"You seem to imagine this is some sort of well equipped laboratory in a properly funded scientific project."
No, I'm just wondering why he has no fear of optimizing the fuel, but is afraid of increasing the insulation. The dangers are the same, and if anything, adding insulation is a more predictable exercise.
"We don't need people who would ignore these results. Better they should ignore them. If "most people" are so stupid they would ignore 50 W in, 300 W out, that's good, let's hope they ignore it, because they would be a nuisance to deal with. We only need people who are smart enough to realize that "working without input" is a trivial engineering problem that should be dealt with later, in a properly equipped engineering facility."
I can hardly wait for the trivial engineering problem to be solved. There will be a lot of red faces around then! Any idea how long it might be?
But, it's not that people are so stupid that they don't understand the importance of 50 W in, 300 W out. It's a question of confidence in the claims. Those who were once bitten by a much larger ratio claimed by Rossi, that never led to the trivial "working without input" solution, are twice shy of subsequent claims. The point is that with zero input, opportunities for errors are greatly diminished.
"It isn't as if Mizuno hasn't thought about ways to do this."
Good to know. I expect the cold fusion revolution will begin in the public perception when he gets it working without input. And it will likely be ignored by most people before that.
"Think about that for a moment and you will see the reason. It would probably not be difficult to trigger a self sustaining reaction. What happens next? As shown in Fig. 8, the heat increases exponentially with temperature. How would you keep the temperature from going up rapidly? What would happen if it did? It would be dangerous, to say the least."
Ah, he's scared. That makes sense.
Still, if he's scared to add insulation because of the possibility of an exponential increase, why is he not scared of improving the reaction? He's gone from small excess heat to 5 or 10 times. A little more, and it would sustain itself without insulation. All the dangers you describe are already present if the reaction gets too efficient.
It's surprising he doesn't have some kind of cooling in place in the event of even greater success with the optimization.
The thing I don't get is why Mizuno doesn't use a fraction of the output heat to replace the input. Couldn't he wrap a blanket around the thing to keep back enough heat to maintain the necessary operating temperature?
If this could be done, then the contraption would produce heat without any input, and if it could do that long enough, Nature could not ignore it. If it's not done, people will wonder why, and it's hard to blame them for having doubts.
Like, if a guy offered me $10,000 if I first give him $1000, I'd tell him to keep $1000 from the 10,000, and just give me $9000. Maybe Mizuno is a Nigerian prince.
