Andrea Rossi and his team at the Leonardo Corp are working on a one ton gas-fired Ecat low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) device. In a post on his blog Rossi stated that the prototype for the hot ecat device will weigh around one ton (presumably one metric ton), it’ll be two meters long, one meter wide and one meter in high.
The device will have to be tested for one to two months of regular operation before Rossi makes it public. This device will presumably be the hot ecat which Rossi has stated will operated at temperatures of around 1200 degrees Celsius. Generating those temperatures would enable it to make steam which could turn a turbine that could generate electricity.
Rossi has also said that he cannot conduct any more interviews until the 1 megawatt (megawatt of heat not electricity) unit has been approved for civil use. He said this decision was made by his new US partner. Rossi didn’t reveal who this partner was but said it had an agreement with the Trust that owns the Leonardo Corp. Rossi didn’t say who the trust was.
Rossi did not say whether the new US partner affects his long standing agreement with AmpEnergo. AmpEnergo is an American group that was set up last year to market ecat technology in the Americas.
These posts also indicate that Rossi has been having trouble with his one megawatt ecat and has had to radically redesign it. It sounds as if Rossi has had to go back to the drawing board and completely change the technology. The older ecat was originally powered by electricity. Rossi seems to have changed that design.
The gas that powers it would presumably be natural gas. That’s good for the United States which has vast supplies of natural gas. It would also be compatible with many modern power plants that are fired by natural gas. The Japanese and Germans are converting many of their nuclear power plants to natural gas. It is also obvious that the ecat could also be powered by propane which is widely used as a home heating fuel in North America and butane which is burned in lower altitude areas.
Gas-powered ecats also put another nail in the coffin of “free energy.” Since you would have to pay for the gas the energy would not be free. It would be far cheaper than current forms of energy but it would be far from free.
The use of gas could also make it easier to use ecat as a waste disposal power technology. Gas-fired ecats could be used as super incinerators to burn up many different kinds of waste and produce heat and electricity in the process.
It is also obvious from posts on his blog that Rossi has backed off on his ambitious plans for home ecat heating and water heating units. He’s apparently having certification for it and possibly in getting it to work. Rossi has stated he won’t reveal the domestic ecat until he gets it certified.
The one MW ecat
Interestingly enough Rossi has received more than half a million requests for the domestic devices but he can’t provide them. Rossi seems to have jumped too quickly on the domestic device. He needs to get an ecat up and running before selling a domestic model.
My guess is that it will be several months before Rossi will be able to unveil the new ecat. It might take longer than that because it sounds like he’s going to have to completely redesign it and then build and test a prototype. So two things are obvious:
- Rossi does not have a working LENR device that can serve as a power source.
- Rossi’s previous design has failed and he has had to completely redesign his technology.
So it looks like 2013 could be an exciting year in LENR, Rossi, Defkalion and Brillouin are all working on LENR devices. It’ll be interesting to see which of them unveils one that can actually produce heat and electricity first, or if somebody else beats them to the punch.
Even if the fuel is free, no energy is free. you have to invest in the reactor and it has a price.
My computation on pure LENR (no energy consumed) is that it would cost 10-20% of nuclear electricity price… maybe I’m optimistic because turbine are very expensive today.
I agree one hundred percent I’ve been trying to get that point across. Unfortunately many people seem to stop thinking when they see the word free. That’s why advertisers constantly put in ads. Even 20-30% cheaper than nuclear would be a big savings. The biggest savings might come from ancillary cost reductions. IE no pipeline or railroad to haul fuel to the reactor. Of course if you need to pump water or natural gas to make it work there might be no such savings.
The gas could be produced from a small portion of the electricity at the output, electrolysis of water producing hydrogen, since such gas produced by LENR would always be essentially free.
This then makes the process near enough free. Any provider who did not follow this route would be out competed by those that did.
Fascinating concept. Even if it works it would not be free. You would have to pay for the device itself and the components it uses. It would be cheaper not free. At the end of the nothing is free. Everything costs. If somebody offers you something for free there’s always a catch.
Using electricity to crack water wouldn’t make sense. It would take more heat to produce hydrolysis than to directly produce the heat with electricity.
I agree. I might also point out that you’d need to make electricity first. Seems like a waste of energy to me.
I don’t see where the gas driver drove a nail into free energy…it was never claimed to be free. The ecat always required a heat producing driver and gas heat, in most areas, is cheaper than electric heat.
True natural gas is now really cheap. In fact it’s getting cheaper because of over production. So why waste money to produce hydrogen when you have a pipe delivering a different gas to your facility. You’re right the ecat was never supposed to be free. Unfortunately some people can’t abandon the myth of free.
in its beginning nuclear was supposed to produce large amounts of electricity for pennies or maybe thats just how they sold it too the public.
True. It didn’t work out.
Great, just screw the planet up more Rossi and sell out to the gas/oil industry. We need to make LERN safe for the environment, not to make the environment worse. This is completley the wrong direction to use natural gas and proves he is in it for the money and not the planet. There is no reason he needed to go to the NG for this solution.
Brillouin, Nanospire and Blacklight Power all seem to have a deeper understanding than Rossi. Now having to use natural gas I’m very curious as to how much better this is than just a natural gas generator? 10%? 100%?
Who knows. Rossi is in flail mode and constantly changing plans. That is indicative of the fact that he doesn’t understand what is really going on.
I agree. I think Brillouin is closest. Rossi hasn’t specified the kind of gas but I think it would be NG which is the most common.
NFE – nearly free energy is the term.
Isn’t cheap energy a better term. Nearly free is not free. It is simply cheaper.
Thermodynamically it takes roughly 3 units of natural gas (NG) to produce one unit of electricity at 33% efficient. Using natural gas directly to make heat is roughly 3 times thermodynamically more effective than wasting electrical power to make resistance heat.
However, it takes a little more capital cost because a furnace requires more safety features that an electrical heater has. This changes the COP coefficient of performance consideration because the thermodynamic heat source is a low quality rather than high quality heat source.
Using the Rossi (COP=6) would achieve twice the result with 1 unit NG heat rather than 1 unit electrical heat as compared to a gas turbine yielding 1 unit of electrical power per (COP=3) units of NG heat. Nuclear already cannot compete with cheaper NG and cheaper NG turbines. Twice the thermodynamic results, with cheaper capital cost, if real, would be a decisive winner.
Thanks great point. Very intelligent. Natural gas is actually very cheap in the US right now because we’re producing too much of it. If Rossi is right then we can make electric plants 33% more efficient and lower the cost of power by 33%.
What possible difference could changing the heat source make? Rossi is leading everyone on and there will never be a working ecat from him, just more delays and excuses.
It’s hard to say. Unfortunately Rossi is giving credence to people like you. He needs to reveal an operating piece of technology. Unfortunately I don’t think he has one just a good idea for one.