Brillouin Energy Corporation (BEC) updates.

JedRothwell: I do see your point Jed, and I actually believe it does square somewhat with what Brillouin is trying to do.

Their licenses with third-parties that will incorporate their technology are partnerships with big companies with lots of money. They only have to deliver prototypes to those companies to get enough money to raise their COP through the roof. And while those prototypes require a certain COP to be reached, we’re talking about 3X-4X, that is to say something extremely close to where they are right now.

Those prototypes are your “impractical” devices. Brillouin is not looking to get stuck in an R&D trap. It is looking to get enough money to build a device that will trigger payments under their licenses.

Provided they do not die for lack of funding in the next two years and they reach a COP that seems extremely reasonable considering the progress they have been making, they should succeed.

As I have said above there are two main risks: one is that their calorimetry is flawed and they are actually not producing any COP, and the other is that they do not get funding and close shop.

Quote from JedRothwell

Maybe there are investors who have different ideas about how to succeed in business than I have

There are...

Doesn't IH invest in Brillouin?

Quote from seven_of_twenty

You think so, without very capable independent confirmation outside of SRI?

SRI is an independent confirmation. Another one wouldn't hurt, but that is not really what is called for at this stage, in my opinion. A simpler, more direct demonstration is needed. A large audience is needed. That is, a bunch of important people who are convinced and who will tell the world what they have seen.

Again and again, I go back to history, especially the Wright brothers, who faced the same problems of credibility and political opposition. They did everything wrong from 1903 to 1908! They were worse than Brillouin. They had a patent. They had photos. They had affidavits from dozens of leading citizens of Dayton who had seen them fly for as long as 20 minutes. They had everything they needed to convince the world and bring in millions of dollars of investment money. And what did they do with this? Nothing! They sat on it. They refused to show it to the U.S. Army or the Europeans they were negotiating with. Like Brillouin they had the proof they needed, but they did not not use it.

The Wrights eventually attracted the biggest of big Wall Street investors, and the biggest military venture capitalist firm in the world. From that moment on, their success was assured. Before that, they were wasting their time. The venture capitalist convinced them to demonstrate to the French and to the U.S. Army, and the rest is history. Brillouin needs to bring in the Big Guns and the Wall Street Money (or Silicon Valley money), and they need to do a demonstration as convincing as the Wrights did, or they will never be heard from again.

Quote from LCC

Their licenses with third-parties that will incorporate their technology are partnerships with big companies with lots of money.

How can you license a technology when no one knows how it works, and when there has not been a single safety test?!? That's absurd. This is a nuclear reactor that operates by unknown principles. It is the most revolutionary invention in recorded history. And they are treating it as if it was an improved formula for window washing fluid.

You cannot commercialize something like this with piddling little steps and slight improvements to the COP. Showing it in secret to a few dozen people. You need the entire industrial establishment frantically working on it. You need contributions from the academic physics establishment. Okay, a theory. Like it or not, no government will allow this until the academic establishment agrees they understand it.

Above all, you need numbers. Massive effort. In 1911, a special issue of Scientific American reported there were 250,000 people frantically working on airplanes. If there had not been that scale of effort, there would have been no airplanes in World War I. Soon after the inventions of automobiles, semiconductors and microcomputers, there were tens of thousand or hundreds of thousands of people working on them. We need hundreds of thousands of people working on cold fusion, or it will go nowhere. Brillouin can trigger this effort. They can profit from it. But they can no more do it themselves than they could build the Great Wall of China.

Quote from JedRothwell

Of course they can! Edison and Steve Jobs were famous for putting on premeditated fake demonstrations. They exaggerated to the point of deceiving people about their inventions. They claimed they had things working long before they actually did. But they also actually did develop working products. They were fakers at times and real inventors at other times.

And the CF researchers?

Leaving aside the lack of any functioning products, can F&P be compared to Edison or Steve Jobs?

Quote

SRI is an independent confirmation.

That's a matter of opinion. More to the point, are they a credible confirmation? I think not. They want too badly for it to work and they trust Godes' claims too much... is my subjective impression. Earth Tech would be much more credible if their past performance is any guide.

Earth Tech's "official" view thus far:

Quote

Over the years we have had the opportunity to test a relatively small number of cold fusion cells, some that we constructed ourselves and some that were brought to our laboratory by other investigators who had seen positive signs of excess heat in their own labs. None of these cold fusion experiments have shown any convincing evidence of excess heat in our calorimeters. We cannot say that we have never seen any signs of excess heat in our laboratory because all calorimeters drift somewhat and, inevitably, that drift sometimes goes in a positive direction and looks just like a low level of genuine excess heat. When that occurs we strive to check the calorimeter’s calibration as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Usually the drift in calibration is evident and its magnitude matches, and thus explains, the apparent excess heat signal. In a few cases the calibration check did not explain the apparent excess heat signal. But when we returned the cell to the calorimeter after the calibration check, the excess heat signal did not reappear. This tantalizing behavior either means that the cell did produce low levels of excess heat for a while or the calorimeter was simply drifting up and down in unfortunate synchrony with our observations.

I don't recall whose cells they tested ... maybe one was Celani's? Anyway, the rest of this link is succinct and worth reading: https://earthtech.org/cold-fusion/ Maybe Brillouin could enlist these people to test their reactor. or boiler or whatever it is.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

That's a matter of opinion. More to the point, are they a credible confirmation? I think not.

SRI is definitely independent of Brillouin. That is not a matter of opinion. Do you have some inside information that they are colluding? Otherwise your opinion has no basis. As to credibility, you have not read anything and you do not know anything, so you have no basis to judge it.

I cannot judge Brillouin's calorimetry, but let me point out that other people have doubts similar to THH's. THH points to difficulty of measuring the waveform. Others have said they would like to see the power measured from the wall into the power supply and waveform generator. That boils down to the same thing THH is saying. If there is something wrong with the waveform measurement, you would see more power going into the system than the waveform measurement predicts. You have to measure the power supply and waveform generator overhead. Hopefully, the power supply and waveform generator are efficient, so that total input power is less than the output for the system as a whole.

There are various foolproof ways to measure AC power. Even if the waveform generator somehow makes the watt meter go wrong, you can establish the upper limit of both power and energy by using something like a battery backup. Use it unplugged and fused. Various other methods have been proposed. Two or more should be used, because this is a critical question.

Measuring output heat with something like a water or air flow calorimeter is less likely to be problematic, in my opinion. Again, using two or more methods would be good.

Quote from Ascoli65

And the CF researchers?

Leaving aside the lack of any functioning products, can F&P be compared to Edison or Steve Jobs?

The CF researchers, including F&P, were government employees. They would be fired for doing fake demonstrations. Some of them were fired for doing actual demonstrations. There would be no benefit for them in any case, and no point to it. To my knowledge, none of has done anything like that. None have been accused of doing this, except by Robert Park and various journalists who knew nothing about the research.

Quote from Ascoli65

Leaving aside the lack of any functioning products, can F&P be compared to Edison or Steve Jobs?

Perhaps you are asking whether F&P made contributions to industry. The answer is yes, both of them did. Fleischmann and Bockris made tremendous contributions to industry. If they had not been government employees, they would have earned millions of dollars. Because they worked for the UK and the state of Texas, they got no more money than the U.S. Federal employees who developed the internet.

Fleischmann's contributions to science are summarized in 19 chapters in this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Develop…mann-ebook/dp/B00KS49ESW/

His contributions were wide ranging. He was elected FRS before cold fusion. Generally speaking, people who are elected Fellows of the Royal Society have made important contributions. People elected chemistry department chairman (Pons) are also good at what they do.

Quote from JedRothwell

How can you license a technology when no one knows how it works, and when there has not been a single safety test?!? That's absurd. This is a nuclear reactor that operates by unknown principles. It is the most revolutionary invention in recorded history. And they are treating it as if it was an improved formula for window washing fluid.

I am not sure I completely agree with that. Mankind has used things without understanding how they worked for most of its existence. The idea that you must first understand the theory of something prior to using it is entirely divorced from most of the human existence. We do not even understand how our own brains work and yet we soldier on. People made fire and they did not know about basic chemistry. Damascus steel was produced for centuries and we do not even know today how that was done. Maybe you are right and Brillouin’s reactors, if successful, will be prohibited because the physics behind them remains controversial, but that does not sound as sure to me as what you seem to imply.

Moreover, you seem to believe that things first need to be demonstrated to be safe prior to their commercialization. Frankly I am not sure of that: we daily ingest tons of chemicals that most probably explain the modern rise of cancer and that does not seem to have caused the government to prohibit all chemicals until it has been proven that they are safe. We use smartphones and I don’t think it has been proven without a doubt that they are safe for human beings. Alcohol and tobacco are sold and their dangerous effects are known without a doubt. We are currently destroying the planet with carbon emissions and any tentative to stop that has been a failure.

Mankind is much less risk-adverse than what you seem to think. If a machine is shown to provide tremendous benefits and has not proven to be incredibly dangerous (at this stage, no one is dead from radiation poisoning at Brillouin), it will not be prohibited for safety reasons.

Maybe I am wrong on this. And I can tell you that investment documentation in Brillouin does list regulation as a significant risk. So they are aware of that.

On the various questions, suggestions or doubts you may have on the SRI report, I would suggest the same thing I proposed to THHuxley earlier. Write them down and I’ll do what I can to forward them to Tanzella.

Me: “I don’t think it is a mystery what could be done with a energy source like cold fusion.”

Jed: “You don't? It took me years to work through the ramifications, and weeks to write that recent paper. You could have done it before breakfast? You are smarter than I am! You are smarter than Arthur C. Clarke, who put a lot of thought into this.”

Classic Jed rhetorical attack method. Totally misuing a person’s quote to score points and taunt.

Any sensible person would understand that all I was saying is that you don’t need a lot of knowledge to know that an unlimited, cheap and safe energy source would be tremendously valuable. I was not in any way implying that I could enumerate or think up every possible application nor does one need to in order to see immense potential value in LENR. Unless Jed is hopelessly literal minded, he knew that. But he loves to pull the old “oh you think you are smarter than (name your favorite genius)” attack in order to pursue yet another pissing contest.

It is boring and utterly predictable.

Quote from LCC

JedRothwell: I do see your point Jed, and I actually believe it does square somewhat with what Brillouin is trying to do.

Their licenses with third-parties that will incorporate their technology are partnerships with big companies with lots of money. They only have to deliver prototypes to those companies to get enough money to raise their COP through the roof. And while those prototypes require a certain COP to be reached, we’re talking about 3X-4X, that is to say something extremely close to where they are right now.

Those prototypes are your “impractical” devices. Brillouin is not looking to get stuck in an R&D trap. It is looking to get enough money to build a device that will trigger payments under their licenses.

Provided they do not die for lack of funding in the next two years and they reach a COP that seems extremely reasonable considering the progress they have been making, they should succeed.

As I have said above there are two main risks: one is that their calorimetry is flawed and they are actually not producing any COP, and the other is that they do not get funding and close shop.

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The R&D trap is not a trap if it is focussed on better validation, because better validation = much more money.

The question therefore (which you have asked) is what more validation is needed apart from the SRI report.

There are two things that would make people more confident these results are real:

1. Somone else (not SRI) crawls all over the test setup and validates it. You need to choose somone who is (a) competent and (b) independent with a reputation to lose. Two views of this are better than one: even if both are paid.

2. Take the current test setup and through some combination of simplification and additional instrumentation/tests make it more obvious that these results are real

I'll attempt to suggest additional instrumentation/tests when I have time to go back to the reports and read them thoroughly.

THH

I like Director believe in being totally open about the science and technology behind cold fusion--I know for whatever reasons nobody believes this but all I can do is reiterate why many gas-based dry cold fusion experiments don't work or are unrepeatable is because at least theoretically the same physical rules apply to all nuclear reactions whether fission or fusion-based. A reasonable assumption? I don't think Rutherford or Einstein would have found a reasonable argument against such a simple premise. Even BEC's model of electron capture to form 'cold neutrons' would be susceptible to the concept of critical mass, or critical density of electron-proton interactions for sustained release of nuclear energy release and further neutron release into the reactor pile by subsequent reactions to He. A chain-reaction. Or may be regarded as a summation of sequentially induced NAE's. Like fission, the reaction simply cannot be maintained with insufficient reactor mass. Which is why I'm trying to encourage BEC to simply scale up as a possible route to success. Meanwhile, my own 2 Kg test reactor is nearly ready to test out.