LENR vs Solar/Wind, and emerging Green Technologies.

Quote from interested observer

FYI, I have read McKubre's 2009 paper several times and it certainly indicates good evidence for a real physical effect and furthermore delineates conditions under which the effect could be observed. Where I go off the rails is the fact that in the ensuing years, it does not appear that the work discussed in the paper has been expanded or improved upon.

No, that is not what you said at first. You said: "The hypothetical advantages of cold fusion as you imagine it are impressive. As far as I can see, those advantages come from rather radical assumptions about things that are highly speculative and not backed up by actual results."

That's completely wrong. The claims are based on actual experiments, and actual results, not speculation. There is far more real-world proof that cold fusion can be made practical than there is for, say, plasma fusion or Star-wars missile defense.

Now you have changed your tune and you are saying you doubt this because there has been no progress, but you ignore the reasons why there has been no progress. Apparently you think that dead people can expand or improve upon their work.

Quote from interested observer

Given that I am not all that interested in the subject, I naively thought The Librarian could perhaps provide a synopsis of the more recent history of the subject so I might decide whether I want to learn more.

I did provide a synopsis of recent history. You don't believe me, so you should read original sources. Here it is again:

In the last 10 or 20 years there has been no progress because practially no experiments have been done. Because the researchers are dead of old age. Dead people cannot do experiments. Other researchers were fired, or like Pons driven out the country. You have not read ICCF papers, so you supposed they report new research. If you had bothered to read them you would have seen they rehash old data and talk about theory, and report nothing new.

And stop blathering about how you can't decide if you want to learn more. You are not fooling anyone. What you want to do is pretend to be a high and mighty intellect, oh so objective, fair and balanced, who might deign to take interest if only we grovel and spoon feed you whatever you ask for, again and again. If you put one-tenth the effort into actually learning that you put into boasting how objective balanced and brilliant you are -- so brilliant you can pontificate about a subject you haven't bothered to study! -- you would already know the answers to the questions you pretend to ask.

Quote from interested observer

You are certainly the master of the straw man attack. Where you construe that I claim to be a high and mighty intellect, brilliant, objective, or any of the other things that you ascribe to me I can’t imagine.

Anyone who pontificates the way you do about a subject he knows nothing about has a gigantic ego problem. You must think the world of yourself to do that. I would never, ever say the kinds of you do about a subject I know nothing about. That is so far beyond the pale it is not even insulting. It is downright crazy. As I said, it is as if you started lecturing me about Meiji-era literature. What is even worse is that you brag about not knowing about it! You say "I haven't bothered to read . . . I am not interested . . ." and you next paragraph is a steaming pile of nonsense based on your imagination only, such as I quoted above. You are playing the Mary Yugo get out of jail free card: "I say this is garbage but I don't have to justify my assertion because I am not interested and I have not read it." That is not a valid argument.

I am not "ascribing" anything. I am describing a person who thinks he knows more about electrochemistry than Martin Fleischmann did. A person who thinks he can dismiss thousands of experimental results he has not so much as glanced at, and which he admits he would not understand. And who goes around lecturing people about his imaginary knowledge. This is chutzpah and out of control egomania. Perhaps you do not see that, because -- at least in this context, in this forum -- you are an out-of-control egomanic with no sense of your own limitations or your own ignorance.

Quote from interested observer

Perhaps I do not see that because none of it is true and it is all part of your vivid imagination.

Do you speak language? Do you understand what you yourself said in your latest burst of bullshit? Here, let's go over it:

"The hypothetical advantages of cold fusion as you imagine it are impressive. As far as I can see, those advantages come from rather radical assumptions about things that are highly speculative and not backed up by actual results."

"Hypothetical." Obviously, yes, but no more than plasma fusion or artificial intelligence. The hypothesis is based on thousands of replicated experiments. "Hypothetical" does not mean "imaginary."

"as you imagine it" -- not me. As experts conclude based on replicated, high sigma experiments. Perhaps you do not understand what "power density and temperatures roughly equivalent to a fission reactor core" means. Ask an engineer.

"As far as I can see . . ." What can you see? You say you have read nothing. You obviously know nothing. So you cannot see far or close. You have no business judging things you have not looked at.

". . . those advantages come from rather radical assumptions." No, they come from conventional engineering and 19th century physics.

". . . highly speculative and not backed up by actual results." They are not a bit speculative and they are backed up by actual results, as I said many times. Your "defense" is to deny what I just pointed out, pretend you did not read it, to refuse to look at those results, or to pretend these results do not exist. Those are not valid arguments.

This is a technical and scientific discussion. You do not get to dismiss evidence by saying "that's speculative." No, it is peer-reviewed evidence published in mainstream journals authored by the world's leading experts in electrochemistry, calorimetry, helium and tritium detection. When you say that is "not actual results" or "speculative" you are saying that you know better than these experts. If you don't see that is egomania, you are blind to the meaning of what you say.

Who the hell do you think you are saying that papers published by experts at Los Alamos are "not real results"? What does that mean? Have you found errors in these papers? Do you think you are God Almighty, or the editor of Nature magazine?

Quote from interested observer

Shane: imagine how much harder my life here would be if I was actually one of the people who argues that LENR doesn’t exist. I don’t do that at all.

"Highly speculative" and "not backed by actual results" means "LENR doesn't exist." What else can it mean? No actual results means no existence. You could not have said it more clearly.

Now you will deny you meant what you just said. Or you will deny you said what you just said. Or you will say, "yes but what have they done in the last 9 years?" -- where "they" have been dead for 9 years.

Quote from interested observer

Spending time talking about Rossi is a foolish endeavor regardless of which side of the fence you occupy.

It might be foolish but we have a bit of fun.

Quote from interested observer

If you lower your blood pressure a bit, perhaps you might take note that the various quotes you cite do not refer to cold fusion itself at all but rather entirely to your extrapolations of how it would be used and commercialized.

These are not my extrapolations. They were made by Fleischmann first, and later by many others. As I said, you should ask an engineer what it means when a heat source continues for months producing temperatures and power density equivalent to a reactor core. It means that if you can control the reaction, you have by far the best, cheapest and most useful source of energy in history. That is a simple extrapolation based on 19th century physics.

All the extrapolations that Fleischmann and others made -- that I reported in my book -- are grounded in replicated, peer-reviewed experimental data, not imagination or speculation. Apparently, you cannot tell the difference.

Quote from interested observer

My entire point has been that cold fusion is not well enough understood and controlled for anyone to make authoritative statements on the performance and characteristics of a future commercial product.

So, once again, you are telling us that you know better than Fleischmann and the others, you are sure that they cannot make "authoritative statements" because you are the real authority and they don't understand high-school level physics. Got it. You are God Almighty and only you understand temperatures and power density.

To translate your assertions:

"Not well understood" means Fleischmann and Duncan cannot do calorimetry as well as people did it in 1780. They don't understand heat.

"Not controlled" means all those papers describing methods of control are wrong, for reasons that you, and only you, know about. But you are not going to tell us.

"Extrapolation" means you get to guess how well R&D might work, even though you have no clue what R&D programs have been proposed to improve control, what instruments would be used, and what results similar research projects have produced in the past. You are sure this will not be controlled, even though you know nothing about it. You are sure that the researchers must be wrong. Got it!

Quote from JedRothwell

That is very expensive, it takes a lot of infrastructure, and it creates a tremendous amount of solid waste when the devices wear out. Especially with PV electricity. Much of that waste cannot be recycled.

If it works, cold fusion will be 10 times cheaper than any other source of energy at first, and later thousands of times cheaper. It will be so abundant that at a consumption level far higher than today's it will last longer than the sun. (As would plasma fusion, but it is not cheap and it produces lots of radwaste.)

See my book for details:

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

Display More

Jed, I believe your judgement here re solar is wrong.

Solar technology has the key advantage that it goes on getting better and cheaper. There is no technological bar to very cheap, high efficiency, panels. The commercial technology available shows this, with costs going down, and efficiencies up, year on year. The installation cost remains of course (it is not subject to much technological change). However two factors make that irrelevant:

(1) As PV panels get better it becomes sensible for all new-build roofs to include PV. New materials with integrated PV in roof tiles remove the installation cost

(2) Organic PV is making great strides and will have a whole range of applications with different install issues, colonising at low install cost different market segments.

So the theoretical position of PV looks good, on fundamentals. How has it proven in practice?

https://www.bp.com/en/global/c…-energy/solar-energy.html

You can see that the increase in total installed PV capacity has been exponential (with 35% increase in 2017). At 1.7% of total generation end of 2017, given this increase, we have 50% of market in 11 years time.

Sustainability and disposal. The costs here are amortised over very long lifetimes. If you compare PV cells with fridges (lower lifetime) you can see that the disposal and recycling cost is low relative to other things in our modern lives. What can be recycled in PV cells is variable. The silicon cells themselves can maybe not be recycled if the cost of extracting rare earth dopants is too low. Organic PVs are very thin and have much lowr costs (even counting lower lifetime).

Here is current recycling tech for PV cells:

https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/b…-of-solar-panel-recycling

Quote from THHuxleynew

There is no technological bar to very cheap, high efficiency, panels.

The limits are: insolation (solar power at ground level; ~1 kW/m^2); 12 hours of sunlight per day, and the best possible conversion efficiency, which is 20% today and I suppose might reach 50%. Given these irreducible limits, the output from an entire roof full of PV at 20% efficiency will be ~24 times less than a cold fusion generator, as I showed yesterday. See the photo:

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

The average weight of PV is 2 lb per sq. ft. Assuming the roof shown in that photo is 500 sq. ft., the PV arrays weighs ~1000 lb. Whereas the generator shown in the other photo weighs 466 lb. So the ratio of PV mass to cold fusion per unit of energy is about ~50. You might counter that PV efficiency will increase to something like 50%, but so will cold fusion with advanced thermoelectric devices. I expect the ratio will be more like ~100.

Actually, the ratio is much worse than ~50 already. The total amount of energy that an entire roof covered with PVs generates is not enough for the average American family, and nowhere near enough for space heating and other non-electrical energy. So it will have to be augmented with centrally generated electricity and with gas heating. This infrastructure adds to the cost and mass of materials needed to produce the energy one family (or individual, or office building) needs. Whereas a cold fusion combined heat and power unit will be self contained, with no need for an infrastructure or augmentation. When the technology matures you are look at ratios of 200 to 1000 when you include space heating and thermal air conditioning. The energy for those can all come from one small cold fusion unit.

It may be that PV on a roof can be augmented with PV elsewhere, but that still adds the cost and mass of material in the other PV array and the electric power distribution network. Plus you will need storage to produce power at night. Overall, this additional equipment will make PV far more massive and far more expensive than cold fusion.

The cost of PV includes both equipment and the maintenance needed for the conventional power distribution network, which is a large fraction of your electric bill, as you see whenever a winter storm cuts power lines. Even if they delivered no power to you at all, the power company would have to charge you a lot just to maintain the power lines to your house. This is why power companies in Hawaii are going bankrupt. People are installing PV, but they still need the power company, but only for a little electricity, so they don't pay enough to maintain the network. Something's gotta give!

Cold fusion will require far less maintenance, and no distribution network, or power company.

When estimating the per capita mass and cost of energy generation and distribution, don't forget to add in your share of the mass and cost of: coal mines, railroads needed just for coal, oil wells, oil tankers, oil refineries, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, electric power substations and control buildings, natural gas central pipelines (not just ones to your house), gasoline stations, etc. (I expect cars will be cold fusion powered, but if they are electric, home cold fusion generators will replace gas stations.) Also the factories needed to produce this gigantic mass of stuff. When the mass of equipment needed to generate and distribute energy is reduced by a factor of a thousand, so will the number and size of the factories needed to make the equipment. If coal and natural gas are replaced with PV and wind, the mass of equipment, distribution network, energy storage equipment, and factories will be much larger than they are today. Many thousands of times larger than they would be with cold fusion.

Quote from THHuxleynew

The commercial technology available shows this, with costs going down, and efficiencies up, year on year.

Yes. It is a better technology than coal, and safer than fission. If cold fusion is never made into a practical technology, we will need it. If cold fusion does succeed, it will not be able to compete.

Quote from THHuxleynew

(1) As PV panels get better it becomes sensible for all new-build roofs to include PV. New materials with integrated PV in roof tiles remove the installation cost

Yes. No doubt it will get cheaper before it bumps into the limits I listed above.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Sustainability and disposal. The costs here are amortised over very long lifetimes.

The lifetimes are not long. They are short even compared to the lifetime of home heating and air conditioning units, and appliances. Or roofing shingles. The performance degrades a great deal after 10 or 15 years. It lasts about as long as an automobile. Most components of conventional generators last 20 to 50 years. Dams and wind turbine towers last 100 years or more, with maintenance. The turbines and blades do not last that long, but most of the cost is for the tower and the wires in it.

Quote from THHuxleynew

If you compare PV cells with fridges (lower lifetime) you can see that the disposal and recycling cost is low relative to other things in our modern lives.

You are overlooking the fact that to produce most of the energy used per capita, we would need a very large amount of PV. Much more than, say, the mass of roofing shingles, grocery bags, or even automobiles per unit of time. (In other words, per year, per decade, or lifetime, or whatever you want to use.) The mass of solid waste at the end of life when the PVs degrade is more than most other consumer products, because you need a lot more PVs than you need shingles or grocery bags. The mass of solid waste is even greater when you add in the other waste from the augmented electricity and gas heating outside the house, and the delivery infrastructure, measured per capita.

I am glad to see your reference to improved recycling for PVs. I wonder what the energy cost of recycling is. PV embodied energy over the useful life of the device is still very high compared to other energy sources. Compared to any other source, the embodied energy and energy payback for cold fusion would be hundreds of times smaller, when the technology matures and cold fusion thermoelectric devices last as long as today's combustion-driven thermoelectric devices (~50 years). They last a long time because they have no moving parts.

According to books and other sources I read years ago, energy payback time is approximately 6 months for a gas turbine, or for a wind turbine in a good location. That is, 6 months until they produce about as much energy as it took to make them. They last about 30 years. That's ~2% payback time over the lifetime. Payback time is a year or two for a PV, and they last about 16 years; ~6 to 12%. It will take ~1 day for a cold fusion device, and they will last for 50 years; 0.005%. However, this ignores the fact that with cold fusion the cost of the energy needed to manufacture the devices will be zero to many decimal places, so energy payback times will not matter at all.

There is also the energy payback ratio, which is how much energy the device itself consumes (or wastes in conversion) to keep itself going. That's effectively zero for a wind turbine or PV, because it just means wasted wind or sunlight. With a gas turbine: "energy payback ratio (EPR), which is the ratio of useful electrical output to the total energy inputs. The EPR for the gas turbine is 4.1 and is limited by large energy investments associated with the fuel cycle." (https://www.seventhwave.org/sites/default/files/202-1.pdf)

With cold fusion that ratio will not make the slightest difference, except where waste heat dispersal is a problem, such as with an implanted heart pump.

You are overlooking the fact that to produce most of the energy used per capita, we would need a very large amount of PV. Much more than, say, the mass of roofing shingles, grocery bags, or even automobiles per unit of time. (In other words, per year, per decade, or lifetime, or whatever you want to use.) The mass of solid waste at the end of life when the PVs degrade is more than most other consumer products, because you need a lot more PVs than you need shingles or grocery bags.

Let us check that. PV cells (even silicon ones, you are ignoring the much lighter organic ones that I mentioned) are heavy only because of the necessary structurally stiff carrier. They can be added to roofing tiles and in that form do not greatly increase the mass. Performance does not degrade a great deal after 10-15 years. Here is the data: http://energyinformative.org/lifespan-solar-panels/. Panels typically have a 25 year warranty at 80% efficency, many will go on working at > 80% for much longer.

I am glad to see your reference to improved recycling for PVs. I wonder what the energy cost of recycling is. PV embodied energy over the useful life of the device is still very high compared to other energy sources.

Currently PV embodied energy is < 10% of payback. See http://info.cat.org.uk/questio…ayback-time-pv-panels-uk/. Note that that is in the UK, in California payback is much faster.

Rating energy production devices by payback is silly. That would be equivalent to saying that an LENR device that generated 10X the electricity out it required to run it (or, say 40X the heat out) was somehow much worse than one with a higher out/in ratio. The 10% loss leaves a device that generates power, just at a rate only 90% of what it would be without considering embodied energy. In a batch of 10 solar cells one will pay for the embodied energy costs, the other 9 are free energy.

Your arguments against PV cells are essentially numerical. That the total lifetime energy cost is high relative to other sources. But that does not matter if the total lifetimes cost is small in comparison with the energy payback. Which it is.

And, the technology has got better (since the very old data you appear to be basing your statements on) and continues to improve, making the current 10% cost (for UK conditions) an upper limit.