Cautiously getting excited

via the Next Big Future blog:

They're calling it a "new kind of physics" which is "enigmatic".

Of the 3 possibilities of fraud, error, or scientific revolution, the probability of error is now much less. If it's a fraud, it'll be one of the great scientific frauds in history. If it's real, it will mark a turning point in human history.


Meanwhile the Italians seem pretty confident. They have shrunk the reactor down to improve some of its performance and remain on track with their plan to connect 300 of these in various series and parallel circuits to build a 1 Megawatt generator. Target is Oct of this year, so their confidence is high. They apparently have a customer.

Details from a Swedish newspaper, NyTeknik:

The reactor itself, which is loaded with the nickel powder and secret catalysts pressurized with hydrogen, has an estimated volume of 50 cubic centimeters (3.2 cubic inches). The reactor is made of stainless steel.

At a first meeting with Rossi at the end of February they were given access to a sample of the pure nickel powder, intended for use in the energy catalyzer, and another sample of nickel powder which, according to Rossi, had been used in the reactor for 2.5 months.

Their analyses showed that the pure powder consists of essentially pure nickel, while the used powder contains several other substances, mainly 10 percent copper and 11 percent iron.

“Provided that copper is not one of the additives used as catalyst, the copper isotopes 63 and 65 can only have been formed during the process. Their presence is therefore a proof that nuclear reactions took place in the process,” Kullander said

Analyses of the nickel powder used in Rossi’s energy catalyzer show that a large amount of copper is formed. Sven Kullander considers this to be evidence of a nuclear reaction.

For copper to be formed out of nickel, the nucleus of nickel has to capture a proton. The fact that this possibly occurs in Rossi’s reactor is why the concept of cold fusion has been mentioned – it would consist of fusion between nuclei of nickel and hydrogen. A term that many consider to be more accurate, however, is LENR, Low Energy Nuclear Reaction.


[SNIP]


Kullander: Provided that copper is not one of the additives used as catalyst, the copper isotopes 63 and 65 can only have been formed during the process. Their presence is therefore a proof that nuclear reactions took place in the process. However, it’s remarkable that nickel-58 and hydrogen can form copper-63 (70%) and copper-65 (30%). This means that in the process, the original nickel-58 should have grown by five and seven atomic mass-units, respectively, during the nuclear transmutation. However, there are two stable isotopes of nickel with low concentration, nickel-62 and nickel-64, which could conceivably contribute to copper production. According to Rossi copper is not among the additives. 100 grams of nickel had been used during 2.5 months of continuous heating with 10 kW output power. A straightforward calculation shows that a large proportion of the nickel must have been consumed if it was ‘burned’ in a nuclear process. It’s then somewhat strange that the isotopic composition doesn’t differ from the natural.