• 3 minutes e-car sales collapse
  • 6 minutes America Is Exceptional in Its Political Divide
  • 11 minutes Perovskites, a ‘dirt cheap’ alternative to silicon, just got a lot more efficient
  • 15 mins GREEN NEW DEAL = BLIZZARD OF LIES
  • 6 days If hydrogen is the answer, you're asking the wrong question
  • 4 hours How Far Have We Really Gotten With Alternative Energy
  • 10 days Biden's $2 trillion Plan for Insfrastructure and Jobs
James Burgess

James Burgess

James Burgess studied Business Management at the University of Nottingham. He has worked in property development, chartered surveying, marketing, law, and accounts. He has also…

More Info

Premium Content

Massachusetts to Invest in Rossi's E-Cat - 13 Units Sold Since October Demonstration

E=mc² is probably Einsteins most famous equation and basically states that all matter is made up of pure energy. The energy levels within atoms are not small either. Theoretically simple atoms are the perfect power source. They are stable, massively abundant and can produce huge amounts of energy with no by-products. Current nuclear power plants produce power via a fission reaction whereby atoms are split apart to produce energy, radiation and “radioactive waste”, but there is another form of nuclear reaction, which is fusion. In a fusion reaction the atoms don’t split, but fuse together, producing energy and no harmful radiation or waste. Obviously fusion seems the better option, however it is incredibly difficult to replicate on earth because it requires enormous amounts of pressure and heat, of the kind normally found within stars. However, the Italian Scientist Andrea Rossi appears to have produced the first working “cold” fusion device, with his Energy Catalyser machine, in which a nuclear fusion reaction is achieved and sustained, but using atoms at room temperature.

Cold fusion was originally theorised in the 1920’s by Austrian scientists Friedrich Paneth and Kurt Peters who hypothesized a form of nuclear reaction that doesn't produce radiation, and gained mainstream attention in 1989 with the experiments of electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons; however no one has been able to produce any successful results following these first few experiments. In fact the American Physical Society declared the field dead, the U.S. Patent office rejects all patents on the subject, and a significant lack of funding has considerably hampered any research.

Although, that’s not to say that research is not still conducted, and the reason that scientists struggle on despite the lack of support is the size of the goal at the end. Cold fusion would transform the world! It could produce clean, safe and virtually free energy in huge amounts....the perfect solution to our current energy dilemma.

Therefore, Rossi’s discovery should have been heralded as the scientific breakthrough of the millennium, but instead has been welcomed with criticism and scepticism. His machine claims to use a small amount of energy to start a fusion reaction between nickel and hydrogen (at room temperature) which then produces massive amounts (more than 10 times the energy that was put in)of energy in the form of heat; and it is this process that attracts the criticism. Atoms don’t just fuse together. There is an electric force of repulsion called the Coulomb barrier between all separate atoms, and huge amounts of energy are needed to overcome this force.

But just as the size of the prize means that scientific study continues in this field despite criticism, it also means that there are people willing to believe in any advances despite scepticism; just in-case it proves to be true. In fact Rossi already claims to have sold 13 E-Cat units since his demonstration in October and was in the U.S last week talking with state senator Bruce Tarr about the possibility of building a cold fusion reactor in Massachusetts.

Tarr said "My thought process was pretty simple: If it works, I want this technology to be developed and manufactured in Massachusetts.” Rossi also spoke with MIT, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts about the logistics and feasibility of manufacturing cold fusion generators for household use. Robert Tamarin, dean of sciences at the University of Massachusetts stated that, "knowing the reputation of cold fusion, I went in with a very healthy level of scepticism” but, “if it’s successful, no one wants to have to say later that we walked away from it." It is this view that the reward is worth the risk, for which people are willing to believe and invest in cold fusion. Rossi is planning to return to Massachusetts soon, with the hope of getting ”something started in a matter of weeks, not months.”

Many questions still remain, and the number of sceptics still outnumber the believers, but if Rossi's device can work consistently and reproduce the same amount of energy he demonstrated, he could finally earn the respect he deserves as we witness the birth of free energy for everybody, and a new era for the age of man.

By. James Burgess of Oilprice.com


Download The Free Oilprice App Today

Back to homepage





Leave a comment
  • Scott H on December 14 2011 said:
    Skeptics should realize that the energy may be coming from an unknown nuclear reactions. That's why I prefer calling it LENR over Cold Fusion.
  • Nixter on December 14 2011 said:
    Nickel Hydrogen reactions producing heat-energy is well documented science, Andrea Rossi's claims of reliably making high amounts of heat energy from LENR has garnered much skepticism from most of the old guard Physicists.Call it whatever you like, "Cold Fusion", "Free Energy", LENR, CANR, the effect is real world, real time, and real science. The nearly unimaginable scope of this breakthrough is so far preventing the world from having a clear idea of what is about to happen. It is like a inventor has says he has a functioning anti-gravity device, or time travel machine, or faster than light travel, all of these are just too fantastic to believe, and that is where we stand right now. AP had a reporter attend a Rossi demo, and refuses to risk reporting on something so unlikely as to be widely scoffed at. Same with most of the big media, bloggers and Hot Fusion Scientists. A Techno-quake of unprecedented scope and power may be speeding towards a incognizant and ignorant humankind.
  • Tas on December 14 2011 said:
    :o The burden of proof, like in all things scientific, is on the claimant. That is, by definition science and scientists are SKEPTICS. It does not matter if a scientist or inventor is unable to know in detail the science behind an experiment - no one is forcing this tough aspect on Rossi - but they must be able to replicate the results and prove it does what he says it does. The fact that Rossi has been unable to show definitively with multiple black box experiments the simple claim that more energy is produced than input means very few scientists will be in the least bit interested.Combined that with ever more news about marketing, sales, interviews and other irrelevance moving FAR ahead of the proof of the core scientific claim, is one of the the classic (really!) trait of a scam.
  • Gene Hawkridge on December 14 2011 said:
    At $2.7 million for an E-Cat 1 MW module, the energy is not "free". There's no such thing as "free" energy - it all costs something to make it useful. We need to dump the idea of "free energy for everybody" - this is pure fantasy, no matter what the energy source.
  • Sandy Wellstone on December 14 2011 said:
    It's not just Rossi. Looks like a lot of people can do it now. Question is who has the best control- energy producing machines need to be stable and low maintenance. It is not fusion. All these devices are doing controlled proton electron capture, which forms an ultra cold neutron. This is just the inverse of the neutron decay reaction. Neutrons accumulate on nearby nuclei. Rossi claims he turns Nickel to Copper in this way, but that's a side effect and probably endothermic. The real energy output comes from adding the netrons to increase the mass of hydrogen. So it goes to deuterium, tritium, 4H, and that beta-decasy to 4He. Helium. No positively charged particles are every shoved together. No columb barrier is broken. Just weak interactions. No gamma or high energy neutron output either. See http://BrillouinEnergy.com for details.
  • Alan DeAngelis on December 15 2011 said:
    I just don’t understand how a proton could be converted to a neutron. The mass of a neutron is 1.008664924 amu (atomic mass units). The mass of a proton is 1.007825032 amu. So, a neutron is 0.000839892 amu more mass than a proton. So, that takes 0.000839892 x 931 (the conversion factor for amu to MeV) = 0.78 MeV! That’s huge! For example, it’s about twice as large as the Coulomb barrier to deuterium deuterium fusion!! I think a nuclear reaction is taking place in Rossi’s E-Cat but I wouldn’t think it’s a proton capturing an electron. In 1989, Fleischmann and Pons thought heavy electrons in the conduction band of palladium might be reducing Coulomb barriers between nuclei the way muons do in muon catalyzed fusion. Maybe this is happening in nickel (making it easier for a proton to fuse with nickel).
  • ADSAD on December 15 2011 said:
    ", however it is incredibly difficult to replicate on earth because it requires enormous amounts of pressure and heat, of the kind normally found within stars."The hot fusion from the stars is just an theoretical model, not a fact! The recent measurements don in the last 2 years by Sun probes revealed that the temperature inside the Sun is lower than at surface and it's in order of several hundred degrees C. So where's the hot fusion? Think for yourself!
  • Victor on December 15 2011 said:
    Possible 'scam' aside, if a device works, it really does not matter whether the scientific community or anyone else believes it or not, or whether they understand it. Simply because you don't understand a how the device works does not in any way imply that it CANNOT work. If it works, it works. We can figure out why later. Indeed, once figured out, then the possibility exists for further refinement and optimisation.And the device will not sell because scientists and sceptics accept it; it will sell because it works - plain and simple. If it doesn't work, it won't sell. You really can't sit there and claim with such certainty it is a fake and a scam until it has been proven to be a fake and a scam.Let's let the market decide - it will anyway. I poo-pooed graphical interfaces and the computer mouse when it first came out came out - said it would never catch on.... :oops: I don't intend to make that mistake again... 8)
  • Max on December 16 2011 said:
    Alan, The mass difference between a proton and a neutron is accounted for by the mass and binding energy of the electron and antineutrino that are produced during neutron decay. This is a well understood reaction as free neutrons are known to decay rapidly.
  • Alan DeAngelis on December 17 2011 said:
    Yeah, thanks Max. (Pardon me. I just saw a typo of mine. It should read: a neutron has 0.000839892 amu more mass than a proton). But anyway, I was just thinking that as you say a neutron beta decays to a proton and when it does it releases energy. So, if a proton (a big if) could undergo electron capture to form a neutron it would require 0.78 MeV (This is energetically uphill!) and for this reason, I have trouble believing in mechanisms that propose the conversion of a proton to a neutron. It’s a nebulous thought (and I hope I don’t sound too delirious) but I could envision a mechanism where a heavy electron is borrowed from the conduction band of a metal to initiate the fusion of two nuclei (as a muon could) and then returning to the conduction band but I have trouble believing that a heavy electron from the conduction band would be consumed in a reaction with a proton to form a neutron.
  • Brad Arnold on December 19 2011 said:
    LENR using nickel. Incredibly: Ni+H(heated under pressure)=Cu+lots of heat. This phenomenon (LENR) has been confirmed in hundreds of published scientific papers: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdfAccording to Forbes, electricity will be "too cheap to meter" if Rossi's Oct 28 demonstration succeeds: http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2011/10/17/hello-cheap-energy-hello-brave-new-world/Here's the latest, according to MSNBC it passed the test: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45153076/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.TrNo9rJqwe4By the way, here is a current survey of all the companies that are bringing LENR to commercialization: http://www.cleantechblog.com/2011/08/the-new-breed-of-energy-catalyzers-ready-for-commercialization.html

Leave a comment




EXXON Mobil -0.35
Open57.81 Trading Vol.6.96M Previous Vol.241.7B
BUY 57.15
Sell 57.00
Oilprice - The No. 1 Source for Oil & Energy News