SRI confirms nuclear fusion startup's reactors are producing excess energy | Hacker News Reader

SRI confirms nuclear fusion startup's reactors are producing excess energy

lenr-forum.com

123 pointsthesausageking23 comments

> Importantly the results presented here, although modeled in a way to account for all input and output powers, do not use all of the heater power necessary to maintain temperature and the losses in the pulse generator, to calculate the COP. Brillouin engineers are confident that these power losses can be minimized or eliminated in future designs.

This pretty much negates the wow factor here IMHO. Or am I missing the point?

There is no wow factor at all. This was a case of notoriously difficult calorimetry measuring single digit wattage from a large device, under the control of Brillouin engineers in their facility. Or rather, the wow factor is just how hard people here are biting on this, presumably out of nothing more than sheer desire for it to be real.

Cold fusion (oh sorry, Low Energy Nuclear Reaction) research is a bad joke, unsupported by theory or practice.

> Cold fusion (oh sorry, Low Energy Nuclear Reaction) research is a bad joke, unsupported by theory or practice.

Is this really true?

After the huge scandal in the 80's, it's very much looked down on. It's worth noting that this "article" is a forum posting of what I think is a press release? That's not exactly reliable...

On the original cold fusion, from wikipedia:

Hopes faded due to the large number of negative replications, the withdrawal of many reported positive replications, the discovery of flaws and sources of experimental error in the original experiment, and finally the discovery that Fleischmann and Pons had not actually detected nuclear reaction byproducts.[5] By late 1989, most scientists considered cold fusion claims dead,[6][7] and cold fusion subsequently gained a reputation as pathological science

Yes.

There are Low Energy Nuclear reactions that can occur but their often catalyzed by a muon which requires _a lot_ of energy to produce. There has been so little academic research (recently) because experimental evidence hasn't been found and the simple well understood math makes such a system impossible. Wikipedia notes this in their 3rd paragraph on the subject [1].

Cold Fusion, or low-energy nuclear reactions, or condensed matter nuclear science is so far behind the pale of serious physics you might as well start trying to jump into orbit with your own two legs, or invent perpetual energy.

Lastly... Given how much the US and USSR spent on nuclear research in the cold war do you really think we missed a way making nuclear bombs smaller?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion

By the early '90s, when most cold fusion as fusion had been pretty much debunked, there were some researchers with good reputations as careful, competent experimenters who were starting to get some interesting results--not necessarily fusion, of course, but they pointed to something interesting and not understood going on.

But by that time, most people were no longer interested at looking at anything connected to cold fusion, so those interesting results weren't followed up on by others.

David Goodstein wrote an interesting article about that shortly afterward, in 1993 [1].

https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/fusion_art.html

Calorimetry is not perfect, and the “interesting” results have always been well within margins for error.

https://sciencing.com/calorimeter-its-limitations-8290898.ht...

If you would have cut it at the second sentence you would have been upvoted. No need for the two sentences of negative sentiment.

> Cold fusion (oh sorry, Low Energy Nuclear Reaction) research is a bad joke, unsupported by theory or practice.

I'm curious, as I only have a fairly shallow depth of knowledge on the subject, why there's been so many reports of large-scale Chinese (etc) investment in the field, if this is the case?

There have been reports of supposed large-scale Chinese investments into EmDrive as well. It's probably one or a combination of "don't believe everything you hear" and poor funding allocation in a corrupt system.

The possible rewards often blind people to the implausibility of the claims made by cold fusion. Politicians and investors are rarely people with a deep knowledge of nuclear physics either, and time and again both are routinely swindled. Theranos is a fine example of how a lot of greed and ignorance parts fools from their money.

I have a book called "yes, we have no neutrons" by Alexander Dewdney. Written during the Pons/Fleischmann years.

It talks a LOT about the fundamental characteristics of bad science and pretty high up the list, is publication by publicity event.

If its not in peer review, then I think we're entitled to say hmmmmm

Yes, its SRI. But its also a commissioned report.

Technical report is here: http://brillouinenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/SRI_Te...

I can’t find any mention of this report from SRI, only on Brillouin’s site, and other cold fusion pages. Given the insanely high bar of reasonable skepticism any claim of cold fusion has to meet, this is suspicious.

I mean, it’s no more suspicious than any claim of “over-unity” from people raising millions to follow in the footsteps of Pons and Fleischman. Meanwhile I’m shocked that an essentially unsupported pseudo report on cold fusion of all things is the top post on the front page here!

What gives?

The report claims to be written by "Francis Tanzella", who seems to actually exist and probably even works at SRI. However, the report claims that he's the PI and Manager of "Low Energy Reactions Research Program", and I see no evidence that such a program exists.

And the progress report from roughly a year ago is here: http://brillouinenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/SRI_Pr...

"During 2017, the calorimeter design was modified to match the analytical methodology suggested by an independent commercial third-party reviewer, who is also overseeing their suggested stimulation and analyses (see dynamic stimulation below)."

Looking at both years side-by-side is interesting, there's slight differences in the figures and text where some things are added and some details removed.

"I can make a fusion reactor that produces excess energy. I just need a little excess energy to 'sharpen it up a bit'."

Just need to open up an actual power plant now. I hope that doesn't take another half a century.

It’s not clear this is fusion. Sounds like it might be fission. Anyone have better info?

This has to be Not the most important news of the 21st century

LENRs have been under study for years. Toyota sunk two years into research and many universities can reproduce these studies .. some of the times. Consistency is key to figuring out how/why these reactions work.

For a somewhat outdated, yet still interesting, documentary on the matter, I suggest watching Fire from Water.

Reading the reports, it looks like the outstanding fact here is that they’ve been consistently able to reproduce the same results with different setups, in different reactors, in different configurations. In every case with Q > 1.

If there isn’t a major measurement error or fraud that occurred here, this looks like the best result yet for LENR.

I’ll still bet on the Stellerator design, though.

If it were real, someone from C-Systems would have already shown up and everyone at Brilloune would be running from the FBI

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