Earlier this year a new and apparently reproductible cold fusion method has emerged, the 'Rossi reactor' or 'Energy Catalyzer'.
It claims to fuse Nickel and Hidrogen, with the production of Copper (which may decay), and generate as much heat from 58 g
of Nickel as about 30,000 tons of oil. There is a patent on the technology, and two companies, one in Greece and one in the USA,
that will commercialize reactors build based on this cold fusion method. Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
http://www.lenr-canr.org/News.htm
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RossiAmethodanda.pdf

Thanks for the links Tzupy, they're an interesting read. I guess the next step is October....
I'll have to admit I'm quite skeptical about this thing though ; if this guy really has something, he should have kept his mouth shut until he had a working patented prototype ready for a serious peer review. Right now, there isn't much more than a mystery ECat device to go by... If this thing does work, I'm going to buy lots and lots of nickel The next thing to invent, a machine that transforms copper back into nickel

Also, this may produce some energy, but it is not a renewable energy

I've been following this a little bit on a different site, and yeah, it sounds fairly fishy. It would be great if it worked, and I hope they can pull it off, but it seems like the testing that has been done under very controlled circumstances where those testing it couldn't see certain parts. And the science is still very speculative, they talk about quantum interactions that create low energy nuclear reactions, but some of the observations they've made don't add up with the theory. So it would be nice to see it work, but I wouldn't count on it.

The lure of cold fusion has been a David's sling for the nuclear industry for far too long. It's not going to happen in our age but the idea/myth keeps us investing in a stupid technology tree.

I don't see "scam" written on this, because it's the wrong milieu for a scam. Where I do see scam is in ITER, the hot fusion experimental reactor, which will continue to get grants for decades to come for a nebulous and likely futile goal.

We know this represents a big threat, and we've seen how even the most mundane of threatening technologies, by some unpublicized agency or other, don't seem to make it to the big time.

This could end up not being workable, but I don't think I'm being too cynical to think that it's more likely to be sabotaged.

I'd say you're being too cynical and not cynical enough.

It won't be sabotaged because no-one in the industry is going to believe that there's anything to sabotage. It's most likely just one more energy for nothing scam. There are too many gullible investors willing to be ripped off over this kind of thing. (It'd be great if it were real, but Occam's Razor would indicate otherwise.)

I must confess that I am a 'believer' in 'cold-fusion', since Pons and Fleischmann have published their results.
Even if those results were never reliably and consistently reproduced (or at least not accepted as such by the scientific community).
A reason for still believing in their results was this patent that I found many years ago, about generating neutrons with a device
inspired by the Pons-Fleischmann experiment:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Pars ... lattice%29
When the US government (actually the Navy) patents something, it's probably not a bogus technology.

Now back to the Rossi reactor: if it's a scam, it's going to be exposed as such within 4-5 months.
The Defkalion company that manufactures the reactors plans to make and sell 300,000 a year, as home heaters.
With a power of about 20-30 kW, and much more expensive than the gas heaters. We'll see who will buy them.
They say that first the home heaters / reactors have to pass the Greek government's inspection for safety.
Hmm, I wish this wouldn't depend on the Greek government, it has the least credibility in the whole UE now...

A couple of worrisome points: the minimum operating capacity is 2.5 kW, I wonder what could happen if you run out of
water (like when the water company does some digging / repairing)? Would the reactor suffer the equivalent of a melt-down?
According to the reports, a nominal 10 kW unit can ocasionally reach 130 kW, could this be a the path to a chain reaction?
If the technology works and is not a scam, with 300,000 units operational that could be turned into nuclear bombs, then
the end of this civilization could come by 21st December 2012... Hmm, I think I should hope it's a scam...

Fantastic! This sounds like just the thing I need to power the warp drive I built last night. Now, what to do with all that copper?

Make electronics! Cheaper copper = cheaper computer components.
It's win-win!

how does nickel = nuclear bomb?

the goal of fusion is taking stable elements and combining them into other stable elements, and extracting energy from that process.

the goal of fission is taking inherently unstable elements and doing a controlled split on them.

neither one will produce a bomb.

A long time after the initial post, this thread is worth ressurecting
Today 20th May 2013 the first independent scientific report on the E-Cat has been released:
http://ecat.com/files/Indication-of-ano ... device.pdf
And an article in Forbes about the long-awaited report:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2 ... after-all/