You can troll me all ya want. I'm pretty sure Rossi's a fraud. He does have a track record there...
I'd happily take substantial bets with me betting on the fraud side, with some fixed duration from pretty much all comers. Say, $10,000 each share?
http://xkcd.com/955/
This kind of stuff I get asked about all the time, so often it gets boring. Alt energy is a great place to be a scammer because there are so many starry eyed hopefuls to part from their money.
In this particular case, someone who knows the guy got a few details and tried to dupe his work, and did get some energy - about the amount you'd get burning that much hydrogen with the oxygen adsorbed on a nickel catalyst surface. No more.
He looked for copper with good gear (mass spectrometer). None.
He documented his attempt over on fusor.net FWIW. It was fairly convincing.
Such as it exists, Rossi's theory is that you can add a proton to a nickel atom and wind up with copper after a decay event. I don't think the masses work out, but since there are a few isotopes of each (with different numbers of neutrons and different non-integer masses due to different binding forces) it takes a lot of work with numbers more precise than in the chemistry books to even find out if there's such a reaction possible that has a mass defect at all. The simple calcs say, nope, you go up in total mass, and have to put in energy to do that.
I could probably utterly debunk his theory if he had one - I don't think there's even a mass discrepancy in the correct direction between what goes in and what comes out, and you need that unless we're going to say mass/energy isn't conserved. We know of no exceptions to that one at the moment, and no hints that we might be wrong.
And that's Rossi's problem - even he says he doesn't understand it, there's no theory at all.
I did see Rossi's patent application - it was rejected for non-specificity. His papers were rejected by everybody but a publisher he set up. In other words, it has all the hallmarks of every scam this business has ever seen, rather than an honest mistake. Which is what most of us think Pons and Fleischman was.
I won't say LENR (cold fusion) isn't possible - because it is, theoretically. But the theory of how things work isn't predictive of how you'd do it, any more than E-MC^2 tells you how to do that - it just says what would happen if you could convert one to the other and how much.
The more we know, the smaller the world of possibilities becomes. If you posit some new theory, well, it has to explain all the existing observations - and the wiggle room there is only getting smaller. It's a big universe and it seems almost anything that could happen has happened and been observed out there - for example, the dark matter theory, when really worked out, would tend to predict different abundance of the elements than astronomers actually observe - so it's not right, for certain. There might be some variation that IS, just that the extant one is certainly wrong.
Now, under the standard model, if you could change say, the Coulomb force, or maybe Planck's constant - man you could do things and go places. But so far we've never observed - from particle accelerators to deep space - any hint that this could be possible, and there's no way in existing theory that it could happen. In some cases if it happened anywhere, it would destroy the universe more or less instantly, so the fact that were here tends to say it doesn't happen. Why those two? I can explain, hopefully without too much complexity.
Lets take one of the simpler and easier to do reactions for fusion, which is deuterium with another D going into something else, one possibility is He (rare). That one gives 16 Mev of energy out as an X ray. The other two give a proton and Tritium, or a neutron and He3 and roughly 3.5 mev excess energy. Here's the isotopes involved:
D is a proton and a neutron, heavy hydrogen
T is a proton and two neutrons, heavier hydrogen. Nasty, radioactive stuff.
He3 is helium but only has one neutron.
He has two of each - so two D's can be one He.
How can that last one give energy? After all, it's the same number of the same stuff as you put in. But - it weighs less than two D's. The reason is the binding force between the protons and neutrons is more "satisfied" in He than it is in the D's. It's as though they all fit better into He than they do as D's. The energy released could be thought of as what happens when a stretched rubber band is allowed to relax, and He weighs just a very little bit less than two Ds because of that.
Further, due to things that are quite similar to the reasons electron shells are as they are in chemistry - the pieces "want" to get together in just this way. You have two protons of opposite spin with two neutrons also opposite filling a "shell" just like in chemistry. You'd think they want to get together like that, and actually they do.
Here's the problem. Those protons repel each other - like charges. They are pretty light (takes 6.02 e 23 of them to make a gram) but the forces required to push two to touching are huge - on the order of pounds/tons. Several mega electron volts (which is a small unit, so the number is big) - but remember, we only got 16 mev out at best because the 'mass defect" is also really small, much less than the weight of a single proton. Thus we need to put in energy (heat!) in some way to get them close enough together for the strong force to pull them in the rest of the way - that's hot fusion. Cold stuff doesn't have the energy to get there, which is why the sun is such a rotten fusion reactor (it's not that hot on this scale), even with heat and all that gravity pushing it all together - it's only so much gravity, and there's not enough to be pounds per nucleus. You should be glad it is - else it would have gone bang like an H bomb. My own fusion reactor has FAR higher energy density. So, solve that repulsion problem (the Couloumb effect) and there you are -
Or,
As luck would have it, due to the uncertainty principle, and quantum mechanics (wave functions) particles are also waves, and kind of have no definite position. What this means is that we don't have to make them touch to get them to stick, quite. That's called quantum tunneling, and yes, it's real and I can verify that.
But those wavefunctions are still tiny - it's not much help with this - because Planck's constant is also very tiny. We know of no way to increase that at present, and if it happened in nature, the universe would be a very different place - good evidence that if it does happen, it's really rare.
For reference, to get close enough to tunnel, here I need about 16 kev on each D to push them close enough (actually put enough speed on each and aim them at one another) such that one in about 10 million fuse - tunneling is probabalistic so some happens farther out - wavefunctions are like that - the distribution has "tails". This corresponds to millions of degrees if you treat it as a temperature, but I don't because my D's aren't hot - hot things have randomly directed motion, and I avoid that which is why I'm doing so well. The other 5 degrees of freedom (there are X, Y Z, and spin around all three as degrees of freedom) are just wasted input energy.Thus, even my high energy fusion is in one sense "cold" - I avoid randomness.
So, for cold fusion to work, you need to somehow overcome that repulsion to get things close enough together to make tunneling happen. EG, either make the repulsion go away (somehow reduce the effects of like charges), or make the uncertainty bigger (increase Planck's constant). Any theory that purports to be the key to fusion has to handle that some way.
There's one more possibility - due to the tails, some fusion can happen even with things pretty far apart due to the tails on the wavefunctions. But those tails are super tiny - it falls off faster than simple exponential. So you could hope that if you had some sort of situation where things bounced close and far, close and far (which needn't take energy if there's a pefect spring) that fusion might happen rarely, but you could try a lot of times for free - kind of like a guitar string might "ring" a long time from one picking - and maybe break on a peak of deflection once in awhile. I think that's what the LENR guys are hoping, but frankly if you read what they write, they are so dead wrong and unschooled on things we know for sure, it's hard to take them seriously.
But actually, and this is where I'm working now, there's just one more way. Perfect aim. If you could aim a D perfectly at another D and hit it every time, just like a benchrest shooter - (which implies very low temperature, no wiggling allowed) but with energy on it in just one degree, say X axis - then with that 32kev of energy you could get 100% fusion rates, and each fusion gives off either around 3 mev, or 16 mev, depending on the reaction pathway taken (which depends on the spins of the incoming protons and neutrons in the D's, so my theory goes). At any rate, that's decent net gain. Actually, to get to 100% rate, you'd need about 250kev energy - but that's still decent gain - call it 64 to one.
But - in a solid substance, say frozen D, the nuclei are the size of golf balls spaced roughly 1/3 of a mile apart, and it's very hard to squeeze them closer together. If you take out the electrons, they repel each other with a force no material can resist. If you leave them in the electrons hold them apart due to the geometry of their "orbits" which aren't really that as most picture them, but it works out similarly anyway. ( quantum wavefunctions are cool looking dipoles and multipoles but it takes pictures to get a hint how it really works and looks)
So, all you'd have to do is have a crystal where you know with high precision where every single nucleus was - and a perfect ion shooter gun to aim at the golf balls and miss all the grass in between, without of course, jiggling anything when you did hit one. What we do in particle accelerators or beam on target devices is more like shooting at the field of golf balls with a shotgun from a helicopter - you mostly miss, and most of the lead and gunpowder is wasted. An array of benchrest guns, perfectly aimed and fired all at once (so the first hit doesn't jiggle the targets before the other bullets get there) could work, in theory.
There is just a ghost of a chance that coherent vibrations (phonons, sound or heat) in say, palladium with D adsorbed on it could accomplish this in the crystal lattice, which is why that stuff was given even a New York second before it was tossed out the window. But it's a damn slim chance, and no one ever has....So the dreamers think some form of LENR might work out. There are just too many people who believe that Moore's law etc apply in cases where they don't, and man's been pretty lucky finding new things that have saved us before. But I think there's no guarantee of that going on forever.
Simple, eh? All you have to do is squeeze a couple things together against an infinite-range force that goes up as the square of close, until they hang around close enough long enough for a very short range force that has tails - but they decay faster than exponential with range - to take over, and fuse them. Simple in concept, anyway.
Before someone says, well, H bombs work - let me say this. Those conditions are kind of hard to work with, and you know what? It's not the resulting fusion that gives most of the energy in one. It's the fact that the D-Li6 reaction gives copious neutrons, which make the uranium or plutonium fission more before the thing blows itself apart....and a fission reaction gives on average over 150 Mev of output - ten times the energy a normal fusion reaction gives...In other words, they give you a way to burn all the fission fuel quicker, instead of the about 1% the first nukes got before they vaporized themselves and disrupted the reaction. Not many years ago that was so classified I'd be writing myself a ticket to jail for saying it, but it's out now.
Actually, this is the fewest words I've ever been able to condense this into so far, and I'm going to keep a copy. I anticipate some questions, because I've left out some important details, but this is not a bad overview. Most people are surprised to learn that in either fission or fusion, no actual particles - protons or neutrons or electrons, actually disappear at all - it's all just how nicely things wind up being packed after versus before. A neutron can decay into a proton and electron, which together weigh less than a neutron, and that gives off energy too - and it happens in beta decay after fission. So all that mass that gets converted to energy is just binding force (what particle guys call the strong force) being added or subtracted from a system of nucleons. Not a big fraction of the total mass involved at all - it's out in the decimals. For pure conversion, you're talking antimatter annihilation kinds of things, which we only do in particle accelerators at ruinous inefficiency - you have to create the stuff first, at a loss (you miss a lot).
. For now, there is no independent confirmation, that I know of, and inventors's track of record is not exactly crystal clear. He was serving time for some illegal market activities. Tinfoil hats cry "suppression", but I do not have an opinion, might be, might be not. The whole story SEEMS plausible, given the list of serious people involved in (many academics).
