RE: Genius Inventor by Thomas E Stolper. Highly recommended, available from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Inventor-controversy-historical-contemporary/dp /1419643045/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1302024882&sr=8-1 This book by former vortician Tom Stolper is the detailed history of Randell Mills, but I am going to be using it for present purposes in the context of Andrea Rossi. I suspect that there is a direct connection. Eventually, if Rossi can produce what is claimed, there will be the seeds of a fabulous drama in the history of science - of the discovery of an energy source which can change the course of human history in the same way as the discovery of fire (a metaphor which Mills has used). However, the really sad part of the saga is that this development could have happened long ago and kept us out the Mid-East, and all of the other problems that have a basis in dependence on OPEC oil; and with a loss of perhaps half of our National wealth in those two decades. Presumably, had we avoided the Gulf War, then 9/11 would not have happened, and the few junker automobiles that require gasoline instead of "ThermoCATS" would be filling up at the non-inflated price. To see how close the "pioneers" actually came to finding success, if things had been slightly more favorable, one need only read the two pages on Thermacore p. 8-10 at the start of the book. I am imagining that had circumstance been optimal, this company would have developed an early version of the E-Cat, with the fanciful name above. They were very close. Essentially, back in March 1992 almost twenty years ago - Thermacore put into operation the prototype Ni-H cell which operated for nearly a year at greater than 3:1 excess energy (50 watts continuous of excess energy for about a year, but catch-22 ... the damn thing required 40 pounds of nickel wire ! This was before the age of "nano" which essentially changed everything, especially the economics, but they did not fully appreciate this in 1992 . maybe they should have. There was still an easy way to get nano-nickel as a coating back then, but they did not pursue this, due to the economics and other factors. When a corporate CPA looks at saving 50 watts of energy continuously, and with an unknown lifetime, the economics do not look that great on scale-up to larger size. There are 8000 billable hours in a year, and if you took a big gamble - on the thing lasting for 5 years (far from certain) you could have 40,000 hours of free heat, and you have saved 2 megawatts thermal - total, that is what you get in return for your 40 pounds of nickel. To put this into proper context (with napkin math) - the nickel was going for $5/pound at the time and coal cost $40/ton. A ton of coal gives about 2.5 MWhr/ton of heat - and consequently, the bottom line for making a marketable device seems to be that with this new invention you need $200 worth of nickel to produce the same heat as $40 worth of coal. Assuming it will even last 5 years, and discounting all the other problems. No brainer for the CPA, at least in that time frame. but things change rapidly, and when you lack foresight - everybody suffers. Today, the nickel price has more than doubled, but less than the coal increase, yet the biggest change is the possibility of increasing surface area - and the massive increase available by going "nano". They actually appreciated this factor at the time (that the Ni-H reaction was a surface reaction) but when it came down to push-and-shove, they were so far away from economic breakeven, that they did not try to go to the higher surface area of a powder or by plating or other techniques. And to make things worse, Mills eventually went to plasma phase, which in hindsight is an even dumber decision (as it appears from Rossi's success with gas phase). BTW the scaling parameter for surface area is 4*pi*r^2 (for spheres) so when you decrease the radius by half but keep the same mass of material you increase the surface area by roughly a factor of 50. If you go from 18 gauge wire down to 10 nm powder, as Thermacore could have done - then you increase the surface area by a factor of 5000 for the same weight of nickel. This is with nickel nanopowder - and had it been available to Thermacore in 1992 they could have lowered the cost of nickel by a large ratio. Saddest thing of all, with some ingenuity they could have achieved this surface effect increase in other ways (such as flash electroplating of ceramic powder) . but that is easy for me to say now, and the beauty of hindsight, no? It is 20-20 as they say. But the lack of a long horizon in 1992 has had massive repercussions for the USA in particular- and has probably cost us fully half of our entire National wealth, in the intervening two decades (if you figure the wealth we would have without two Gulf Wars and with $25 oil, instead of $110.) Jones
