Italian cold fusion machine passes another test

Italian cold fusion machine passes another test

Despite a world of skepticism about E-Cat and other devices, proof is adding up

By Natalie Wolchover

Italian physicist and inventor Andrea Rossi has conducted a public demonstration of his "cold fusion" machine, the E-Cat, at the University of Bologna, showing that a small amount of input energy drives an unexplained reaction between atoms of hydrogen and nickel that leads to a large outpouring of energy, more than 10 times what was put in.

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But the experimentalists who have seemingly demonstrated cold fusion over the years have been unable to explain the underlying mechanism that drives the miraculous reaction they claim to observe, and so the scientific community has largely turned its back on this line of research. Most physicists — as well as the United States Department of Energy (DoE), academic journals, and the U.S. Patent Office — consider cold fusion machines to be hoaxes, because they say physics rules out the possibility of room-temperature nuclear fusion.

Life's Little Mysteries http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/newest-cold-fusion-machine-does-impossible-1584/">reported on the E-Cat machine in April, when Rossi and fellow physicist Sergio Focardi successfully demonstrated the device for a group of Swedish physicists. At the time, we explained that the Italian physicists are two of a handful of researchers around the world who have kept the cold fusion fire burning. These cold fusion devotees believe that there is a little-understood physical process occurring in their machines that produces a safe, clean and endlessly renewable form of energy.

The physicists who were invited to the demonstration in April gave the E-Cat a solid thumbs-up. It produced too much excess heat to have been originating from a chemical process, they wrote in http://www.nyteknik.se/incoming/article3144960.ece/BINARY/Download+the+report+by+Kullander+and+Ess">their report, adding that, "The only alternative explanation is that there is some kind of a nuclear process that gives rise to the measured energy production."

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Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi of the University of Bologna announced that they developed a cold fusion device capable of producing 12,400 W of heat power with an input of just 400 W. Last Friday, the scientists held a private invitation press conference in Bologna, attended by about 50 people, where they demonstrated what they claim is a nickel-hydrogen fusion reactor. Further, the scientists say that the reactor is well beyond the research phase; they plan to start shipping commercial devices within the next three months and start mass production by the end of 2011.