1. Physicist Claims First Real Demonstration of Cold Fusion

Comment #187779 by doreladam on June 2, 2008 at 4:04 pm

An energy source is as valuable as its EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested). There is no such thing as a free meal. You have to invest energy to produce energy.

To produce oil we invest on average right now 1 BOE (Barrel of Oil Equivalent) per 10 barrels of oil. 80 years ago the ratio was close to 1 to 100. The attractiveness of oil comes from the fact that it's a very concentrated source of energy under high pressure. You only need to puncture the oil chamber and it will gush out, almost for free.

Hydrogen is not an energy source. It will never be. It is an energy carrier. There is no free hydrogen on earth. Most of it is already burnt (spent) in the guise of water. The rest is combined with carbon to form hydrocarbon. The most common and efficient is natural gas which is on the same path as oil, meaning on its way out.

To obtain hydrogen, one must expend a lot of energy to dissociate H2O into H2 and O2.

Also, to produce fusion we need deuterium or heavy hydrogen which is present in the water in an average ratio of 1 atom of deuterium to 6500 atoms of hydrogen.

Even if the cold fusion announced by professor Arata turns out to be true, which I highly doubt, what will be the final EROEI of the entire process?

That is the important question of any alternative energy source. Without an energy source at least as efficient as oil we cannot sustain the present level of economic activity. Forget about economic growth.

2. Edgar Mitchell ushers in the Next Epoch in Evolution

Comment #183245 by doreladam on May 21, 2008 at 3:30 pm

As far as I know, since the synapses in the human brain are at least an order of magnitude larger than the quantum scale, there is no way quantum phenomena play an important role in our psychology.

New Age postmodernist woo indeed. People with extremely vague knowledge of quantum physics start applying it in all sorts of domains where it certainly doesn't belong.