Posted: Nov 27, 2011 5:06 pm
You can always count on Lubos to speak his mind...
So what Andrea Rossi has achieved was to use the electricity from the power outlet to heat the water right beneath the boiling point at a 75 percent efficiency; something that a good housewife should be able to do in the kitchen at least twice a day. If Mr Rossi has a genuine reactor, a simple way to disprove this description of the details of his stupidity (or his naive magic) is heat the water/steam to 110 °C instead of 100.1 °C using the same gadget.This is not too much to ask for: typical steam generators in nuclear power plants are pressurized at 60-160 atmospheres and the temperature of water and steam is 220-315 °C.
Meanwhile, if an American consumer really paid $24 million for this ugly electric coffee machine, I recommend him to eat his feces for the dinner, too. He may send me $20 million (discount!) for the great know-how. It will be an equally intelligent investment and an equally progressive consumption of an equally revolutionary food product.