long competent blog discussions on possible reality of Rossi HNi reactor, April 11 to May 22, 2010, May 16 to 22, especially Abd Lomax and Joshua Cude: Rich Murray 2011.05.23

[Rich Murray-2]

long competent blog discussions on possible reality of Rossi HNi
reactor, April 11 to May 22, 2010, May 16 to 22, especially Abd Lomax
and Joshua Cude: Rich Murray 2011.05.23


[Vo]:Re: Joshua Cude at it
from Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [hidden email]
reply-to [hidden email]
to [hidden email]
date Sun, May 22, 2011 at 6:58 PM
subject [Vo]:Re: Joshua Cude at it
6:58 PM (22 hours ago)

By the way, the blog that these comments from Cude were posted on was that of
Kjell Aleklett, Professor of Physics, Global Energy Systems, Uppsala University,
http://www.physics.uu.se/ges ,
President of ASPO International (Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas),
Website: http://aleklett.wordpress.com .

http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/rossi-energy-catalyst-a-big-hoax-or-new-physics/

long competent blog discussions on possible reality of Rossi HNi reactor,
April 11 to May 22, 2010

http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-sun-rossi%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Denergy-catalyzer%E2%80%9D-and-the-%E2%80%9Cneutron-barometer%E2%80%9D/#comment-5906

more, May 16 to May 22, 2011


[Vo]:Joshua Cude at it
from Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [hidden email]
reply-to [hidden email]
to [hidden email]
date Sun, May 22, 2011 at 3:35 PM
subject [Vo]:Joshua Cude at it
May 22 (1 day ago)

<http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-sun-rossi%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9denergy-catalyzer%e2%80%9d-and-the-%e2%80%9cneutron-barometer%e2%80%9d#comment-5906>Joshua
Cude said on <http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-sun-rossi%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9denergy-catalyzer%e2%80%9d-and-the-%e2%80%9cneutron-barometer%e2%80%9d>The
sun, Rossi’s ”energy catalyzer” and the “neutron barometer”

I'm not responding there, not yet anyway, since the blog owner seems
irritated by CF discussion taking over. He tells a remarkable story,
see the previous
http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/rossi-energy-catalyst-a-big-hoax-or-new-physics/,
which Joshua Cude may not have read, since he roundly sticks his foot
in his mouth.

May 22, 2011 at 7:51 am

In response to aleklett on May 16, 2011 at 3:45 pm:

One hundred years ago the sun’s source of energy was a complete
mystery. The famous professor Svante Arrhenius is said to have
asserted that the sun’s energy output could not be due to combustion
and that there was no other explanation. Today our knowledge of
physics allows us to explain why the sun can radiate [...]

So far, claimed evidence for excess heat in a Rossi apparatus has been
observed directly only by people vetted by Rossi. First Levi, who was
on Rossi’s editorial board, and the recipient of research funding from
Rossi. Then Essen & Kallander who were on record as being sympathetic
to the Rossi device. And lastly journalist/blogger Lewan, who was on
record as being an uncritical Rossi groupie.

Cude is correct as to observers. But, ah, those people! Cude will
point out avery factoid he can find that might seem to impeach
evidence, this is what he's done for a long time. When the January
announcement came out, I pointed out that when the possible economic
impact of something is as great as this, fraud that might be normally
so impractical, as to be preposterous as a consideration, might not
be. People can be bought, and people can also be fooled. I pointed out
that we won't know *absolutely for sure* until there are multiple
fully independent replications or verifications.

This isn't like ordinary cold fusion, where the experiment was very
difficult to set up. If this thing works or doesn't work, it will be
obvious. It is to the point, already, where "fraud" is, first of all,
the only possibility besides "it's real," and "fraud" has become so
remote that *believing* it is a fraud is insane, hanging one's hat on
something quite unlikely. But not yet impossible, and if I were about
to write a check for a hundred million dollars, I'd certainly want to
see more than has become public! Frankly, if, as seems quite possible
from the announcements, these things come on the market by the
beginning of next year for a few thousand dollars, I wouldn't be the
first on my block to write a check. But .... maybe the second!

Cude is just tossing mud to make his correct initial statement mean
more than it does. This is an invention, not yet clearly well
protected by patent, and Rossi, if we assume this is real, has many
sound reasons to keep it very private. As far as we can tell, so far,
he hasn't solicited funding, except from Ampenergo, a reputable
company in the U.S., formed by people who have long worked with Rossi,
they know him well. Rossi does not need other investors, apparently.

We know from Aleklett's previous blog post on this that he personally
knows Kullander, the "person" whom Cude so cavalierly dismisses as if
he were some shill. From his blog:

First I would like to mention that Professor Sven Kullander -- who is
chairman of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Energy committee,
since the beginning of the year -- is also a professor emeritus in my
research group at Uppsala University. He sits in the room next to mine
so Rossi’s experiment has come up every time we have met in recent
weeks. I always try to be as critical as possible, but at the same
time it is exciting to be pretty close to the center of something that
is either a hoax or something new and exciting. There are scientists
who criticize Sven for associating himself with the experiment, but
also many that think he is doing the right thing. As scientists we
have a responsibility to investigate whether a reported phenomenon is
real or a hoax. Sven’s involvement is quite natural since he is
chairman of the KVA’s energy committee, but if anyone thinks that he
has simply accepted the results then they are completely wrong. By
attending and examining the experiment, he also has the opportunity to
confirm or reject. As a researcher, you want an explanation for what
is happening and right now there appears to be no suitable explanation
with the knowledge we currently have in chemistry and physics. This
means that it may be entirely new physics that must be explained or it
may be a scam that must be explained and exposed.

And Cude's comment on Mats Lewan, the Ny Teknik reporter (highly
qualified and professional), is simply an evidence-free cheap shot.
I've seen nothing but professional work from Lewan, but Cude,
anonymous, can say whatever he likes, and it won't fall back on him.
If Lewan screws up, it's his livelihood. Cude is a coward, hiding
behind his anonymity. I have a suspicion who he is, but .... I don't
know that for sure, not yet.

Cude continues:

In experiments where more details are available to outsiders (mainly
by photos or video), more contradictions and outright inaccuracies
have been exposed. In the January experiment ­ the most public one so
far ­ the claimed flow rate is not consistent with the pump in the
video, the duration at 100C is 17 minutes according to the video of
the screen, not 40 minutes as claimed; the average input power is 1
kW, but the brief reduction to 400 W is used to calculate the gain,
even though there is obvious thermal mass in the apparatus.

In examining a body of evidence and comparing it with reports, it's
always possible to find apparent contradictions. Obviously, the more
evidence is available, the more exposure there is to error and
inaccuracy. I'm not examining all these specific claims, but I'll note
that many have been over this evidence with a fine-tooth comb, and
Cude's interpretations certainly are not as accepted and obvious as
he'd like us to believe. "Brief reduction to 400 W"? This is what the
physorg.com report has:

The reactor uses less than 1 gram of hydrogen and starts with about
1,000 W of electricity, which is reduced to 400 W after a few minutes.
Every minute, the reaction can convert 292 grams of 20°C water into
dry steam at about 101°C. Since raising the temperature of water by
80°C and converting it to steam requires about 12,400 W of power, the
experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31.

Cude has it backwards. The input power, which is initially used to
raise the temperature of the reactor to operating temperature, is
scaled back to 400 watts for the remainder of the demonstration, not
"for a few minutes." See also
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MacyMspecificso.pdf and other reports on
the January demonstration. The January demonstration was, indeed, the
"most public," but in other demonstrations, observers were allowed
much closer access to the device and the setup. The January
demonstration had some obvious shortcomings, as to possible fraud
mechanisms, and other demonstrations addressed these. It has been
pointed out that a fraud could use different mechanisms in different
demonstrations, and, in my view, there is no end of this possibility,
until and unless fully independent verification is possible. I see no
way that Rossi can avoid this happening before the end of the year. If
something comes up and he can't deliver, my opinion, he'll be forced
to provide evaluation units, which are already claimed to exist, in
order to survive. He's following what is, for him, Plan A, the
delivery of a 1 MW assembly of individual E-Cats by October.

What Cude is betraying is his own severe bias: he's *certain* that
this is a fraud, and how can he be certain? It's because he's bought
the common nonsense about cold fusion, that it is, that by established
physical theory, it's *impossible.* That is a religious,
pseudoskeptical belief, it's not a rational or skeptical one. Cold
fusion is claimed to operate by an "unknown mechanism," all that is
known for Pd-D cold fusion is the main fuel (deuterium) and the main
product (helium), not the mechanism by which deuterium is convered
into helium. And theory cannot predict a fusion cross-section for
"unknown reaction," not without making some unwarranted -- and, in the
past, unstated -- assumptions as to reaction mechanism.

Aleklett is showing us the response of a phyisicst, a genuine skeptic,
who knows that he doesn't know everything. "Show me!" is his approach,
and he's willing to look. Cude is not willing to look, except to look
for "flaws." Whatever he can find to justify sitting in his secure
smugness.

Rossi is remarkably successful at choosing observers who do not ask
any difficult questions, or request any embarrassing measurements.

Rossi has been asked difficult questions by the observers, how could
Cude know that he hasn't? The physicist-observers have said that
Rossi's theory doesn't make sense. They are't buying it at all. But
they are also not denying the evidence, and, yes, Rossi probably is
not selecting people who might pull a Feynman.

(I sat with Feynman at Cal Tech, and love the late physicist, but he
made a horrible mistake one day. He was witnessing a demonstration of
a claimed energy device, and he surreptitiously pulled the plug,
attempting to show that the claimed energy was coming from the mains.
The thing exploded, and a man was killed. Recent news can give us a
clue as to the hazards of removing power from the control mechanisms
in an energy device. It's called Fukashima.)

Such questions have been repeatedly pointed out in online forums from
the first January experiment: check and *monitor* input flow rate;
monitor the output flow rate; check dependence of steam temperature on
input flow rate (in particular, why is it always pinned at the boiling
point, when if it were dry, it would likely climb well above the bp).
It seems impossible that the 3 Swedes could not have been familiar
with these objections, and yet they made no attempt to resolve them.

Cude thinks he's cute. Lots of variations have been proposed, but a
central problem here is that Rossi really doesn't care whether he
proves this thing or not. That must drive some skeptics up the wall!
The best test approach, to my mind, was where the flow rate was
increased so that the water didn't boil, thus avoiding the whole wet
steam/dry steam issue. Quantity of water vaporized is a very simply
calorimetric technique, but when we are trying to rule out fraud
(which wasn't the goal of the January demonstration), there are lots
of possible problems. Reducing the flow rate, so that all that is
being measured is temperature rise in a known volume of water, is much
cleaner. That was the February test, which was witnessed only by Levi.
It was a stunning result, in fact, but, of course, we are depending on
Levi not colluding with Rossi.

My view is that "fraud" can't be completely ruled out. But it's
getting preposterous as a claim. Kullander? Come on!

Oddly, they measure the temperature every few seconds during the
boiling phase, even though temperature isn’t expected to change during
a 6-fold increase in power, but they don’t measure the flow rate of
the output gas, which would actually change in proportion to the
output power, thereby providing some evidence of the power increase.
Instead they make one or two “visual” inspections of this far more
critical metric.

He's talking about one demonstration as if this were the whole banana.

So, the public has not seen any evidence that steam is dry, nor that
the device is producing excess heat.

Except for expert testimony. What Cude expects absolutely won't be
available for quite some time, unless Rossi changes his mind, and he's
not likely to do so. This is one very persistant man, however we slice
it.

Until critical observation is permitted by any interested party, there
seems no point in trying to understand what they *claim* is happening.

Now, here, I'm going to agree with Cude. Speculation on the mechanism
by with the Rossi device generates power is, to some extent, a fool's
errand, since so much information is missing. We may have some better
analyses of the fuel and ash soon. But that evidence might also be
withheld, since the "secret catalyst" is crucial proprietary
information.

On the other hand, I do know that many LENR researchers have changed
course and are now investigating Ni-H reactions, which, before Rossi,
were considered an unlikely bypath, even though there were reported
results (Focardi and Piantelli).

And it is not necessary to reveal the contents of Rossi’s black box.
Just allow critics ­ any critics ­ to measure in arbitrary detail the
incoming and outgoing fluids and electrical power.

Well, that's been done, actually. Cude should become more familiar
with the full range of evidence. It will, however, always be possible
to make up some fraud mechanism, until there are so many independent
replications that it becomes completely impossible. If I have an E-Cat
rated for, say, 10 kW, and I can buy it and use it to heat water in my
home, for a few thousand dollars, it will either work or it won't, and
if it works, given the apparent size of these things, it's nuclear.
The really big issue is going to be safety, and Cude completely misses
this:

But the best evidence that the thing doesn’t produce excess power is
the fact that it can’t power itself.

But, apparently, it can. The problem is that controlling it, fully
self-powered, is very difficult, they have not engineered it for that
yet. There is only one access, at this point, to reaction control,
which is controlling the temperature of the reactor. If you allow the
thing to self-power, what controls the reactor temperature? Apparently
the reaction rate increases with temperature, at least over some
range. So my guess is that the control electronics heat the reaction
chamber to below the self-powering range, it needs a few hundred watts
of power to maintain the reaction rate, so that when you turn off the
power, it shuts down. This raises a host of safety issues!

(The other control mechanism would be to control the hydrogen feed.
How well that would work is far from clear to me, without knowing the
mechanism! But experiment would provide the evidence. Rossi almost
certainly knows this, and it's in his interest at this point to be
several steps ahead of the crowd that's dogging him. Believe me, his
big worry isn't the skeptics, they can go jump in a lake as far as
he's concerned.)

(And if he's a fraud, this will all be over, I predict, by the end of
the year. It won't be possible to maintain.)

When a salesman comes to your door selling a new source of energy, and
the first thing he asks is where to plug it in, be very suspicious.

If a salesman comes to my door selling about anything, I'll be
suspicious. But, Joshua, what about Fukashima? Do you think that the
reactor there needed to be "plugged in" -- for safety -- meant that
the energy produced was doubtful?

If the salesman can demonstrate a volume of hot water heated, showing
12 kW of power being generated (repeated buckets of a certain volume
at a certain temperature, fed with tap water at a certain
temperature), and this thing doesn't blow fuses, I don't care if it's
plugged in. Yeah, there are still a few things to check.

But no salesman is knocking on my door or Cude's door, selling E-Cats.
If one came today I'd toss him out on his ear. This is all polemic,
designed to ridicule. Typical Cude.

An analogy to Cude's objection. Someone comes to my door to sell me a
portable gas stove, I can use it, he claims, to cook and heat water
while I'm camping. To demonstrate it to me, he asks me for a match, he
left his at home. I toss him out, since, if it needs a match, it must
be a fraud.


Rich Murray:  Lomax: " I pointed out that.we won't know *absolutely
for sure* until there are multiple fully independent replications or
verifications.....My view is that "fraud" can't be completely ruled
out..... It has been pointed out that a fraud could use different
mechanisms in different demonstrations, and, in my view, there is no
end of this possibility, until and unless fully independent
verification is possible.....And it is not necessary to reveal the
contents of Rossi’s black box. Just allow critics ­ any critics ­ to
measure in arbitrary detail the incoming and outgoing fluids and
electrical power....."

Lomax is actually agreeing that after over 4 busy months since January
15, the reality of massive excess heat from Rossi reactors is still
not beyond reasonable dispute.  This is prudent, thoughtful, informed
skepticism.

I agree, and add that apparent deliberate fraud can also result from
individual illness, coupled with group think.

I agree also with Cude's evaluation that there is no replicable
evidence for any form of cold fusion since 1989:

Joshua Cude says:
May 22, 2011 at 8:21 am
> “because the measured helium correlates very well, at the expected value for deuterium -> helium; this was known by the mid-1990s. It’s a reproducible and reproduced experiment, see Storms, Status of cold fusion (2010), Naturwissenschaften.”

This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. A correlation between
heat and helium is clearly an important and definitive experiment for
cold fusion. And yet, in the referenced paper, the most recent
peer-reviewed results used to demonstrate such a correlation come from
a set of experiments by Miles in the early 90s. These were very crude
experiments in which peaks were eyeballed as small, medium, and large,
the small taken as equal to the detection limit (which seemed to
change by orders of magnitude over the years). Even in the best of
Miles results, the energy per helium varies by more than a factor of
3. Miles’ results were severely criticized by Jones in peer-reviewed
literature. And although there was considerable back and forth on the
results, and in Storms view (of course) Miles successfully defended
his claims, that kind of disagreement and large variation simply cries
out for new and better experiments. So what have we got since?

A very careful set of experiments looking for helium by Gozzi, which
was published in peer-reviewed literature in 1998, concludes that the
evidence for helium is not definitive.

The only results since Miles that Storms has deemed worthwhile to
calculate energy correlation come from conference proceedings, and the
most recent of those from year 2000. Nothing that Storms considers
adequate quality in this critically important experiment has met the
standard of peer review. And they’re not good enough to allow Miles
results to be replaced; Storms still uses some of Miles results, one
assumes because it improves the average. The error in the result, even
if you accept Storms’ cherry-picked, dubious analysis is still 20%. On
an experiment that removes the dependence on material quality. Heat,
it is claimed, can be measured to mW, the helium, it is claimed, is
orders of magnitude above the detection limit, and yet the errors are
huge.

This is what passes for conclusive in the field of cold fusion. This
is good enough that no measurements of helium-heat in the last decade
entered Storms’ calculations.

An objective look at the heat/helium results does not provide even
weak evidence for cold fusion.

Reply
Joshua Cude says:
May 22, 2011 at 8:36 am
>The original report of neutrons was artifact. The recent reports are at levels vastly lower, but well above background.

Presumably you are referring to the CR-39 results, but these have been
observed by one group only, and the results have been challenged as to
whether they are in fact above background, and/or caused by artifacts.
A project led by Krivit with a number of groups involved, and
pretentiously named the Galileo project, failed to confirm the CR-39
results.

So even these results, which in any case cannot explain the claimed
heat, are far from convincing.

Cold fusion experiments simply never get past marginal, controversial,
and dubious. There is not a single convincing experiment in cold
fusion, period. And Rossi has not changed that picture at all.
[ End of Cude quotes ]

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[michael barron]

R:

The best thing Rossi could do is to SHUT UP, AND STOP PUTTING HIS

FOOT IN HIS MOUTH OR HIS HEAD UP HIS ASS!

::M

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 6:43 PM, Rich Murray <[hidden email]> wrote:

long competent blog discussions on possible reality of Rossi HNi
reactor, April 11 to May 22, 2010, May 16 to 22, especially Abd Lomax
and Joshua Cude: Rich Murray 2011.05.23


[Vo]:Re: Joshua Cude at it
from    Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [hidden email]
reply-to        [hidden email]
to      [hidden email]
date    Sun, May 22, 2011 at 6:58 PM
subject [Vo]:Re: Joshua Cude at it
6:58 PM (22 hours ago)

By the way, the blog that these comments from Cude were posted on was that of
Kjell Aleklett, Professor of Physics, Global Energy Systems, Uppsala University,
http://www.physics.uu.se/ges ,
President of ASPO International (Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas),
Website: http://aleklett.wordpress.com .

http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/rossi-energy-catalyst-a-big-hoax-or-new-physics/

long competent blog discussions on possible reality of Rossi HNi reactor,
April 11 to May 22, 2010

http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-sun-rossi%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Denergy-catalyzer%E2%80%9D-and-the-%E2%80%9Cneutron-barometer%E2%80%9D/#comment-5906

more, May 16 to May 22, 2011


[Vo]:Joshua Cude at it
from    Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [hidden email]
reply-to        [hidden email]
to      [hidden email]
date    Sun, May 22, 2011 at 3:35 PM
subject [Vo]:Joshua Cude at it
May 22 (1 day ago)

<http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-sun-rossi%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9denergy-catalyzer%e2%80%9d-and-the-%e2%80%9cneutron-barometer%e2%80%9d#comment-5906>Joshua
Cude said on <http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-sun-rossi%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9denergy-catalyzer%e2%80%9d-and-the-%e2%80%9cneutron-barometer%e2%80%9d>The
sun, Rossi’s ”energy catalyzer” and the “neutron barometer”

I'm not responding there, not yet anyway, since the blog owner seems
irritated by CF discussion taking over. He tells a remarkable story,
see the previous
http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/rossi-energy-catalyst-a-big-hoax-or-new-physics/,
which Joshua Cude may not have read, since he roundly sticks his foot
in his mouth.

May 22, 2011 at 7:51 am

In response to aleklett on May 16, 2011 at 3:45 pm:

One hundred years ago the sun’s source of energy was a complete
mystery. The famous professor Svante Arrhenius is said to have
asserted that the sun’s energy output could not be due to combustion
and that there was no other explanation. Today our knowledge of
physics allows us to explain why the sun can radiate [...]

So far, claimed evidence for excess heat in a Rossi apparatus has been
observed directly only by people vetted by Rossi. First Levi, who was
on Rossi’s editorial board, and the recipient of research funding from
Rossi. Then Essen & Kallander who were on record as being sympathetic
to the Rossi device. And lastly journalist/blogger Lewan, who was on
record as being an uncritical Rossi groupie.

Cude is correct as to observers. But, ah, those people! Cude will
point out avery factoid he can find that might seem to impeach
evidence, this is what he's done for a long time. When the January
announcement came out, I pointed out that when the possible economic
impact of something is as great as this, fraud that might be normally
so impractical, as to be preposterous as a consideration, might not
be. People can be bought, and people can also be fooled. I pointed out
that we won't know *absolutely for sure* until there are multiple
fully independent replications or verifications.

This isn't like ordinary cold fusion, where the experiment was very
difficult to set up. If this thing works or doesn't work, it will be
obvious. It is to the point, already, where "fraud" is, first of all,
the only possibility besides "it's real," and "fraud" has become so
remote that *believing* it is a fraud is insane, hanging one's hat on
something quite unlikely. But not yet impossible, and if I were about
to write a check for a hundred million dollars, I'd certainly want to
see more than has become public! Frankly, if, as seems quite possible
from the announcements, these things come on the market by the
beginning of next year for a few thousand dollars, I wouldn't be the
first on my block to write a check. But .... maybe the second!

Cude is just tossing mud to make his correct initial statement mean
more than it does. This is an invention, not yet clearly well
protected by patent, and Rossi, if we assume this is real, has many
sound reasons to keep it very private. As far as we can tell, so far,
he hasn't solicited funding, except from Ampenergo, a reputable
company in the U.S., formed by people who have long worked with Rossi,
they know him well. Rossi does not need other investors, apparently.

We know from Aleklett's previous blog post on this that he personally
knows Kullander, the "person" whom Cude so cavalierly dismisses as if
he were some shill. From his blog:

First I would like to mention that Professor Sven Kullander -- who is
chairman of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Energy committee,
since the beginning of the year -- is also a professor emeritus in my
research group at Uppsala University. He sits in the room next to mine
so Rossi’s experiment has come up every time we have met in recent
weeks. I always try to be as critical as possible, but at the same
time it is exciting to be pretty close to the center of something that
is either a hoax or something new and exciting. There are scientists
who criticize Sven for associating himself with the experiment, but
also many that think he is doing the right thing. As scientists we
have a responsibility to investigate whether a reported phenomenon is
real or a hoax. Sven’s involvement is quite natural since he is
chairman of the KVA’s energy committee, but if anyone thinks that he
has simply accepted the results then they are completely wrong. By
attending and examining the experiment, he also has the opportunity to
confirm or reject. As a researcher, you want an explanation for what
is happening and right now there appears to be no suitable explanation
with the knowledge we currently have in chemistry and physics. This
means that it may be entirely new physics that must be explained or it
may be a scam that must be explained and exposed.

And Cude's comment on Mats Lewan, the Ny Teknik reporter (highly
qualified and professional), is simply an evidence-free cheap shot.
I've seen nothing but professional work from Lewan, but Cude,
anonymous, can say whatever he likes, and it won't fall back on him.
If Lewan screws up, it's his livelihood. Cude is a coward, hiding
behind his anonymity. I have a suspicion who he is, but .... I don't
know that for sure, not yet.

Cude continues:

In experiments where more details are available to outsiders (mainly
by photos or video), more contradictions and outright inaccuracies
have been exposed. In the January experiment ­ the most public one so
far ­ the claimed flow rate is not consistent with the pump in the
video, the duration at 100C is 17 minutes according to the video of
the screen, not 40 minutes as claimed; the average input power is 1
kW, but the brief reduction to 400 W is used to calculate the gain,
even though there is obvious thermal mass in the apparatus.

In examining a body of evidence and comparing it with reports, it's
always possible to find apparent contradictions. Obviously, the more
evidence is available, the more exposure there is to error and
inaccuracy. I'm not examining all these specific claims, but I'll note
that many have been over this evidence with a fine-tooth comb, and
Cude's interpretations certainly are not as accepted and obvious as
he'd like us to believe. "Brief reduction to 400 W"? This is what the
physorg.com report has:

The reactor uses less than 1 gram of hydrogen and starts with about
1,000 W of electricity, which is reduced to 400 W after a few minutes.
Every minute, the reaction can convert 292 grams of 20°C water into
dry steam at about 101°C. Since raising the temperature of water by
80°C and converting it to steam requires about 12,400 W of power, the
experiment provides a power gain of 12,400/400 = 31.

Cude has it backwards. The input power, which is initially used to
raise the temperature of the reactor to operating temperature, is
scaled back to 400 watts for the remainder of the demonstration, not
"for a few minutes." See also
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MacyMspecificso.pdf and other reports on
the January demonstration. The January demonstration was, indeed, the
"most public," but in other demonstrations, observers were allowed
much closer access to the device and the setup. The January
demonstration had some obvious shortcomings, as to possible fraud
mechanisms, and other demonstrations addressed these. It has been
pointed out that a fraud could use different mechanisms in different
demonstrations, and, in my view, there is no end of this possibility,
until and unless fully independent verification is possible. I see no
way that Rossi can avoid this happening before the end of the year. If
something comes up and he can't deliver, my opinion, he'll be forced
to provide evaluation units, which are already claimed to exist, in
order to survive. He's following what is, for him, Plan A, the
delivery of a 1 MW assembly of individual E-Cats by October.

What Cude is betraying is his own severe bias: he's *certain* that
this is a fraud, and how can he be certain? It's because he's bought
the common nonsense about cold fusion, that it is, that by established
physical theory, it's *impossible.* That is a religious,
pseudoskeptical belief, it's not a rational or skeptical one. Cold
fusion is claimed to operate by an "unknown mechanism," all that is
known for Pd-D cold fusion is the main fuel (deuterium) and the main
product (helium), not the mechanism by which deuterium is convered
into helium. And theory cannot predict a fusion cross-section for
"unknown reaction," not without making some unwarranted -- and, in the
past, unstated -- assumptions as to reaction mechanism.

Aleklett is showing us the response of a phyisicst, a genuine skeptic,
who knows that he doesn't know everything. "Show me!" is his approach,
and he's willing to look. Cude is not willing to look, except to look
for "flaws." Whatever he can find to justify sitting in his secure
smugness.

Rossi is remarkably successful at choosing observers who do not ask
any difficult questions, or request any embarrassing measurements.

Rossi has been asked difficult questions by the observers, how could
Cude know that he hasn't? The physicist-observers have said that
Rossi's theory doesn't make sense. They are't buying it at all. But
they are also not denying the evidence, and, yes, Rossi probably is
not selecting people who might pull a Feynman.

(I sat with Feynman at Cal Tech, and love the late physicist, but he
made a horrible mistake one day. He was witnessing a demonstration of
a claimed energy device, and he surreptitiously pulled the plug,
attempting to show that the claimed energy was coming from the mains.
The thing exploded, and a man was killed. Recent news can give us a
clue as to the hazards of removing power from the control mechanisms
in an energy device. It's called Fukashima.)

Such questions have been repeatedly pointed out in online forums from
the first January experiment: check and *monitor* input flow rate;
monitor the output flow rate; check dependence of steam temperature on
input flow rate (in particular, why is it always pinned at the boiling
point, when if it were dry, it would likely climb well above the bp).
It seems impossible that the 3 Swedes could not have been familiar
with these objections, and yet they made no attempt to resolve them.

Cude thinks he's cute. Lots of variations have been proposed, but a
central problem here is that Rossi really doesn't care whether he
proves this thing or not. That must drive some skeptics up the wall!
The best test approach, to my mind, was where the flow rate was
increased so that the water didn't boil, thus avoiding the whole wet
steam/dry steam issue. Quantity of water vaporized is a very simply
calorimetric technique, but when we are trying to rule out fraud
(which wasn't the goal of the January demonstration), there are lots
of possible problems. Reducing the flow rate, so that all that is
being measured is temperature rise in a known volume of water, is much
cleaner. That was the February test, which was witnessed only by Levi.
It was a stunning result, in fact, but, of course, we are depending on
Levi not colluding with Rossi.

My view is that "fraud" can't be completely ruled out. But it's
getting preposterous as a claim. Kullander? Come on!

Oddly, they measure the temperature every few seconds during the
boiling phase, even though temperature isn’t expected to change during
a 6-fold increase in power, but they don’t measure the flow rate of
the output gas, which would actually change in proportion to the
output power, thereby providing some evidence of the power increase.
Instead they make one or two “visual” inspections of this far more
critical metric.

He's talking about one demonstration as if this were the whole banana.

So, the public has not seen any evidence that steam is dry, nor that
the device is producing excess heat.

Except for expert testimony. What Cude expects absolutely won't be
available for quite some time, unless Rossi changes his mind, and he's
not likely to do so. This is one very persistant man, however we slice
it.

Until critical observation is permitted by any interested party, there
seems no point in trying to understand what they *claim* is happening.

Now, here, I'm going to agree with Cude. Speculation on the mechanism
by with the Rossi device generates power is, to some extent, a fool's
errand, since so much information is missing. We may have some better
analyses of the fuel and ash soon. But that evidence might also be
withheld, since the "secret catalyst" is crucial proprietary
information.

On the other hand, I do know that many LENR researchers have changed
course and are now investigating Ni-H reactions, which, before Rossi,
were considered an unlikely bypath, even though there were reported
results (Focardi and Piantelli).

And it is not necessary to reveal the contents of Rossi’s black box.
Just allow critics ­ any critics ­ to measure in arbitrary detail the
incoming and outgoing fluids and electrical power.

Well, that's been done, actually. Cude should become more familiar
with the full range of evidence. It will, however, always be possible
to make up some fraud mechanism, until there are so many independent
replications that it becomes completely impossible. If I have an E-Cat
rated for, say, 10 kW, and I can buy it and use it to heat water in my
home, for a few thousand dollars, it will either work or it won't, and
if it works, given the apparent size of these things, it's nuclear.
The really big issue is going to be safety, and Cude completely misses
this:

But the best evidence that the thing doesn’t produce excess power is
the fact that it can’t power itself.

But, apparently, it can. The problem is that controlling it, fully
self-powered, is very difficult, they have not engineered it for that
yet. There is only one access, at this point, to reaction control,
which is controlling the temperature of the reactor. If you allow the
thing to self-power, what controls the reactor temperature? Apparently
the reaction rate increases with temperature, at least over some
range. So my guess is that the control electronics heat the reaction
chamber to below the self-powering range, it needs a few hundred watts
of power to maintain the reaction rate, so that when you turn off the
power, it shuts down. This raises a host of safety issues!

(The other control mechanism would be to control the hydrogen feed.
How well that would work is far from clear to me, without knowing the
mechanism! But experiment would provide the evidence. Rossi almost
certainly knows this, and it's in his interest at this point to be
several steps ahead of the crowd that's dogging him. Believe me, his
big worry isn't the skeptics, they can go jump in a lake as far as
he's concerned.)

(And if he's a fraud, this will all be over, I predict, by the end of
the year. It won't be possible to maintain.)

When a salesman comes to your door selling a new source of energy, and
the first thing he asks is where to plug it in, be very suspicious.

If a salesman comes to my door selling about anything, I'll be
suspicious. But, Joshua, what about Fukashima? Do you think that the
reactor there needed to be "plugged in" -- for safety -- meant that
the energy produced was doubtful?

If the salesman can demonstrate a volume of hot water heated, showing
12 kW of power being generated (repeated buckets of a certain volume
at a certain temperature, fed with tap water at a certain
temperature), and this thing doesn't blow fuses, I don't care if it's
plugged in. Yeah, there are still a few things to check.

But no salesman is knocking on my door or Cude's door, selling E-Cats.
If one came today I'd toss him out on his ear. This is all polemic,
designed to ridicule. Typical Cude.

An analogy to Cude's objection. Someone comes to my door to sell me a
portable gas stove, I can use it, he claims, to cook and heat water
while I'm camping. To demonstrate it to me, he asks me for a match, he
left his at home. I toss him out, since, if it needs a match, it must
be a fraud.


Rich Murray:  Lomax: " I pointed out that.we won't know *absolutely
for sure* until there are multiple fully independent replications or
verifications.....My view is that "fraud" can't be completely ruled
out..... It has been pointed out that a fraud could use different
mechanisms in different demonstrations, and, in my view, there is no
end of this possibility, until and unless fully independent
verification is possible.....And it is not necessary to reveal the
contents of Rossi’s black box. Just allow critics ­ any critics ­ to
measure in arbitrary detail the incoming and outgoing fluids and
electrical power....."

Lomax is actually agreeing that after over 4 busy months since January
15, the reality of massive excess heat from Rossi reactors is still
not beyond reasonable dispute.  This is prudent, thoughtful, informed
skepticism.

I agree, and add that apparent deliberate fraud can also result from
individual illness, coupled with group think.

I agree also with Cude's evaluation that there is no replicable
evidence for any form of cold fusion since 1989:

Joshua Cude says:
May 22, 2011 at 8:21 am
> “because the measured helium correlates very well, at the expected value for deuterium -> helium; this was known by the mid-1990s. It’s a reproducible and reproduced experiment, see Storms, Status of cold fusion (2010), Naturwissenschaften.”

This is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. A correlation between
heat and helium is clearly an important and definitive experiment for
cold fusion. And yet, in the referenced paper, the most recent
peer-reviewed results used to demonstrate such a correlation come from
a set of experiments by Miles in the early 90s. These were very crude
experiments in which peaks were eyeballed as small, medium, and large,
the small taken as equal to the detection limit (which seemed to
change by orders of magnitude over the years). Even in the best of
Miles results, the energy per helium varies by more than a factor of
3. Miles’ results were severely criticized by Jones in peer-reviewed
literature. And although there was considerable back and forth on the
results, and in Storms view (of course) Miles successfully defended
his claims, that kind of disagreement and large variation simply cries
out for new and better experiments. So what have we got since?

A very careful set of experiments looking for helium by Gozzi, which
was published in peer-reviewed literature in 1998, concludes that the
evidence for helium is not definitive.

The only results since Miles that Storms has deemed worthwhile to
calculate energy correlation come from conference proceedings, and the
most recent of those from year 2000. Nothing that Storms considers
adequate quality in this critically important experiment has met the
standard of peer review. And they’re not good enough to allow Miles
results to be replaced; Storms still uses some of Miles results, one
assumes because it improves the average. The error in the result, even
if you accept Storms’ cherry-picked, dubious analysis is still 20%. On
an experiment that removes the dependence on material quality. Heat,
it is claimed, can be measured to mW, the helium, it is claimed, is
orders of magnitude above the detection limit, and yet the errors are
huge.

This is what passes for conclusive in the field of cold fusion. This
is good enough that no measurements of helium-heat in the last decade
entered Storms’ calculations.

An objective look at the heat/helium results does not provide even
weak evidence for cold fusion.

Reply
Joshua Cude says:
May 22, 2011 at 8:36 am
>The original report of neutrons was artifact. The recent reports are at levels vastly lower, but well above background.

Presumably you are referring to the CR-39 results, but these have been
observed by one group only, and the results have been challenged as to
whether they are in fact above background, and/or caused by artifacts.
A project led by Krivit with a number of groups involved, and
pretentiously named the Galileo project, failed to confirm the CR-39
results.

So even these results, which in any case cannot explain the claimed
heat, are far from convincing.

Cold fusion experiments simply never get past marginal, controversial,
and dubious. There is not a single convincing experiment in cold
fusion, period. And Rossi has not changed that picture at all.
[ End of Cude quotes ]

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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org