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Comment by johnnybowman | Hacker News Reader

Does it mention anything about timeline?

The obligatory 10 to 15 years :-)

More seriously though a summary is that you can buy off the shelf high temperature superconductors (HTS) and they allow a Tokamak type architecture to reach break even with a much smaller machine. He wants to build such a machine to prove his statements.

He did not address the question what this means for stellerators (only that they were interesting to watch)

And I found his dismissal of LENR somewhat presumptuous. His point that there isn't any sort of theory yet that is testable experimentally that would explain the results is true, but as far as I can tell the ability to generate results from an experiment that are not explained by existing theory is something to not write off just yet. I agree that it's unlikely in the extreme to have an impact but science has to accept that sometimes the crazy stuff leads to a deeper understanding.

If you aren't willing to write of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions AKA cold fusion (had to look that up) by now, when will you think it appropriate?

It is now 30 years on from Pons and Fleischman's famous mistake and we have had a tiny smattering of irreproducible results and a mass of reproducible non-results.

The point about lack of a theory is a nice way to say that there isn't any plausible explanation why researchers who produced watts of excess energy didn't die of either neutron or gamma flux. All of the supposed explanations that I have heard have been tens of orders of magnitude off of the mark.

So what kind of reasonable dismissal of LENR would you find not presumptuous?

Hmm, it's a fair question. I pretty much have written off LENR as has most everyone else, my comment was that I try not to disparage people who haven't written it off, I just set my expectations that something that will come from it at zero.

The difference is that I feel it is a perfectly legitimate scientific pursuit to understand what is going on in a LENR experiment producing unexplained results, even if I personally don't expect it to produce any meaningful results. I know its a fine line, I totally dismiss creationists trying to 'prove' that the world is only 6,000 years old, even though they tell me they have approached it 'scientifically.'

It's been about 25 years since I hung out on Usenet sci.physics.fusion, where there was a lot of debate about cold fusion/LENR back in the day. I remember that the most likely theory I saw was that the extra energy (aside from the widespread calorimetry errors) was coming from the pressure of deuterium within the palladium matrix. It takes hundreds of thousands of psi to load the palladium with deuterium. If you pressurized a scuba tank slowly with thousands of psi, then released the gas in bursts, you'd see a constant energy input with bursts of "excess" energy output, just like cold fusion experiments report. The fact that experimenters using pre-loaded electrodes were more likely to observe "excess" energy seems to corroborate this theory.

Are you aware of any experiment proving or disproving this theory?

Here is a relevant experiment, albeit aimed towards energy storage: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/september/battery-palladi...

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