A few times now I’ve said that the ‘deep oil’ found in the Gulf of Mexico meant there was a “whole new shell of depth” to be drilled. That even in places where we already “depleted the field” there could be more oil down below it.
Older theory had said the oil was made in ‘source rocks’ but had largely migrated upward to where we drained the pools, and that deep areas were just so hot that oils would break down (oddly, the typical ‘story’ would say something like “into natural gas” … like that was a bad thing…)
So I’m doing some digging on LENR / Cold Fusion ( Rossi was to give a conference / news / something on Oct 12th that turned out to be a bit of a dud…) and stumbled on this interesting blog and article:
http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2012/10/11/huge-oil-strike-in-oklahoma/
Huge Oil Strike in Oklahoma
October 11, 2012 |
Continental Resources Inc. unveiled its newest oil field with a reservoir rock of an oil-rich portion of the Woodford Shale that lies beneath oil fields tapped long ago by some of the state’s biggest oil names, including Phillips Petroleum, Noble, Hefner and Skelly Oil.
[…]
The first oil was found in the area more than 100 years ago.
[…]
Jack Stark, Continental’s senior vice president of exploration said, “It’s a huge opportunity for the company and another great asset for us because we’re looking at an asset with rates of return that compete head-to-head with what we’re doing in the Bakken” in North Dakota and Montana.”What stands out about the discovery is its thought to be huge. The company reports it may have found 1.8 billion barrels of oil equivalent.
[…]
Stark explains in part how the discovery was made, “Technology transfer is a huge part of this business right now. We’re accessing what were once considered just source rock.”
I’ve bolded a few bits. It’s deep, below fields that have been producing for 100 years, and it’s unexpected (by most folks). But what really made me sit up and take notice was the next section:
For observers the key is Stark’s comment, “We’re accessing what were once considered just source rock.”. Many oil reservoirs are pooled from seeps out of source rock where the oil formed. Pooled reservoirs are not the whole of the reserve, but only the easily accessed and freest flowing of the petroleum.
We’re still learning about subsurface oil and gas. The amounts of oil and gas to be recovered are still incalculable. The extent of petroleum to be discovered isn’t known. How much oil is in source rock from the reservoirs already found is still a big question without hard answers.The new Woodford Shale discovery is great news for the U.S. Once the world’s largest oil producer, the U.S. could do it again in phase two of mankind’s oil age.
A whole new shell of depth, and drilling in it, we’ve found a whole lot more oil…
In related news, lots of folks have their panties in a bunch about the amount of natural gas used to extract oil from tar sands (hot liquids basically melt the tar by heating the ground ‘way down there’ but that takes burning a lot of natural gas on top, even though it’s relatively cheap and often ‘stranded gas’ that can’t be shipped to markets due to no pipelines out of the area.) While checking on comments on a Thorium Reactor thread at WUWT, there was this bit in a comment at the bottom:
Spector says:
October 8, 2012 at 1:12 am (Edit)
[…]
According to Dr. David LeBlanc in his presentation at the TEAC4 Future of Energy Conference, there appears to be gathering serious interest in Canada for developing liquid fueled uranium burner reactors, similar to the Molten Salt test unit built at Oak Ridge–to help recover petroleum from the tar-sands. This application could serve as a proving ground for the technology. He said that these burner reactors would be so efficient that if uranium prices rose to $500 per Kg, the impact would only be about 0.2 cents per kw-hr.David LeBlanc – Molten Salt Reactor Designs,
Options & Outlook @ TEAC4
“Published on Jul 20, 2012 by gordonmcdowell”
32 likes, 0 dislikes; 1480 views; 19:46 min
“Canadian David LeBlanc describes the benefits of liquid fuel Molten Salt Reactors over solid fuel reactors, emphasizing reactor design over any relative advantages of thorium or uranium.“Come for the thorium, stay for the reactor!”
Followed by a video. (Inserted below). But think about that for a minute. Relatively small THERMAL sources. Displacing a lot of natural gas. At extraordinarily low cost per kWhr-thermal.
Kind of blows giant crater sized holes in that whole “energy ROI” argument. (As I’ve pointed out before, it’s the FORM of the energy that matters. Most energy is thrown away in the process of giving the form we want in the place we want it. Even burning for heat, or to make a wheel turn, tosses lots of BTUs to get the desired form…)
So using nuclear process heat gives us a giant (Trillions of bbls scale) “new” oil reserve in North America. But as it is “non-conventional oil” the Peakers will continue to shout that we’re at (or past) Hubbert’s Peak of Oil!!! while ignoring that is “conventional oil” and the unconventional oil is just starting up the production ramp.
Both of them give us the same “oil products”, so as consumers we don’t really care if our gasoline is “unconventional”, or not, or came from “source rocks” directly, or after oozing for a few million years on their own into a small pool.
Sidebar on Cold Fusion
There was supposed to be a ‘big deal’ of some sort on October 12th. IMHO it’s Yet Another Fizzle. Rossi sent out a report on the “Third Party Test” that again did not include the Third Party report, just his summary. BUT it was wrong, and he claimed to have fumbled and sent out a draft, so sent out a ‘correction’ that’s full of basic math / physics errors…
So once again we have a ‘perhaps he got real run time hot’ or ‘perhaps he is just fudging numbers and doing it badly’. So more “watchful waiting”…
Report, such as it is, in the top of this article:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/10/update-andrea-rossi-provides-corrected-pordenone-hot-cat-report/
While the comments that follow point out a lot of “just plain wrong” and dissapointment in it…
Also we’re coming up on a year since the Greek folks, Defkalion, claimed to have ‘the magic formula’ and promised to ship product in 2012. But no product yet…
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3353181.ece
and the Big Boys have lots of promising toys, and requests for even bigger toy budgets next year… along with the perpetual promise of “Energy Breakeven Real Soon Now!!” that’s at least one career / lifetime in the future…
I wonder if someone ought to remind them that Be is rather seriously toxic? And tungsten a bit of a bitch to machine and form…
The Most Expensive Irrational Optimism for Fusion Power
October 9, 2012 | 2 Comments
Yesterday Dr Francesco Romanelli, Leader of the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) and the Joint European Torus (JET) Leader, delivered a summary of the JET results at the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference in San Diego.
The conference aims to discuss various options with the goal of building the first demonstration power plant before the middle of the 21st century, 38 years out in the future.
Before simply thinking things though is interjected, operation with a new lining inside JET has demonstrated the suitability of materials for the much larger and more powerful ITER device.
[…]
For the tests JET was transformed successfully into a ‘mini-ITER’ with an inner confinement wall made of the same materials – beryllium and tungsten – that ITER plans to use.
[…]The good news begins with the first test in August 2011 when the beryllium and tungsten lining enabled more reliable plasmas to be produced. The JET work found that the amount of fuel being retained in the wall is at least ten times less than in the previous, carbon-based, configuration. The results achieved may lead ITER to drop plans for an initial phase of operation with carbon and adopt a beryllium-tungsten wall from the outset, bringing a significant savings in time and cost for the project.
So in 38 years, the present staff ought to be long retired on nice pensions… as long as the Euro Zone / EU holds together… Even the “Twenty Somethings”…
But hey, it’s progress, I suppose.
Personally, I’d bet on Cold Fusion before I’d bet on them. Cold Fusion is already showing “anomalous heat”, so is past break-even.
Before that, we could make one of these starting tomorrow:
Note that he says “2 cents / kw-hr” so the quote above has the decimal wrong…
The bottom line doesn’t change in any case: We’re up to our eyeballs in energy choices. We just need to use them.
I especially like the parts where he talks about getting even MORE of the oil out of the ground using nuclear powered SAGD and the frequent references to massive amounts of energy ;-)
So a hearty “Go Canada!” from down here south of the border…
Musings from the Chiefio 
@E.M.: We’re up to our eyeballs in energy choices. ….and of energy too, just consider all the electric energy between ground and clouds.
Interesting stuff indeed. Not that much interest to me personally i’ll be dead long time before the fossile fuel economy has been switched over. But nice to smack econuts with.
Great thread! The Thorium reactors offer very good promise. There is a US company in New Jersey that offers a promising solution. While LENR (Cold Fusion) has disappointed in its timeline, it is still moving forward. This summer an Italian Scientist named Celani demonstrated a reproducible capability demonstrated at several major conferences. Out of his open sharing of information a company has put together kits that can be bought for experiments. Here is a link to a company building the kit.
A group has been formed with various teams to use this methodology to do different test, such as power scaling. They will soon have a web site where they report their activities. The list of participants is impressive.
A further note on LENR, the company Brillouin out of San Fransisco has obtained 20 million funding and is working with Stanford Research (SRI) to build and test their design. Part of their funding agreement was to demonstrate usage in a refurbish effort of a coal fired plant.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/09/brillouin-energy-has-conditional.html
The Greek company, defkalion, has moved its operation to Vancouver because of business considerations.They claim to have signed licensees and have run tests with such companies that they are working with. http://ecatnews.com/?p=2435
Rossi has disappointed with delays, much he claims to be based on certification approval delays. He has claimed to have developed a new reactor core that runs at 1000 C and can drive a turbine direct. He just released some data, unverified.
http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/10/update-andrea-rossi-provides-corrected-pordenone-hot-cat-report/
In addition to this there are advances in other areas. The Air force now has converted coal into jet fuel, but it was quickly outlawed for commercial use as its carbon content was higher than other gas. Seems like a great way to kill something to me.
Also, the Navy has efforts to convert Sea Water to fuel.
http://www.businessinsider.com/seawater-could-fuel-navy-jets-2012-10
There are other promising technologies I follow, but the bottom line in my opinion is that new energy sources are on the Horizon and will be here soon, but until then, drill baby drill.
As a side note, I know some guys working the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota and they claim the government is using every trick in the book to impede their work. Some pretty unhappy people in North Dakota with government regulations.
Thanks for this story, E.M.Smith.
Yes, are up to our eyeballs in
a.) Energy, and
b.) Deception
That is why society is in free-fall worldwide, and will collapse in disarray if we do not end sixty-seven years (2012 – 1945 = 67 yrs) of deception to hide the FORCE at the Sun’s core that:
a.) Made our elements
b.) Birthed the world
c.) Sustains our lives
d.) Controls our climate
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-1369
With deep regrets,
– Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
PS -The publishers of Science (AAAS or American Association for the Advancement of Science) removed the link to deceitful information published there on 24 Dec 1975. These two most important articles in the 24 Dec 1975 issue of Science are not listed in the current Table of Contents of vol. 190.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/190/4221.toc
1. “Host Phase of a Strange Xenon Component in Allende”
R. S. LEWIS, B. SRINIVASAN, and EDWARD ANDERS
Science 190 (24 December 1975) 1251-1262
2. “Extinct Super-heavy Element in the Allende Meteorite”
E. ANDERS, H. HIGUCHI, J. GROS, H. TAKAHASHI, and J. W. MORGAN
Science 190 (24 December 1975) 1262-1271.
A change of paradigm needed!
Since when have facts and real resources come before telling a “You are all doomed” story?HR Menken nailed it with the imaginary hobgoblins years ago.I am constantly amazed by our [canadian] attitude to nuclear energy and oil. One comedic aspect is the fact we cannot afford to fuel the icebreakers we do have and have little with true arctic ice capacity.Not to mention zero in high arctic refuelling capability. For years I have been intrigued by the russian theory of abiotic oil, because even though the theory is contentious they drill and find oil, apparently using their theory to decide where.
By the way thanks for the March of Global Warming from April 1 whatever year still laughing.
Blacklight Energy:
http://www.blacklightpower.com/index.shtml
Common reaction between NaOH and Aluminum:
sodium aluminate
Al + NaOH + H2O = NaAlO2 + 3H (1)
But they obtain Sodium Hydride, that would be like this:
sodium hydride
2Al + NaOH + 2H2O= NaH + Al2O3 + 3H (1a)
and, to keep the reaction reach its next step, there must be a reduction reaction:
Al2O3 + 6H = Al + 3H2O (2)
Which, in turn, it is produced by decomposing H2O with electricity.
This process uses as catalyst “Raney Nickel” Raney nickel ( /ˈreɪniː ˈnɪkəl/) is a solid catalyst composed of fine grains of a nickel-aluminium alloy, used in many industrial processes. It was developed in 1926 by American]] engineer Murray Raney[1] as an alternative catalyst for the hydrogenation of vegetable oils in industrial processes.
A.Rossi says he uses also nickel…..
Couple of more links. First one has a LOT of Rossi video at a conference presenting “results”. I’ve not had time to watch them, but the guy claims to have just uploaded the raw feed… so may be hours worth. (and that’s why I’ve not watch them yet).
http://pesn.com/2012/09/09/9602178_Rossi_Reports_Third-Party_Test_Results_from_Hot_Cat/#September_9_QnA
This one has that same video about the “kit” for universities.
http://pesn.com/2012/10/11/9602202_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_October11/
It also has a LOT of link to stories in it, including one that I’ve read, but can’t tell if it is a new technology description or just made up jumble of “sciency” terms…
http://pesn.com/2012/10/10/9602204_Discovery_of_Macrocationic_Crystalline_H2O_Cavitation-Reentrant-Jets_and_their_Role_in_Cavitation_Zero-Point-Energy_Fusion_and_the_Origin_of_Life/
So not just some guy in the backyard with a web page… yet it really doesn’t “click” for me as to what the words mean… So either I’m way out of my depth, or the guy is just making stuff up (perhaps that he really believes…)
Further down (i.e. skipping a bunch):
So either a paradigm shifting breakthrough in everything from LENR and Zero-Point energy to formation of life; or someone with a wild imagination looking at rust spots / contamination and seeing God…
Maybe someone more familiar with it can explain what a “cavitation reentrant jet water crystal ” might be in physical terms, or even what a “small scale supernova” could possibly be as it sure sounds like an oxymoron to me…
@Adolfo:
I’ve pondered that for decades. First learned there was a few hundred volts of differential between the top of an antenna and ground some long time ago and been trying to figure a way to ‘get it out and use it’ ever since. (Problem is too low a particle density to make a lot of usable current… so I imagined various kinds of ‘mesh’ at the top to collect the electrons… Currently – no pun intended ;-0 – pondering a micro fractal antenna…)
Heck, seems to me that a large tall building ought to be able to put a fine mesh on the roof an tap out electricity… but it just seems to little air particle density… I think maybe I need to ponder some kind of field coupling instead of particle motion.
@Petrossa:
The MSR design in the video could be constructed inside a year as a test bed (production depending mostly on licensing). That picture of a tall cylindrical reactor is an existing reactor with just a swap of core-stuff. If approved for testing, this could be in the field heating a tar sands operation inside 5 years ‘with some hustle’… so hope you aren’t planning on leaving that soon! ;-)
@John Robertson:
Maybe you could buy a Russian built nuclear ice breaker and claim it was not allowed to ban it under some free trade treaty or other?!
They really do make a lot of sense, and the technology of seagoing nuclear ships is well proven.
@BobN:
Oh Boy, more fresh links! ;-)
Yes, one of my great annoyances is just how much there looks to be an organized plan to herd a lot of panic ridden folks into destructive anti-tech “movements” that just ‘accidentally’ keep the existing oil producers prices up and competition out of the picture…
An analysis of web traffic (don’t have a reference, heard it on TV) showed a very large number of IP addresses for “small donations” to the Obama web site had their origin in foreign lands. It would not be hard at all for a Sheik somewhere to hire a few thousand folks to move a few million dollars to ‘the right campaign’ in under $200 amounts (that are not subject to reporting). As “foreign money” is illegal, but below $200 is not inspected, it’s not a big leap to thing someone “figured this out”. As a guy / company with a few $Billion per day hanging on oil prices, think they could spring a couple dozen $Million to fund folks quashing the competition?…
Oh, and I think you mean this one:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/global-warming-from-africa-contagious-spreading-at-100-miles-per-year/
It very seriously points out that some PROCESS was being changed that artificially shows up as a ‘warming signal’… but does it with some humor ;-)
@Oliver:
Perhaps you can look at the “small supernova” thing and make some sense of it….
BTW, in a prior thread I’d pointed to stuff that showed the age of the elements here as being in a supernova at about the start of the formation of “here”; thus giving a ‘zero transit time’ from said supernova TO here… kind of hard to do if our sun were not the forming event.
IMHO, that is extremely strong evidence for the ‘sun blew up and is now a neutron core with cover layer’ idea. Otherwise you have a requirement that the elements got here moving at faster than light speed…. and something just doesn’t add up.
The correct date and link to the Table of Contents are:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/190/4221.toc
1. “Host Phase of a Strange Xenon Component in Allende”
R. S. LEWIS, B. SRINIVASAN, and EDWARD ANDERS
Science 190 (26 December 1975) 1251-1262
2. “Extinct Super-heavy Element in the Allende Meteorite”
E. ANDERS, H. HIGUCHI, J. GROS, H. TAKAHASHI, and J. W. MORGAN
Science 190 (26 December 1975) 1262-1271.
One caution about the Rossi and similar devices that use nickel. Raney nickel creates heat when exposed to water. I’m not saying all these devices work this way, but when the guy won’t show you the guts, you have to be careful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raney_nickel
Rossi is a convicted fellon, with a diploma mill Ph.D. and otherwise shady past. I believe it highly unlikely that such as person would make a major scientific/engineering breakthrough in the LENR field. While the above is not sufficient to exclude the possibility of such a breakthrough, it is relevant to the story and should be made known so that people can view the story with proper scepticism.
I suspect that cold fusion will (forever ?) remain an unfulfilled intellectual curiosity. I have more faith in hot fusion, though I think they need to be more innovative if they are to make progress. Still, one can hope.
@ J Martin – I have just the opposite opinion. Cold fusion can now be demonstrated repeatedly on demand and outputs more energy than input. This has yet to be achieved after 50 years of research and Billions in funding for Hot Fusion. If the high energy claims of any of the contenders, Rossi, defkalion or Brillouin turn out to be true, its off to the races. If not, the work by Celani shows real promise and just may scale. The good part is, I think we will know the answer in a few short years. Then again, something from left field may come along and end up being the winner. Your opinion is probably more mainstream than mine.
Since I’ve been alive, and probably before that, fusion power exponents have been saying that we’ll have the first commercial plants in 40 years. Now we’re down to 38. Progress!
I could be cynical and suggest that the 38 year figure was pulled out of somebody’s ‘something or other’ simply because the fusion people have wised up to that fact that we’ve all heard the same 40 year figure every year for the last 40 years and everyone regards it as a kind of a joke – instead I’ll just be sarcastic.
Ultimately we don’t travel to the stars without fusion power, and ultimately it will be a ‘Very Good Thing’ for terrestrial civilization when fusion power finally arrives, but I wouldn’t plan my economy around fusion technology being available to rescue my utopian plans by any particular decade. That said, when it does arrive it will be a surprise, a lot of experts will be astonished, and everything will unfold very quickly after that.
In the mean time I think we should continue to ‘decarbonize’ our energy economy by continuing to move to natural gas as a bridge to Thorium based nuclear – at all practical scales.
I really like E.M.’s idea of using Thorium as a thermal source for industrial processes; how about turning all of that ‘unconventional oil’ into natural gas ‘in situ’, rather than trying to pump it out as oil. Do this from the surface or could you package a refinery process like that to be deliverable by well hole directly into the source rock, pump technology and water in and gas out of the same drill hole?
Speaking of Thorium, how about a residential home scale Thorium ‘battery’ planted in the ground next to your home, it’s included in the price of your mortgage and every ten to twenty years you swap it out for a new/fueled one, and your old one goes off for refurbishment/refueling for someone else. Complete energy independence for the individual or family for a generation. Could you imagine that? What will the government do? What will the environmentalists do when they realize that they can no longer threaten starve, freeze, and immobilize us in order to rescue ‘their’ utopian plans?
Our human future is really all about cheap energy. Why do so many peoples’ utopian plans seem to revolve around making everyone’s energy more expensive?
W^3
I have been watching the Rossi circus from a safe distance. Once again Chiefio has found many interesting links. All this farce needs is the Keystone Cops (Interpol?) to make it truly rib splitting.
David LeBlanc and Kirk Sorensen are onto something. The front runners in the Thorium race used to be China, India and the Czech republic. Canada could leave them all in the dust if it chose to do so, given its track record with home grown nuclear technology (e.g. CANDU).
The first nuclear reactor I visited was at “Deep River”, Canada in 1967 and a “Scram” shutdown occured while I was in the control room. Quite a panic but no real harm done! Back then there was zero security and visitors were allowed to handle real fuel rods (chained to a table) during a most interesting tour.
In contrast I spent a week last year at a 2.8 GW nuclear power plant. The head count was ~1,400 and 350 of them were dedicated to “Security”. The security was similar to what I experienced in Belfast from 1971 to 1976. My car was searched (thoroughly) including mirrors to examine the underside of the car. Even so it was pitiful compared to Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque where after wating six weeks for clearance, I was accompanied by an armed guard even on visits to the rest room. That in turn fell short of the security related to obtaining a mere handful of Krytrons…………………
I tried to get Rod Adams to talk about the huge number of high paying jobs that nuclear power can create but he did not take the bait:
http://atomicinsights.com/2012/08/nuclear-jobs-jobs-jobs.html#comment-25664
Thanks to King Coal, frakking, methane clathrates and newer sources such as the ones Chiefio is talking about fossil fuels should last several more centuries even with expanding per capita consumption. More than enough time to get our nuclear fission house in order. Maybe time enough to develop a viable fusion technology for space travel if the power generation applications prove too challenging.
Great comments by w.w.wygart, someone who has a clue about the “Big Picture”. My Utopian plan is to bring cheap electricity to every dusty hamlet in the third world. Maybe that could happen quite soon if someone would fund David LeBlanc to design a small LFTR that could be delivered on a single truck.
http://atomicinsights.com/2011/12/kirk-sorensen-why-didnt-molten-salt-thorium-reactors-succeed-the-first-time.html#comment-14900
Apologies adolfogiurfa. I didn’t see your post – didn’t intend to Rane on your parade.
“The transmuted material has been analyzed by SEM-EDAX, XPS and LA-ICP-MS, revealing that the transmuted material was generated by small scale supernova nucleosynthesis forming on the supersonic bow shock surrounding the crystal. Seventy-eight elements were detected, along with short-lived isotopes.”
“Cold Fusion” was not enough so let’s have “Cold Supernovas”. My BS detector just went crazy.
Technology continues to trump scepticism, but continues to have difficulties with politics. It looks like half of our country is incapable of imagining how relatively cheap and unlimited energy supplies would impact our society. That’s the half that thinks that restricting and “conserving” energy is a fine way to control everything.
I can’t make a judgement on cold fusion; but a profusion of carbon resources brought up by new technology, and a trend toward (real) design efficiency in spite of green mythology is heartening.
112 years ago (you can look it up) a huge problem for the futurists concern was what cities were going to do with all the horse hockey.
Within a decade we had seen the airplane and the automobile, and within the lifespan of a fair number we landed on the moon – my grandfathers life spanned “no cars or planes” to a moon landing.
Allowing technology to produce today while research defines tomorrow
seems obvious; the threat only to those who define their self-interest as being the senior custodians of a shrinking pie, massaging their outsize egos defining the lives of others.
@R. Shearer:
Agreed. However, his early ‘work’ was largely ripping off the work of another guy (who’s name escapes me at the moment) who’ reputation is rather good. My “thesis” is just that in the ripping off, he “got something wrong” (probably by accident) and the device worked. Since then he’s likely been blinding trying to figure out just what it was and just how to stabilize it, but doesn’t have much of a clue. (That he might have stuck in something like Rayney Nickle is a reasonable hypothesis… have someone not really in touch with subtle tech calls up and orders “some nickle catalyst” and likes the sound of the name when that sales clerk asks “Plain nickle or Rayney?”…)
Short form: Even a fool and a felon can accidentally discover a gold nugget on the beach… (and then spend a lot of time continuing to dig in empty sand looking for more…)
@J. Martin:
Cold fusion has an inherent problem with scale. As you scale up, heat flow issues will push it toward warm fusion and eventually hot fusion… The question is: Will added heat quench, or accelerate, the process? If it quenches, LENR becomes a lab curiosity. If it accelerates, there are stability problems.
If we’re really lucky, it accelerates up to about 900 C and THEN quenches …
@Jim2 and Adolfo:
Why we need to see a device running continuously for a few weeks with much more power out than in AND analysis of the “guts” post operation. Heck, just an aluminum air battery can provide a lot of unexpected power…
@BobN:
If I were placing bets, right now I’d bet on LENR as a new entrant vs Hot Fusion as the old favorite that has never quite crossed the line in the first 4 but has a great “paper trail”. But that new entrant can have a fatal flaw and end up dead on the track 1/2 way around; and that old “also ran” has been slowly moving up the pack each run of the race…
To me, the more interesting perspective is just that Hot Fusion is “All Government All The Time” so proceeds based on massive cash consumption and folks with cushy jobs and fat salaries that are not all that interested in having their jobs end (upon success…) Yes, they want it to work, but not too soon…
To me, it looks like both can work (fusion does happen, and in both hot and cold). So I’d bet on LENR / Cold Fusion simply based on the nature of the organizations exploring / pushing for it. More market based and less heavy hand of government / bureaucratic stifle.
@Jim2:
Adolpho’s comment came in later but showed up earlier. I’m not sure why. Sometimes WordPress seems to put some random things into a ‘pause queue’ somewhere ;-)
I think when they are doing some kind of maintenance…
@w.w.wygart:
I must be older than you, I remember when Fusion was being said as “50 years from now”… that was in the early ’70s, so “only” 40 years ago… Hmmm…. we moved the goal 10 years out of 40. it’s presently 38. So in 152 years they will have it working!
By designing a thermal reactor to breed as much fuel as it burns you can make one that stays hot for 50+ years, if desired. No need to dig up and refuel…. Stick it in a large concrete block in the yard and run pipe through the concrete, you have a nice heat battery that soaks up the excess in summer and gives it back all winter. Think a zero heating cost home would sell “back east” or in Canada? Never happen, though. Too many folks paranoid of the word nuclear. (Don’t tell them the smoke detector is radioactive!)
On ‘in situ nat gas generation’: We get AT MOST about 1/2 the oil out of depleted fields. NOTHING prevents us from driving out the remaining hydrocarbon with lots of excess nuclear heat. First as liquefaction, then as steam stripping, then as hydroforming with superheated steam (after which could then use that huge hot rock as a ‘domestic heat battery’ for a good long time taking the heat back out…) Might need to send some metal dust catalyst down the flow to make natural gas, and ‘depth’ (thus pressure) will limit where it can be done…
But the idea that “the hole is dry” is flat out wrong (about 1/2 typically remains) and the idea that we can’t get it is also wrong (as it is just a technological race condition). And that is without looking at the “source rock” shell of depth, without looking at “abiotic oil’ as a constantly regenerating resource on carbonate rock subduction, and without looking at the potential of cometary oil deep under most rocks.
We’re so far from “running out” I can’t even guess how many centuries it will take.
Why are some folks so set against energy development? Frankly, I think most of the “greens” are simply being exploited as “useful idiots”. The government does NOT want you to be independent of it and possessed of lots of power. You might realize you do not need to pay their cheques… The existing (massive) energy providing companies do not want you to be energy independent. Just who is helped by letting you cut loose of the “controllers” and the “sellers”? Only you…
Think OPEC just rakes in a few $BILLION per DAY and doesn’t try to use that money to “shape events” to its benefit? Including supporting political groups and NGOs that would be of long term benefit?
@Richard Ilfeld:
There is a long history of “The Scarcity Scare Meme” (my term). It is inherent in our culture in primitive form thanks to a long history of famines. But it was in the early ’70s that The Club Of Rome funded a book ‘The limits to growth’ by Meadows et. al. which was the genesis of using “computer models” to “project” the future. (Largely done by using exponential growth of consumption and linear or no growth of reserves. Ignoring the financial axis that moves ‘resources’ into economical ‘reserves’ as prices rise. Ignoring technical advance. Ignoring resource substitution. Ignoring…) IT was a great success for them and recruited a lot of followers.
Fast forward a couple of decades, the same folks lever their success to promote “global warming” as the opposite side of “running out”. Not only are we “running out”, but if we use what we have, we drown in an invisible sewer…
It is all about scare tactics to herd the masses into a scenario with much higher prices while having much lower costs to produce for the core resources (i.e. only using the ‘easy oil’) and while keeping the existing powers as the ones who STAY in power. NOBODY with a large company wants to compete. Especially not a cartel. This is simply about suppression of viable alternatives and competition while maximizing profit for the “cartels” involved.
(Not a paranoid fantasy. It is just the only thing that fits all the known data. We have at least 2 clearly working absolutely economically doable and very beneficial alternatives to oil that would break the OPEC revenue stream inside a decade. NOTHING is being done to implement them nor has it been done in 40 ish years. Instead we get clearly ‘fantasy ideas’ that will simply not work in decades to centuries or are thermodynamic idiocies. Hydrogen Cars when there are no hydrogen wells… so it’s more a kind of battery than an energy source. Windmills to heat homes in Britain? Yeah, right. etc. etc. No coal to liquids. No modular nuclear and electric cars. No…. Only one pattern fits the “scared about what works, promoting what can not work” pattern, and that is “continued oil dependency with higher prices for lower quantities”. And from that you can easily map ‘winners and losers’… )
@GallopingCamel:
They made it that hard to get a gas filled vacuum tube? Heck, at that point it’s easier to make your own. Triode with a ‘keep alive’ electrode and fill with gas. Nearly trivial…
Per Rossi: Yeah, either he has accidentally found something he doesn’t understand (while attempting a fraud and “fumbling it” into a real result) and THAT will make a great movie, or he’s just “making stuff up” and that, too, makes a decent movie…. Keystone Kops would help, but I think they are for “Scene Three” ;-)
Interesting links!
I’d love to see nuclear “go small”. There was a village in Alaska that was offered a very small modular nuke (from Toshiba?) for free, just to get them past the licensing hurdle. (ONE Diesel driven generation plant powered the whole place. It stops, people freeze to death. Great use for a small nuke). Fully encapsulated and just stick in the ground and let it run…
Big kerfuffle by “greens” and last I heard they were still burning Diesel…
And yeah… “Cold” or “Small” just don’t go with “Supernova”… so either it’s complete fabricated bunk, or the guy is trying to re-use words in a bad way for an idea he has that isn’t made clear at all… BS detector on high, but a small wondering “maybe I’m not ‘getting it’ based on some other POV used by physicists… and a language barrier.”…
Speaking of vacuum tubes. Here is a Frenchmen who makes his own. What a cool video!
http://paillard.claude.free.fr/
OK, that link has ads. Here’s one that does not, I think …
@gallopingcamel
Please give a reference and link, if available, for the quote,
“The transmuted material has been analyzed by SEM-EDAX, XPS and LA-ICP-MS, revealing that the transmuted material was generated by small scale supernova nucleosynthesis forming on the supersonic bow shock surrounding the crystal. Seventy-eight elements were detected, along with short-lived isotopes.”
Thanks, om
EM – if you look down the comments on that Nanospire/Mark LeClair article on PESN you’ll find he put in a few comments – I did too and asked him some questions he ducked. The terms he used seem to be invented (not that unusual for a new technology where no words exist) as I don’t understand a lot of them myself. Although he has a load of background in the subject, he’s not offering any hard evidence other than his own word. No pictures of the unbelievable stuff, no medical affidavits. His technology ought to work, but I don’t buy the explanations. It’s also maybe good to read Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax’s comments at http://www.mail-archive.com/vortex-l@eskimo.com/msg40544.html for some useful insights.
Personally I think the technology is basically so simple that without the dire warnings of danger (FUD again) it would be ubiquitous. I’m not arguing with either the nanomachining capabilities of the technology or the possibility of some nuclear activity, but the weird stuff (vortices etc.) is not believable.
On Rossi you seem to hit the nail on the head, but luckily there are believable scientists who have presented results in LENR, but it will be a few years before it becomes generally available.
On the oil issue, which is where this thread started, it seems that the closer we get to that Peak Oil moment the more the known reserves keep being expanded, and there’s only the political will needed to use them. With the Global Warming FUD, it does seem we’re always being asked to pay more in order to achieve less – in the name of saving the planet for our kids. Meantime the rich (that is really rich) seem to be still doing just as well and getting richer.
@Simon Derricutt: nanomachining capabilities of the technology I have a procedure without any “machining” at all which can obtain metal nano-particles in the ton per batch range; if somebody need to produce them its production cost it is about US$10.-per kilo plus the metal value; the method could be obtained for testing though a disclosure agreement.
Back in the 1950´s it was published in the “Science et Vie” french magazine, the blue prints of a small reactor for converting radioactivity from a isotope source, directly into electricity. As I remember it its construction was similar to that of an old radio vacuum tube, but like an sphere in shape, with a depolarizing grid in between the electrodes.
“By designing a thermal reactor to breed as much fuel as it burns you can make one that stays hot for 50+ years, if desired. No need to dig up and refuel…. ”
What about the “Nuke in a Hole”:
http://seekerblog.com/2008/09/19/nuscale-power-45-mwe-nuclear-heat-source/
Or Bill Gates’ Travelling Wave Reactor:
omanuel,
I got that quote from Chiefio himself, further up this thread:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/whole-new-layer-of-oil-depth/#comment-41266
jim2,
That video was awesome! That milling machine near the end was a Dufour. Very good machine but not as flexible or easy to use as a Bridgeport.
@GallopingCamel:
where I was quoting it having picked it up from:
http://pesn.com/2012/10/10/9602204_Discovery_of_Macrocationic_Crystalline_H2O_Cavitation-Reentrant-Jets_and_their_Role_in_Cavitation_Zero-Point-Energy_Fusion_and_the_Origin_of_Life/
Thanks, galloping camel and E.M.Smith.
The quote is surprisingly like the event that
a.) Made out elements
b.) Birthed the world as we know it
c.) Sustained life as it evolved on Earth
d.) Gave rise to all of our creative talents
e.) Still extends out >100 AU beyond Earth as
The force that will defeat the would-be world tyrants and confirm once again that “Truth is victorious, never untruth”
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-1369
FWIW, the web page with the article about the new, big Oklahoma find has an incorrect map. It shows an area in the SE quandrant of Oklahoma as being where the oil was found. However, I have a paper copy of the original print edition of the newspaper where the news was first released. It includes a map with a highlight in the SW quadrant of the state. Also, the article itself mentions Grady, Stephens, and Garvin counties. Those are in the SW quadrant of the state, not the SE quadrant.
Just saying.
I loves me some old-fashioned paper periodicals!
@Power Grab: Sometime in the future law must change as to have government to own underground, so you can own only the surface…as it is already in many a country.
adolfogiurfa – Yes, adolfogiurfa, if we let the little guy own the mineral rights, he might get rich, and we all know the government can’t let something atrocious like that happen!
adolfogiurfa (end sarc) :)
Speaking of mineral rights – I have a couple of tiny shares. Five years ago, the last time I got a signing bonus for a lease, it allowed me to buy my now-21-year-old shabby chic ride. It looks pretty rough, but it’s been very dependable. Probably the best $1,000 I ever spent! I told the family I bought the car from that I could pay their asking price of $1,500, but they insisted on taking less. That allowed me to afford the insurance on it. Yeah, oil leases will make you rich!
/sarc off
@Power Grab: In order to successfully GRAB POWER it is not enough mergers and aggressive buys but to make disappear all small mining/land/commercial assets, by will or by force. There are cases, in some countries, where small miners are persecuted by accusing them of contaminating the environment,etc.
In the peruvian case this clashes with a traditional organization, coming from Incas´time, where locals are their land is organized in a system called “communities”(local communal property), which though they do not have a legal property of the underground they have it as a fact, and if big companies do not make agree with them they just cannot work at all.
So, you see, at the end of the day, it does not matter how big or how powerful a corporation could be, “we the people” count in such a “power grab” equation.
Why?….we are many, they are just a few. Yes, you could say, they have a lot of obedient butlers, but these and they too, appreciate very much their small and meaningless lives. It´s gonna be like maffias´wars of the past.
@Power Grab: Your property is too small for an environmental friendly operation, then, as the government has the obligation of caring for the many and not only for you, your property will be transferred back to the state. /Sarc off
Today’s route from oil sands deposit in Canada to bitumen to refinery feed to refined product or petrochemical feedstock requires natural gas for two reasons: burn it for heat, or reform it into H2 and CO2 to enable hydrogen to be added to correct the imbalance between too much carbon and not enough hydrogen in this plentiful but low-value hydrocarbon. Since the early 1970’s the deal has been to take a third-rate hydrocarbon (bitumen) and add a first-rate hydrocarbon (methane) in order to make a second-rate hydrocarbon (synthetic crude in its various forms).
This makes economic sense if the first rate hydrocarbon is trapped in Alberta due to lack of infrastructure to get it to where it can get world prices. That is still the case today where gas sells for $3 MMBTU locally, 4 times that globally. It offends me, but it makes money.
A local nuclear facility could create heat and power, could scare H2 out of water, and could allow that nice natural gas to sit where it is right now, until the time comes when it can be sold for what it is really worth. But the people who own gas deposits don’t build nuclear plants, and vice versa. So we will do what doesn’t make sense in the long run, just because it makes sense in the short run.
Light sweet crude from a well is a wonderful form of energy, as is dry sweet gas. A new supply of these products, in quantity, would be a serious threat to the Oil Sands business model that loves high oil prices (and low gas prices, for reasons that should be clear from above). Bring oil prices down, and oil:gas ratios back to normal, and the Athabasca Oil Sands would no longer be the engine of Canada’s economy that they are today. Interesting prospect, and one that the strategists are well aware of.
@Jim2:
In theory, one can make a vacuum tube via taking an incandescent bulb (even the low power ones still available) and removing the shell (glass bulb). Then put in the desired electrodes and insert the guts into a new container (that gets sealed and evacuated.) It does not need to be a glass bulb (so while I like working glass, and it is easy, one can use copper pipe and solder…)
So a simple vacuum pump and some plumbing gear ought to be all it takes. Though that French Guy did a really nice job of it…
@Simon Derricutt:
It’s also hard to tell someone dodging an issue due to being a fraud from someone dodging due to the desire to preserve Intellectual Property Rights from someone dodging due to technology not being clear or having a mature jargon…
Per “peak oil”: That is an essential attribute of the way resources vs reserves are defined, as economic values. So as scarcity rises, by definition, more resources become reserves and reserves grow… since reserves depend on price and at higher price, more resource can be produced, so becomes reserves…
@Adolfo:
If you find a link to that French Reactor article anywhere, let us know!
@GallopingCamel:
No idea why the “nuke in a whole” and “Traveling Wave” reactor article went into the SPAM queue. I’ve fished it out. Looks interesting.
@PowerGrab:
A lot of folks are surprisingly limited on their Geography… ;-)
@Adolfo:
Theft of subsurface rights, by ANY person, agency, government, or company, is still theft. My personal goal is to own, fee simple, including ALL rights, a few acres of land. If someone (ANYONE including the government) owns the mineral rights, you can be removed from your “surface”, the land completely destroyed, then a crummy analog of the original surface “restored”, and you put back on a semi-toxic waste dump… Yeah, you get some “compensation”… But I’d rather be able to say “See that fence? Be on the other side of it in 10 minutes.”
@PowerGrab:
Good on you! Evil Mineral Baron! (Baroness?)
@Stuart:
Good point about the need for Hydrogen and nuclear water cracking replacing natural gas!
In the F-T process iron and related metals catalysts (along with others like mineral zeolites) are used to make oil from coal. Early in the process a ‘water shift’ reaction is done to make hydrogen. Nuke process heat can also be used in just that way…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process#Other_reactions_relevant_to_the_Fischer.E2.80.93Tropsch_process
EM – I made a cold cathode electron gun. Small, but it worked. Never did get an around toit to add coils. But fun to play with magnets around it, nonetheless.
It would seem that the deeper the wells, another layer of oil is found, contrary to the science that say’s it can not exist at those pressures and temperatures. That it does tends to make one believe that it is not fossil fuel. Burying a forest, dinosaurs in huge numbers or ocean dwelling critters that deep and over so much of the world, and in such quantity beggars belief.
That it is so deep and so wide spread in all it’s forms of oil, gas and bitumen surely rings alarm bells. That hydrocarbons seem to be present on comets and moons around other planets would give one a sense that it may be not the whole sale death of fauna or flora that created it.
The reactor being looked for Bush Alaska at was the Toshiba 4S which is not yet a production system. Though Toshiba has mentioned they may be willing to discuss providing one or more as testbeds to the state. Comes in 2 flavors – 50 MWe and 10 MWe. MWt(hermal) output ends up about 3X the electrical output. Small town was Galena, which is on the Yukon.
We had to get state law changed to even allow consideration of reactors. It was passed sometime in the early 1980s in response to TMI and nuclear testing in the Aleutians.
As it turns out, even the small flavor at 10 MWe / 30 MWt is too big for small villages. OTOH, properly done, you can take advantage of the MWt to heat homes and buildings, heat a hatchery, heat local greenhouses, and provide hydrogen for a biomass to liquid (synthetic diesel) plant locally. Think of it as a regional energy center.
A few other villages have expressed interest. Nome comes to mind. Problem here in AK is infrastructure. Lots of square miles of land and little infrastructure. The greens aim to keep it that way. Hooking up a bunch of widely separated villages with a couple hundred people resident at most is cost prohibitive with transmission running in the neighborhood of $1 million / linear mile.
State energy folks did a look at smaller reactors and found that it would be cost effective to put one into Fairbanks sized at around 100MWe right now, today. Some of the mines are also looking at reactors for electricity.
We are way behind the power curve up here on reactors, but a small group of us are pushing that particular noodle. I got tossed off the board of the local electrical Co-op for suggesting they look at small modular reactors rather than windmills. They ran ads with mushroom clouds to defeat me, which made me smile a lot.
Final thought. With all of this, I am in contact with some real nuke guys. One is highly skeptical about the thorium liquid salt concept as a long term solution, as it has significant corrosion problems. OTOH, burning thorium in an existing LWR is doable right now, today. And it is a way to use existing depleted fuels without reprocessing. I need to look into that closer to figure out how it is done. Cheers –
Lightbridge is researching the use of thorium in conventional reactors – used in conjunction with uranium.
2.03 Up 0.03(1.50%) 3:51PM EDT
Lightbridge Corp.
1600 Tysons Boulevard
Suite 550
Tysons Corner, VA 22102
United States – Map
Phone: 571-730-1200
Fax: 571-730-1259
Website: http://www.ltbridge.com
Details
Index Membership: N/A
Sector: Basic Materials
Industry: Synthetics
Full Time Employees: 15
Business Summary
Lightbridge Corporation develops nuclear fuel technology; and provides nuclear power consulting and strategic advisory services worldwide. The company operates in two segments, Nuclear Fuel Technology Business and Consulting Business. The Nuclear Fuel Technology Business segment is involved in the design and development of nuclear fuels. This segment focuses on developing fuel product lines, such as all-uranium seed and blanket fuel for existing plants; all-metal fuel for new build reactors; and thorium-based seed and blanket fuel for existing and new build reactors. The Consulting Business segment provides consulting and strategic advisory services to companies and governments planning to create or expand electricity generation capabilities using nuclear power plants. This segment provides integrated strategic advice services across a range of areas, including regulatory development, nuclear reactor site selection, procurement and deployment, reactor and fuel technology, international relations, and regulatory affairs. The company was formerly known as Thorium Power, Ltd. and changed its name to Lightbridge Corporation in September 2009. Lightbridge Corporation was founded in 1992 and is based in Tysons Corner, Virginia.
Key Statistics
Company Websites
@Wayne Job:
I’ve not seen any kind of study on what kind of rocks the ‘deep oil’ inhabit, but it sure does seem hard to explain things like oil a few MILES down… Though for me, the ‘kicker’ is the way oil ‘regions’ tend to be found in places with active subduction zones. And often just about as far back behind the subduction as the leading edge of volcanoes. As though the oil “cooks out” about Bakersfield and the rocks go deeper and hotter to make volcanoes in the Mojave… (or Santa Barbara / Mojave; or Indonesia near shore and inland; or…)
@Agimarc:
Thanks for the detail!
@Jim2:
Some couple of years back they had fuel rods in testing / validation in a Russian reactor design. Don’t know if they ever got licensed. Using Thorium is just not very hard at all… and doesn’t take a new reactor (though I like new reactors ;-)
Can anyone comment on the fission/fusion technology talked about be Robert Steinhaus?
https://www.economist.com/users/robert-steinhaus/comments
It seems that there has been plenty of research over a long period of time:
http://home.comcast.net/~aeropharoh/site/?/page/Documents_Related_to_PACER_FUSION_/
@Camel; Back in the late 1950s I studied fission/fusion and rocket reaction drives to create a real space drive. At that time heavy hydrogen fusion could be created in your “garage lab” if you really wanted to go to the effort, not too complex. but one small problem. If you got matter/energy density high enough to get a fusion event it would snuff the conditions for further fusion. The very last thing plasma wants to do is fuse. The energy needed to reach fusion conditions is multiplied by every fusion event. But hydrogen wants to bond at standard conditions and only needs some encouragement to cross over from hydrogen to neutron. A naked neutron under standard conditions has a half life of a few minuets before returning to Hydrogen condition. This change results in a very energetic pulse of EMF and physical energy as the neutron increases in size 10 to the 6th power at the speed of light to become a Hydrogen Atom. Smashing atoms together to effect fusion requires way too much energy to be practical.
Now sneaking hydrogen into a crystal lattice seems to reach packing densities needed to create isotope upgrades, one nucleon at a time. Controllable Fusion with extra energy left over.
As far as high temperature salt reactors; The use of hot salts in circulation poses a very tough engineering problem. These materials are VERY corrosive and erosive to their containment. As far as I know, that is the real deal breaker for their commercial use. pg
Somehow I feel a few more days draining from my life as I come to grips with the idea of “fission driven fusion” (that I’d never heard of before…)
Sounds really useful, but so much to read and it’s already late…
It looks like there’s a wiki on it that’s not too bad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_nuclear_fusion
E.M. Smith,
One of the claims of the LFTR is that it will consume waste from Gen I & II nuclear power plants, thus eliminating the need for geologic storage (aka Yucca Mountain), always assuming we can solve the plumbing problems mentioned by P.G Sharrow. ADRs (Acclerator Driven Reactors) make similar claims.
Your “Wiki” says that fusion can generate enough neutrons to cause efficient fission in materials that would otherwise be regarded as “Nuclear Waste”.
The hydrogen bomb uses a fission bomb to trigger thermo-nuclear fusion. Maybe I am over simplifying things but PACER sounds like the opposite (using fusion to trigger fission). Finally a way to make tiny nuclear bombs.
It is pretty obvious that the human race can’t travel very far using chemical rockets. However, nuclear fission typically produces a few million times more energy per kilogram of fuel than chemical fuels can. Using really small nuclear bombs that can be fired every few minutes you have the nuclear rocket PGS mentioned. Probably Freeman Dyson figured this out decades ago but I missed it!
Popular Science funded a reporter to attend a LENR conference and interview Andrea Rossi in Italy. Don’t buy “Popular Science” to read this article unless you are a fan of fence straddling. Some of you may be masochists so here is a link where you can see a tiny version of the article which will be just as informative as the legible version:
http://pesn.com/2012/10/16/9602208_Andrea-Rossis_Black-Box–by_Popular-Science/
Earthtech, a physics research organization, have attempted to replicate some of the “cold fusion” experiments. Their results have been negative and they have proposed alternative explanations of the observations. They haven’t done any experiments lately, but the ones they have done are interesting and should raise a caution flag, IMO. I was very enthusiastic about cold fusion in the years after 1989, but still don’t have that cold fusion water heater. Just sayin’.
http://earthtech.org/index.php/cold-fusion http://earthtech.org/index.php/cold-fusion
The link for Earthtech was pasted twice and does not work. Here it is:
http://earthtech.org/index.php/cold-fusion
Jim2 – LENR has been notoriously difficult to get working. For Fleischmann and Pons, it seems that one Palladium purchase gave the best results. It was from Engelhardts, and was supposed to be 99.9% pure if I recall correctly. Turns out it wasn’t so pure in that particular batch, and samples of that batch worked with other people, too. Impurities in the bar they bought also were not constant down the length of it – some sections worked and others didn’t.
It’s looking like we’ll get some reliable methods by the end of this year, but it will still be a while before you can buy a home heater or generator that runs on it.
In the meantime, it’s good that there’s such a lot of oil around, and that it’s feeding the plants if we burn it. It makes more sense to burn local fuels rather than import them.
@Jim2:
Fixed… now you have it 3 times ;-)
I’m not so much worried that the early experiments are sporadic. Now we have reliable ones that clearly work. Scale is still an issue, though. But it can now be regularly demonstrated in the classroom.
@Zeke:
Yup.
@GallopingCamel:
A fusion bomb in every pot! Get your back yard micro-thermonuclear device today! ;-)
Somehow I think there’s going to be “issues” here… ;-)
Still, since neutron economy is one of the ‘big issues’, having various ways to shift the neutron flux ‘is a good thing’.
Personally, I’ve never thought of the stuff that comes out of our present reactors as ‘waste’. It’s still about 90% or so ‘what went in’ IIRC the stats. A bit “poisoned” for the present reactors, but still far more ‘fuel’ than ‘waste’. I’m quite fond of either / any of reprocessing, close cycle recycle designs, and ‘waste burner’ designs.
Could someone cite their best example of a cold fusion experiment believed to be working? Rossi and anyone else who won’t explain the setup don’t count.
Jim2 – at the moment it looks like Celani has the best chance of being replicated and verified. Brillouin have just got another $10M in funding, and although they are not dramatic the results seem to be solid and heading for verification. Take all the theories with a good pinch of Sodium Chloride at the moment.
@Jim2; The only dependable and repeatable device is Rossi’s, at least as far as I know of. But, in my opinion, it appears to have a design flaw. He uses external heating to reach operating temperature. Fusion requires reaching matter/energy density that will effect hydrogen/neutron transition. If you can control the transition point, you can control the fusion. This can be done with pressure and heat but the fusion event causes heat and pressure that push the matter apart and stops further fusion. High energy events loose a storm of neutrons that decay as well as create unstable atoms that they hit. Low energy events loose no neutrons as they convert in place in the atomic structure. No radioactive materials are created and those that exist are passivated. Rossi’s device always requires input heating from the outside in. Energy wants to travel from the inside out, so his device must always operate below the optimum matter/energy density.
It would be fun to create a device from scratch that would work well, because it had to, instead of one that works mostly by accident. pg
pgs – An internal combustion engine requires external energy to get started, too, but it works by consuming gasoline after that. As far as I’m concerned, Rossi has squat until he either publishes how it works and is replicated, or sells water heaters that run on water after getting started by whatever means. To my way of thinking, he isn’t even in the running.
Simon, could you recommend a paper by Celani that is science journal quality? I’m not saying it would have to be peer reviewed, but it would have to have details succinctly expressed, as you see in a typical journal paper. Peer review isn’t a requirement because we know it is biased to the status quo.
Jim2 – try http://www.kresenn.com/#!articles for the one he’s publishing himself, but otherwise go through lenr-canr.org and you’ll find quite a few hits. There’s the results from ICCF17 there, too, where you’ll find other peoples’ comments on it. It’s possible to pick holes in Celani’s work, but to me it looks like he has got the goods and is willing to get it replicated by other groups in order to prove it.
@Jim2: As an inventor I know the problems Rossi endures to bring his product to market. So I will give him some slack. He claims to have sold a large 1meg watt heater to the DoD and is working with their people to develop a very high temperature device (1000C) that is in testing. Those low temperature industrial water heaters are available to, any purchaser, now. The domestic water heaters can not be built and sold until they are permitted by all agencies of government and insurers.
I have not built a liquid fueled rocket but I can tell that the science is correct. Rossi’s device has much of the needed parts for the job but I believe the design needs some changes. Rossi points the way to a working device. A leap forward. The high temperature device appears to me to prove that the design is important and secret additives are not needed if the design is right. pg
pgs – claims is about all he has at this point. Not good enough.
@Jim2:
I think the one run at M.I.T. is a pretty good example. Here’s a ‘touchy feely’ video, or just do a web-search on MIT NANOR.
I’ve also seen a ‘kit’ for use in schools that’s reputed to be reliable. IIRC it is a nickel in KOH or KCL solution with electric driven cavitation. (But that’s a very fuzzy memory). Some high school kids got it to work… I think this is it:
http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/ColdFusion/040808nokitsyet_kiriv.htm
I’m fond of those two examples as nobody has a giant axe of money to grind…
@jim2 – Here is a link to a slide share summary of the state of affairs given by Celani.
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1433866/?ln=fr
I agree with Simon, Celani offers the most solid reproducible results and is the baseline of a new group team effort to use his results and try to scale and parametrize his setup. He published a detailed description of exactly how to build his system, I lost it in a recent crash of my system, but when I find it I will give the link.
E. M.Smith,
What do you think of Porter Stansberry economic/political advice?
http://pro.stansberryresearch.com/1210THIRDLIA/LPSINA38/
@ omanuel – I subscribed to Porter Stansberry for a short time, but found their service to drag everything out and not cut to the chase. Didn’t want to sit and listen for a half hour on their reports. While most of the investment information I agree with, they seem to be at odds with my political view of what is happening.
I totally believe the Natural gas and oil revolution is starting and will be huge as he describes. If America uses this boom properly we have a chance of wiping out our debt and getting back to full employment. Right now our country is divided between the give me group and the workers, the next election will determine which path we take and how this bonanza is used.
I disagree with his basic premiss that Obama will not only win the 2nd term, but possibly the 3rd term. I believe that Romney will win and will embrace all out production that will put this economy back on coarse. If I’m wrong I do not believe Obama will use the oil/gas wealth as told in the report. Obama is an ideologue and despite the opportunity, he will continue to restrict drilling as much as possible. Note he most resent ban on much of the drilling in Alaska he just issued a few weeks ago. No, I think Obama will keep pushing green energy and will try and fund more wind and solar with tax payer dollars. This will be a disaster as the huge new oil/gas finds will drive down the cost of energy making the green technology even more of a bogus investment.
With this much wealth creation the pockets in Washington will be properly greased and and oil will be king once again. With Obama re-election the LPG permits will never be granted. I think the mood of the country is to swing the other way reducing social investment to less investment.
Over the years I dabbled in gas drilling investments, its a very risky bet. While gas is found the shady people always seem to go through bankruptcy just before the big find occurs. The little investor walks away with nothing and the big guys step in for the profits. If you do hit one that pans out the royalty checks are great.
Investing in the oil field off Israel carries too much risk, its just the Geo-politics of that area.
This new oil boom has the potential to bring the house of Saud down, they will not relent easily. I expect a relentless attack on our energy infrastructure to quickly develop.
I have seen much bigger projections of the amount of oil we can produce than what is listed in this report. I worry that any breakthrough by any of the new energy ideas, such as LENR, will be politically squashed with the new found oil resurgence.
I hope you are right. E.M.
We have been richly blessed to live in interesting times:
1. I suspect the election will be decided by the tyrannical one-world government that brought us fraudulent science since the UN was established on 24 Oct 1945
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-1615
2. Porter Stansberry suggests the election is a scam for another unspecified reason
http://pro.stansberryresearch.com/1210THIRDLIA/LPSINA38/
That is intriguing because the structure of the current United Nations is:
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-1581
_ a.) A core directed by a reincarnation of USSR’s Joseph Stalin
_ b.) Guiding USA’s arrogant capitalists and bureaucrats toward
_ c.) The UN’s Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and Agenda 21:
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
Here’s the rest of the story: http://omanuel.wordpress.com/
With deep regrets,
– Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
@OManuel:
BobN pretty much has it right. I’ve only seen some of the ‘sales hype’ bits (never subscribed) as I don’t get pushed by sales hype into doing anything.
What I’ve seen is the classical “hustle and bump”. LOTS of Grand Pronouncements with teases, a “sign up to get more” (and send money) at the end.
Lots of “I predicted and nobody else did” (IF true, why are they not holding a few $Billion from their options positions and why are they hawking ‘reports’…) Usually that kind of thing, when you dig into it, has some kind of generalized “warn” and not much else. Like me saying “Bonds are not safe” then a year from now coming back and saying “See, you didn’t get much interest. I predicted interest rates would plunge” or coming back in 4 to 8 years and saying “See, the principle collapsed when the Fed finally tightened. I predicted the Fed would tighten and bonds would drop.” I can safely predict both those things right now for ‘someday’ (and that’s a more detailed prediction than ‘bonds are not safe’…) but to take ACTION on them needs better timing and more specifics.
Per oil:
I’ve got a newspaper clipping (trying to track down the original sources) saying the USA is on track to produce more total ‘oil liquids’ than Saudi Arabia and more than ever in history. So much for “running out of oil” and Hubbert’s Peak (even the much vaunted ’70s N.America max production ‘history’…) Obama and friends will do everything possible to prevent that, as will the House of Saud, as will all of OPEC. (As will Russia…) Can simple capitalism overcome that stacked deck? While the EU / UN do everything possible to kill capitalism? On such things hinge history…
So, as typical for me, I got about 1/3 through that ‘pitch’ to “send money” and ended up doing something else. (Making dinner for the spouse and experimental no-tomato chile). Don’t know what the other 2/3 were, but if it is like others, it was a plea to buy some particular (vague) investment based on a (equally vague but with Hot Button words and topic) “Story” and details if you will only subscribe and ‘send money now’…
Personally, I find little to no use for that kind of stuff.
I’ve started the “pitch” running again, so this time I might see more than the first part… but since they have shut off the “time slider”, I need to let it run, but not too long, and hop back at just the right time…. Unlikely I’ll be patient enough to do that…
So instead, my prediction:
I have no idea who will win this election. Nor does anyone else. Romney is leading popular vote, but Obama is leading Electoral college. But New England is heavy for Obama and it’s getting nailed with “Snowmageddon” Sandy and I suspect that Republicans are more likely to own a 4 x 4 and be motivated to get to the polling place… So in ‘swing’ states the storm itself might decide the election.
If Obama wins, it’s 4 more years of the same. At the end of that time, there’s no way in hell he gets a 3rd term. The 22nd Amendment to the constitution assures that (and NOBODY can get it repealed in a second Obama presidency). So this guy has in the pitch ‘weasel words’ that say “or his proxy” in essence. That’s basically saying that IF Obama gets elected he’s willing to make a 50/50 bet that in 4 more years, a Democrat gets elected…. or that nobody remembers 5 years back…
Looks to me like the classical Nostradamus technique. Make dozen predictions, then in a year or three, tout the 4 that actually happened and bury the rest… Make them vague enough you have at least 50/50 odds, and you will likely have a half dozen that “came true”…
The other thing that irks me a bit is his tendency to attribute great accomplishment to some economic change, when in reality some other change could just as easily have made it happen. Like that whole “oil caused the car boom” pitch. Cars were already starting to boom on alcohol. All oil did was swap in a worse fuel (very low octane then) that was very cheap. Had oil not happened, we’d have just had more coal derived methanol instead. It wasn’t oil that made cars happen, it was cars that gave gasoline value…
At any rate, I find him far more ‘pitch man’ selling a ‘story’ then ‘trusted adviser’…
Sorry, BobN, I read you comment and it made so much sense I assumed it was written by E.M.Smith in responding.
Old age plays tricks on us if we don’t play close attention !
Hopefully I was paying more close attention when I concluded a tentative structure for the modern UN from the corruption observed on both sides of the aisle over my career.
OK, I’ve been able to get further through it this time (turned the sound on too).
A lot of his “predictions” are in fact “post-dictions”. The fleet conversions, for example, have been a visible activity for several years now. ( I first bought CLNE on that play some several years back. T.Boon Pickens has been pushing it since before Obama…)
We won’t be doing shipping of LNG to Europe very fast, given that it takes a decade or so to site and build export facilities, pipelines, and LNG ships. BTW, I bought an LGN shipper a couple of years back…posted about it here, too. Nice dividend. Not a secret and you don’t need to pay to play. LNG and TGP are the two tickers I know off the top of my head. TGP has a 7+% dividend. Chart here: (Blue line is LNG with lower dividend but more growth company that does infrastructure builds):
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/kaavio.Webhost/charts/big.chart?nosettings=1&symb=tgp&uf=0&type=4&size=3&sid=1987841&style=320&freq=1&entitlementtoken=0c33378313484ba9b46b8e24ded87dd6&time=8&rand=561300335&compidx=aaaaa%3a0&comp=gld+lng+rut+jjc+tip+uso+qqqq+jjn+tlt&ma=0&maval=24&lf=2&lf2=4&lf3=1024&height=820&width=720&mocktick=1
About 1/3 of the total energy in the natural gas is wasted in the liquefaction process. Not going to be a very fast boom, and prone to stagnation when cheaper local gas is developed. There’s a reason why ‘stranded’ natural gas is stranded. It’s damn hard to ship other than by pipeline…
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=lng gives a write up on LNG and you can click on competitors and other things in the left margin for more info.
I’m not going to go into the power producer parts. Most any power producer can, with modest ease, convert between coal, oil, and natural gas. It’s a well known technology. So pick any “lots of coal” electrical producer and you can pretty much say it will do more natural gas in the future.
So like most hucksters, he takes obvious facts on the ground and turns them into ‘future visions’, then pushes it into “The Storey” (that is usually made overly dramatic and with some emotional hot button – like the Obama Third Term pitch and Socialism!!! Oh No!!!!)
So his pitch is about 2/3 ‘obvious’ about 1/6 “Fear and Panic Hot Buttons” and about 1/6 ‘buy my pitch for the way to become rich from it’… Still not interested.
We’ve had Progressive / Liberals / Socialists pushing for exactly the same stuff for about 80 years now. Not exactly a big insight to say “more of that will happen”. So it gets pitched into an Obama 3rd Term and Socialism Scare.
Oh, and the idea of buying commodity properties when supply is going to explode? Crazy talk. Glut causes price collapse and loss of profits. It’s a well known cycle. Similarly, the boom in drilling results in a glut that results in a collapse of new drilling… In short, oil is highly cyclical and oil production / services is even more so. You make money by timed entry / exit on the cycles, not ‘buy and hold’ of any of it.
He then goes into a “Story” about a giant growth of US energy exports. This ignores that the same techniques used in OUR shale can be used in THEIR shale… So China, Israel, Russia, and several others are going to get more oil. North Sea will likely get horizontal drilling and fracking (if not already being done). Technology is global, as are the impacts… So I’d not expect a giant growth of US oil exports.
The point on chemicals is valid. About a year? back I said DD Dow et al would be making more money from the low gas prices.
So he takes a lot of ‘well known stuff’ and hypes it. “There’s always a story. -E.M.Smith” and some folks like to hype the stories… and no way I’d buy an ‘oil asset’ from this guy and the idea of taking a 20cent / dollar bond bet on a company in bankruptcy is crazy for anyone not a specialist nor with ‘Friends On The Bench’ and in the court in charge.
THE most likely result is that it’s 20/100 because that’s what they are worth…
Track it here: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ATPAQ
http://biz.yahoo.com/e/121017/atpaq8-k.html
So he wants you buy bonds in a bankrupt company in a foreign country… with other folks ( i.e. Banks Debt and folks like “Frank’s”) ahead of you in the queue…
I’d go nowhere near it if my net worth was below $2 Million with $1 Million of it ‘liquid’ and could afford to fly a lawyer and accountant to Israel a couple of times a year…
Per the “Oil and Land” trusts, I’ve had them reported here frequently.
TPL ticker / reports here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=tpl
So why send him money again?
Just listen to the Nice Story, and do bit of homework on your own. Takes about 1/2 hour…