I'm coming to this discussion a little late, I know, and I'll probably repeat points others have covered, but as I read through the nonsense Rothwell writes, I can't carry on to the next nonsensical paragraph until I've dealt with the previous, so I'll post my thoughts as I work through it. If you feel he's been adequately refuted by others already, feel free to ignore.
On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com>wrote: > > In this case you should do what I described earlier: > > Bring ~30 L of water to boil in a large pot > > Insulate the pot, but not much, so that the outer layer is still too hot > to touch (60 to 80 deg C). > > Check the temperature periodically for 4 hours and see whether it remains > at boiling temperature, or cools down. > > That may sound silly, but I am 100% serious. Any skeptic who sincerely > believes the claim may be mistaken should be willing to do this test. > That you would even write this shows that you pay no attention to the experiment, or what other people try to tell you about it. It is not simply a large pot. It is a large 100-kg device, with plenty of volume unaccounted for. You can store energy in 100 kg of material heated to a high temperature. You cannot store much energy in a simple pot. You can also put fuel into large unaccounted for volume. You can't do that in a pot. Frankly, if anyone is being silly it is the skeptics who are unwilling to > try this, or to deal with the fact that this is a direct simulation of eCat > behavior. > It's not a direct simulation because a 1-kg pot is not like a 100-kg container. And there is no need for skeptics to do anything when it is perfectly obvious that a 100-kg device can easily keep water boiling for 4 hours, or 40 hours for that matter. > However, you can ignore that, not replace the water, and simply look at > the heat lost from 30 L container. > OK. For a container that size at 60C in a room at 30C, covered with foil with an emissivity less than 10%, the heat loss is about 50 W. Over 3.5 hours, that's less than a MJ (less then 3/4 MJ). You don't think you can store 3/4 MJ in 100 kg of material, at any temperature? > > This is a much easier test than making a copy of the reactor. This is as > definitive and irrefutable as a test with a copy would be. This test gets > to the point, without confusing the issue, and without getting into debates > about trivial and irrelevant matters such as the placement of the cooling > loop outlet thermocouple. > Or such as the heat or chemical fuel that you can store in a 100 kg device. > The only way this may not model the reactor in all important respects > would be if there is a hidden source of chemical or electric energy. There > is absolute no evidence for that. > Well, now, if there were evidence for it, it wouldn't be hidden, would it? There is absolutely no evidence for a nuclear source either. And you left out a hidden source of thermal energy storage. > To put it another way, if there is a hidden source, it is hidden so well > no expert has seen any trace of it, and there no suggestions anywhere as to > how you might simulate it; i.e. how you might hide wires large enough to > keep a 30 L pot boiling for 4 hours. > You're just not listening. There are suggestions all over the internet for how you might simulate it with thermal storage, thermite, alcohol and oxygen candles, and so on. For your reduced experiment, it would be simple in fact. > > (There are a few crackpot ideas about putting bricks heated to 3000 deg C > into the reactor beforehand. There is no way that could work, and it would > be dangerous, so do not try it.) > > A sure sign that you do not have a rebuttal for the actual argument is that you replace it with an absurd one. No one suggested heating bricks to 3000C, nor is it necessary to do it beforehand. For your simplified experiment of supplying the heat lost through the insulation, less than a MJ is needed. Even if you double that to keep the water boiling it's only 2 MJ. That's a small fraction of the 34 MJ of heat that went in during the pre-heat phase. And 10 kg of fire brick (only 1/10 of the total mass) only has to change temperature by about 200C to provide that heat. Heating fire brick to 1000C should not be a problem to provide much more. Or use a salt like sodium nitrate with an even higher heat capacity, and a large heat of fusion (190 J/g) at the melting point of 308C, for even more storage with a relatively small temperature change.
