E-cat Replication Attempt Ends in Explosion

“Project Dog Bone” the Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project’s attempt to replicate Andrea Rossi’s e-cat low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) technology has apparently been rocked by an explosion.

This is the reactor vaporized in a recent explosion at Project Dog Bone.

The Project’s reactor apparently exploded after reaching a temperature of 1,027 degrees Celsius, (1,880.6 degrees Fahrenheit for Americans) on Thursday Feb. 5, Wired UK reported. Interestingly enough the explosion was capture live on web cam and broadcast over the Project’s YouTube feed as Swagelok based reactor leak test. The explosion occurred three hours and 47 minutes into the test.

Two researchers including one with what sounds like a British accent are heard discussing the experiment. Earlier in the video a voice with an American accent can be heard. One of them noted that the temperature had reached 1,027 degrees Celsius shortly before the blast.

No blast can be seen on the YouTube video but an explosion can clearly be heard. Instead the tube in which the device was sitting, simply became very bright.

“That vaporized it, it utterly vaporized it,” a team member said of the reactor after the blast.

From the discussion on the video it sounds as if the researchers were attempting to recreate Alexander Parkhomov’s replication of Rossi’s Lugarno LENR test. Parkhomov reported getting large amounts of excess heat from a device similar to Rossi’s on December 25, 2014.

The explosion highlights the potential dangers from LENR research. The researchers mentioned they were using hydrogen gas which is highly flammable. They were also using nickel powder which is poisonous. It is easy to see why one researcher advised viewers “don’t try this at home.”

Yet it also demonstrates the huge amounts of energy and heat that LENR could someday generate if we could harness it. The explosion proves that some sort of effect is taking place but it also shows how little we really know about this process.

Interestingly enough they discussed the potential of an explosion earlier in the video. They also mentioned how easy it is to build such a device and achieve an explosion.

“It’s a 25 dollar reactor you can build in an hour,” one of the researchers in the video said. That underscores how cheap this technology could be and the possibility for lots of garage inventors and other amateurs to enter the field. We’d better hope those people are careful.

An intriguing view of one of the Project's Home View cold fusion devices.

The dangers from LENR are well known, researcher Michael McKubre was badly injured by an explosion in the 1990s. There have been explosions at other facilities.

The Dog Bone experiment shows that LENR is not as safe as some people think it is. There are potential dangers and a strong possibility that LENR could be weaponized by nefarious individuals at some point. One hopes that no terrorists try to harness LENR to create explosives.

The potential power of this technology is staggering even if all of its properties are not known. Wired reported that a number of researchers including Brian Ahern who formerly worked for the US Air Force are attempting to replicate the Lugarno work. In a forum post Ahern revealed that he too is trying to build a nickel and hydrogen reactor similar to those used by Rossi and Alexander Parkhomov.

One has to wonder how many more LENR explosions there will be. One also has to hope that nobody gets hurt or killed in one of those blasts, although I feel it is only a matter of time before somebody does.

Continue reading here: Inventor: Brillouin LENR Device will generate 355,000 times as much energy as Gasoline

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