mike McKubre's presentation p. 21 - heat excess always
but very variable from 1% to 300% without an explanation- what is
the reason for this variation.
You are incorrect. It is not as complicated as you think. The reasons
for the variability shown on p. 21 and the failures are well known.
McKubre himself described them in several lecturers and in this slide
collection. Storms, Miles and others have also described some of the reasons.
The main reason is poor Pd material, such as material that will not
load, or that cracks apart when load. The conditions necessary to
produce the effect are shown on p. 14:
Necessary conditions:
Maintain High Average D/Pd Ratio (Loading )
For times >> 20-50 times Tau D/D (Initiation)
At electrolytic i >250-500mA cm^-2 (Activation)
With an imposed D Flux (Disequilibrium)
See also p. 18, which clearly shows: "Electrodes made from the same
lot of materials (Pd) produce consistent levels of excess heat."
You have to make a clear distinction here:
To achieve a large reaction, the researchers know what the control
parameters are. They know what conditions must be met. HOWEVER they
do not always know how to achieve those conditions.
This is analogous to rocket scientists in the late 1950s who
understood how to make rockets, understood how to control them, and
knew they could put a rocket into orbit successfully . . . yet their
rockets such as the Vanguard series often exploded or flew out of
control. They knew what they were doing, but not very well. They
needed more practice. They needed to do more experiments. They needed
buckets and barrels and then truckloads of money -- which they soon
got. I have no doubt that if McKubre and the others were given lots
more funding, materials and people to help them, they would make good
progress controlling and scaling up the reaction, just as the rocket
scientists of the 1950s eventually learned to make fairly reliable rockets.
Note however, that to this day rockets often explode. Insurance rates
remain very high for communication satellite launches. The Space
Shuttle is still extremely dangerous, and likely to explode
approximately once in 50 flights. Rockets are nowhere near as
reliable as jet aircraft, fission reactors, or other high energy,
large-scale technology invented in the 1940s and 50s. Perhaps if we
put hundreds of billions of dollars more into rocket technology it
would become reliable, but then again, perhaps not. It may be
inherently dangerous because rockets are barely controlled explosions
of massive amounts of chemical fuel. Rockets may be a dead-end technology.
It may be that bulk Pd cold fusion with electrolysis is also a dead
end technology. I am sure it can be improved. The people at ENEA and
Energetics Technology are gradually improving reproducibility, the
ratio of input to output, and they are raising the absolute power
levels. Progress is slow but their cathodes are far better than most
of the ones from the early 1990s. Bulk Pd can be improved, but can it
be made practical? How much can it be improved, at what cost? I do
not know. My guess is that other materials are more promising, and
are more likely to lead to practical devices. I think the best
candidate is nanoparticle Pd suspended in other materials to prevent
sintering (or whatever it is that causes the particles to clump together).
Cold fusion is or wants to be a source of energy not some lab
curiosity so the kind of reproducibility we need is quantitative
(reasonably), at mucher higher levels of energy, upscalable - it has
to be technological. If we want to "sell" cold fusion.
Most experts I have spoken with believe this cannot be accomplished
without huge sums of money, probably hundreds of millions of dollars.
On the other hand, if the money is provided they have confidence that
it can be accomplished. Other technologies, such as rockets,
transistors and solid-state Aegis radar were given hundreds of
millions when they were still at that the laboratory curiosity stage.
It is irrational not to fund cold fusion. Withholding the funding is
a political ploy by academic rivals. If we are going to succeed, we
are probably going to have to overcome those politics without the
benefit of a scaled up device.
Anyway, if they could scale it up or control it now, we wouldn't need funding.
It is possible that someone will find a way to control and scale up
without hundreds of millions of dollars. You never know. People are
making remarkable progress with nanoparticle materials with only
noise-level funding.
- Jed
