I'm kind of astonished to hear someone paid money for the e-cat. I'd always thought of Rossi as a crank. Hopefully I was wrong and we get a revolutionary new energy source, but I'm still not convinced.
That is because he is a crank. Anyone who actually has a working device would simply sell electricity at below market rates to earn the money to continue the development. And any system which cannot generate enough energy to pay for its cost of operation and generate at least some profit, is not a working system.
That said, since there is a whole of confusion about just what is going on around LENR type systems, it feels a lot like Sarnoff and Tesla arguing about Radio to me.
But have you ever calculated how expensive is to get any amount of heat-generated electricity into the grid? Even if one had a completely free source of heat, any generator that is not at least on the tens of MW isn't economicaly viable. And for tens of MW, one needs tens of millions of dollars.
But with the caveat: This is of course not verified scientific data, but it’s about as good as we are going to get until the test is concluded and data published, and it might help paint something of a picture of how things are going with the plant.
Any plant that generates 1MW net power can earn $54,000 a month in revenue. A bit more than 1/2 million dollars a year. If it costs less than that per year to run, then he just has to wait for it to generate enough cash to build a second one, and then a third one. At which point he will become exponentially rich without anyone's help.
Except that isn't the way its working out. I wish him the best of luck but he seems to have this century's version of the Moeller Air Car.
> Scientists are learning much from all this tinkering, but experts say these big projects—if they work—are at best decades away from commercialization.
I don't understand what the rush is. Are we really that shortsighted that we can't wait a few decades or even centuries for the ultimate energy cure-all? We continue to enthusiastically support a space program, even though we know the practical payoff is a long way away. Why can't we have the same attitude about fusion? Traditional nuclear and associated advanced concepts can carry us in the medium term, albeit with some proliferation risk.
It's a shame that the smaller projects got cut from government funding, and I'm glad venture capitalists are stepping in and contributing. But it seems that they are outright dismissing of mainstream academic scientists, and believe that nothing useful can be learned from the scientific community. This seems hubristic, and will just lead to wasted resources and good will.
Plasma physicists have tried many things over the decades and have gotten good at pointing out failure modes. There is no good reason why there can't be more collaboration between academia and industry in this space.
At least they are trying
to do some real innovation --
powerful, valuable, important, useful,
difficult to duplicate or equal,
lots of intellectual property and
trade secrets, etc.
Much better than yet another
social, local, mobile, sharing, membership,
app.
Terrific! Go for it, guys.
Uh, guys, original research in
applied physics is not
the only good direction for
especially powerful innovations.
There is also information technology
from original research in applied
mathematics (theorem and proof kind)
for, yes, powerful, valuable,
important, useful, difficult to
duplicate or equal, lots of
intellectual property and
trade secrets, etc.
General Fusion is still awesome though, and it's great to see they're making progress. I wish I were a rich VC because I would have bet on them 6 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8np70/fusion_dream...