July/August 2011 Living Now
Will Italian Invention Replace Dirty Fuels?
by Jeane Manning
A non-polluting source of carbon-free power for the world may evolve from a fist-sized energy device being tested at an Italian university. The Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat) holds promise as a cheap, clean way to generate power.
Its co-inventors plan to install the technology in a power plant in Greece this fall. Consuming only tiny amounts of powdered nickel and hydrogen, 300 of the E-Cat modules combined are expected to produce a million watts of heat. The heat would create steam, powering a turbine to generate electricity. Smaller units are said to have heated an industrial building for months.
Independent scientists have witnessed the device producing significantly more power than the input. The chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society and the president of Sweden’s Royal Academy of Science tested it and admitted that producing 25 kilowatt/hours in a 50 centimeter squared container can’t be explained by chemistry.
If it were burning fuel, that output requires three liters of oil for fuel. Unlike hot fusion, no dangerous radiation is measured. The chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center recently praised the nonpolluting breakthrough.
The science behind the invention is controversial, using what may be called “cold fusion” or low energy nuclear reactions.
Nuclear simply refers to a nucleus — a grouping of protons and neutrons in the center of an atom. Atom-splitting is called nuclear fission, which releases deadly radioactive fragments. In an opposite process, fusion, nuclei fuse to become one nucleus while also releasing energy.
Physicists who build particle accelerators try to mimic what they believe happens in the sun — tremendous heat and pressure causing “hot fusion.” It is less harmful than fission, but does contaminate reactors. Hot fusion research has cost billions of dollars without providing solid results.
In 1989 two electrochemists announced room-temperature fusion using ordinary devices putting out excess heat energy with no harmful radiation. Accepted physics says that’s impossible. The label "cold fusion" stuck to this type of experiment.
Many physicists tried to replicate it but failed. After a Department of Energy panel recommended against funding cold fusion, science media began calling it junk science. Despite ridicule, other scientists persisted and achieved an excess-heat result from a variety of experiments. A new theory says that what they’re doing is creating nuclear reactions that are neither fission nor fusion. Perhaps proving it’s possible, the E-Cat is said to release enough heat to do useful work.
Who are the inventors creating this buzz? The academic partner is Sergio Focardi, a professor from the University of Bologna. He’s refining the E-Cat while Andrea Rossi is in Florida dealing with manufacturing and business details. Focardi had been seeking nickel-hydrogen fusion since 1994. Rossi in turn found a catalyst that’s the secret ingredient. Nickel is plentiful and cheap — so is hydrogen in the tiny amounts used in their invention.
An American company planning to commercialize E-Cat was co-founded by Robert Gentile, a former assistant secretary of energy for fossil energy at the Department of Energy.
Jeane Manning and Joel Garbon
are coauthors of Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-Leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World. Visit www.breakthroughpower.net and www.newenergymovement.org.