Hmmm link doesnt seem to e working, shame as i'd like a read of that paper. As with most other people in this thread, im extremely skeptical of this "discovery"
I seem to remember a story a few years back of some French scientist or the like claiming he'd perfected cold fusion, and then told the Arab oil producing nations that unless they gave him a boatload of money he'd go public..
To quote a former head of OPEC, "The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones" I remember reading about a team some time back that developed what was essentially a cold fusion process but they were using it to generate neutrons. Science has been working on this problem for 50 odd years now, so it's reasonable to expect someone is going to crack it. Also remember, they discovered the cosmic background radiation because they couldn't figure out where that hiss was coming from on their microwave link and it wasn't the bird poop. Discoveries sometimes come from strange places.
Exactly. Oil companies will do just fine as long as they remember what business they are in. They are not in the oil business; they are in the fuel and material resource business. If that happens to be purified water then that is what they will move into. Then again, if you stumbled upon the holy Grail of cheap, clean, abundant energy you might want to patent it up to the hilt first. Just sayin'.
If we stumbled upon that then most forms of currency would probably go the way of the do-do fairly quickly. So patents might not be needed... I'm thinking purely supply and demand.
One of the primary means of separating heavy water is by controlled distillation, which just happens to be something that the oil industry knows a lot about. If production of heavy water becomes profitable a positive side effect could be large scale desalination and the greater availability of fresh water. If you're going to boil thousands of tons of water to extract the deuterium you might as well condense the rest of it and sell or distribute it.
There is a petty good reason to be skeptical of this claim in addition to all of the failed 'Cold Fusion' that have appeared over the last few decades. During the atomic age where the US and USSR where both looking for ways to produce larger and larger bombs, we were looking for ways to improve the energy released per nucleus in the bomb. Through exhaustive experimentation, we discovered that each element (isotope really) produces or consumes a set amount of energy based on it's starting mass and ending mass and eventually we discovered a nice simple curve to model this energy based on the isotope's mass. Now the goal of this chart is always to go 'up', a nuclear reaction that results in the isotopes changing in this way will produce energy and the larger the change, the more energy is produced and this difference can be seen with atomic bombs. Uranium based bombs start off with a heavy element with a mass in the 230's and these elements are split down to elements whose mass is closer to 100, there is only a small vertical change over this distance so relativity only a small amount of energy is released. Fusion based bombs on the other had work by turning light elements (hydrogen with a mass of 2 or 3) into helium with a mass of 4. The curve at this point however is extremely step which results in a massive quantity of energy being released. Now the 'problem' with this curve is that at some point it flat lines around an isotope of iron. When you are near this point, there is simply no way to gain energy by adding or removing nucleons since it is all down hill. This is also conformed via astronomy with large stars where fusion eventually results in the formation of Iron cores in larger stars. Iron in this case, also doesn't release energy and effectively causes stars to turn off with explosive results as the star collapses. Now, the problem with this project is that they are using fusion with nickel, this element is just to the right of Iron. If 50 years of nuclear physics resulting from the combined efforts of rivals trying to blow each other to bits is correct and countless experimental results is correct, this reaction should consume energy, or at the very least, produce a essentially no energy since the curve is, for all useful purposes, flat at this region and any energy produced will be far outweighed by the energy required to overcome other problems. As they say, "extraordinary claims require extraordinarily evidence," but a self published journal article that lacks the capability for peer review (since the exact method is unknown to the authors and the apparatus is not documented) does not inspire much confidence.
If the Great British scientist cant do it....IT CANT BE DONE!!! /me stamps feet. Now bring me moon cheese, and or zombie sheep.
Going by that graph and your words i would imagine that using an element with an atomic mass of around 40-ish would actually yield result instead consuming energy but would also not be such a huge release that it couldn't be controlled. Potassium is 39.1........god i would pay to to see the experiments using that with water. Anyway back to the the point. I totally agree with The Toy here. Until they publish a methodology and independently verifiable results its all hokum.
