At 03:22 PM 8/17/2012, Axil Axil wrote:
In a post today integral sited a death of a LENR developer in an explosion. The take away, LENR is dangerous when the power is high. It is best to be as safe as you can.
When Pons and Fleischmann, in 1983, in one of their first experiments, using a cubic centimeter of palladium, loaded for a long time with deuterium, experienced a meltdown (actually, it seems that palladium was vaporized), they scaled down, and LENR researchers, until stability and reliability is demonstrated with any approach, are strongly advised to do this as well.
Consider this: just a bit more nudge in a certain unfortunate direction, "success," they might not have only lost an apparatus and a lab bench and a few inches of concrete floor, they might have lost the whole building and more. If you are going to mess with "nuclear," be prepared to succeed.
This conflicts with the drumbeat of demands for More Power! But "More Power" should be resisted, until much more is known. As long as power is adequate to be measured, clearly above noise, and especially when power is correlated with independent measures (helium is perfect for the Fleischman-Pons Heat Effect in PdD), there is no scientific value to More Power, only increased danger -- and expense.
(To satisfy skeptics who very likely aren't going to be satisfied no matter what you do.)
Get a small cell to produce reliable, stable power, it is easy to extrapolate to large devices, and there is no reason to expect that a cell would fail just because there were other cells operating in its vicinity. Or that if a 5 cm length of wire reliably produces X watts, a 500 cm length would not produce 100 * X watts.
(Yes, it's possible that scale-up, if it involves operation at a different temperature, will fail. The Fleischmann-Pons approach may well not be scalable at practical power levels, and it may be inherently unreliable. However, it's still valuable for scientific investigation.)
(If you have a small, reliable cell that produces XP or other easily measurable effects, *that* will ultimately satisfy the skeptics, if it's cheap and readily available. A skeptic isn't going to come up with $100,000 for a kilowatt "generator," but might well spend $200 for a 1-watt device, if he or she gets to play with it to his or her heart's content. And if an inventor has a 1-watt device that is reliable, it should be trivial to get a patent. It's the lack of easily available demonstrations that has allowed the USPTO to deny patents. The patent, under "additional claims," goes for bigger stuff. Once the patent is issued, as well, skeptics can independently make devices. But if you can buy one for $200, it makes no sense to go to all the work to recreate it independently -- unless one is actually aiming at engineering something bigger. And someone who wants to do that will *certainly* buy the kit. And serious skeptics will do it to figure out the "trick." Good luck to them! -- and I mean that. -- If the FPHE had been replicable for $200, this would all have been over twenty years ago. Unfortunately, the figure is probably not far south of $10,000, plus a *lot* of time, for a full-on heat demonstration well above noise and possible calorimetric error. You can probably set up the FPHE for much less than that, if the scale is small. I'm working on it.)
