Result of Cold Fusion experiment claimed a success of 470kW output | Hacker News Reader

Result of Cold Fusion experiment claimed a success of 470kW output

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33 pointswavephorm21 comments

So it produced 470kW of electricity. But there was a 500kW generator hooked up to it running the whole time. Mystery solved.

That sucks. I don't believe in free energy, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Actually, if you read the article, the output was being independently verified.

Independently verified by a mysterious "unnamed customer."

It's really irritating. I have training in physics and actually think cold fusion is a very promising area of research. But jokers like this dude end up giving it a bad name, which makes it harder to do real research on it without losing funding for your other projects, which makes legitimate scientists pass over it even more, which makes even more loons take the stage.

Le sigh.

Right, but unless I misunderstood something, the generator hooked up to it could have been an input, making it imminently possible to produce the verified output without actually performing cold fusion.

I'm not saying that this is what happened, but that's a pretty important loophole in all this, no?

There are more videos floating around of this eCat system:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhvD4KuAEmo&feature=playe...!

If it's all a hoax, it's a very elaborate one.

If it isn't a hoax, why wouldn't they disconnect the generator to remove doubt?

"Once the reaction chambers got up to temperature, they were maintained by the heat produced by the reaction. I'm not sure why they kept the generator running after that, but I would guess it was for back-up or safety. I'm sure the engineers testing the system made sure what the power levels were at all times."

I'm not sure I buy the explanation.

Looks like article tries to answer this : "Probably the biggest opening for skeptics will be the continually running genset that is probably rated for 500 kW (my guess), and appears to have been connected by cables to the E-Cat. "Where's the mystery?" So knock yourselves out, skeptics. It's the customer who has to be happy, and apparently this one was satisfied that those cables were not contributing to the 470 kW output during self-sustaining mode."

It is still need to be independently verified in controlled environment though.

The "customer" is probably part of the scam. It doesn't smell like a scam, it reeks like a scam.

I'm not saying anything about the validity of this technology, but it's a mistake to lump this in with things that violate the laws of thermodynamics. The energy is supposed to come from fusion of a cheap fuel.

Though there may be other reasons to reject cold fusion, it's hard to rule out that some future technology will draw power from something plentiful. To an earlier level of science, running a steam engine from a lump of heavy metal would also be free energy.

Assuming the cited 470kW was an average rate, 470kW times 5.5 hours ~= 9.3 gigaJoules. [1]

Pick your choice of divisor off of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density . A convenient one is gasoline, at 34.2 megajoules per liter, for 272 liters of gasoline ignoring the oxygen [2], or about 72 gallons of gasoline for us backward folks in the US.

Or Lithium-ion batteries, at the high end of .9 MJ/kg according to Wikipedia[3], that's about 10,000 kilograms of battery [4].

I don't know what this means, just thought the math would be helpful. It seems like we are getting up into the domain where if there really is a hidden generator doing this, it really ought to be pretty obvious, and ISTM we are getting out of the domain of measurement error or trivial-and-brief chemical reaction rounding error. If this is a fraud, it's a bold one. Fraud is still my dominant theory pending further confirmation, but someone (I consider) trustworthy confirming those numbers would shake my beliefs up quite a bit.

[1]: http://www.google.com/search?q=(5.5+hours+*+470+kilowatts)+i...

[2]: http://www.google.com/search?q=(5.5+hours+*+470+kilowatts)+/...

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery , see sidebar

[4]: http://www.google.com/search?q=(5.5+hours+*+470+kilowatts)+/...

What about the 500kW generator hooked up to it? That would explain it.

Sounds like a scam.

I'm not saying it isn't. Just that those are the numbers. As I said, if it's a scam, it's a bold one, even by free energy standards; just leaving the generator running is pretty obvious to anybody, and I mean, obvious to my metaphorical grandmother (you know, the one who can't turn on a computer). If the observers "missed" that then they are clearly in cahoots. This is why I said I'd want "trustworthy" confirmation, not anonymous.

If this is a scam it almost belongs on Hacker News just so it can be analyzed for future posterity as a marketing hack.

It seems to me like the only one who was actually doing any serious confirming was some mysterious and anonymous “customer”. Sorry, that’s just not good enough.

Gosh, I seem to recall saying something quite like that. Maybe you're hitting the wrong "reply" or something?

I think this is more like it: http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3934

Why is someone spending their time trying to figure out free energy, when we have the sun and thermal energy that is untapped and plentiful? Seems like a waste of time, we need to be working on getting the costs of real solutions down so they can be adopted and used more widespread.

The same reason people were developing internal combustion engines when they should have been focusing on how to breed faster and bigger horses.

Because wind and solar etc have a few disadvantages, especially that they are not steady, sometimes the wind is strong, sometimes none, sometimes the sun shines, sometimes it doesn't (especially during the night). And power grids don't like energy like that, it can collapse the whole grid. So you have to buffer your energy, and that is expensive and not so easy to do. Nuclear or (if it works one day) fusion will give you a steady source of energy.

This is not a free energy device, there is mass loss.

A secret experiment, limited only to an unknown customer.

SCAM.

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