Cold Fusion: Are We There Yet?

It’s a story that’s had more twists and turns than a good spy novel. It started so well, but nearly two years on, have the wheels fallen off the LENR bus or is it about to take off at high speed?

In January 2011 a small and relatively quiet public demonstration was held in Bologna, Italy of a tabletop device called the eCat (Energy Catalyzer).   What was so special about this device you may ask?  Simply that it has the potential to change the world.

Simplified eCat reactor diagram

Nickel Hydrogen Fuel

The eCat (we are told), uses minute amounts of powdered Nickel and Hydrogen in a pressurized “reactor” (only a few inches in size) to create small LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions), or CALENR (Chemically Assited Low Energy Reactions) – these surface reactions result in the production of vast quantities of heat, many times in excess of what should be possible, and way beyond the energy that could be harvested from any chemical reaction.  The nickel-hydrogen fuel (rumoured now be in the form of a solid hydride) lasts approximately 6 months before it needs replacing in the form of a new cartridge, and since Nickel is one of the cheapest and most abundant materials on earth, the fuel cartridges should quite literally be “dirt-cheap”.

Safety

So what about safety you ask? – well, what makes this technology even better is that the particular reaction involved in this process does not produce any radioactive waste or harmful bi-products. What seems to be produced are trace amounts of copper  – a bi-product of the transmutation of the Nickel.

The end of polluting forms of energy?

The possibilities in application? – endless.  First of all, there would be obvious implications for the energy sector with trillion dollar markets in oil, coal, gas and renewables under increasing threat, not to mention the ever more controversial nuclear industry. The first impact though, would be on the stock market, where any serious and credible announcement of a viable replacement for fossil fuels would have an immediate financial impact.  The actual real impacts in production would most likely be limited and short-lived as a slow transition away from oil, coal, gas and nuclear gradually gathered pace -possibly taking many decades to occur.

Rossi Meets Massachusetts State Senate Minoriy Leader Bruce E. Tarr

Andrea Rossi

The inventor of the eCat – an Italian engineer named Andrea Rossi was working with Greek firm, Defkalion Green Technologies and together would commercialize the technology for use in both industrial premises and the wider household consumer market.  All was going to plan until later in 2011 the two parties had a disagreement of sorts which resulted in each continuing down their own separate path to commercialization – but now of course as direct competitors.

The drama continued to unfold with high level endorsements of the eCat from extremely reputable scientists, a Nobel physics prize winner, and other suitably qualified individuals. NASA even got involved, but nothing materialized in the way of an official endorsement or joint development – despite an admission that LENR is the energy of the future.  Meanwhile, the saga continued to polarize opinions with Rossi’s colourful past and his unconventional style being used to argue against the validity of his claims.  Soon a 1MW plant (made from 50 or so smaller eCats housed in a shipping container) was shown off and apparently sold to a customer for the princely sum of 1 million dollars.  The mysterious unknown customer? apparently a branch of the military who is still to this day “publicity shy”.

Rossi stands in front of the 1MW eCat plant housed in a shipping container.

A year of constant drama followed with what seemed an endless stream of negatively charged articles (surely particles? –  Ed.) from Widom-Larsen proponents – New Energy Times.  It didn’t stop there either.  Next to crash the party was Australian millionaire entrepreneur and outspoken pseudosceptic Dick Smith, who waved his more than ample wallet with an offer of one million cases of vegemite dollars to Rossi for a successful demonstration of the eCat.

Rossi treated the offer with disdain, but Defkalion were up for the challenge and jumped at the invitation.  In the end though, both parties could not agree on various aspects of the test protocols, and so no wager ever took place.

Today, Rossi continues to communicate directly to supporters through his suitably named Journal Of Nuclear Physics blog, with commercialization still the focus.  Several refinements and improvements later – the eCat is now purported to be “solid state” (whatever that means), the hydrogen gas bottle has now been replaced with a solid hydrogen pellet and the new operational temperature of the eCat is now claimed to be 600 1,000, 1200 degrees centigrade, but to date there has been no solid verifiable independent test results despite many suitably qualified observers staking their reputations that it works as described.

Meanwhile Defkalion have fell silent, despite assurances that they would post independent test results from various qualified testers. The only “evidence” of progress in over 6 months are two pdf documents. One was  a photographic progress report released several months ago and then again at the end of June, a second progress report. Also unchanged in several months is a page on the website advertising thirty eight supposed job vacancies – everything from electrical engineers to account executives.  The latest information seems to be that they intend to leave Greece and focus development of their Hyperion product in Canada, so where does that leave the Greek based job advertisements one wonders?

There is no doubt that LENR can produce excess energy in the form of heat, but the problem for many is that both the stability of the reactions and power figures Rossi and Defkalion claim (in the Kw/h range) are way beyond what everyone else in the industry seems to be able to  achieve. Meanwhile other individuals are publishing results and are not claiming such out of this world power output, such as Francesco Celani (video below).

So 6-12 months from now will the world wake up to a new era of clean energy generation? In the absence of solid unambiguous independent confirmation, one”s belief or skepticism  simply comes down to a weighing up of the circumstantial evidence presented so far.

Both Defkalion and Rossi exhibit supreme confidence in their respective aims to develop a commercially available product – if the answer to the question of whether they have a verifiable working product could be gleaned from sheer outward confidence and grandstanding alone, then it would be a resounding yes – for those waiting for solid unquestionable third-party proof, the wait continues.

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