Peter Gluck wrote:
I hope you do not suppose that after being for over 21 years a
faithful coldfusionist I do not know the necessary conditions to
obtain some decent and modest levels of heat excess.
McKubre knows the necessary conditions to obtain decent & modest
levels of heat, but he does not know how to achieve them in every
case. See p. 21. 14 out of 23 isn't bad. The cathodes from ENEA that
produce .3 to 7 W are much smaller than the ones from the early
1990s. If you were to scale one back up to the size they used back
then I expect it would produce a lot more.
The problem is that our champions cannot obtain consistently say
300% heat excess and please do not forget this is a minimum to get
real excess (1KWh electric energy needs 3 kwh thermal electricity).
Once they learn to control the reaction they will be able to make it
100 to 1, or 1000 to 1, or zero input (gas loading). I wouldn't worry
about the ratio now, as long it is large enough to allow the reaction
to be measured with confidence.
The 4 basic conditions are known in theory, in principle but the manufacturers
of Pd do not master the technology, metallurgy and nanotechnology to
make such materials batch after batch- so at least for me it is
obvious that it is some hidden parameter at play here.
Well, it is not all that hidden. As I said, that is like saying that
the "secret" to make rockets was not known to the Americans in the
late 1950s when the Russians were winning the "space race." Many
people thought that was the case, but it was not.
Plus as you well know, palladium is very scarce- and cannot be the
basis of a really great energy source.
There is enough Pd to put a catalytic converter into every automobile
and truck, using about half the supply. Automobiles produce ~27 of
all energy, so it is not a huge stretch to think that if the Pd were
producing energy instead of cleaning up emissions, it could supply
about half the energy we use, and maybe all. That would depend on how
thin the thin films can be, and how active the nuclear active environment is.
Anyway, I expect they will find a way to use Ni instead.
We should ask Mike what is "consistent levels of excess heat" And
can this level be increased?
I have no doubt it can be increased, because it has been much higher
in a few cases. Anything that happens by accident or happenstance can
be made to happen on purpose. It is just a matter of money --
truckloads of funding.
As regarding Energetics and ENEA they have really obtained some
excellent results- but are they able to obtain 10 or 100 or 1000
times repeatedly the same level of energy as in the historical
cathode No. 64? Or is it only about condition No 5- some smart
method of stimulation? With a limited potential....improving but not sooo much.
That is because there is not sooo much money. There are 2 or 3 people
at work on this technique in the entire world. We need 500,000
people. That's how many people were working on airplanes in 1910, and
transistors in 1958. With that kind effort we will make more progress
every month than people have made in the last 21 years.
Your analogies from aviation and rocket science are inspiring but do
not much for solving the problem which can be formulated simply as
Cold Fusion is not yet technologically reproducible.
Rockets and transistors were not reproducible when they were first
funded. Goddard's rockets in the 1930s were mere toys, but Guggenheim
started forking out real money to develop them. In 1954 transistors
were less predictable and controllable than the ENEA cold fusion
cathodes are today, yet millions of dollars was pouring into the R&D
(hundreds of millions after inflation). The thing is, when they made
batches of 100 small, weak transistors, and only 3 of them worked --
each with different performance -- they could still sell those 3 for
$16 each and make a profit. A small, unpredictable transistor was
still a commercially useful device whereas a small cold fusion device
(or one of Goddard's rockets) is perfectly useless.
What I am not able to understand: we have got information that a
technologically reproducible system of LENR exists- nickel and
hydrogen based- the original Piantelli system for which the
necessary know-how elements were found and this is developed both by
the author, Prof PIantelli and his former coworker Sergio Focardi
plus the inventor Andrea Rossi and the results are encouraging if
true- and nobody from our community has taken this seriously (?) . . .
They take it seriously. Unfortunately, Piantelli has been secretive
and uncooperative, and others who tried to replicate got nowhere, so
other researchers do not have much interest in this. That has been
the case with many other promising development, and it looks like
Rossi may be the same way. It is too early to say. A researcher who
is secretive and uncooperative might as well be dead and forgotten
for all the good he will do. I think there is no chance this will
developed quietly by someone like Piantelli off in a corner. The only
surprise development might come from Mizuno, who is off trying to
develop the phenanthrene system, discovered in the 1930s. He is off
by himself with noise level funding -- or perhaps zero funding (I
don't know) -- but he is not secretive, and he cooperates with many people.
Anyway, we have a serious reproducibility problem and we will not
solve it with slogans and forced analogies.
The analogies are close, not forced. Transistors and cold fusion
devices are solid state devices with many similarities. The first
transistors were in aqueous solution, very similar to electrochemical
cells, with many similar problems. Our problems are political, not
technical. With any other discovery in the history of technology,
given a development that had come this far, with this much solid
proof and promise, the field would be flooded with public and private
funding. We would have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people
frantically working on it.
The only reason we do not have funding is because of academic
politics and opposition from a relatively small number of people. You
could reveal a working 2 kW reactor tomorrow and not one of those
people who admit he is wrong or tone down his attacks. We will have
to work around them because they will never, to their dying day,
admit they were wrong. The people who opposed railroads, airplanes,
transistors, computers and other technology never admitted they were
wrong. They will say 'yes it works, but it will never be of any real
use.' Well into the 1970s people opposed to computers said they were
a waste of money, and data processing was a fad that will soon go away.
- Jed
