Tokomaks - who can tell? Most people reckon they will not work, but certainly worth trying, and the best bet.
Experts at Los Alamos disagree. They do not think they are the best bet. See:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/KrakowskiRlessonslea.pdf
I do not think they are worth trying. Not unless someone can suggest a plausible way to make them work without the radiation destroying the machinery in a short time.
Following same logic ITER people follow we should start building a 4m diameter pipe , fill it with NiH mixture. The small one didn't work but the big one certainly will.
I, for one, would not say that but I would hasten to point out that neither has followed up on those experiments which you consider successful demonstrations of LENR. That is, at best, very strange.
Wait a minute Mary, I'm not sure you're really qualified to be making these sort of judgements...
I know nothing about Pd-D or electrolytic systems, I don't pretend to know about them, I don't comment about them, and I have said that many times.
Zeus46As I said before, I have no interest in claims for small, low level, low power LENR effects. I know nothing about those, I care little about them, and I don't evaluate them. So what?
A complete misquoting, for sure...
"4m diameter pipe "
Actually Mizuno has gone opposite to ITER logic, he has demonstrated excess heat with with miilimoles of deuterium.
and without expending billions of taxpayer $
Following same logic ITER people follow we should start building a 4m diameter pipe , fill it with NiH mixture. The small one didn't work but the big one certainly will.
That's funny. But let's give the ITER people some credit. There is no question that today's tokamaks produce nuclear fusion. Theory predicts that a larger reactor will have some advantages and will be closer to a practical device. So, they have reasons to scale up. There is no similar rationale to scale up cold fusion. You can confirm a small reaction with as much confidence as you can confirm a large one.
That is why Rossi's gigantic reactor was a farce. There was no need for it. A 10 W reaction would have been just as convincing as a real 1 MW reaction would have been. As it happened, his 1 MW claim was preposterous, and obviously fake.
Some people claim that only a large reaction would have commercial value. They do not understand the energy market. Most energy demand ranges from 1 to 10 kW for heat or electric power. In a cold fusion world, I predict there would be little use for 1 MW reactors. See:
THH: Tokomaks - who can tell? Most people reckon they will not work, but certainly worth trying, and the best bet.
Jed: Experts at Los Alamos disagree. They do not think they are the best bet. See:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/KrakowskiRlessonslea.pdf
My point was that for near-term fast workable fusion they are the best bet. ITER etc is more certain to work (we are reasonably sure it will work) but it requires very large size and will therefore take a very long time to get working in any useful way, if ever.
Whereas the various designs (Tokomak is leading contender I think) for much smaller-scale fusion devices offer the possibility of near-term success. They are all, as I pointed out, a long shot. And, as I also pointed out, many people still (now, not 1993) think that Tokomaks will not be workable.
Your link above is still the mainstream position but it is 25 years old (1993). Recent positive information is:
(1) Containment in H-modes is better than previously expected- leading to the current resurgence of interest in spherical tokomaks
(2) Much better HTS magnets (which the UK guys are hoping to use).
Jed, as somone who promotes unusual non-mainstream possible new ways to get clean energy, I'd expect you to be more open to the possibilities.
THH
Some cold fusion experiments have produced far more energy than any tokamak ever did, albeit far less power. It seems unlikely that plasma fusion reactors can be made for long term use, because the radiation destroys the machinery. So, in some ways, cold fusion is closer to being practical than plasma fusion, despite having orders of magnitude less funding and intense opposition.
The difference is this. The experiments validating Tokomak fusion are done by multiple groups and all broadly consistent. Where there are variations (one group says something is better or worse) they get checked and validated or not by experimental replication and theoretical checks. There remains a lot of uncertainty, but it is slowly being explored and understood. In that process there are surprises, both positive and negative. Take the now confirmed good confinement characteristics of H-modes as a small positive surprise. The (now well understood) problems maintaining plasma stability in torus Tokomaks as a big negative surprise.
The LENR experiments have not yet produced a coherent body of understanding that advances. The excess energy Jed mentions above has not been validated and remains anomalous. It may be so validated, at which point LENR will emerge from the shadows and attract major interest. Or, it may never be, in which case Shanahan's CCS/ATER and other disparate unconsidered experimental issues are the most likley cause of the claimed results.
As evidence of no coherence, which I might perhaps write more about some time, consider the issue of whether the LENR effect means that reaction rates increase with temperature, or decrease with temperature.
The clear consensus from much of the experimental work quoted here is that reaction rates increase a lot with increasing temperature.
However one recently posted here theoretical paper proposes a (correct, sort of) electron shielding in liquid-phase (gamma = 1 - 170) plasma mechanism which would mean that reaction rates decrease (a lot) with increasing temperature.
These two sets of data are incoherent. if one is true, the other is false, and vice versa. Unless are there two quite distinct new to science mechanisms at work here.
I think that many people on this site take the abundance of different incoherent mechanisms as positive - well, one of them must be right. For me, the fact that they are nearly all incoherent is a big negative. The electron shielding mechanism (almost OK) cannot derive any support from the positive or neutral temperature-dependent LENR results. Or, from the many anecdotal accounts of thermal runaway (though I'm not sure many people see those as good evidence).
You don't have to have an overall negative view of LENR prospects to pay attention to this. It is just one of many filters that helps to direct attention to things that could just possibly work.
As evidence of no coherence, which I might perhaps write more about some time, consider the issue of whether the LENR effect means that reaction rates increase with temperature, or decrease with temperature.
I take that as evidence that there is more than one way to skin a cat. There is good evidence (for varying values of 'good') that LENR reactions can occur in plasma, in gases, in liquids and in solids, at all kinds of temperatures and pressures. There is also evidence that it can sometimes produce radiation, sometimes not, can cause detectable transmutation with evolved heat, or transmutation with little evolved heat. I am (you won't be surprised) one of those who considers this to be a positive rather than a negative aspect of LENR. There is certainly room for more than one kind of mechanism, maybe all roads lead to the nucleus, but some are smoother and shorter than others.
I am encouraged on this by the fact that we know of 7 different classes of stars, each one of which has 9 different sub-types. That's a lot of different shit going one, right there.
My point was that for near-term fast workable fusion they are the best bet.
Krakowski et al. disagree with you, because there no way to make a plasma fusion reactor safe or long lasting. It produces too much radiation.
As things now stand, the best bets for the future are wind and solar energy. They could easily supply all of the energy on earth. In the U.S., wind power in North and South Dakota alone could produce more synthetic fuel than all of oil produced in the Middle East. They could supply all of the energy consumed in North America. A single square solar site ~100 km per side in Texas could produce all electricity.
http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/…ch-solar-to-power-the-us/
It might not be economical to concentrate all production in one geographic area, but it could be done. It would take 0.6% of U.S. land to produce all electricity with solar. That may sound like a lot, but much of it is already covered with roofs and other structures, which could be also used for energy production.
https://www.good.is/infographics/solar-power-all-of-america
Uranium for fission will likely last for thousands of years at present consumption rates, especially if efficiency can be improved.
Wind and solar will never be as cheap as cold fusion but they will last indefinitely and they could easily supply far more energy than we now use. Space based solar could produce enough energy to vaporize the Earth.
ITER etc is more certain to work (we are reasonably sure it will work) but it requires very large size and will therefore take a very long time to get working in any useful way, if ever.
No, we are not reasonably sure it will work. Many experts disagree with that. Yes, it will probably work as claimed. It will produce the amount of energy claimed, and it will meet the design goals. Probably. Although it will probably exceed the budget. However, there is no known way for this design to reach minimal engineering goals for safety and effectiveness. It resembles a 1960s moon-rocket: you can only use it once, for a short time, and there is no path toward a practical, cost effective version that might compete with fission and other sources.
The difference is this. The experiments validating Tokomak fusion are done by multiple groups and all broadly consistent.
Yes, of course. So are the experiments that validated cold fusion. No one disputes the scientific claims made by plasma fusion scientists. The problem is that they have not addressed the engineering problems, and there are no suggestions as to how they might address them. You might say a plasma fusion reaction does not lend itself to producing electricity.
The other problem is that even if the engineering and safety issues are solved, it is likely that a giant tokamak power generator would be far more expensive per kilowatt hour than fission, solar, wind, natural gas or coal. Cold fusion, on the other hand, is likely to be 4 to 6 orders of magnitude cheaper than these other sources, eventually.
On the contrary, MIT and Caltech got positive results, even though they were opposed to the research. There is nothing more convincing than a positive result from the people at MIT who were dead set against the claim, and who held a party celebrating the death of cold fusion before they got a positive result.
But in any case, roughly 180 labs reported positive results. Why would you say these four outweigh those 180? What makes you think the I.H. has more credibility than Los Alamos or China Lake?
A difference is that you continue to point to results from the 1990's, 2000's, and perhaps even 1989 as verifications. The results from IH and Coolescense(sp?) were within the last two years or so. The result from Hydrofusion's representative was within the last 6 years I believe. These latest experimenters have had time to review the past results and, using the latest equipment and techniques, come up with experiments to find the issues those in the past might have missed. Also, many of the papers from the past which claimed success, did not have significant followup to expand on the claims, which seems unusual.
QuoteA complete misquoting, for sure...
Well, no. A complete misunderstanding this time, and a misstatement of the facts. In what you quote, I did not comment on the merits of allegations of Pd-D fusion as to the experiments. I simply remarked about the course of events. That must be too subtle a distinction for you to make. Like a demented old horse, you only deal with the equivalent of 2 x 4 's impacting between the ears.
Anyway, even though I do not grasp nuances of electrochemistry and subatomic physics, I am happy to comment many aspects of the arguments related to claims for fusion that do not require that level of comprehension.
QuoteAlso, many of the papers from the past which claimed success, did not have significant followup to expand on the claims, which seems unusual.
This (by lenrisnotreal) is what I was stating in the quote. It had nothing to do with the merits of a particular experiment.
A difference is that you continue to point to results from the 1990's, 2000's, and perhaps even 1989 as verifications.
That makes no difference. Experiments once replicated remain valid forever. Experiments conducted in the 1600s are valid today as they ever were. Cold fusion is based calorimetry developed by Lavoisier in 1780, J. P. Joule circa 1840 (Fleischmann's method) and flow calorimetry circa 1900. Lavoisier or Joule could have detected the excess heat from cold fusion with confidence. There are no better methods of measuring macroscopic levels of heat.
Joule's thermometers measured to the nearest 0.05 deg C, which is as good as an ordinary laboratory-grade modern thermocouple. You can buy one for $10,000 that can measure to the nearest ~0.001 deg C, but that would only marginally increase confidence in most cold fusion experiments. The people at SRI and Los Alamos used $10,000 thermocouples, but the people working today use cheaper ones.
The results from IH and Coolescense(sp?) were within the last two years or so. The result from Hydrofusion's representative was within the last 6 years I believe.
The major labs stopped doing cold fusion in 1990s because of academic politics, and because the researchers retired or died. Their results are as valid as ever. The results from CalTech and MIT are still positive, despite their claims to the contrary.
These latest experimenters have had time to review the past results and, using the latest equipment and techniques, come up with experiments to find the issues those in the past might have missed.
That is incorrect. They did not review past results. Not enough, in my opinion. If they had, they might have done a better job. They did not use the latest equipment or techniques. They used the same techniques everyone else uses, which I said, were invented in 1780 and 1840.
The equipment at Los Alamos, China Lake SRI and BARC was the best in the world, and it was far superior to anything used in the last few years. The equipment used I.H. and Coolescence was pretty good, but it cost tens of thousands of dollars, whereas the mass spec. and other instruments used at the national labs and BARC cost millions of dollars. Miles, at China Lake, sent his samples to the three best mass spec. labs in the world, where the instruments are about a thousand to a million times more sensitive than anything you can buy off the shelf, and the staff have been doing these analyses for decades.
The Italian Nat. Lab. researchers still have access to big ticket equipment such as this, but I.H. did not, and no one there would know how to use it:
http://lenr-canr.org/?page_id=187#PhotosENEAFrascati
The instruments at U. Missouri are national-lab grade. They finally have positive results, I have heard.
The weird things people say about technology whose very existence is unconfirmed:
QuoteThat's funny. But let's give the ITER people some credit. There is no question that today's tokamaks produce nuclear fusion. Theory predicts that a larger reactor will have some advantages and will be closer to a practical device. So, they have reasons to scale up. There is no similar rationale to scale up cold fusion. You can confirm a small reaction with as much confidence as you can confirm a large one.
Hell no, you can't. The larger the output, the better the output/input ratio and the longer the run on small amounts of fuel, the more persuasive the experiment is. The ultimate goal should be to run indefinitely (it's nuclear, right?) on small amounts of fuel with no input power at all (except for control circuitry, well isolated from the power out measurement).
QuoteThat is why Rossi's gigantic reactor was a farce. There was no need for it. A 10 W reaction would have been just as convincing as a real 1 MW reaction would have been. As it happened, his 1 MW claim was preposterous, and obviously fake.
That is correct. A much better test, as I have been saying since early 2012, would have been a repeat of Levi's alleged test, cooled by running tap water, and yielding up to 135kW of peak power with averages around 15kW for many hours. The device used was small, easy to measure in and out if done correctly (which it was not) and comparatively fast and cheap to test. Of course, the repeat would have to have been done credibly which the original was not for various reasons which have been noted ad nausea. But yes, there never was any sense to Rossi's stacking 50+ units of leaky rusty kludges into a supposed megawatt "plant", run by a Diesel generator, and observed by a gaggle of supposed experts who were denied any view. I have been screaming fraud since October 2011, based in part on just that.
QuoteSome people claim that only a large reaction would have commercial value. They do not understand the energy market. Most energy demand ranges from 1 to 10 kW for heat or electric power. In a cold fusion world, I predict there would be little use for 1 MW reactors. See:
Well, even considering this is silly until there is definitive proof that the thing, whatever it is, works. Want to heat a room? one or a few kW are fine. Want to run an air conditioner for a large building, you need much more. Want to power an aircraft carrier? An airliner? .... and so on. Considering the market when the technology is not for sure and the claims may be a scam is a hallmark of a scam. When the original nuclear "pile" was developed somewhere in Chicago in the 1940's, nobody made claims related to marketing!
QuoteI take that as evidence that there is more than one way to skin a cat. There is good evidence (for varying values of 'good') that LENR reactions can occur in plasma, in gases, in liquids and in solids, at all kinds of temperatures and pressures. There is also evidence that it can sometimes produce radiation, sometimes not, can cause detectable transmutation with evolved heat, or transmutation with little evolved heat. I am (you won't be surprised) one of those who considers this to be a positive rather than a negative aspect of LENR. There is certainly room for more than one kind of mechanism, maybe all roads lead to the nucleus, but some are smoother and shorter than others.
With such a bounty of methods, it would be nice if the field could organize the regimes in which LENR occurs, define them, and demonstrate that under a given set of conditions, it always occurs. That is sadly lacking. The other problem with the claim above is that if LENR is so ubiquitous, you would expect it to show up in many places in scientific experiments and industry where it is not expected and where it could be very dangerous. Far as I know, that has not happened in spite of all the work which is done with tritium and deuterium and lithium compounds of all sorts in all kinds of mixes and conditions. The same issue is also true for hydrogen and nickel which are widely used in chemical processing as well as battery technology. I'd expect a nice fat explosion somewhere along the way, provably due to LENR and reproducible.
If I understood him right, that is Shanahan's main reason for his examination of claims to LENR. He doesn't want his highly radioactive materials blowing up on him or heating unpredictably. But so far, nothing like that can be proven to happen. That is a huge argument against the ubiquity of LENR that Alan suggests in the above quote.
Hell no, you can't. The larger the output, the better the output/input ratio and the longer the run on small amounts of fuel, the more persuasive the experiment is.
That is incorrect. On the contrary, once you get above 1 to 10 W it becomes more difficult to measure heat. Both accuracy and precision begin to decline.
As I have pointed out many times, there is often no input power, so that is not an issue. Even when there is input power, it is either electrolysis power or direct current heating. You can measure both with very high precision and practically no noise, so you can subtract them out almost entirely. They have almost no effect on accuracy.
The amount of fuel used is already 1,000 to 100,000 times smaller than any chemical reaction, and there are no signs of any chemical changes in cells, so that is not an issue. You say it is an issue because you are innumerate and you cannot tell the difference between 6 seconds and 3 hours -- which a direct indication of the ratio of energy to fuel. You are saying that an experiment that exceeds the limits of chemistry by a factor of 1,800 is "less persuasive" than one that exceeds the limit by 100,000 or a million, or a billion. That's absurd.
Imagine you see a person jump over the Empire State Building. That would be roughly 300 times higher than any human being can jump. That would have to be Superman or some other non-human. Because you are innumerate, and incapable of elementary quantitative thinking, you would say: "That's not persuasive. He should jump over Mount Everest instead."
QuoteThe results from CalTech and MIT are still positive, despite their claims to the contrary.
Why in the world would they do that? And even it is true, why would not politically independent people with essentially inexhaustible funding like Musk, Bezos, Page, Gates, and many many other billioinaires pick it up?
QuoteThey (Missouri) finally have positive results, I have heard.
Daring claim. Want to expand on that a bit? We've heard such anecdotes before and they led nowhere. When more carefully asked about and examined, they didn't bear out to be meaningful results.
QuoteThat is incorrect. On the contrary, once you get above 1 to 10 W it becomes more difficult to measure heat. Both accuracy and precision begin to decline.
I never understood this nonsense. If you make a lot of power and energy with little or none input, you don't need accuracy. Precision is essentially irrelevant within broad limits at high power levels. Anyway, it's not hard to measure kilowatts by making and sparging steam or measuring the actual heat flux with heat flow transducers and using good calibration. Complaining about how hard high power is to measure is one of the many strange (and in this case unique) things you do.
You remind me of the street person who says he doesn't want to be a millionaire because it's so much trouble to manage money!
QuoteAs I have pointed out many times, there is often no input power, so that is not an issue. Even when there is input power, it is either electrolysis power or direct current heating. You can measure both with very high precision and practically no noise, so you can subtract them out almost entirely. They have almost no effect on accuracy.
You keep making that claim. The problem is that when there is no input power, there is no duration or there is very low output. You need high output, low input (a high signal to noise ratio) and long duration to make the case for potentially useful LENR. ALL THREE AT ONCE. And of course, excellent measurement methods and precise replication. You know, like IH tried to do with Mizuno.
QuoteBecause you are innumerate, and incapable of elementary quantitative thinking, you would say: "That's not persuasive. He should jump over Mount Everest instead."
You seriously believe that sort of statement helps your case?
QuoteYou are saying that an experiment that exceeds the limits of chemistry by a factor of 1,800 is "less persuasive" than one that exceeds the limit by 100,000 or a million, or a billion. That's absurd.
No. What I am saying is that your claiming that these experiments do that doesn't make it so. That's all. And a better, clearer and more spectacular demonstrations COUPLED WITH INDEPENDENT AND PRECISE REPLICATION would help. S/N. But no matter how I state it, you will manage to twist it and misconstrue it into a vague and inappropriate insult. Doing that a lot is one reason your claims and summaries about LENR are not generally taken seriously.
I did not comment on the merits of allegations of Pd-D fusion as to the experiments. I simply remarked about the course of events.
In other words, you were providing a meta-commentary, on a subject you know nothing about?
What? Responding to your inane posts is useless.
Want to heat a room? one or a few kW are fine. Want to run an air conditioner for a large building, you need much more. Want to power an aircraft carrier? An airliner? ....
You are missing the point. I did not say there would be no market for megawatt power supplies or heaters. I said:
"Most energy demand ranges from 1 to 10 kW for heat or electric power. In a cold fusion world, I predict there would be little use for 1 MW reactors."
"Little use" does not mean "no use."
Most of the energy in the world is expended on applications smaller than 10 kW. There are far more small buildings in the world than big ones. The average U.S. home furnace is 80,000 btu/hr which is 23 kW. Most hybrid electric automobiles in most markets such as China would need 10 or 20 kWe. There are roughly 1 billion automobiles in the world, and about 24,000 airplanes. So we need ~42,000 times more automobile engines than aircraft engines. (That is counting a pair of engines per airplane as one, or four individual wheel-mounted motors in a car as one.) If, eventually, cold fusion heat engines are used to drive washing machines (instead of electricity), we will need ~2 billion more small heat engines for that application alone (each 500 to 1300 W mechanical).
I apologize for throwing these numbers at you. I realize you don't do numbers or arithmetic, and you never fact check or back up your assertions with data. So it must seem disconcerting to you that I actually know what I am talking about and I didn't just make stuff up the way you do.
