At 10:54 AM 8/17/2012, Akira Shirakawa wrote:
On 2012-08-17 17:43, Jones Beene wrote:
Why do you say that 3W/cm² is not enough for a commercial product ? We are
talking about an alloy that costs only $20/kg (US) in large volume lots.
The treatment (not known in detail yet - but
Celani said a paper about it is in preparation)
to create deep nano/micro structures needed for
the reaction to occur might increase costs significantly, however.
At the moment, all we know at the moment is that
treated ISOTAN44 wires cost him less than pure palladium.
Frequently people discussing commercial prospects
neglect that LENR materials, classically, don't
continue to operate indefinitely. Until we have
solid theory of operation, it may be impossible
to design materials for continued, reliable operation.
That's why calls for someone like Celani to scale
up are misguided. It's putting the cart before
the horse. First, establish an effect. Second,
investigate the characteristics of the effect
thoroughly, which, combined with theoretical
exploration and the feedback of controlled
experiments to test theory, discover and elucidate the mechanism.
Then engineering reliable materials that will
continue to operate *might* be possible.
While it's possible someone will stumble across
something that works -- Rossi has certainly made
the claim that he did -- it's stabbing in the
dark, until the lights have been turned on by the
development of confirmed theory.
(Though anyone is free to run with an unconfirmed
theory, and if this leads them to success, great!
That's a confirmation of a kind. Not necessarily
a proof, but it could lead to proof.)
Suppose we discover that a material that costs
$20/kg works, that, say, a few grams of this will
generate a kilowatt. Processing the material
might cost $10 per gram, say for a KW reactor it
costs $30, just pulling these figures out of the
air. Suppose the thing operates for three days,
then the material needs to be replaced,
reprepared. that's $10 per day. Electric power
presently, for a day, might run $3.00. Utterly
impractical except for certain narrow
applications. The point is that processing cost
could be the major cost, by far.
I hope that those who are working with NiH, and
who are seeing unreliable results, release their
data. Certainly that would be preferable to
giving up! Until there is sharing of information,
there is going to be vast inefficiency, as groups
independently invent the wheel.
For starters, we need very much to know what
*does not* work. That could be more than half the struggle!
