Hydrogen/Nickel Cold Fusion Breakthrough | Hacker News Reader

Hydrogen/Nickel Cold Fusion Breakthrough

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9 pointsy0ghur7_xxx10 comments

(1) always be skeptical of any "free energy" device that requires energy input, (2) calorimetry is hard, particularly when phase changes are involved.

Joe Newman showed up my undergrad institution with his "Miracle Motor" which, with some instruments, would appear to send power back into the grid. Of course, it wouldn't run if it wasn't plugged into a power source.

His motor worked a lot like the old spark-gap radio transmitters, and would send an pulse of wideband RF energy back into the line, which would of course totally screw up clip-on inductive power meters and many other instruments.

Funny, the motor needed about 10 kilovolts to work, and was normally powered through a neon sign transformer. I jokingly suggested that we put 100 car batteries in series to power it, and a potential investor said, "Great, let's go to Ace Hardware."

I cobbled up a circuit in the lab that would screw up power meters in the same way and made the [measured] statement that "conventional power meters don't accurately record the performance of the motor"

The senior lab tech in the EE department came under Newman's spell and didn't show up for work the next day. A friend of mine who worked for him and I were looking for him all over town, and one day a hippie asked me "Have you ever heard of gyro power?" Well, it turned out that he'd set up a makeshift lab in the garage of a drug house, funded by a consortium of real estate investors from Albuquerque.

My friend and I showed up loaded for bear, equipped with measurement gear, surveillance equipment, and burglar's tools. (We figured if we nicked the motor, Newman would think the CIA took it) It turned out the head hippie was home, and he invited us into the garage to check out the lab. They had a big lathe they rented for turning coils, and some measurement equipment from the E.E. department, but Newman was sleeping with the motor in his hotel room.

The investors lost interest and Newman blew out of town, but the lab tech had been changed by the experience. He used to listen to good music, like Jeff Beck, but afterwards he only listened to bad Christian Rock. He got paranoid, thought people were trying to run him over when he was walking on the road, and thought he got attacked by the president of the school's dog. He quit his job about two months later and went to Mississippi to study at the foot of the great man.

It was a loss of a damn good lab tech.

It seems to be quackery. Points of interest (taken from links below):

>> Journal of Nuclear Physics? Really?

- A web site registered in California by a secret entity. - A “journal” that is not a journal but a blog. - A blog name that resembles the (real) former Soviet Journal of Nuclear Physics. - A virtual “editor” comprised of a “team of scientists.” - A “team of scientists” who’s only active participant appears to be Andrea Rossi. - A “10 kW module reactor” that is anybody’s guess. >>

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=198040 http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/14/focardi-and-rossi-...

I'm not really convinced.

The amount of power required to heat water 80°C and convert it to steam is approximately 12,000 watts.

Alarm! Alarm! Someone throw that journalist a life ring, she is in over her head.

Update: I was unsure if 'Marriane Macy' would need a 'he' or a 'she', European names confuse me, and got so distracted by her Amazon book that I forgot to give proper acknowledgement to the outer article's byline. Surely "Buddy of Georgia, USA" is a source beyond reproach.

These things come up from time to time, the perpetual motion machines and the like. This one is rubbish.

The thing that makes fusion attractive is it makes some minimal theoretical sense - if you can get two hydrogen atoms to combine into a helium atom, you get helium and a surplus of energy. So it is not perpetual motion based on magnets or total bunk like that.

But as jbm pointed out, there's a lot of flaws in it. Not the least of which is that I got tired of reading the article before I saw what critical insight they had in terms of getting those hydrogen elements to combine. If this was a respectable publication, I'd have to think that'd be one of the first things to be explained, at least in journalist-ese.

The regular journals out there really need to step up and start making a community around this low-energy nuclear reaction stuff. The Navy has rekindled interest in this and other similar electrolysis experiments. The problems are many, but key are 1) what is the working formula to explain how this works and what all is going on 2) where are the dead grad students and 3) do you need to answer those two things before using it.

The American Chemical Society has had a meeting about all of this most years, and a lot of great videos on the topic can be found from a meeting at the University of Missouri (google video search http://bit.ly/exACQU ).

The demonstration (in italian)

http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/

From the "What you can do" section at the bottom:

3. Purchase a unit and/or encourage others who are able, to do so.

Sounds like a scam. Any real breakthrough would be pushing to get major funders on board via trails, demos, etc, and not appealing to a blog reader to buy a unit.

"I don't have conclusive data on radiation but absolutely we have measured ~12 kW (at steady state) of energy produced with an input of about just 400 watts."

Free energy? Something smells fishy...

While I have extreme doubts, I really hope, for humanity's sake, that this is true. If it all pans out, this would likely be the greatest invention of the 21st century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_hydrogen_battery

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