Sounds just like the E-cat reactors that Rossi and Focardi have been selling in Italy for that past couple of years.
Paul van Dinther
Fueling a flying car with egg shells and banana peels suddenly sounds a lot less ridiculous (Movie: Back to the future). There is an absolute abundance of energy out there. Latent heat in the Earth, Chemical energy, Fission from the sun and nuclear in various shapes and forms. It is kind of crazy that people keep telling us we are running out of energy. It would violate the first law of thermodynamics.
Kris Lee
Andrea Rossi Energy Catalyzer anyone? The NASA guys did visit him. I'm wondering why he is not mentioned here and how related this and his story are.
The Skud
I wish him well, but if the 'Green' lobby doesn't scare-monger it out of business - NUCLEAR, Everybody Panic - then the big power suppliers will find another way to close it down. I hope his relatives have taken out a lot of life insurance on his good self.
Scion
I don't think anyone is saying we are running out of energy in absolute terms. It is more a case of being limited by economics and technology. There is only so much fossil fuel we can extract, only so much sunlight we can reasonably turn into electricity and only so much fissile material we can mine and refine. I am excited to see the boundaries of theoretical physics being pushed in a rational way (see e-cat device for irrational).
The cool thing is the waste out of this reaction would be copper which is a useful product in itself. I am dubious that we'll discover the method to start the proposed reaction, if the reaction is possible in any way other than theory.
Kris Lee
@me Likely Rossi is just a conman but I like to know more about those melted windows. Do you refer to the uncontrolled process?
nutcase
Hmmm... submillimetre radiation. Very tricky. Beyond microwaves, not quite infra-red. Just beyond the threshold of direct measurement. Good luck there. No one's really cracked it yet.
Anne Ominous
Yes, it does sound just like Rossi's device. This is precisely the process he claims to create, except that he claims to be using some kind of catalyst rather than terahertz waves. Whether Rossi is a conman or not I cannot say, but one thing we do know is that his device produces excess heat. We also know that he has successfully sold arrays of devices that reportedly output in the 10MW range... and that is something that is pretty hard to fake. We also know that a separate company that they and Rossi both claim to have evaluated Rossi's device also claims to know what the catalyst is, and is selling devices of their own. So... I make no claims about the science or whether it's a scam or somehow real. But last I heard there were 2 separate firms making and selling Rossi-style devices. I am adopting a wait-and-see attitude.
Anne Ominous
Also... submillimeter waves? Hmmm. Maybe a good use for all those scanners the TSA is trying to dump off on other departments.
Gerrit
There is a 5.5 million USD project running at University of Missouri.
Robert Duncan, Vice Chancellor for Research writes: "There have been great advances in this discipline over the last five years by research labs and private institutions around the world, and this work will be explored at ICCF-18. The Naval Research Lab (NRL), and many other excellent laboratories have confirmed that the excess heat effects reported by Fleischmann and Pons are real, and roughly one thousand times larger than can be attributed to a chemical process." Missouri U together with Purdue will host the international conference on cold fusion in July this year.
At the NETS-2013 meeting (Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space, organized by the ANS) starting Monday 25 Feb, George Miley from Illinois (UIUC) will speak about his research in this field.