E-Cat part 26723 - the return of E-Cat

[rhoenix]

Quick recap - E-Cat is that one cold-fusion design by a private inventor who won't let people see how his machine works, the one that most people derided for being a snake-oil salesman. Well, now his invention got tested.

Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat — the device that purports to use cold fusion to generate massive amounts of cheap, green energy – has been verified by third-party researchers, according to a new 54-page report. The researchers observed a small E-Cat over 32 days, where it produced net energy of 1.5 megawatt-hours, or “far more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume.” The researchers were also allowed to analyze the fuel before and after the 32-day run, noting that the isotopes in the spent fuel could only have been obtained by “nuclear reactions” — a conclusion that boggles the researchers: “… It is of course very hard to comprehend how these fusion processes can take place in the fuel compound at low energies.”

This new report [PDF] on the E-Cat was carried out by six (reputable) researchers from Italy and Sweden. While the new E-Cat looks very different from previous iterations, the researchers say that it uses the same “hydrogen-loaded nickel” and additives (most notably lithium) as a fuel. The device’s inventor, Andrea Rossi, claims that the E-Cat uses cold fusion — low-energy nuclear reactions, LENR — to fuse nickel and hydrogen atoms into copper, releasing oodles of energy. The researchers, analyzing the fuel before and after the 32-day burn, note that there is an isotope shift from a “natural” mix of Nickel-58/Nickel-60 to almost entirely Nickel-62 — a reaction that, the researchers say, cannot occur without nuclear reactions (i.e. fusion). The researchers say there is just 1 gram of fuel inside the E-Cat. For more info about the science/chemistry behind LENR, read our previous story about Rossi’s E-Cat.

The researchers are very careful about not actually saying that cold fusion/LENR is the source of the E-Cat’s energy, instead merely saying that an “unknown reaction” is at work. In serious scientific circles, LENR is still a bit of a joke/taboo topic. The paper is actually somewhat comical in this regard: The researchers really try to work out how the E-Cat produces so much darn energy — and they conclude that fusion is the only answer — but then they reel it all back in by adding: “The reaction speculation above should only be considered as an example of reasoning and not a serious conjecture.”

Anyway, now that we’ve got the necessary cynicism/scrutiny out of the way, let’s get down to what everyone’s really interested in: The utterly insane amounts of energy produced by the E-Cat. In the table below you can see some figures from the 32-day test. The most important figures are on the right hand side: a COP (coefficient of performance) of up to 3.74, and net power production of 2,373 watts. Remember that this is a small device that produced these kinds of figures for 32 days straight. Total energy obtained over 32 days was 1.5 MWh.



To put this into perspective, the E-Cat tested by the researchers has an energy density of 1.6×109 Wh/kg and power density of 2.1×106 W/kg. This is orders (plural) of magnitude higher than anything else ever tested — somewhere in the region of 100 times more power than the best supercapacitors, and maybe a million times more energy than gasoline. In the words of the researchers, “These values place the E-Cat beyond any other known conventional source of energy.”

Obviously, if these third-party findings are to be believed — if the E-Cat really is performing cold fusion — then this is rather exciting. We are talking about an extremely cheap, green, and dense power source that could quite literally change the world.

Before the world can be changed, however, there will now be a very extensive period of scrutiny from the scientific community at large. The previous third-party analysis of the E-Cat device, published in March 2013, was attacked and debunked very rapidly. It seems this new report has been intentionally designed so that there are fewer plot holes and logical leaps. The research paper has reportedly been submitted to the Arxiv pre-print server, with the hope of eventually being published in the Journal of Nuclear Physics.

The next few weeks could be very interesting indeed. According to one report at Sifferkoll, a big bank downloaded the new E-Cat report just minutes after it was made available online — and “oil futures have stayed volatile since.” And of course this morning Glasgow University announced that it would be selling its fossil fuel investments. Hmm…

The last two paragraphs are rather breathless, I will point out. However, I do think this certainly bears further examination, if only to verify the researchers' findings.

[General Havoc]

I'm sorry, I don't believe a word of it. Those last two breathless paragraphs read like conspiracy theory nutjob jargon to me, as if oil futures don't have a million factors going into them. This guy got busted multiple times making shit up about his contraption which nobody is allowed to know anything about, and now suddenly I have to take the numbers on faith? Numbers by the way that are literally orders of magnitude better than every other power source in the history of the world?

This is the most obvious hoax since crop circles. This is like believing the fifth Nigerian scam email you receive because it could be real this time. It is utter, and complete bunkum.

[Lys]

It's alien technology stolen from the Illuminati's Area 51 site by the Majestic-12. Andrea Rossi is so secretive because he spends his evening dodging UFOs and fighting Nazi Lizardmen from the Hollow Earth. It's been very difficult to get the invention out in the world without Illuminati sabotage, but the Majestic-12 are doing their darnedest to try and make this happen. Don't be fooled into thinking this means they're on our side though. If they can manage to outmanoeuvre the opposition, and get this miracle technology to market, they'll use it success to seize control of the world's power generation infrastructure. Their UN black helicopters will then descend upon us and finally take over the world!

This is no doubt Brain's best plan to date.

[rhoenix]

Oh, quite possibly. However, I lose nothing but time waiting to see it verified, or proven to be, as you say, bunkum.

And Lys, given the circumstances, I'll grant that your scenario is also possible - in the inventor's own mind, at least.

[Cynical Cat]

I don't believe a word of it. Guys like this love limited observer because the limited allows them to get away with shit like tinkered monitors, hidden power sources, a so forth while gaining credibility because of the presence of outside observers.

[frigidmagi]

If it's not bullshit, I expect to see NASA or someone comparable talking about this by the end of the month.

If it's not bullshit.

[rhoenix]

If it's not bullshit, I expect to see NASA or someone comparable talking about this by the end of the month.

If it's not bullshit.

If.

Yeah, I'm dropping this site from my news feed, considering that theirs is really the only science- or tech-related site I've seen talk about it after a few searches. U of W's fusion project got mention in several of these sites (e.g. slashdot, arstechnica, phys.org, and the like) but this... not so much.