Jones Beene <jone...@pacbell.net> wrote: > 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 ! >
I well remember that thing. The version I saw (in photos) was built inside a heavy-duty garbage can. Thermocore's calorimetry seemed convincing to me. That company specializes in thermal engineering so they know what they are doing. I have their MIT handouts if anyone would like to see them. They never gave me permission to upload them. They might be available on the Internet elsewhere. Power density was low, as you say. Other people such as Srinivasan were not even able to achieve that level of power. Most of them saw no significant heat. For a long time it seemed that Ni-H cold fusion was either a mistake or a dead-end. No one ever plausible reason how Thermocore's results could be mistaken, but on the other hand they made no progress and few others claimed they could replicate, I did not know what to make of it. > 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 . . . > That would be a preposterous analysis. I wouldn't be surprised if some CPA actually made that analysis, but it is nuts. Obviously, the 40 lb version was just a crude prototype, and before it could be made into a commercial product power density would have to be improved. The assumption was that it *could be* improved. Okay, that was my assumption, anyway. Using the gadget in that form would be as impractical as using a bulk palladium electrochemical cell. I do not know anyone who seriously proposed doing that. The purpose of the bulk Pd-D cathodes was to learn the mechanism of the reaction and then find a way to do it using much less precious metal. When Toyota achieved excellent reproducibility, high temperatures, and high power density in the laboratory in France, using Johnson-Matthey bulk palladium, I assumed that would be a stepping-stone to a more practical implementation, perhaps with thin-film Pd, for example. I never envisioned a bunch of solid Pd cathodes producing boiling water in a pressurized reactor. Although, I suppose the materials in that configuration would not be far more expensive than rods made of uranium oxide in a fission reactor. A whole lot safer! There have indeed been many lost opportunities in this field. - Jed
