How can we get more LENR experts into teaching positions?
By seance.
You have heard of remote teaching? It doesn't get more remote than this! The technique was pioneered by the founder of University College London, Jeremy Bentham, in 1832. Continuing to the present.
Who are you going to believe, Bloomberg or the mother of all fact checkers?
I don't know what to make of it, as I said. Meaning I don't know. If it was important for me to find out, I would look for original sources, or contact people in government agencies that are supposed to be regulating carbon offsets.
this link:- RE: IWAHLM Conference September 25th 2022
and in case of doubt, around 37.5 minutes in.
That's the great long video. Anyway, I jumped to 37.5 minutes and there you are!
But the department of agriculture is talking about carbon credits, isn't this the same thing.
I do not think the Department of Agriculture has any role in setting energy policy. The DoE would object. Anyway, carbon credits are controversial and would have to be approved by Congress. I doubt Congress would do this.
Well JedRothwell , the mother of all fact checkers says the Carbon Offset market is thriving, specially in Europe.
I don't know what to make of that. Bloomberg says European carbon offsets are dead.
Nuclear power works as base load. Solar/wind do not.
So you need to add to the cost of them, enough energy storage to make them work when there is no sun/wind.
You don't need them when there is no sun. That's at night, when demand falls by half or 2/3rds. Actually, you don't need storage at all; you can use peak generators, with natural gas or Diesel. You must have that peak generation capacity for times when base load sources such as nuclear go offline. Nukes go offline for maintenance, and in SCRAM events. The cost of storage is falling rapidly, and more storage is being built. It is now 11% of new capacity:
If storage becomes cheaper than peak generators, some of them can be retired. Or used at even less than 10% of their capacity, which is how much they are used now.
You can't back up a nuke with today's storage. That has to be done with natural gas peak generators, because storage cannot produce 1 GW and you never know how long the nuke will be down. Wind and solar are more predictable than a nuke, with modern weather forecasting. So, even though wind and solar are down more often than a nuke, with a 40% duty cycle compared to 88% to 95% for a nuke (Lazard), if the cost of storage continues to fall it will soon be cheaper to back up wind and solar with batteries than it is to back up a nuke with peak generators.
My presentation on the LEC - long, because I ended up on the platform through the following two presentations by Frank Gordon
It is one big long video, 3.5 hours so far. Do you know what hour your presentation begins?
A lot of the experiments referenced here are not well described.
Which ones? Be specific. I have mainly referenced the top tier ones by Fleischmann, Miles, McKubre, Storms and others. They are well described. I suggest you ignore poorly described experiments.
And, of course - in a cathode loaded with H or D and exposed to air at an elevated temperature the reaction:
H (in lattice) + O2 (in air) -> H2O can happen.
The lattice is under water. Recombination never happens underwater with an anode horizontally separated from a cathode, but only when one is on top of the other. Recombination can occur in the headspace, but only when there is a recombiner. It is very unlikely to happen when most of the gas is water vapor.
But even if we assume that every drop of free O2 and D2 recombined in the cell headspace, that would still not be enough to explain the excess heat. The thermoneutral potential for heavy water is 1.54. That's how many volts you add to the voltage. Electrolysis heat during the 600 second sample was 37.5 W. It would have been around 40 W with full recombination. Excess was 144 W. The excess heat far exceeded the limits of recombination, and it continue long after electrolysis stopped and all free O2 and D2 left the cell.
What is the point of your hypothesis? Anyone can see it cannot explain the facts even if it is true.
such as heavy and light water magically reaching out and affecting Seebeck calorimeters, The case in point was where the barrier was a gap containing vapour where H2 and D2 have different thermal conductivity?
As I said, the cells are calibrated with whatever isotope will be used in the final test. The difference in thermal conductivity is well known and can be included in the equations if both isotopes are used. Ordinary water is 1.045 times more conductive at 75°C. See:
Furthermore, you applied that argument to all experiments, even those it does not apply to. Heat has been measured outside the cells in many experiments. Are you suggesting this heat in these tests was real, but heat measured in cells in which both D2O and H2O were used was not? (And which tests were these? I am not aware of any.) As Fleischmann said, dreaming up a special case to explain away every variation of the experiment and every different instrument is no way to do science.
For heat of vaporisation you can:
(1) have constant power in exactly measured
(2) have a container without gunk where the exact point of complete evaporation can easily and accurately be deterimed
(3) measure over the whole experiment (full to empty) not some guessed half of it, and therefore have an exact amount of liquid boiled
(4) have no possible chemical reactions (recombination) to complicate issues
This is all bullshit. The power is easily measured. It is constant current, so they need only publish voltage, but in fact they measure both. They measure over the entire experiment. There is no guesswork. The amount of liquid in the cell at each minute is known. Ascoli's comments about foam are wrong. The minute boiling begins and the minute the cells is boiled dry are known, and so is the total volume of water. A 10-minute segment is used for convenience. It is a round number of seconds during a prolonged, steady state segment of boiling. You can use the entire mass of water, and the entire duration of the event, which you can measure from the video. There is no gunk -- only lithium salt, which is measured with precision, going in, and remaining in the cell. There is no recombiner and no recombination, but even if there were, it would have practically no effect on the energy balance. The total energy release far exceeds the limits of recombination. In other words, you can assume 100% recombination and it would hardly affect the heat balance. Most of the gas is water vapor, not D2 and O2. After electrolysis stops, it is all water, so recombination cannot happen.
Everything you say here is wrong. Everything you have said in this entire thread is wrong. Not slightly wrong, but completely at odds with the facts and with common sense and textbook knowledge. Your assertions are as baseless, ignorant, and wrong as the anti-vaxxer's nonsense about RNA vaccines changing DNA, and all the rest of it. It is appalling that you can recognize their ignorance, but you are blind to your own mistakes with regard to cold fusion. How can you possibly imagine -- for one second -- that heavy water and light water affect the performance of a calorimeter outside the cell?!? It is as if you have no knowledge of everyday physics. Kitchen level physics. You are stringing together words that mean nothing, about "exact amounts of liquid boiled." If you seriously think foam is a problem, why don't you boil some water in test tube? Find out. See for yourself. Drop a hot nail into water. Put a resistance heater in a test tube and see if it boils the water after the water falls below it. You make one crazy assertion after another, and you could test most of them easily, but you will not lift a finger to do that. It is the opposite of science when you refuse to check anything by experiment, even things that people have known to be true for thousands of years.
You seem to lack all self awareness and objectivity with regard to this subject. Everyone has blind spots, but this is an extreme example.
That is true. And as you know all three methods have severe issues.
Yes! Imaginary severe issues. In your mind alone. No one else can see them. No expert anywhere has pointed them out. All of the example "issues" you have proposed -- such as heavy and light water magically reaching out and affecting Seebeck calorimeters, or chemical retorts not working, or clocks unable to distinguish between 10 minutes and 3 hours -- are preposterous nonsense.
Something that you alone can see, which violates the laws of physics and common sense known to every cook for the last several thousand years has a name. It is called a delusion. You suffer from a delusion, brought about by the Dunning Kruger effect and an ego so large, I am amazed you can fit through a doorway.
But think more about the fact that trying to get clear evidence from such a complex dynamic system poorly instrumented is impossible.
Yes. That is why no one has any idea what the heat of vaporization of water is. People have been measuring it since the 18th century using Fleischmann's method. It has been in the textbooks for hundreds of years: 540 Cal/g. Chemists have been using retorts to distill water, alcohol, and countless other liquids since Medieval times, but the textbooks are all wrong and distillation does not work. Because you and Ascoli say so. You two -- and you alone -- know what the REAL heat of vaporization is. Someday you will reveal your knowledge to humanity. We will be grateful.
Also, you know when 10 minutes is actually 3 hours (3 hours, isn't it?!?) despite what clocks and wristwatches say. Your knowledge is God-like. Ineffable. Irrefutable! Not falsifiable! We stand in awe.
PayPal bans Free Speech and Sceptics
Following EU, UK, US Gov't orders?
The U.S. government has not issued any such orders. It cannot. That would violate the Constitution. More to the point, do you think PayPal would keep it secret if it was following U.S. Government orders? Are you familiar with U.S. corporations? I mean, were you born yesterday? Corporations do not take kindly to the government telling them what to do. They do not keep it secret.
When the government timidly suggests it might just be in the public interest for power companies to maybe think about not killing 20,000 people a year with coal smoke, the power companies raise holy hell and accuse the government of tyranny. When the government suggests that the increase in obesity from 15% to 42% of the population since 1960 might not be good for our health, and it might possibly have some connection to food marketing, fast food, and Dept. of Agriculture policies . . . the food industry raises hell and nothing is done. Obesity costs $173 billion and kills roughly 300,000 people per year (plus a lot more with COVID) but the industry prevents any effective public health response, or any education in public schools, or any change in public school menus, USDA price supports, or anything else. Granted, Uncle Sam does publishes the facts, and so does the medical establishment:
You people need to do a little more fact checking. There are no carbon offsets in the U.S., so the prices that FM1 and I have been discussing are not affected by carbon offsets. Virtually no electricity in the U.S. is generated with oil. Less than 1% of electricity generated with oil, mostly oil waste products that cannot be used for gasoline, such as residual fuel oil and petroleum coke, but not enough to affect the overall cost of electricity significantly.
Granted, if the cost of oil were to skyrocket to $20 per gallon, electric power company repair trucks and things like that would cost a lot more to operate. In that scenario, the cost of oil would affect the cost of electricity. But that has not happened. In fact, the cost of gasoline has not risen or fallen since 1978, in inflation adjusted dollars:
So it could not have caused inflation in the cost of electricity (above general inflation) even if we still used it. Which we stopped doing when the price rose in the 1970s, when OPEC raised the cost of oil.
I admit there is a ton information about energy that I do not know, but I try not to pontificate about things I know nothing about. I try to avoid making huge mistakes, such as saying that electricity costs are rising and gasoline costs are rising when every industry and government source shows they are not rising. Google makes it easy to fact check stuff like that. It is even better to read a bunch of books about energy.
Here is something I did not know. Bloomberg says they used to have carbon offsets in Europe but they stopped in 2021:
"The EU, which used to allow United Nations carbon offsets for compliance in its Emissions Trading System, imposed restrictions in the 2013-2020 period on concerns about their environmental integrity and banned them as of 2021. That sent the price of the credits to close to zero."
Anyone who follows energy news in the U.S. will know we don't have carbon offsets.
the price hikes has much less to do with Ukrain War or with lowering / rising production costs than with the much coveted Net Zero goals that are forcing many energy companies to buy Carbon offsets, the cost of which is being transfered to the end users. I tend to agree.
There are no carbon offsets in the U.S., so that cannot be affecting our costs.
There are some voluntary offsets, not enforced by anyone. These are real, but I think their primary goal is public relations. Being carbon neutral increases sales and revenue, the way advertising does. For example, Google says "carbon neutral since 2007." That's true, and it is important, because they use a lot of energy, but they are not doing that out of the goodness of their hearts, and not because any government agency told them to. They are doing it because the public is more likely to buy their products knowing they are carbon neutral. I buy Palmolive dish soap partly because a label on the bottle says, "made with recycled plastic 100%." I am willing to pay a few extra pennies for that. I don't know if it actually costs them more, but anyway, I'll pay more for it. It might be that Google pays less for carbon-neutral electricity than carbonous electricity, but either way, I don't mind paying extra for their good deed.
Huizenga's views can be found in his book, in Beaudette's book, and my summary of Beaudette on pages 39 and 40 here:
https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJreviewofth.pdf
I would say his views were also highly unscientific. Read his papers and judge for yourself. Always read primary sources. As they say at the Royal Society, "Nullius in verba" (Take no one's word for it).
what I care about is why such very smart people – the ERAB members – could have seen such clear and irrefutable evidence, and basically rejected it.
The ERAB panel was convened early in the history of cold fusion. They turned in their final report in November 1989. There was not much clear evidence at that time. Most replications had not even been published yet. The panel did ignore some of the unpublished information they collected. For example, when they talked to Mel Miles, he told them he had not seen any excess heat. Later on, he saw heat and he got back in touch with the panel. They ignored him, and in their final report they counted him as a negative.
The ERAB report did not summarily reject cold fusion. It recommended some funding. This recommendation was ignored. The head of the panel, Huizenga, said: "The present evidence for a new nuclear fusion process is just not persuasive." The article described the committee’s final report as differing "only slightly from a preliminary report the committee made public in July." Issuing a preliminary report in July was ridiculous.
The 2004 DoE review panel did reject clear and irrefutable evidence. See:
Their reasons for rejecting the evidence were highly unscientific, to say the least:
https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJresponsest.pdf
Like the ERAB panel, the 2004 DoE panel did recommend funding for cold fusion, but this recommendation was again ignored.
You keep claiming the cost of generating electricity is falling and that may be so but and it's a big but, it's not being passed on to the consumer.
It has to be passed on to the consumer. Every power company in the U.S. is regulated, and all the regulators insist on this.
Pretty obvious you don't pay the monthly electric bill.
I do. I quote my annual cost in my latest paper and lecture. (Okay, okay, my wife pays it, but I keep a spreadsheet.) Quoting myself:
ENERGY
Average residential energy costs are:
$115/month electricity, $1,380/year
Natural gas costs ~$100/month gas, $1,200/year. Much of this is used for space heating.
Electricity and gas total: $2,580/year. (Incidentally, this is close to what we pay at our house in Atlanta, Georgia. Electricity $1,164, natural gas $1,333.)
Now we pay more for the generation based on oil prices and for infustructure of your renewables.
Who is we? Where did you find this information? The data from the electric power industry, the EIA and all other sources I know of shows the cost of electricity has been falling steadily. Actually, it has been falling since the 1890s. I mean in constant dollars, counting inflation. From 1960 to 2011 it has fallen from 14.0 cents to 10.4 cents per kilowatt hour. It did reach lower points in 1979 and 1999, but the overall trend has been consistently down:
U.S. Energy Information Administration - EIA - Independent Statistics and Analysis
1979 and 1999 low prices were probably caused by economic downturns and high inflation. (These are inflation adjusted numbers.) It probably reached another low point in 2020, because the economic crisis.
Since the year 2000, the price of residential retail electricity has not changed:
During 2021, U.S. retail electricity prices rose at fastest rate since 2008
Oil is not used to generate electricity anywhere in the U.S. except Hawaii. It was phased out in the 1970s. Oil has no effect on the cost of electricity. It is not interchangeable with natural gas, which does affect electricity costs. See:
Electricity in the U.S. - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
"Petroleum was the source of less than 1% of U.S. electricity generation in 2021."
Hydroelectric is threatened worldwide, at present, capacity in some areas are down as much as 30% due to drought.
I read that too. It is awful. Until now, hydro has been the surest way to generate electricity. There have been cutbacks from time to time, such as in Washington State during droughts. They were not as drastic, and they did not last long. I do not think anyone anticipated a long lasting 30% cut.
Droughts also affect coal and nukes. They have gigantic cooling towers to cool down the spent steam. These are heat exchangers. They take a lot of water from rivers in the U.S.: 400 gallons per megawatt-hour. (In Japan they use ocean water, which is available in unlimited amounts, of course.) See:
Nuclear Power Plant Water Usage and Consumption
I think most combined cycle gas turbines use "dry" cooling towers, meaning the heat exchange is with air, not with water from a river or the ocean. I suppose this is because they are much more efficient than coal or nukes. Which is to say, they produce less waste heat per megawatt-hour. So I guess they can work with less effective cooling towers.
If you are wondering what a combined cycle gas generator is, here is nice little explanation:
The cost of electricity is only rising for the foreseeable future.
It has been falling rapidly for several years. Unless the climate crisis increases substantially -- which I cannot rule out -- there is no reason to think the cost of electricity will not continue to fall, as solar and wind become more common. Except in Georgia, where we will be paying outrageous sums for the two new Vogtle nukes for decades! Solar and wind cost the power company much less than any other source. They are replacing other sources as old plants wear out and are retired. Power companies are regulated and they have to pass on savings to the customers. So why will electricity become more expensive?
There is still plenty of ways to improve solar and wind, making them even cheaper. They are not at the end of the development cycle, the way combined cycle gas or coal are. Also, solar and wind are not affected by the climate crisis.
Conventional nukes are at the end of their development. But some radically new fission reactor might come along, such as the pebble bed one I mentioned above. I gather it would be cheaper.
One or other of these two judgements is correct. I do not need to imagine I know more than the minority side of it, when I am agreeing with the majority.
I agreed to stop with the political comments, but someone should answer this. It is completely wrong. THH is not agreeing with the majority. The vast majority of scientists who have read the cold fusion literature or done experiments are convinced the effect is real. I know only four scientists who read the literature yet still claimed the effect is not real: Morrison, Huizenga, Park and Britz. There may be a few others, but I know hundreds who are certain the effect is real. Of these four, only Morrison tried to give technical reasons to support his claims. I do not think his reasons had any scientific merit. Read them and see for yourself:
https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf
All of the other scientists in what THH calls the "majority" know nothing about cold fusion. They have read no papers. Most of them claim there are no papers. They do not know what instruments were used, what results were obtained, or what conclusions were drawn from these results. You can see this from the comments they publish in the mass media and on the internet. Therefore, they have no basis to judge. Their opinions do not count. Anyone can see they have no idea what they are talking about. You might as well tally up the opinions of professional baseball players or taxicab drivers. A scientist who has not read the literature has no business expressing an opinion about an experimental result. It would be like me pontificating about a Japanese author I have not read. Yes, I did study Japanese literature in translation and in the original. Yes, I did translate some short stories by well known modern authors in college. So I know more about Japanese literature than most people do. But I would be way out of line discussing an author I have not read.
The opinions of the 2004 Review panelists who voted against funding cold fusion also have zero scientific merit. They are elementary violations of the scientific method. If a seventh grade student were to write the kind of slop they wrote, you would give her a failing grade. See:
https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJresponsest.pdf
The panel members did not even try to challenge the technical issues, the way Morrison and THH have done. I guess they were smarter than that.
Jed, the shape of the cooling curve shows there was HAD It is convex, Without HAD it would be concave.
I assume you mean the calorimetry after the boil off. I covered this on pages 18 - 20 here:
https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJreviewofth.pdf
In a way, it is the easiest and most convincing of the three methods, because there is no input power. There is a dramatic difference between the blank cooling curve in Fig. 7 and the HAD curves in Figs. 8 and 9.
I covered this and the other methods under the tutelage of Mel Miles, who is quite the most rigorous and demanding professor I have ever studied under. I do not envy his students! I should also give credit to Biberian and Pons. This is like writing a paper on information theory which is reviewed and corrected by Claude Shannon. Kind of nerve wracking. But I am confident there are no stupid mistakes left in the paper.
