Merci elephant mais attends c'est pas fini
et si cela fonctionne durablement cela bouleversera le monde économique (qui de toute façon est entrain de vaciller...) qu'on connait bien plus que sur le prix du baril...
Evidement ca ne va pas plaire à tous...
mais les réserves de nickel sur Terre sont de toute façon limitées (quelqu'un a fait le bilan pour voir si cela suffirait, à raison de 1 g pour 2000kWh thermiques et si oui pendant combien de temps ??)
Voici le dernier article cité par Langlois:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/201 ... heating-up plus accès sur l'aspect "commercial" et "intérêts économiques"...en gras toujours les infos les plus importantes...
What to make of Andrea Rossi's apparent cold fusion success
The apparent success of Andrea Rossi's E-Cat cold fusion demonstration on 28 October is starting to send ripples into the mainstream press. So what new clues do we have to settle whether it's the breakthrough of the century or the scam of the decade?
In the demonstration, overseen by engineers and technicians from Rossi's mysterious US customer, the device appeared to produce over 470 kilowatts of heat for several hours. The customer was evidently satisfied and paid for the device, though other scientists and journalists attending were not given close access to the test equipment.
Following his first sale, Rossi now says he has orders for thirteen more megawatt-class E-Cat power plants. He's offering them to anyone at $2,000 (£1,250) a kilowatt, which works out at $2 million (£1.25 million) per unit, and says he has customers in the US and Europe. Rossi says a domestic version rated at a few kilowatts is at least a year away. He is also working on adapting the E-Cat so its heat output can converted to electricity, but this will require higher working temperatures and will take two years or more.
This is not quite what you'd expect from a fraudster.
Firstly, the demonstration should have been much more convincing. The shipping container housing the E-Cat setup should have been hoisted from a crane and visibly disconnected from any external power supply. As with all conjuring tricks, the audience should have been allowed to inspect the apparatus. And why only claim 470 kilowatts when you're supposed to be producing twice that amount? If the whole thing was set-up, and the mystery customer a fake, it was not well calculated to convince anyone else.
Secondly, this is normally the point at which a con artist starts issuing shares, asking for capital, or taking "deposits" from gullible consumers. Anything to grab some cash from those willing to offer it. Instead, Rossi is apparently only taking orders from large customers who will be checking the devices work before they take delivery. These are people with good lawyers to write contracts and deal with any complications. They are not easy targets. Whatever he's doing, he's going for the longer game.
Meanwhile, the media coverage has been shifting away from the possibility of fraud, and some mainstream commentators are toying with the idea that this might just be the big breakthrough that Rossi claims.
Fox News was first out, though they took a few days to catch on, publishing a piece on 2 November which focused on the identity of the anonymous customer. Following a hint from Rossi, Fox decided the customer is real and is the US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR).
It's a reasonable enough guess. The US Navy is one of the few institutions where cold fusion research still continues openly, but the evidence is scant. Although a Paul Swanson from SPAWAR was present as an observer at one test, this may simply be evidence of continuing interest in the field, and the organisation will not make any comment.
Then on 3 November MSNBC ran a cautiously optimistic piece under the headline "Italian cold fusion machine passes another test", noting that although there is widespread scepticism about cold fusion, "proof is adding up" that the technology works.
More curious is the lack of a story from Associated Press. AP science reporter Peter Svensson flew from New York to attend the demonstration, and live coverage of the event was curtailed to give AP the exclusive. But Svensson has so far not written a word about it. Some online commentators suggested that he had been silenced by "Chinese-style information censorship." When challenged, AP apparently initially tried to deny Svensson was there, though photographs suggest otherwise.
This led to a campaign encouraging people to contact Svensson about the story via his Twitter feed. At first he simply replied with variations of "Sorry, there's nothing I can tell you at this point", but later changed to "All I can say is 'stay tuned'".
Our guess is that AP does not want to publish anything until it can verify the reality and perhaps the identity of the customer. This in itself suggests a degree of optimism: it's gambling that there will be a big story at the end, and it has accepted being scooped by Fox and MSNBC on the smaller story of the demonstration in order to get it.
Meanwhile, we're left waiting until Rossi delivers the next E-Cat, which will be going to a different customer, in a few months. Hopefully they will be less secretive. In fact, if interest keeps growing, they could put the machine on show and use the steam output to make froth on cups of cappuccino for paying spectators and get a quick return on their £1.25 million investment.
Bel humour en conclusion
Lire aussi cet article d'il y a 1 mois (avant la démo du 28 donc) :
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/201 ... old-fusionCold fusion rears its head as 'E-Cat' research promises to change the world
Is Andrea Rossi the messiah -- or just a very naughty boy?
Rossi, an Italian inventor, claims to have come up with the Holy Grail of power generation, an "Energy Catalyser" or E-Cat, which produces limitless energy. He has already carried out laboratory demonstrations in front of scientists and the Italian media, and in October he plans to unveil a one-megawatt power plant in the US. If it works, the E-Cat is the biggest thing since atomic power, bringing an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy. It looks much too good to be true and many dismiss it as an obvious scam, but Rossi has powerful support from some surprising quarters.
The E-Cat is deceptively simple: hydrogen is passed over a special catalyst based on nickel in a container about a litre in size, and enough heat is produced to boil water. A demonstration in January appeared to show a several kilowatts of output from a four hundred watt input. The catalyst is secret, but Rossi says it can be produced at low cost. The two questions that matter: does it really work? And what are the implications if it does?
The E-Cat is the latest incarnation of cold fusion, an area long shunned by respectable scientists. In 1989, researchers Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have produced a small amount of energy by nuclear fusion on a lab bench via electrolysis. This was unprecedented and appeared to contradict accepted science, as fusion only occurs at temperatures of millions of degrees in the Sun and stars. Other scientists failed to replicate this cold fusion, and the whole field was soon labelled bad science at best. Few journals will cover it these days. In science terms, an interest cold fusion is up there with astrology and alchemy.
A few scientists do still work in this field, notably at the US Naval Research Laboratory. Occasional papers are published claiming positive results in the area of "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" and "excess heat generation". Nobody calls it cold fusion, and this is an area led by experiment rather than theory. But some scientists are breaking cover.
Frank Acland has been following Rossi's work closely, and has a website, E-Cat World, tackling the latest developments. He reels off a list of scientists who have examined the E-Cat for themselves and verified what was happening.
"They have all gone on the record to say that they believe that there is a nuclear reaction taking place, " says Acland, "that the levels of energy output the E-Cat produces could not come from a chemical reaction."
The demonstrations appear to show a lot more heat is coming out of apparatus than goes in. Two Swedish scientists from NyTeknik magazine ruled out any hidden power source and concluded: "The only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production." Unlike the Pons and Fleishman experiments, where the excess heat was tiny, this is on a massive scale. Rossi even claims to have been heating a factory using E-Cats. It's a big effect -- or a big hoax.
Rossi's heavyweight supporters include 1973 physics Nobel prize winner Brian Josephson. Josephson also supports telepathy research. Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at Nasa's Langley Research Centre, appears to be a believer in the E-Cat, commenting in a recent interview with Electric Vehicle World that the science was being worked out and, "I think this will go forward fairly rapidly now". However, Nasa scientists are still at the stage of exploring whether there is valid physics behind the E-Cat rather than actually buying them.
Darpa, the Pentagon's advanced science wing, has also been involved in this field. Budget documents reveal a longstanding interest in low energy nuclear reactions, and the plan for 2012 includes the line "Establish scalability and scaling parameters in excess heat generation processes in collaboration with the Italian Department of Energy."
Ex-Darpa chief Tony Tether told New Energy Times that "If it is a hoax, it's a damned good one."
Inventors often complain that their technology could change the world if investors would just give them a few million to produce it. Rossi will get his chance. The one-megawatt device Rossi plans to soon demonstrate was originally meant to be made by combining 300 small E-Cats. It will now comprise 52 larger E-Cats.
What will it mean if it does work?
The E-cat will provide a lightweight source of cheap energy, without any CO2 emissions. (And unlike nuclear fission, there is also no radioactive waste.) This could turn the world upside-down, and trigger a new industrial revolution which would shift away from fossil fuels and into an era of clean, plentiful energy.
The simplest application would use the steam or hot water from an E-Cat for heating. An E-Cat could heat your home so you would never need gas, oil or coal again. It could be scaled to heat offices, factories, or other buildings. Rossi eventually hopes to make 300,000 E-Cat modules a year.
The E-Cat could also bring back the steam engine. The steam car powered by an E-Cat could replace the electric car as green transport. The idea is not as peculiar as it might sound; steam cars have a long pedigree, and speed record for this type of vehicle is held by the British Steam Car team who achieved an impressive 149 mph in 2009. It might not make the sort of noise beloved of Jeremy Clarkson, but you'd never have to stop at a petrol station again, just top up with water at intervals.
Electricity generation is more challenging. Rossi says the E-Cat only runs at about 500 degrees for safety reasons; modern power plants run at higher temperatures, which are more efficient. Rossi says he is working on the problem, and reckons that E-Cats could produce electricity for about 2,000 Euros per kilowatt initially, with costs falling dramatically when economies of scale kick in. Combined heat and power units would be most economical, and domestic E-Cats could see people selling to the grid rather than buying from it. Energy prices would plummet, and it could create a new type of economy.
"Many people go to work every day to have enough money to fuel their cars, pay the light and heat bills, and to pay for goods whose cost is largely made up of the energy required to produce and transport it," says Acland. "If energy prices go down across the board, theoretically goods will become much cheaper, and people won't need to work in the same way that they do now just to survive."
Because it does not produce carbon dioxide, the E-Cat solves the CO2 emission problem at a stroke. Transport, manufacturing and heating will all switch over to E-Cat because of the lower costs, and fossil fuels would become a thing of the past. Britain's reliance on imported gas would end, and oil imports would all but cease, being confined to a few niche applications. Oil companies, and oil-based economies, would collapse.
It's an appealing vision -- unless you happen to be working in one of the sectors that would be affected -- but until later this month we can't tell if it's for real. Skeptics point to the lack of published science, and the way that Rossi keeps details of his special catalyst secret. They also point to his past involvement in Petroldragon, a company involved in converting organic waste into fuel, which collapsed in the 1990's amidst allegations of dumping toxic waste. (Rossi maintains that he was the victim in this complex case).
And the E-Cat development has thrown up its own scandal. Until August of this year, Rossi was planning his big launch in Greece, and an E-Cat factory was being built in Xanthi. But the deal has somehow fallen through for unexplained reasons, vaguely blamed on pressure from "international energy interests" who may be threatened by the invention.
The megawatt E-Cat will be unveiled in America. Rossi has licensed the technology to a start-up called Ampenergo. Though new, the company has credentials; one of its founders is Robert Gentile, Assistant Secretary of Energy for Fossil Energy at the US Department of Energy (DOE) in the 90's.
Rossi claims the demonstration will be attended by high-level scientists and science journalists, unlike previous occasions which have had little mainstream coverage. They have not so much attacked his claims as ignored them.
Surprisingly enough, Rossi's most severe critic is Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times. Krivit has had years of experience at looking at all sorts cold fusion devices which have been claimed to produce power. His team have carried out a very thorough analysis of Rossi's demonstrations and they have their doubts.
"According to my analysis, his claim has no scientific credibility," Krivit told Wired.co.uk. The device he claimed to heat a factory in Bondeno seems to exist only on paper."
Krivit's analysis looks at the amount of steam that actually comes out of the device and the way it is measured. He concludes that the E-Cat does not have nearly the output he suggests, and may not even be producing excess energy.
Krivit's answer to the question of whether Rossi's demonstrations support his claims is: "Definitely no."
There is some irony at work here: we apparently have a number of mainstream scientists backing an outlandish project which investors are putting money into, while the most vocal critic comes from the world of cold fusion.
Who's right? The only way to find out will be to watch out for what Rossi does later this month.
