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Comment by consultutah | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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