Thomas's Comments

A 470 kilowatt system was shipped in September to a customer, who has ordered 12 more units. The customer's name was not disclosed but the acceptance testing was semi open to many invited scientists.
You can keep up with developments on Rossi's blog here:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=510#comments

Tim Both the nickel and the hydrogen consumption are so low that insignificant amounts are used. Nuclear reactions use one millionth as much fuel as they are based on E=MC2

The public testing is over. The customer loaded the container on a truck and took it home. Rossi won the order. The customer was only interested in self-sustaining mode, which is why the power was only half what we expected. The 1 MW mode required a continuous electrical supply of 167 KW which limits its practical use to heating. Heating applications account for more than half of our fuel consumption so they are significant. Customer tests are all that matter. Cynical academics like maryyugo think that products undergo peer review. They don't.
Though Rossi will eventually develop a power generator, thermal generation is so inefficient that I think the future will be in clean Boron fusion like that being worked on by Lawrenceville.
Nuclear reactions don't have to be dirty. The world will soon learn that. Since the energy content of fuel with nuclear reactions is a million times greater, having a safe version will transform our economy and make coal and oil totally non-competitive just based on economics.

Posted on his blog:
Andrea Rossi
October 27th, 2011 at 9:03 AM
Dear RockEye:
Thank you: now it's 4 p.m. of the 27th, and we are finishing the cosmetics of the plant. I think tomorrow we will make, with the help of God, a good job. My work, basically, is finished. Within one hour the Consultants of the Customer will arrive to start the check of all the parts of the plant and prepare all their stuff for the test of tomorrow. Until some hour ago I felt a strong pressure, now, at the eve of the battle, as usual, I am recovering all my coldness and calm. We are ready.
Warm Regards,
A.R.

anon " the notion that a bureaucracy could identify the best research directions to fund prizes for is highly dubious."
You are completely misunderstanding what I said. Prizes should not be for specific goals like "most efficient corn ethanol" They should be for general goals that are guaranteed not to be dead end, For example the $10 million Ansari X-prize for space travel was for bringing people into space twice in two weeks. No technology was specified, just the general goal. That challange resulted in 26 teams from 7 different nations spending $100 million to reach the goal using diverse creative ideas. Since spaceshipone won the prize $150 billion has been spent on the private space travel industry.
Lindburg's flight to Paris was to get a $25,000 prize. Nine teams spent $400,000 total trying for the prize. The $400 billion commercial aviation industry grew rapidly beginning in 1927.
Your notion that "science progresses most rapidly when ideas are exchanged openly, with rapid presentation of findings in conferences followed by publication of full details in peer reviewed journals" sounds nice in theory but does not agree with reality. The peer review process is controlled by people who have become rich with government subsidies. They use it to silence voices that may kill their golden goose. The discovery of cold fusion was sabotaged by physicists who saw it as a threat to their billion dollar Tokamak fusion projects. For 60 years we have wasted money on that misguided idea while people like Rossi had to work underground and create their own journals to discuss their work which was blackballed in the mainstream journals.
We could have had Rossi's breakthrough a decade earlier if the "big science" establishment hadn't sabotaged Pons and Fleischman's breakthrough.

anon "Do we really want the DOE giving money out to industrialists based on claims of super secret catalysts? The DOE would very rapidly become a laughing stock if they started doing that."
They already somewhat of a laughing stock. A giant government bureaucracy subject to political pressures from all sorts of special interests who contribute heavily to political campaigns is bound to do a terrible job of picking winners.
With a fraction of the money that they now redistribute to well-connected interests, they could easily create X-prize type awards that are goal oriented and not technology specific. A clean, safe power plant with a certain cost/watt for example could be immediately rewarded with a large cash prize upon successful demonstration. This would unlock billions in private research money that would be intelligently allocated by smart investors who are now afraid of the long time horizon for actual profits from such a project.
As a liberal Democrat I am surprised to find myself agreeing with Ron Paul's proposal to shut down the DOE and many other agencies that simply channel money to their well-connected friends.

Thanks! Interesting. They apparantly actually achieved 3.7 billion degrees K (6.6 billion F) according to this article:
http://www.mhdprospects.com/pdf/comments_on_haines_paper.pdf
Unfortunatly, the Sandia setup is the size of two Olympic swimming pools and they are blowing up wires so it's a one-shot reaction. The nice thing about LPP's machine is that it is very compact and designed to ultimatly cycle 1000 times per second for continuous output. It also produces focused electron beams so efficient conversion to electrical output is easy. It's an elegant and simple solution that will cost an estimated $300k to build.

I love the idea of a big prize for something the world really needs but the world doesn't need hydrogen power. We need clean, cheap power. The government loves to pick technologies and the hydrogen economy was one of the dumbest choices they ever made. Hydrogen just wants to fly into space. We can try to pin it down but the result is always inconvenient and expensive because we are fighting nature. They have already wasted enough on this dumb idea to create a special interest group that is trying to keep the gravy train going.
Prizes should be defined only by goals. Clean electricity at two cents per kilowatt hour would be a good goal.
It can be done and a prize would unleash a lot of creative private investment.
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/08/really-cheap-really-clean-electricity-from-boron

Wow! Try reading the article!
Yes "nuclear", as in bombs and existing power plants, is a bad word. I have been crusading against it for years in my articles in Renewable Energy World. But these new breakthroughs produce no neutrons and are completely clean and sustainable. They will have much less negative environmental impact than utility-scale wind or solar if they work as planned. Open up your mind and don't let "the n word" cloud your thinking. Welcome progress and judge it, not by old prejudices but by looking at the facts. In the meantime let's keep working hard with the best technology we have now. So far we are losing the battle so we need all the help we can get.

Steven The claims were no more tenuous than early semiconductor work which took decades of work to get reliable results.
Rossi is not a physicist. He is an engineer and businessman. In the world of business secrets are kept and there is no obligation to explain inner workings to the competition.
A recent theoretical paper from Purdue may shed some light on the theory. First on the list here:
http://www.physics.purdue.edu/people/faculty/yekim.shtml
A good theory would be nice but, since we still don't have a good theory for permanent magnetism it shouldn't stop us.

anon You are demonstrating how denial works and it is frightening. Now you have glanced at the Mallove link but not really read it. Please look at the two versions of the graph and try to see that the newer one is clearly a fabrication to make the result negative. It is the elephant under the rug that you cannot see.
Also how about the headline story that MIT arranged to appear on the day of the big APS meeting where Caltech got a standing ovation for their, later discredited, failure to replicate.
I hate to repeat myself but 60 years and tens of billion dollars with no usable result except a theory is hardly comparable to 22 years with a few million financing that produces a useful product.

anon represents the typical scientist who has heard from others that cold fusion could never be replicated but has never taken the trouble to read any facts for himself. His arguments make it quite clear that he didn't bother to click on the references I provided in the article. For example, if he just clicked on "MIT" he would find a paper written by Dr Eugene Mallove, who resigned from the MIT publications office when he discovered earlier drafts of the MIT paper with different data clearly showing excess heat. There are even photocopies of both versions.
Likewise he seems to be unaware of any replications even though I linked to one of the hundreds that have been published. Being unaware doesn't mean much when you denial keeps you from reading anything.
You can start by reading the links on the things you are disagreeing on before shooting off your mouth.
Also, there are plenty of theories to explain LENRs but it will take a while to get agreement. It doesn't help when all of the major journals smugly reject all articles mentioning LENR.
22 years isn't very long compared to the 60 years hot fusion has failed to even achieve break-even. They did make a good theory though. I'll take useful power over theories any day.

I agree. Power generation should should be distributed, where it is needed. Those gigawatt nuclear plants produce so much waste heat that it must be thrown away by heating up a river or ocean. With distributed power, generation is put where heat is needed so the waste heat can be put to good use. I am not advocating anything like the nuclear power plants of today. LENR is clean, safe and radiation-free and can be sized to the application.

Bill I agree that we should take the free energy offered by nature but that takes a lot of work and a lot of resources. Wind, for example uses a lot of steel and energy in its construction and then we need ugly and expensive power lines to get the power to the customer. LENR can produce the power where it is needed. Vehicles can produce their own power without massive batteries and recharging. A nickel coin has enough nickel to produce 2.5 megawatt-hours on real reactors of today, so fuel consumption is almost zero. LENR may actually be more sustainable than many renewable technologies in the long run.

Upali Your body also contains a natural radioactive isotope of potassium that is continually producing radiation as it decays. Here is a reference:
"The source of these gammas is K-40 which has a half-life of 1.26 billion years, and is the main source of radioactivity inside the body...
"There are 1.2 radioactive atoms of 40K for every 10,000 nonradioactive atoms of potassium. There is of the order of 140 g of potassium in an adult who weighs 70 kg, and 0.0169 g consists of the 40K isotope. This amount of 40K disintegrates at the rate of 266,000 atoms per minute. Of every 100 disintegrations, 89 result in the release of beta particles with maximum energy of 1.33 MeV, and 11 result in gamma photons with an energy of 1.46 MeV. All of the beta particles and about 50 percent of the gamma rays are absorbed in the body, giving annual doses of 16 mrad from the beta particles and 2 mrad from the gamma rays." 1 So about 14,600/min of the 1.46 MeV gammas exit the whole body, in all directions."
http://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k16940&pageid=icb.page102829&pageContentId=icb.pagecontent270775&state=maximize&view=view.do&viewParam_name=indepth.html#a_icb_pagecontent270775