How to make LENR technology a reality

Built nearly 200 years ago, in 1825, Clarendon's Cambridge University batteries generate 2,000 volts, and this high voltage is enough to attract a small brass ball that rings two small bells. This instrument has ringed continuously for two centuries.

The builder, Watkin and Hill, did not leave any archive, blueprint or recipe about this battery.

We don't know what's inside! Officially, it would be a "dry" pile of Zamboni. But dry cells of this type usually only lasted a few years. The same goes for the high-voltage dry batteries used by the Germans for the light intensifying spyglasses for snipers of the Second World War.

At 2 Hertz (2 ringtones per second), and a stroke of about 1 mm, calculate the distance traveled by the brass ball in two centuries and discuss whether the energy can be of chemical origin.

What if our friend Professor Josephson spent every day beside a steampunk fusion diode without knowing it?

https://youtu.be/UtQGYz4f3YQ?t=234

Commercial apps are absolutely unnecessary. All that is needed is a reactor that makes substantial energy for prolonged periods without any power input. Of course, it has to be verified by independent and trustworthy parties such as renown testing labs. It would be just as good to make a lot of energy even if input power/energy is required. But only if you can show a large ratio of Pout/Pin. In that case, it is probably not difficult to make it self sustaining by using its own heat to keep it hot.

Finally, if control is an issue, just feed all the heat back to the reactor, disconnect power, and hope for thermal runaway or a nice fat explosion. Either way, use a reliable method for determining enthalpy. And get it replicated and verified.

I know... I know... I expect lots of excuses.

One thing I like about the current experiment by Alan Smith and Russ George and whoever else are involved. I have heard no lame excuses, just data. Thus far, anyway. Let's hope the data get more and more robust.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Finally, if control is an issue, just feed all the heat back to the reactor, disconnect power, and hope for thermal runaway or a nice fat explosion.

Control is the critical issue. I doubt anyone can deliberately cause a run away reaction. More likely it would fizzle out. But if this could be done, deliberately causing an explosion would be a terrible plan. A "nice fat explosion" might well hurt or kill someone. Because this is 21st century and people have a low tolerance for risk, that might spell the end of cold fusion research. After Mizuno experienced an explosion, the university forbade any more research on cold fusion.

If we had control over cold fusion, we would have cold fusion cars by now.

Another example of modern society's excessively low tolerance for risk can be seen in the reaction to the accident with a self-driving car that killed a woman. I read that the company involved may abandon the research. That is irrational; manual driving kills hundreds of people every day. There is no question that automated cars will kill some number of people, and the R&D phase will also kill more people. In the end the technology will probably be far safer than manual driving, so the sacrifices will be worth it. To stop the research now is to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

I know... I know... I expect lots of excuses.

If "excuses" are what you think the researchers are giving, then no, you don't know. You don't know a damn thing, and you have no idea how science works. You apparently think research is some version of paint-by-the numbers, where people know the answers but they pretend they do not. As I often say, if you "skeptics" who claim there has been no progress had any idea how difficult this is, you would be amazed at how much progress has been made. I put skeptic in quotes because this is not actual skepticism. It is blind faith in one's own ignorant, baseless opinion.

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. But if this could be done, deliberately causing an explosion would be a terrible plan. A "nice fat explosion" might well hurt or kill someone.

No, silly goose. Of course I mean in a safe place, not a lab! A while back, some friends of mine conducted an experiment with liquid metals and gas phase mercury that might have been quite lethal in a lab. They did not want to bother with local safety regulations for a one shot deal due to time and expense. So they built the whole mess on an old surplus Army truck and drove the heavy duty rig into the desert near Barstow. They used a huge expanse of fenced off sand and brush belonging to someone they knew. They set up a secure remote control and telemetry system, drove a worst-case-safe distance away, and conducted their experiment. As it happens, it didn't blow up or release noxious vapors, but had it, there would have been little consequence. It would all have diffused to safe levels before any possibility of reaching civilization. That's the sort of thing I mean. Intended thermal runaway or explosion under controlled or completely fail-safe conditions-- not in someone's lab!

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You don't know a damn thing, and you have no idea how science works.

Not sure about that but sure as hell, I know a lot of ways science won't work.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Commercial apps are absolutely unnecessary.

Yes, I agree. We don't need a working reactor for sale to change the mindset. I think all that is needed is one repeatable "effect" (no I am not talking about the Rossi Effect, or Hutchison Effect). I like to think of the Photoelectric Effect, which helped launch a new understanding physics shortly after it's discovery. If somebody can just create a repeatable experiment that breaks the current laws of physics, that should be enough. Maybe something as simple as repeatable transmutations when they shouldn't happen. I don't believe conspiracy theories that the deep state or big oil or the physics establishment will crush it. I also go crazy when people claim all this has been done already, and give crackpot lists of unverified claims.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

That's the sort of thing I mean. Intended thermal runaway or explosion under controlled or completely fail-safe conditions-- not in someone's lab!

I doubt anyone would be convinced by that. For one thing, it would be a one-off event, very difficult to reproduce. People would say it was a conventional explosion.

What we need is something that can be repeated on demand many times with similar results. Similar, not exactly the same -- that's not necessary. As I said, for that you need more control than we now have. It should be done on a small scale. No more than a few watts. Anyone who does not believe it because it is on a "small scale" is an idiot. That's all the more reason to do it on a small scale. You don't want to deal with idiots, so by keeping the experiment small, you filter them out.

Even a repeatable, semi-controlled experiment might not convince people. We have seen such experiments in the past, and they did not convince the people who were supposed to evaluate them. F&P did the boil off experiments 16 at a time, dozens of times. Hundreds of tests overall. The experiment worked nearly every time. See the paper and video here:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmancalorimetra.pdf

Unfortunately, this did not convince the Toyota managers. Reportedly because they were nitwits who went to France to play golf, not to look at experiments. That sounds plausible to me. Things like that often happen. I have worked with equally incompetent people at minicomputer and mainframe companies such as DEC and Data General. They were sitting on top of the world, controlling huge shares of the computer market, and they let Microsoft steal their customers and bankrupt their companies.

Quote from PhysicsForDummies

I also go crazy when people claim all this has been done already, and give crackpot lists of unverified claims.

What list would that be? Does that include claims made by the people at Los Alamos, or the Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission? Do you mean the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry, or the guys they named the buildings after at Osaka U. at Case Western? Do you think they were crackpots?

http://lenr-canr.org/wordpress/?page_id=463

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/WillFGgroupsrepo.pdf

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GerischerHiscoldfusi.pdf

http://chemistry.case.edu/research/yces/

http://www.jwri.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/about/enkaku.html (Arata Hall)

Maybe you are not talking about cold fusion.

Jed, all theses crackpot lists (I am not calling the people crackpots) are always old and most of the people are dead or they were never able to reproduce the experiments. Can you name one of these people we can contact right now who will corroborate that they can repeatably reproduce LENR in a clearly power out > power in fashion, right now in a lab? I wish this person would start posting instructions. Please name names (not Rossi 😑) if there are hundreds, there should be one we can talk too.

Quote from AlainCo

Shane D.

I hope it will work, but it seems that convincing with evidence no more work today. Sadly you need a theory, and if you have a good looking theory, probably evidence are no more needed today. (sarcasm).

If it happening that way, in relative secret, this mean that Duncan have been trying to hide from the mainstream mindguards, which after all seems required.

AlainCo,

Disagree vehemently, my French amigo.

Edison relentlessly experimented, failed, and did it all again until he came up with a solution. He did not have a theory, he did thought experiments and then went about building solutions.

Einstein did thought experiments and then built theories to support them.

Two very different approaches to problem solving.

As I see it, LENR suffers from not being able to be consistently replicated, ie:

Use the same bill of materials

Use the same build instructions

Use the same testing equipment

Use the same testing procedures/protocols

Consistently get the same results

Now, to be fair, you suggest there are hundreds of papers suggesting the LENR phenomenon produces excess heat,

I don’t doubt you, however, how many of these experiments followed the above replication requirements?

If they have, then they should ALL be able to be replicated again and again by anyone, anywhere following the same instructions, no?

Quote from PhysicsForDummies

Can you name one of these people we can contact right now who will corroborate that they can repeatably reproduce LENR in a clearly power out > power in fashion, right now in a lab?

See:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJlessonsfro.pdf

If you are an expert, you have lots of funding, a well-equipped lab, and a year or two to devote to the effort, it is very likely you can replicate cold fusion. If you happen to have ~$20 million you can probably do it in less time than a year. It is much easier than building a tokamak plasma reactor or building and launching a robot explorer to Mars. I would say it is roughly as difficult as doing successful open heart surgery, where the patient survives. Richard Oriani, who was one of the world top electrochemists, said it was the most difficult experiment he ever did. The success rate will be higher than it was for transistors in 1955. Since no one questioned the existence of transistors then, there is no rational reason to question cold fusion now.

If you are looking for an experiment that you or any amateur can do, forget it.

Quote from JedRothwell

If you happen to have ~$20 million you can probably do it in less time than a year.

The paper I cited above explains why. It is done manually. You have to test ~100 samples to get ~5 that work well. I have heard about a group with a great deal of money, experience, and robotic equipment designed for a similar research purpose. I have heard they are adapting it to cold fusion research. I believe that costs ~$250 million, but I could be wrong. Maybe more? If that works, they may be able to perform tests and explore the parameter space a few thousand times faster than one person can using the methods described in the paper.

Once you know how to make a cell, you don't need to make ~100 cells to get 5. You make 100 and they all work. Experts tell me you would need one or two billion dollars to make a production line that produces reliable cells every time. In other words, it would cost about as much as Toyota spent to start mass producing Prius automobile. Not a lot of money by the standards of modern high technology.

An actual physical cold fusion device resembles a Nicad battery or an LED light that replaces an incandescent bulb. The materials purity, manufacturing tolerances and so on are similar. It is not something you can put together yourself, at home, by hand, with parts purchased from Home Depot. Roseland67 wants something that "anyone, anywhere following the same instructions" can make. I doubt he would demand similar instructions for making a Nicad battery or an LED light. Or for that matter, a Prius or the Top Quark hadron collider. Yet for some reason he believes these things exist. He has never seen a Top Quark or visited the hadron collider, yet he does not demand a lists of supplies and a recipe to make one. I think he has come up with a unique demand for easy reproducibility that he makes for cold fusion, and cold fusion alone. I also suspect that he makes that demand because he has not read the literature and he does not have a clue how cold fusion research is done, or why it is difficult.

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The success rate will be higher than it was for transistors in 1955. Since no one questioned the existence of transistors then, there is no rational reason to question cold fusion now

Me winces at bad logic. Parallel thoughts: since no one questioned the existence of transistors then, there is no rational reason to question flying pigs now.

Quote from seven_of_twenty

Me winces at bad logic. Parallel thoughts: since no one questioned the existence of transistors then, there is no rational reason to question flying pigs now.

If 20% to 50% of pigs flew, and the others failed to get off the ground, you would not question the existence of flying pigs. The success rate for transistors and cold fusion devices varies from around 50% to 20%. The fact that they often fail is no reason to doubt they exist.

You seem to be saying you do not believe any report that any cold fusion device worked. You think the success rate is zero. That is a different assertion. I suppose if you believed the success rate is 20%, you would concede that proves cold fusion is real. You and many other skeptics are in a tough position. To maintain your belief, you have to reject every single report of every positive experiment, no matter how well it was done, or how many hundreds of times it was repeated. Like Shanahan, you have to come up with excuse after excuse, mainly to avoid looking at the results, but when you do look, you have to come up with wildly improbably reasons to dismiss them, finally resorting to physically impossible nonsense to dismiss them. If even one experiment succeeded, that would mean cold fusion is real. I suppose it would also mean the success rate is 1 in ~14,000 attempts, where the other 14,000 are mistakes. That seems unlikely to me. (There have been approximately 14,000 positive tests, according to someone who counted them at the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.)

I don't envy you, or the mental gymnastics you must perform to deny reality. The calorimetry used in cold fusion was first developed by Lavoisier in 1780, and perfected in the 1840s by J.P. Joule. Any scientist from that time on could have confirmed the excess heat. Anyone after 1900 could have confirmed the tritium. When you reject these results, in essence you have to reject the whole of physics going back two centuries, including all of thermodynamics. You have to pretend that fundamental techniques performed thousands of times a day do not work. Your plight is very similar to that of the Rossi supporters, who are also forced to pretend that thermodynamics and the conservation of energy do not exist, and that photos and other hard data proving they are wrong does not exist.

To repeat my original question, "Can you name one of these people we can contact right now who will corroborate that they can repeatably reproduce LENR in a clearly power out > power in fashion, right now in a lab?"

So Jed, after reading what you said, I take it your answer is no? I only saw one name mentioned and that person is dead. I would like to see if we can get one of these crackpot list people onto this board to corroborate. I don't think the people are crackpot, I think the list is crackpot.