COLD FUSION SUCCESS

[Omnibus]

I know, but you won't even need to do that had the OU become ubiquitous. The freedom will come about naturally and that's the worst nightmare for the powers that be.

[neptune]

@Omnibus. You raise a very interesting point here . Free energy will to an extent make people free . I feel however that this particular technology is different , in that the energy is only free to the seller of energy . To the consumer , nothing is going to change . It is only free energy in the sense that oil is free . There are of course costs involved in extracting it and exploiting it , and in its distribution . The same holds good for the device under discussion . The main difference is the potential for a greater profit margin . It is not on the same level as, say ,a magnet motor driving a generator which you could build in your garage . It may have , as I previously stated , certain environmental advantages . So while it is a step forward , it is not exactly what we seek .

[mscoffman]

One big problem with this from a scientific aspect;

The inventors did not describe the exact make-up of fuel
in this reactor. This is a major problem for repeatability
and therefore a major set-back for the scientific acceptability
of this reactor. I guess this may be a step in the route of
failure of this tech.

The problem is as soon as you sell this to someone it becomes
proprietary knowledge of *that* corporation â€" mentioning
the fundamental operating principle is just going to disturb
the population - the critics â€" so it doesn't get mentioned and
there are good reasons not too. So its operating principle never
becomes the “Oh whatever”,  common engineering knowledge
required to get it broadly accepted.

Of course if ones sells this to the military â€" then it becomes
military proprietary secret technology and if it’s really useful it
may even get written up as a secret energy patent. Then write
it off completely, please â€" as secrets stay secret. So military
secrets are just a special case of normal proprietary information
and this is in the pathway of limited sales confidential tech.

So I think this is technology on the cusp.

:S:MarkSCoffman

[batfish]

@mscoffman

See

http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/19/rossi-and-focardi-lenr-device-probably-real-with-credit-to-piantelli

and

http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2008/NET29-8dd54geg.shtml#dpnr

These and other articles relate Focardi's work to a finding reported by Francesco Piantelli, a biophysicist at the University of Siena, based on an observation made in 1988. There was an article in Nuovo Cimento  by Focardi, Habel and Piantelli, and the finding seems to have been replicated at the University of Pavia (see New Energy Times articles for references).

It seems that Piantelli didn't follow up energy aspects of his finding, as he is concerned with finding a treatment for cancer.

I was puzzled how a setup involving Hydrodgen and Nickel related to biophysics. The answer seems to lie in the use of Raney Nickel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raney_nickel) as a catalyst for hydrogenation of vegetable oils.

Raney nickel is made by using caustic soda to dissolve most of the aluminum out of a chunk of nickel-aluminium alloy, leaving a chunk of extremely porous nickel that can have a a surface area of 100 m2 per gram. The process (2 Al + 2 NaOH + 6 H2O â†' 2 Na[Al(OH)4] + 3 H2) releases hydrogen and the resulting material is presumably used to absorb hydrogen and deliver it in the hydrogenation process.

I seem to remember that Raney Nickel has also been mentioned in relation to the Blacklight process

So it looks as if Focardi's system is likely to involve some kind of Raney Nickel as providing a deeply porous container for processes of the kind that were observed by Piantelli.

[Omnibus]

Please make no mistake, Rossi is not the discoverer of the excess heat effect during electrolysis of water.