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Page added on April 17, 2014
The Peak Oil Crisis: Cold Fusion Update
There are at least four contenders in the race to bring a cold-fusion powered heat-producing device to market in the near future. These are the Rossi E-cat project now based in North Carolina under the aegis of a new firm called Industrial Heat; the Brillouin and SRI effort to develop a nuclear reaction boiler out in California; the Defkalion Green Technology’s effort in Vancouver and Greece to market a heat producing device later this year; and finally BlackLight Power’s radically different “hydrino” technology which, if it proves to work at a commercial scale, could trump all the rest.
Of the four, Rossi’s E-cat has received the most publicity – at least on the internet if not in the mainstream media. Last week a new book by Swedish journalist, Mat Lewan, entitled An Impossible Invention, was released. Lewan relates the story of Andrea Rossi and his E-cat in much detail from the time when Rossi first decided to research the phenomenon, through the first semi-public demonstration in January 2011 to the current time. If nothing else, Rossi is important to the cold fusion story as he was the first to demonstrate commercial-scale production of heat and may be the first to develop a commercially viable product.
Lewan, who trained as a scientist before becoming a journalist, started as a skeptic. However, after attending many demonstrations, making measurements of his own, and conducting extensive interviews with Rossi and independent scientists, he has become convinced that Rossi and his heat generating device are for real. He concludes that we are on the cusp of a new age in which virtually unlimited quantities of clean, cheap energy will be at the service of mankind.
The Rossi story, however, is nearly as bizarre as that of the mainstream media’s treatment of the cold fusion story. Rossi came upon the idea that he should work on cold fusion in 1995 while sitting in an Italian jail for six months – but that is another story. Upon release he returned to the U.S. where he had been developing thermoelectric generators for the U.S. government and began experiments with nickel and hydrogen as a way to produce heat without a chemical reaction.
After years of experiments, and the encouragement of a well-respected Italian physicist, Sergio Focardi, who Rossi had called in to evaluate his work, he finally hit upon powdered nickel, a catalyst (possibly lithium), and a reactor configuration that would produce commercial quantities of heat – well beyond the test-tube scale that many other scientists had been observing over the previous 20 years.
In 2010 Rossi and Focardi self-published a paper about their work, but of course left out the details of the key catalyst. As cold fusion devices are generally un-patentable due to prejudices left from the Fleishman-Pons era, the only protection an inventor has for now is to keep key details proprietary. This withholding of information by Rossi, and others working in the field, coupled with no firm idea as to how what is known as the production of “anomalous heat” actually works, has made the whole topic highly controversial.
While the semi-public demonstration in January 2011 met its goals of producing steam before an audience of invited scientists and members of the press, the claims that the device was powered by a nuclear reaction raised a storm of controversy focusing on the notion that such a device could not be real. While a few Italian newspapers covered the event along with a handful of websites specializing in cold fusion, the mainstream media stayed silent and largely remains so to this day.
Interestingly enough the first demonstration seems to have raised the most interest in Sweden. Five days after the first demonstration Lewan wrote a story for his Swedish newspaper, Ny Teknik, which attracted widespread attention in Sweden, and eventually led to support for Rossi from the country’s electric power industry. The next two years were taken up in a search by Rossi for a partner that would test his device, bring credibility to his work as well as finance its development, and allow him bring a heat producing device to market.
At one time or another, partnership deals were about to be struck with five different organizations in Greece, Sweden, and the U.S. but for one reason or another they fell through, sometimes with recriminations. During this time however, Rossi, possibly with the help of a noted Japanese scientist, came up with a new design for his device which raised its operating temperatures considerably. In October 2012 Rossi concluded a deal with a then-secret U.S. partner in whom he had enough confidence to turn over the secrets of his designs and catalysts to the new partnership. At the end of 2013 the news leaked that Rossi was now with Cherokee Investment Partners in Raleigh North Carolina and was working out of a new firm called Industrial Heat to develop and market products based on his designs.
Currently Rossi and Industrial Heat have their latest device out for lengthy off-site testing and evaluation by an independent team of scientists financed by Sweden’s electric power institute. It is hoped that the results of these test will be available within the next few months and will be long, thorough, and independent enough to convince the world that Rossi’s device does indeed produce the claimed amounts of heat.
In an even more interesting development, BlackLight Power announced last week that they have designed and are patenting a device that can continuously produce the mini-explosions that occur as hydrogen atoms are converted into what BlackLight calls “hydrinos.” BlackLight says the blinding flashes resulting from these conversions, some 50,000 times brighter than the sun, have been directed onto solar cells to produce large amounts of electricity. They say they have designed a one-cubic-foot device that will produce 10 million watts of power. If this proves to be true, cold fusion may be obsolete before most know that it exists.
19 Comments on "The Peak Oil Crisis: Cold Fusion Update"
doug nicodemus on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 2:07 pm
fraud…
chilyb on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 2:20 pm
when can I pick one up at Home Depot?
islander on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 2:22 pm
And yet these devices never seem to be quite ready, but with some money from gullible investors, they will be ready in no time and provide the world with all the energy we could ever need.
ghung on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 2:30 pm
If there’s a God, it never meant for humans to have unlimited energy and power. The humility of limits kept us sane. Fossil fuels and fission were tests; ones which we are failing miserably. Power corrupts. Unlimited power corrupts absolutely.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 2:33 pm
Yea, G, Like Heinberg has often said if it is not peak energy it will be peak something else. Leipzigs law of the minimum will in the end effect any big breakthrough.
Kevin Cobley on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 2:51 pm
The cold fusion story has been around since the 50’s when an Argentinian con man suckered a whole host of people into lending him money, it was resurrected in the 80’s with an identical story by Ponds and Fleischman, now it’s the Rossi resurrection of the same con and it’s headed the same place. Unfortunately the laws of Physics don’t support any of these conmen’s claims.
I’m selling my plans to extract dark energy from captured neutrinos anyone got a few million to help me!
Makati1 on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 3:04 pm
“I’ve got a dilithium mine for sale cheap … ” Contact Scotty.
Arthur on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 3:10 pm
“Unfortunately the laws of Physics don’t support any of these conmen’s claim”
Really? Which law in particular?
Fusion exists and is exothermic. The problem is how to let them fuse. But in quantum physics there is such a thing as tunnel effect.
Italians are good at making tunnels. 😉
ronpatterson on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 4:47 pm
Arthur wrote:Fusion exists and is exothermic. The problem is how to let them fuse.
Fusion exist near the center of the sun. Nothing “let’s” them fuse, gravity and heat “forces” them to fuse.
If you could create the similar gravitational forces a like amount of heat here on earth then you could have fusion. But you can’t and therefore you can’t.
RICHARD RALPH ROEHL on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 5:40 pm
If the perpetual promise of cold fusion ever gets passed the stage of investor $camola, will it also be “safe, clean and too cheap to meter”?
Arthur on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 6:17 pm
ronpatterson, in quantum physics there is a phenomena called tunneling…
Quantum tunnelling or tunneling (see spelling differences) refers to the quantum mechanical phenomenon where a particle tunnels through a barrier that it classically could not surmount. This plays an essential role in several physical phenomena, such as the nuclear fusion that occurs in main sequence stars like the Sun. It has important applications to modern devices such as the tunnel diode, quantum computing, and the scanning tunnelling microscope. The effect was predicted in the early 20th century and its acceptance, as a general physical phenomenon, came mid-century.
Tunnelling is often explained using the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the wave–particle duality of matter. Purely quantum mechanical concepts are central to the phenomenon, so quantum tunnelling is one of the novel implications of quantum mechanics.
There is no law that says that fusion can only take place under conditions such as in the sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunnelling
drwater on Thu, 17th Apr 2014 8:05 pm
Actually, I had read that Cold Fusion is now accepted as a real phenomena, but the actual subatomic level reaction details were still being worked out.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-03/30/rossi
And generating heat or electricity in a commercially viable manner is a whole additional thing still to be worked out after they get the physics straight.
SilentRunning on Fri, 18th Apr 2014 4:11 am
NONE of these fakes will be producing power in the future. They will instead defraud investors and dupe the gullible.
Dr. Jesse Herbert on Fri, 18th Apr 2014 4:20 am
I was working on my Ph.D. at Los Alamos National Labs in the late 1990s and met a number of scientists while there who all told me that they had results showing this phenomenon was real–but they could not (at the time) get it to occur reliably, nor even heat a cup of coffee with it. When I left there I started working on fuel cell tech (later laid off for telling the truth about limitations) and while at that company (Plug Power in NY) met their chief consultant from GE’s earlier fuel cell investigations. He also confirmed that they got positive CF results after Pons and Fleischmann published their work, but due to similar issues that the LANL folks had, kept quiet about it. The Hirsch report comes to mind when I think about this all, as in even if we figure it out now, it may be a tad late to help too much. However, I feel that it could make the difference in the long run in terms of just how far we fall from our current ‘drunk on liquid sunshine’ status. For those interested, the scientists I have met in person seem to now have much more info. online, their names are Michael Mckubre (SRI guy, but I met him later when a friend worked in a lab next to his), Ed Storms, Tom Claytor, and the others asked me back then not to reveal their identities, so I’ll still honor that even though they might not care any longer. In any case I still plan to keep learning about animal husbandry, sustainable hunting/fishing (yes there is such a thing 😉 and wild edibles sustainable harvesting, as I would be highly impressed if any CF developments were able to stave off some mighty corrections heading our way shortly (particularly in the financial sector). As for my Ph.D. in Material Science and Electrochemistry, at least it lands me some part time college instruction these days, though I did not need it to build the motorized mountain bike that carries me over the hills in the winter 😉
Arthur on Fri, 18th Apr 2014 8:12 am
That’s a premature conclusion. Who would have thought that as we speak several countries are able to generate quit a few gigawatts from sunlight, based on Startrek technology from the sixties.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/STEREO_Panels_Deploy_Vision.jpg
Makati1 on Fri, 18th Apr 2014 9:43 am
Arthur, building a sun on earth is far different than solar panels and exponentially more dangerous and expensive.
Arthur on Fri, 18th Apr 2014 10:48 am
Makati, I agree about the undesirability of rebuilding the sun on earth. But the topic of this thread is cold fusion. Don’t know if that works, now or in the future, but there are many here too easily writing off that possibility.
Makati1 on Fri, 18th Apr 2014 3:07 pm
Maybe it is because many of us here have been down this road before and promises of ‘future’ goodies never seem to happen. Not too many years ago, we were promised a ‘George Jetson’ lifestyle. Never happened. Not even close. Ditto for electric too cheap to meter. Most of the tech we have today are the result of military research and NASA.
Arthur on Fri, 18th Apr 2014 3:32 pm
– Airtravel for the masses happened
– The internet happened
– TV + films on demand happened
– car ownership for the masses happened
– home ownership for the masses happened
– nuclear energy/weapons happened
– solar/wind technology happened
So why not cold fusion?
Maybe it works, maybe not.