Stubby wrote:TallDave wrote:I thought it was interesting that NRL claimed the other day to have a process to produce jet fuel from seawater for $3-$6, for which they were not immediately condemned by all right-thinking people.
I wonder how Industrial Heat is faring with Rossi's design? I suspect not well, no one seems to have the kind of solid theoretical grasp needed for effective mass production.
Because it is a well known process.
However it is endothermic meaning it needs outside power to work. It is not something claiming to be 'free power'.
I wonder how build a co2 coversion plant needs to be to satisfying a carrier's air group during war time level operations? Would that fit into the space liberated by the jet fuel tanks?
Contrast with the Ecat, which is supposedly a better than unity unknown exothermic process.
The 'lack of condemnation' here is just people not reacting to blather in the press and understanding the science behind the claims.
Well, similar processes have been around a long time, but NRL claims this is a novel process that took ten years to develop and will take another ten to productize. And its endothermic nature is what makes the claims so implausible: this novel process is supposedly so close to unity it will be cheaper than producing jet fuel in refineries from oil pumped out of the ground -- which, let's note, is an
exothermic process. So basically they're claiming they can economically replace an exothermic fuel production process with an endothermic one, on a water platform, right at the point when the U.S. is poised to become the world's #1 oil producer. Fortunately they gave everyone a nice long ten-year window to forget this technology exists.
Also, LENR is neither "free power" nor unknown. It's not well-understood, but numerous experimental results exist.
Now this is not to pick on NRL or these guys in particular, or to promote Rossi (who probably does not have a viable product), it's just to point out lots of new technology comes with implausible claims, whether in industry or government labs. A lot of the hostility to Rossi seems not to stem from any particular aspect of the technology, but from the over-enthusiastic reception he gets from many supporters, and his own checkered past.
Heck, Lerner was supposedly going to have a net power focus fusion machine... in 2010. And people still give him money.
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Axil -- Maybe. I suspect they may run into the same issues BLP did, which apparently involved having to replace the nickel much more often than they had planned. BLP obviously had a terrible theory (fractional electron states?) but there's always an infinite number of wrong theories...
n*kBolt*Te = B**2/(2*mu0) and B^.25 loss scaling? Or not so much? Hopefully we'll know soon...