I don't buy this either-or headline. Either the magic trick is going to impress the audience, or there will be claims of some sort of tragic last-minute technical difficulty that could be worked around with a bit more research. Either way, the game is likely to continue. Maybe one mark or another will drop out of the con, having endured one too many cycles of investment followed by disappointment, but there are new marks being born every day.
Perpetual motion machines are a really old dream. The dream outlived Clausius, Kelvin, and Carnot and it will outlive us. Dreams are durable.
>Perpetual motion machines are a really old dream. The dream outlived Clausius, Kelvin, and Carnot and it will outlive us. Dreams are durable.
FWIW, it's not perpetual motion. This is not a claim of free energy, but a claim of matter being converted to energy in a way physicists deem exceedingly unlikely. I, too, would be incredulous of any positive result, but it's not claiming to violate thermodynamics.
Its not perpetual since you put in a smaller energy than you get out, but you still consume a fuel that is extremely plentiful everywhere in the universe.
Perpetual = outputs more energy than it uses while consuming no fuel, so it fuels itself + some output.
While I don't disagree with you, I do have a nit: they're not claiming this is a perpetual motion machine, which is categorically impossible and an incontrovertible indicator of a scam.
They're claiming it can derive energy from nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms. This has not been proven to be impossible. In fact, we know it's possible (albiet at much higher temperatures.)
Therefore, there is at least a logical possibility that it's legit, even if their behavior doesn't indicate that so far.
"the hydrogen atoms penetrate into the nickel and copper turn. Or at least, this is our interpretation." (gli atomi di idrogeno penetrano nel nichel e lo trasformano in rame. --- translated by google)
all these cold fusion schemes use "input/output < 1" energy demonstration as a prove of the fusion. A lot of unaccounted chemical reactions can happen inside - for example, they split water into hydrogen and oxygen and the oxygen would burn with nickel - you'd have energy gain if nickel burns better than hydrogen (i just don't remember what produces better reaction though)
The real scientific approach would be to demonstrate the real indicators of supposed reaction. Be it fast neutrons, alpha or some specific radiation frequency. Because when hydrogen supposedly fuses with nickel (lets forget for a moment that nickel is past the iron in the periodic table and thus isn't expected to produce much of, if at all, a fusion energy gain) the energy is released in some very specific and detectable form - either some particle like alpha or some photon of pretty specific frequency and there is nothing easier to detect than that ... much much easier than to compare input/output energy and trace the heat loses/gains through the piping, etc...
I'm a firm believer in the fusion as a practical energy source. We have upper bound - 10Kt thermonuclear weapons that produce net energy gain, we have lower bound - Z machine (my personal favorite as it is just a miniaturized thermonuclear bomb process, which is well proven at Kt scale, with X-rays produced by electric discharge (at 15% efficiency of electric power to X-rays conversion!) instead of nuclear fission primary), Tokamaks, fusor, polywell, NIF with some of them reaching output levels of tens of percent of the input energy. The sweet spot is somewhere in between. It takes money and time to develop it. ITER or even order of magnitude bigger ITER will get us there. The cold fusion which is unknown (in particular it doesn't have such proven upper/lower bounds) and when presented in such unscientific fashion it just undermines the public support, ie. funding for development of proven (in the sense mentioned above) technologies.
no. Look at the binding energy curve. Even incremental increase of the size of nuclei for nuclei beyond iron (actually Ni-62, ie. still left of Cu which is supposed to be the result of fusion here) is generally energy consuming process.
Nickel 62 (34 neutrons) and 64 (36 neutrons) are the only ones capable of fusing with hydrogen to produce stable copper (63 with 34 neutrons and 65 with 36 neutrons). Others are going to create an isotope of Copper, which will decay to cobalt. Obviously by their claim they're only finding copper.
The problem here is that only 4.5% of nickel atoms would even be capable, which doesn't sound like an efficient reaction medium. I don't understand how a full atom would be capable of fusing with nickel when a single neutron can't efficiently fuse with a uranium 235 atom at a .72%.
What I'm wondering is would there be any energy gain from turning Nickel 58 with 30 neutrons into Copper 59, which decays into Nickel 59, which in turn decays into Cobalt 59. However, this decay is long lived (76,000 years so likely not going to result in any immediate energy gains), but then there's the potential of turning cobalt 59 into nickel 60.
So then you reach the question of does turning Nickel 58 into Nickel 60 net you energy? Also would keep forcing a new proton into Nickel 60 making it Copper 61, decaying into Nickel 61 + proton -> Copper 62 -> Nickel 62 (the highest binding energy) actually work?
Honestly, I think they've found a "potential" here, but it's likely just the potential for exploitation. It's been too long since I've done that kind of math to work out if there's the potential for energy gain, regardless of if their 'method' would allow it.
They are claiming that they can both fuse hydrogen atoms at low temperatures, produce useful amounts of energy, AND not produce significant amounts of radiation which seems ridiculously unlikely. To the point where a perpetual motion machine could be created without violating as many past observations. IMO, the radiation bit is the most ridiculous, If 2 atoms are going to release that much energy there is really no way to get it without either an high energy photon or high energy particles.
PS: 1MW worth of power from fusion would generate enough radiation to kill a stadium full of people in a fraction of a second without a lot of shielding, but cold fusion people never seem to have an fear of radiation...
"To the point where a perpetual motion machine could be created without violating as many past observations."
No, that's not fair. Perpetual motion, or even more accurately over-unity perpetual motion, cracks physics wide open; violation of conservation of energy means that everything we think we know about fields isn't just a bit off in the details, but blatantly wrong, from the most foundational math we have on up. Successful cold fusion would most likely imply that our understanding of how QM in particles ends up manifesting in more complicated systems is wrong. In this case, really, really wrong, but in general that's less of a shock. We've done a lot of work in things like superconductors and the frontiers of material science that has been something we could characterize that way, and if we ever expect to get quantum computers going we'll need some more. (There's a faint chance that we just plain missed something in QM but I'd consider the missed interaction in large systems far more likely.)
I'll still believe it when I see it and not before, but it isn't quite the same level of crazy.
1MW worth of power from fusion would generate enough radiation to kill a stadium full of people in a fraction of a second without a lot of shielding,
Well, it depends on the reaction. The p-B reaction ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Residual_radi... ) releases the vast majority of its energy in charged particles, which could potentially be converted directly to electricity with not much physical shielding.
(Not that that has anything to do with the linked article, of course).
Sure, the energy of these neutrons would account for less than 0.2% of the total energy released, but do some math.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert
The unit gray measures the absorbed dose of radiation (D), absorbed by any material. The unit sievert measures the equivalent dose of radiation (H), having the same damaging effect as an equal dose of gamma rays.
Both the gray, with symbol Gy and the sievert, with symbol Sv are SI derived units, defined as a unit of energy (joule) per unit of mass (kilogram):
1 Gy = 1 Sv = 1 J / kg
So, 2KW of gamma rays = 2000 joule per second = 2000 Gy / second. But high energy neutrons are significantly worse than gamarays so you need to multiply that by a (function of linear energy transfer L in keV/μm) but in this case we are dealing with a few different reactions all of which are producing 2+ MeV neutrons so it's 2000 times worse than Gamarays.
Ops, linear energy transfer is way more complex than I thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stopping_power_%28particle_radi... it turns out that really high energy particles are less dangerous relative to their energy. Still going to kill everyone in a mid sized building vary quickly without a lot of shielding though.
> 1MW worth of power from fusion would generate enough radiation to kill a stadium full of people in a fraction of a second without a lot of shielding, but cold fusion people never seem to have an fear of radiation...
No, not necessarily. Only if the output is gamma or, to a lesser extent, neutrons. If it's alpha, even a paper sheet would provide adequate protection.
Alpha particles is two protons and two neutrons bound together into a particle identical to a helium nucleus. If your fusing hydrogen and spitting out an Alpha particle your losing energy. Anyway, generally speaking, Alpha particles show up when something decay's. It's possible to put mix fission and fusion to get energy but fission by products are far less energetic.
Except all those have side reactions, and are not truly aneutronic. Plus the fuel in every cold fusion cell I've ever heard of has been deuterium or tritium and those are not aneutronic.
I agree it will continue. Although a true perpetual motion machine is impossible, there's no reason that a device couldn't produce seemingly unlimited energy. The total energy of a mass system is incredibly high. At some point (maybe a long way from today's tech) we may be able to extract a constant portion in a controlled fashion in a small device. That carrot will lead many people to try and fail.
What's great is the empiricism of energy: we can measure the input and output precisely (given enough effort), and so its pretty easy (comparatively) to tell whether the box does what it says on the lid. Even this demo shows that: the consultants will only pay once the machine shows that the numbers add up.
It's claimed to be producing energy via so-called "low energy nuclear reactions" involving hydrogen. You have to supply hydrogen (which you can get by electrolyzing water once the systems is up and running) and re-form the catalyst when it wears out. It's not claimed to be a perpetual motion machine, so stop attacking a straw man.
I remain highly skeptical about this, but it's not a perpetual motion scam.
Yes, it's true that cold fusion isn't, itself, perpetual motion. It does indeed meet that standard.
My invocation of perpetual motion is as a fencepost. If you can get people to believe in that, you can get them to believe in anything.
People like clean energy sources. They have good reasons – logical and factual reasons – to desire them. They also don't understand them very well. This has been true for centuries, as illustrated by the history of perpetual-motion scams, and thus it will likely remain true for the foreseeable future. People want to believe, and they will.
He didn't. He pointed out that people still invest in perpetual motion scams as reason to believe people will keep investing in cold fusion. The fact that cold fusion is less obviously a scam than perpetual motion actually strengthens his point.
Oh, there is always a third option in science: "Oops, the box would have given us a definitive yes-or-no answer if only the fuse hadn't blown, and gosh darn it, the local stores have no fuses in stock. Oh, and these fuses are special and cost $750,000."
You'll learn all about this phenomenon in years two through six of your seven-year Ph.D. program in experimental physics. ;)
Here is an article from a 2009 60 Minutes show about the work of Michael McKubre at SRI. He has been able to get excess energy. but not large enough or reliably enough to claim complete success. He thinks it's some kind of catalytic surface effect.
I've known McKubre for a long time. We were neighbors in the 90's. He's a good honest man. He may be mistaken, but he's not a fraud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_McKubre
I'm inclined to accept that some kind of low energy nuclear process is going on, although it is not fusion as we know it.
There are two main causes for "not large or reliable enough".
The reason for "not large enough" is calorimetry. When you hydrolyze water some reforms back into steam and escapes. So you subtract that energy as lost in your calculations of output - input. The error is in not correctly calculating how much energy is actually lost vs left in the experiment.
Good experiments don't allow any steam to be lost, they are perfectly insulated and keep everything inside the cell. Unfortunately it's extremely hard to do this accurately. (Or you can generate so much energy it's more than the input without subtracting the losses, but no one has ever been able to do that.)
The reason for not reliably, is that experiments look for signs of radiation. Palladium is sometimes sourced from refined nuclear waste. It's refined extremely well, it's perfectly safe. But it has just enough residual radiation to cause very strange data for the experimenters: One batch of palladium works great, the next batch doesn't work at all, and they can't figure out what's different.
Exactly. One of the reasons that Pons and Fleischman got into such trouble is that their calorimic measurements were very inaccurate. They also tried to measure neutron radiation but their equipment wasnt up to the task. McKumbe mentions that the quality of the palladium varies greatly from source to source. Since one theory is that the fine structure of the palladium forces the deuterium atoms so close that they fuse, I infer that the nature of the fine structure is important and could vary greatly from source to source. Impurities could be the key or the poison.
From the PESNetwork twitter:
Here's an excerpt from Rossi's report on today's results http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sZHOQ6P-Rw. I hope to have a story up at PESN by 1 am Italy {+1GMT}
"1mw" would at least convey you are consistently irreverent of the proper case, or using an impractical onscreen keyboard, or in a rush to type this post. (We would understand.)
"1mW" on the other hand makes you look uneducated. Inconsistently inconsistent. You care about the case sometimes, but not always. You have no excuse to write it this way.
Or maybe flog is using the IT convention of using lower case for numbers based on powers of ten and upper case for powers of two? If so, it's out of place.
The report was that the customer wanted to see it run over a period of hours sustained and relatively stable, rather than pushing it to the max rated.
from what I understand, the customer is taking this complete unit with them, having purchased it, and were satisfied enough to say, (guessing here) "ok, we want to take it home and really drive it ourselves".
I'm sorry, but how is it at all difficult to figure out if a black box has more or less total electrical output than input?
You put in electricity, but output steam? Fine, use a steam turbine to make out electricity, or whatever technology you want. If the delivered output is not greater than the delivered input, you fail.
If you suspect batteries, run the test longer.
If you suspect that there is another process going on, then you have to open the black box, and look for unintentional wear and tear - are you accidentally performing another chemical reaction that is providing energy? If so, over a long enough period, it'll be obvious.
Debates about exit velocity of steam seem like a giant waste of time.
I'm not reading the details of this particular experiment, because I'm wasting enough time talking about it as it is. ;)
But you have to understand the nature of real prototype devices. Take it from someone who has built many semiconductor lasers that worked so badly that it took hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of specialized equipment to learn that they worked at all: The first transistor probably didn't work very well. The first laser didn't produce a lot of power or have a very long lifetime. Famously, the first several thousand Edison light bulbs didn't work well enough to be viable products. The difference between success and failure in an early-stage experiment is often small, and often statistical, and is often so ephemeral that you yourself have crises of faith in the results. And that's for the kind of phenomenon that eventually turns out to be tremendously important!
And this is the problem. On the frontier, the difference between a promising sign and a statistical fluke is small. It's a territory ripe for self-delusion and fraud.
You ask me to run a steam engine. Well, okay, suppose I can do that for five minutes. But then a piece of duct tape comes unstuck. You say: Replace that duct tape with something more durable. I reply, okay, sure, can you lend me the necessary $1500? (I was trying to save money with the duct tape. Half the parts are duct tape. Prototype device, remember?)
You ask me to run the test longer. Well, okay, I can run it until my special catalyst runs out. You say: Get more catalyst. I reply, okay, sure, can you lend me the necessary $10,000? (The catalyst is expensive in small quantities, you see, but in the future we'll have economies of scale.)
You ask me to open up my black box and submit every part to detailed analysis. We'll hire an independent laboratory and they'll handle all of it. I reply, okay, sure, can you pony up the necessary $10 million?
And then the independent laboratory finds a suspicious anomaly. Oh dear, I say, I didn't realize that was happening. Maybe I made a mistake. I'll have to go back to the drawing board. Can I have a $1m grant to go back to the drawing board?
"The exact design has changed repeatedly; originally the one-megawatt generator was to be composed of three hundred small E-Cats, then it was 52 larger "fat cats", now the number seems to be 43."
Why do we have to build 43 of something, to find out if it produces more electricity than it consumes? Either it does, or it doesn't. The third possibility is that there's some cross-talk or multiplicative effect of having more than 1, but I doubt it.
I could make up a very plausible reason. Handwaving is a key job skill for physicists and con men alike.
Example: It's about the surface area of the catalyst. You can't just use one big cylinder of catalyst because that doesn't have enough surface. You need 40 or 50 little cylinders. And then you can't put all of those in one tank because then the flow of reactant past the surfaces of the cylinders isn't properly laminar, so you put each one in its individual cell. Then you build each cell with a separate housing and so forth, to contain the damage from the occasional explosions.
As for why the magic number "43": We built 52, but 9 of them have, um, failed, so now we have 43. Soon there will only be 42. By the way, I hope you are wearing your safety goggles? ;)
[REITERATION OF DISCLAIMER: I am not describing a real experiment. I am describing a figment of my imagination. Please do not send money.]
Maybe 'cause the company with the money was all "we are only interested if it can output one megawatt" and the guy making it was all "huh, looks like I can get one of these units to put out about 1/43 of a megawatt apiece"? The shrinking number would jibe with him having a few improvements over the process of developing the thing and scaling it up.
Most of the issues with the experiment could be addressed very easily, e.g. A transparent pane to verify water level or absence thereof in the "chimney", simply showing the steam being output vs. sending it into a drain. The possibility that it's wet steam vs dry would more or less perfectly account for the 6x ratio.
Here's the thing: if this were real, Rossi wouldn't care about satisfying skeptics if it meant distracting him from meeting project goals. If it's a hoax, act like it's real.
Further, three scientists calculated that, based on the diameter of the hose, the steam should have an exit velocity of 67, 76, or 137 mph. When Krivit visited Rossi, he took a video of the steam exiting the hose, which he said appears to be flowing at around 10 mph - the expected velocity due to the amount of electrical input energy.
Not so sure about this "Bob Higgins" though. I didn't find a Bob Higgins at Motorola on LinkedIn (granted, it was a quick and fairly superficial search).
Edit: Ok, upon further review, I did find a Bob Higgins @ Motorola, so he's real at least. Hard to say much beyond that...
What I do find suspicious though, is this: Take a look at the results from this search:
I mean, somebody has really poured a lot of energy into promoting this thing, and it hasn't even been properly verified yet? This comes off as a bit scammy to me.
This is way more than "one or two" domains though. And it's not like they all just point to the same page, which would seem like a fairly normal thing to do. These all appear to have slight variations of the same content (at least relative to this Bob Higgins thing), so that they superficially look like completely independent sites... but I have a hunch they're not really independent at all. This seems like a very conscious and moderately elaborate effort to artificially boost the "buzz" around the e-cat in a sort of spammy way.
I remember Fleishmann and Pons announcement back in the late 80's - personally, the gross theory of bringing together Deuterium atoms close enough to create fusion using a catalytic surface still seems plausible to me,even if their experimental results were never supported at "a university without a division I football team."
Of course, I am probably biased because back in '89 I did my first presentation using computer generated materials on the subject for a Science Education course - overheads printed with my StarMicronix NX1000 from images generated with EA Deluxe Paint on the Amiga 500.
The difference though is that F&P were real scientists who simply happened to be wrong. They published their work in a way that could be replicated, and those experiments found their results were in error. They were shamed and embarassed, but they played by the rules and were doing real science.
This nonsense is pure charlatanry and fraud. An "inventor" working alone and discovering new fundamental physics without published results or peer review needs to be viewed far more suspiciously.
Actually, Pons and Flesciemann announced their results at a press conference prior to publication, which was extremely detrimental to their credibility without regard to the validity of their science.
I remember seeing an interview with one of them and he claimed that he never wanted to do that announcement. Rather, he was pushed into it by the University and was probably more responsible for ruining his career than the experiment not working.
As for the experiment, as I recall it did produce neutrons, an expected byproduct of fusion. There was certainly an interesting reaction going on but it turned out that it wasn't fusion.
I remember being so excited that my brother and I skipped school and "snuck in" to the ACS meeting in Dallas. This was after their first announcement, but they came and gave a big talk to a packed hall. I seem to recall it was hurriedly put together because of all the interest. At the time I thought I was witnessing a huge historical event. I guess I was in the history-of-science sense at least.
I was speaking to a nuclear physicist about Fusion, and he stated that really was being used to verify nuclear models for making bombs and such, and that it would never be practical for power generation.
He's referring to the National Ignition Facility, but that's not the only project. In Europe, there is ITER. And the NIF has recently gotten serious about trying to actually do fusion for power generation.
This isn't to say that fusion power generation will be a reality anytime soon, so on that most critical point I'm sure the nuclear physicist is correct.
I'm not really sure why I am getting downvoted. I was talking to a friend about this and a nuclear engineering ph.d. candidate at the University of Michigan working on plasma physics started talking with me about it and essentially echoed the same sentiment. I'm paraphrasing, "One of the jokes of Fusion is that it's always 50 years off... It's sexy, but in reality it gets funding because it happens to be what we build nuclear bombs with, and because we can't do live simulations anymore, we build supercomputers and fusion experiments to verify our bomb making."
I've been following this story for 12 months or more. I've read a lot of criticism and deep discussions that go way beyond my capability to understand.
But we should know, soon enough, if it's a fraud or not.
Either the thing works as advertised, or it doesn't.
Even if this particular test has 'teething problems' I would assume that, within a week or two, all will be known.
To me, it's a case of sit back, remain patient and open minded, and watch to see what happens.
It's not like he's asking for taxpayer money or subsidies. If he ends up fleecing a rich company or individual, well, that sort of things goes on every day. It would be a drop in the ocean compared to, say, pets.com or any number of mega-flop movie releases.
I just don't get the invective directed at this guy and his project. If he's wrong, there will be plenty of time for gloating and schadenfreude. If he's right, a lot of people are going to look very silly with their big statements.
The invective comes because he flouts the way scientists normally go about announcing and proving major scientific discoveries. And that matters because the scientific approach is evolved to be very different than what scam artists and loons gets up to.
One reason many people are unwilling to be patient and open-minded is that they've already done that in the past, and had their patience worn thin by said scam artists and loons. Another is that they respect (or have worked hard to become) actual scientists who put forth the extra time and effort to properly demonstrate and document novel findings.
You can evaluate these sources as you would like. I however, am waiting to hear what Peter Svensson has to say. AP has reporters all over the world, yet they flew in Mr. Svensson from new york to cover the private event.
Now, this may be because he has been successful in gaining access and an invite, or it may be because the company purchasing picked him, I am not sure - it is unusual from an outsider view.
Always thought that this is a scam considering his past. How many of you know of the Petroldragon thing he did in the seventies? Interesting story (still not clear if it was a scam or not) http://translate.google.com/translate?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF...
Plastic pyrolysis and then subsequent cracking to diesel is not a scam. In fact, I know the guy behind http://www.agilyx.com/ which is doing the same thing.
That Rossi attempted this in the mid 70's is interesting to me, and gives him more credibility, not less.
My bet: either the experiment will fail with a "strange" technical issue, or the "anonymous customer" will report a success but will choose to remain anonymous and not provide any more information (because he is nothing more than one of Rossi's lies).
The key part is when the anonymous buyer remains anonymous. If his invention works, why not patent it and let everyone see the internals?
EDIT: Looks like there supposedly is a patent: "a method and apparatus for carrying out nickel and hydrogen exothermal reactions," with production of copper, though I haven't found the patent itself.
The article was a disappointment. It was full of hype and no substance. The article pulled people in with a head line claiming a potential science and energy break through but whose contents focused on vague details of the human story around it. Bait and switch I say.
That is what I expected though from the head line. Just like I would expect it from the below headlines:
"Homeopathy either becomes reality or proved a scam today"
"Perpetual motion either becomes reality or proved a scam today"
An added wrinkle here, reported by Wired:
(http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/29/rossi-success )
"The customer's controller, one Domenico Fioravanti, apparently reports to a man whose title is "Colonel". This suggests that the mystery customer might be DARPA, the Pentagon's extreme science wing which, as Wired.co.uk has previously noted, has expressed interestin Rossi's work -- but which might not be quite ready to explain to its political masters why it spent millions on a cold fusion device."
I think that goes a long way to explain a lot of the secrecy that the customer engaged in. Rather than being a scam it may actually be the visible tip of a military project. Remember, you can run cars on electricity and trucks on natural gas, but when you run out of oil your army comes to a stop. They have a lot of motivation to find an alternative.
As I understand it the process did not achieve 1MW because it got too hot and they had to cool it down. Per Rossi, if it gets over the melting temperature of nickle the reaction stops. But it ran in self-sustaining mode putting out enough power to satisfy the men in uniforms that it works so now they take it back to the USA and tinker with it themselves.
Well, Rossi seems to believe in it, and I really hope it works. If it does, it'll not only be useful for generating power, but could conceivably be adapted for jet engines, ships and other vehicles, making everything cheaper. I guess we'll see in a few days...
I guess it is a little OT, but I was interested to read elswhere that room-temperature fusion is already possible, demonstrated and understood using negative muons to produce proton-deuteron fusion reaction. It just isn't possible to generate additional energy with the process.
If you could actually achieve essentially unlimited energy at very little cost you wouldn't tell anyone and would just connect it to the grid and collect your money. There is no reason to "prove" cheap cold fusion.
I'm not going to make any claims as to whether or not this is a scam, but your logic is completely wrong. Most people would probably need investors to finance any mass production. To get investors, you (normally) have to prove that it works...
With cold fusion the claim as always been that it would be small scale, cheap and would easily scale up. You don't need mass production when you can generate unlimited energy for free. The only reason you would need investment would be for the original device (which is required to prove it works anyway), it would then pay for the next set of devices, etc until you owned the earth. If you can't break even quickly on a 1MW generator that doesn't cost anything to run, your device is too expensive to be practical since you are generating about $1m of electricity a year.
I'm not going to believe it until they show a closed system, with only a hydrogen (or water) input, producing enough energy to sustain its own reaction for an extended period of time.
If it works, we'll just figure out a way to make nickel (or whatever material eventually becomes the catalyst) scarcer. For that matter, it might trigger a Water Rush because the assholes who run the world's govts don't like to share.
I'm happy to go on record here and the unerasable archives of internet history, risking my own reputation and that of my entire line of descendants, in saying that I am convinced this particular dog and pony show is a hoax.
I hope he has some bodyguards. If this would be true, there are a couple of countries with lots of oil that would not really like this idea to become reality.
But then, as the article says, chances of it being true are small, unfortunately.
Oil can be synthesized from air and water given sufficient electricity. I've heard a Canadian company got it down to just a few hundred dollars of electricity for a barrel of oil, though that ignores the capital cost of making the plant to do it.
Let's say the oil price would dive vertically. And with free electricity, you could make synthetics and synthetic oil cheaper than digging for it. For some countries this would mean ruin. (Not to mention the US, having just spend so much money to take over Iraq.) But it would also relax many international conflicts. Suddenly, nobody would be interested in the Spratley and Parcell-Islands anymore, for instance.
Of course technology from the XXIInd century would likely disrupt the economy of the early XXIst century...
Even if electricity were free (and cold fusion wouldn't make it free, you need to build a factory, have people operate it, build power lines, convert the electricity...), how do you make synthetic oil? Which property would that synthetic oil have? Could it work to make gasoline? Could we build plastic with it?
The factories would not being build in the few countries that currently supply the vast majority of the oil the world consumes. A number of countries (Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, to name a few) would lose 99% of their income overnight.
Maybe its the wrong place to discuss the political implications of technical inventions here on hn, though.
(I am a little annoyed that some people seem to just down vote anything they lack knowledge about. What do you mean by "science fiction story"??)
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible (or at least non-supernatural) content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities.
Yaix is correct. There's nothing magical about oil such that it can only be produced underground in the Earth. All the petrochemicals can be made via other processes. We know this because people have done it, some even at industrial scales. If you have enough cheap electricity, the oil problem goes away... but there's a lot of terawatts lying in wait behind that innocuous word "enough". But in the end, all significant resource considerations across the next couple of centuries come down to matters of energy, not atoms.
Hmn. All _chemical_ resource considerations, sure. I agree that the oil/plastic thing is a no-brainer, with "enough free energy". What're you going to do about rare elements? Just apply nuclear reactors?
Helium is easy, I guess, since we have no shortage of plans for fusion reactors that run at a loss.
The "futuristic technology" in this case is the cold fusion (particularly, the cold fusion being cheap enough that we don't care about electrical costs of anything), not the synthetic oil.
I am asking you, what part of what I wrote sounds like SciFi to you. Synthetic Fuel is produced for many years already, its not SciFi but decade old technology.
Perpetual motion machines are a really old dream. The dream outlived Clausius, Kelvin, and Carnot and it will outlive us. Dreams are durable.