Making some very generous assumptions for Rossi's secret machine.paperburn1 wrote:F9 I am making a correction before I supposed that the rossi reaction was more energy than the energy in the total annihilation of the matter involved.
I was off by a factor (pesky zeros) so there is enough potential energy to provide for the reaction.
Over a gram of lithium or the equvalent of 0.2 moles of lithium.
Assumption of a rediculous 100 MeV per reaction
Operation over 1 year at one million Wat seconds (one million Joules ) continous output
Using this conversion calculater
https://www.unitjuggler.com/convert-ene ... =100000000
100000000 eV = 1.602176487 * 10-11 Ws (Joules)
Or more usefully, 1 eV= 1.602176487 E-19 Ws I commonly use 10^19 to express the exponet and it is the same.
Continous production would result in 1 million Watt c0ntinous for one Hour ( a more common unit of measure than MW Days). In any case this would be 60 MWs or 60 million Joules over one minute and 3600 MWs over an hour and 86400 MWs or Joules over one day and 31536000 MWs or MJoules over a 365 day year.
One mole of lithium is 6-7 grams and 6.03 *10^23 atoms. 0.1 mole would be 6.03 *10^22 atoms. With the given 100 MeV per atom reacting that would be 603 *10^24 MeV that could be produced if all of the generous estimate of lithium with the generous energy output estimate was consumed.
Plugging this number into the above conversion would yield-
(6.03 *10^24 MeV) / (1 MeV/ 1.602176487 E-19 Ws)
This gives an answer of 9.66 *10^7 Ws (or again Joules)
This means that ~ 2 grams fused with hydrogen or other magic ingredients could provide one magawatt of output for about 100 seconds. Even if you give an order of magnitude additional yield the two grams of lithium would last for at most ~ 20 minutes.
To last a year at continous one MWs output would require about 26000 times more or about 52000 grams or 52 Kg of lithium. For a quick check, assume that fusion reactions yield about 10,000,000 times as much energy as burning coal. A coal fired plant would consume about 520 million Kg or about 52000 KT of coal or about 1000 train cars. This is a lot of coal, though remember I am giving the Rossi machine a 10 to 100 fold gift in reasonable fusion output of lithium with hydrogen. Other claimed ingredients muddies the water somewhat, but they would all contribute less and less energy to the total.
Assuming my math is remotely accurate, then your original dismay is reasonable.
Rossi of course can claim that he meant 1 million watts over a longer time frame, such as a total output of 1 MWs delivered over over 1 week. This would translate to 1,000,000 Watt sec / ~504 seconds. That would at least be believable (assuming the system works at all). But the real world energy output would now be about 2,000 Joules/s or 2000 Watts continuous. This output is rather modest for running a factory.
PS: Extrapolating my calculations to your matter- antimatter comparison and assuming there is about 1000 times more energy released than with light element fusion reactions then several grams would come close. But, recall that I made the ridiculous assumption that each lithium consumed in the fusion reaction produced about a GeV of energy. Using much more reasonable fusion yield numbers the output falls about 100 fold less, so the annihilation reaction would only yield about 1% of the claimed output with only about 1 to 2 grams of lithium to work with...
Dan Tibbets
