The past few weeks have been very exciting for those following the saga of Andrea Rossi's E-Cat Energy Catalyzer technology and its race to the marketplace. Here is a roundup of recent events! 

 

Professor Sergio Focardi (left)
with Andrea Ross (right)
and Prof. Stremmenos (center)
checking readings during recent experiments
with E-Catalyst. (Source: EV World)

by Hank Mills 
Pure Energy Systems News

Andrea Rossi has repeatedly stated that he will not give any more interviews until the one megawatt plant opens in Xanthi, Greece, but interviews with Andrea Rossi continue to emerge. The editor and chief of the EV World website has posted a thirty minute interview with Andrea Rossi. The interview can be downloaded from here.  Perhaps the most interesting part of the interview was Andrea Rossi's comment on how temperatures and pressures are produced between the hydrogen and the nickel (apparently in small cavities inside of the nickel), that resemble those found on the surface of a White Dwarf star. 

The full transcription is below.
 


KEY:
H = Host, William Moore
A = Andrea Rossi

 

H – I have with me on the other end of this connection – unfortunately we do not have video due to technical difficulties – but we do have Mr. Andrea Rossi. From I believe Andrea you are in Bologna. Is this correct?

A – No, I am in Miami, Florida.

H – You are in Miami! Oh my goodness. Alright! 

A- Yes, because in Miami we have a factory where we are preparing the reactors that will be the modules of the one megawatt plant that we are preparing for Defkalion in Greece, that will go into operation in October.

H – Excellent, this is going faster than I expected it to. So first of all, welcome to the United States and to Miami. 

A – Actually, I reside in Miami.

H – Do you really? Well, good! 

H – Alright well, let's begin first of all just to give everybody a brief… I am going to give just a brief intro here. Mr. Rossi is the developer of a process or a device that he is calling the E-Catalyst. It has some really interesting properties about it that we want to talk about today that is related very possibly to a new process in physics that for want of a better name we are calling low energy nuclear reactions. We want to talk to him, because this device could hold a lot of promise for solving some of the energy problems that we face as a planet. First of all, thank you for being with us here. Let's start off first of all by maybe telling us a little bit about who Andrea Rossi is. Give us a little bit of your back ground. 

A – Yes, first of all thank you for calling me. I am honored to be here with you today. My background is in engineering. I started in my twenties to produce plants to recover energy from waste heat from organic waste, etc. I worked in the field of energy production. It is close to 40 years, and this is the story of my life from a technological point of view.

H – Did you work for other companies or did you end up starting your own companies?

A – I started my own company when I was 22.

H – Okay.

A – I always worked for companies that I have started.

H – Good. Now, can we use the term.. I know there is always a bit of debate as to what we call these different sort of technologies, energy technologies, that aren't quite.. have not quite reached the mainstream yet. Can we call this a low energy nuclear reaction? Is that a fair term from your perspective.

A – Yes. This is the… Yes, this can be LENR.. Low energy nuclear reactions can be acceptable. Nuclear effect can be acceptable. I think both of these would be acceptable definitions.

H – So, if agree we can talk about this as low energy nucler reactions, can we sort of share with us when you began to take an interest in this process? What sort of thing brought you to that point?

A – In 1989, Pons and Fleischmann made their famous presentation and I was working in the energy field, and I was extremely fascinated from what they presented. So I tried to replicate their effect with electrolysis and so on and so on. I did not succeed in making anything, but from that point the seed had been implanted.

H – Ok

A – So I started to make different experiments, and there has been an evolution that broke where I am now.

H – So this began then with the original Pons and Fleischmann announcement that… out in Salt Lake City back in 1989.

A – Yes.

H – Good. So you attempted to do it and you were not successful, as many people were not successful, but many people simply wrote that off. Why did you not write it off? What kept you going thinking there was actually something there.

A – You know, sometimes dreams are more important than actuality. They gave to you a dream and they invented a dream basically. But a very important dream. Dreams are immaterial, but matter more. So, I was thinking what they imagined could be true, and I struggled to make it true.

H – Very good. At some point here along the line then you began an association with professor Focardi from Bologna University?

A – Yes… Actually, when I arrived at the very critical point in my research in 2007… Until 2007 I made this work in the time left free from all my arrangements to make power plants, etc. I arrived in 2007 to a point that to go ahead it was necessary to abandon completely all the other engagements and make only this full time 16 hours per day. Before making a choice like this, I hired Focardi who was an expert in the matter, because also he had worked on Nickle Hydrogen reactions. And I knew him as an expert so I hired him as a consultant, and I asked him not to see if my process could work, but I demanded him to demonstrate that it could not work. Because I wanted… You know a very strong to be sure it was worth ???? another activity to put myself in this one. And he has taken… It was July 2007. After some day he said, I think this will work. At that point, we hired him as a consultant for the safety side of the issue. Because at that point I decided that to produce actual generators, and so I wanted to be sure that we did not make mistakes under the safety point of view. Because if it worked, there would have been radiations, and he taught to us very well how to protect the environment from the radiations, and thermalize the radiations to make heat. And I built a boiler that has heated my factory which was in a small town of Italy which is Fariera, just in the outskirts of Ferrari, in North East Italy. This boiler has heated my factory for about one year, and so we made experiments in an actual working reactor. Of course, for many years I made a lot of smaller units. They have been used, destroyed, and so on.

H – So you actually have a working boiler. Can you sort of give us a sense of the size of this? I mean you got the factory is what, how many square meters, and how much… Does this supply just hot water or are you using it for heating?

A – Very good. With that reactor which was similar to the modern E-Cat that we are making, was a module of about 20 kilowatts. And with that we heated an area of the factory that was about 1000 square feet, with offices, etc. In that area in Italy it is very cold for at least five months a year, because in the North East the winter is very cold. We have temperatures that range between – 6 and 10 celsius degrees. And we heated our offices with that for one year, and studied it very well. It was after that a strong evolution we made the module that has been tested in the tests that you have mentioned. And in the module that will be the brick of the one megawatt plant that we are going to do.

H – Ok. That is pretty interesting. Wow. So the chronology of the E-Cat, the E-Catalyst, you were doing these various experiments since about 1989. Then around 2007 you brought in Professor Focardi to help you ensure that the module you were building was safe, and that there was… and that any radiation issues would be mitigated. Correct?

A – Correct

H – Does this device put out much… Of course that is one of our concerns. I am here in Omaha Nebraska, and we have two nuclear power stations both of which are surrounded by flood waters. And this is a concern for us obviously, we don't want any of those plants to be damaged by flood waters, because that would.. you know.. we would have our own version of Fukushima here. We don't want that obviously! We are concerned about radiation issues. What are the concerns with respect to radiation that this process puts out? Should I be worried?

A – Ok. First of all, we do not use radioactive materials. We use nickel and hydrogen. And we do not produce radioactive materials, so when the reactor is turned off, after twenty minutes every kind of radiation is thermalized. And what we leave is just metal… nickel, some copper, and that's it. The radiations that we produce are produced inside the box of the reactor which is shielded by lead, and these radiations which are gamma rays in the range between 50 and 200 KEVS (kiloelectronvolts), they are very low energy radiations. Which have a life.. a maximum life of twenty minutes, because they are completely thermalized which means… they turned into heat. The fact that we do not use radioactive materials and do not leave radioactive materials of course, makes this kind of use of the nuclear reactor safe.

H – As I understand it the only by product of this process is the nickel being… and I use with reserve here the word "transmuted" because that kinda has an almost.. "magical" sound to it… but transmuted or moves back from nickel… nickel moves then to copper. Is that correct? Which is essentially just one atom difference?

A – This is correct. The isotopes of nickel that are turning into copper are the sixty two and the sixty four. They turn only into copper sixty three and copper sixty five. Maybe your listeners will not understand what I am saying, and in this case it is very complicated to explain to the layman in a few minutes, what is an isotope, etc. 

H – The main thing is we just want to make sure we are not creating any long term radioactive byproducts from a process like this.

A – Absolutely not. We are creating sixty three and sixty five copper, which are stable atoms.

H – Alright. That's great. Of course this raises the question as the process runs along for weeks, months, hopefully years that the nickel eventually begins to be more and more copper. I suppose at some point you actually need to then replace that nickel, and refresh it? Would that be correct.

A – Absolutely correct. Every six months the charge is substituted.

H – Ok. So you need essentially a fresh… is there anything special about this nickel? I know that there is… apparently… there are some material in there along with a catalyst that is proprietary. 

A – Correct.

H – For understandable reasons you don't want to tell anyone about it, and I certainly appreciate that. So every six months then the current catalyst… the current material… the nickel… is recycled, is taken, replaced.. Can that material.. I guess I should ask you, can that material be recycled?

A – Absolutely, yes. We sell the used nickel which contains traces of catalysts and has a slightly different isotopic composition, because it is a little bit enriched sixty two and sixty four, but this is nothing important. So it is absolutely and totally acceptable for nickel dealers.

H – So you could take and someone could use it to make steel and other items of that nature?

A – Absolutely. Nickel is used to make stainless steel.

H – How pure does the nickel have to be… and are you… I guess my question is here we look at questions of resource availability. Is there enough nickel available for us to use this for many years in the future?

A – Well, you must consider that one gram of matter produces twenty three times ten to the sixth which means times one million kilowatt hours. So the amount of nickel we are going to consume is irrelevant in regards to the amount of nickel that is mined every year. 

H – Okay.

A – We are in a.. we can consume…. even if all the energy of the world…. which is impossible… would be made with this system the amount of nickel that we consume is in the order of some point percentage of the nickel that is extracted from the mines every year.

H – That is a great lead into the next question that I had, because when I talked to.. when I interviewed Dennis Bushnell who is the chief research scientists at NASA's Langley facility in Virginia. And I was interviewing him with respect to what does NASA see as some of the future energy technologies, and the very first one he mentioned was low energy nuclear reaction. While he was cautious in endorsing it, he did tell me, which did surprise me, this could be the game changing. I'm wondering if this is how you see this. Do you see this as an energy game changer for the planet?

A – Absolutely yes. I am surprised that Bushnell made those statements, and I am positively surprised. This means that he is an extremely open minded scientist, and probably due to the fact in NASA they have to resolve extremely difficult problems and they have to be open minded.

H – Could you walk us through.. obviously without giving away trade secrets here… for people who aren't familiar with… who have not watched the Youtube videos and haven't followed this… the dialog regarding the process… could you sort of explain to us when you.. for example. When you did a demonstration for the press in Bologna back in January. Could you walk us through how the process works.

A – Yes. To make it extremely simple, what happens is that nickel has a particularity that protons spread from it's surface with extreme efficiency. And very close to the nucleus, even if repelled by the so called coulomb barrier forces. And when we in the reactor inject the hydrogen the protons of hydrogen at high pressures and temperatures, will go pretty close to the nucleus of the nickel. And at those points, we have nuclear effects that produce gamma rays which add more energy and using a particular system to increase the pressure arriving to extremely high pressures… similar to ones that happen to be in the White Dwarf stars. In those situations, is possible that physically that so called Gamow Factor which is a probabilistic calculation of the coulomb repelling forces is overcame, and at that point enough energy is produced to make it worth to be recorded.

H – So you use as I gather you use as the moderating medium here, you run water through there to create steam, is that correct?

A – It is absolutely correct. The water runs outside the reactor. It exchanges heat. The reactor is cooled by the water and consequently the water is heated by the wall of the reactor. And we can heat as the temperature that we want depending on the amount of the flow.

H – This process as I understand it… well, you said that you have a boiler that has been running for at least a year now?

A – It has worked at least one year, when I was there. Now we no longer have the factory. I had to sell everything to finance this. Now we have here in the United States. Here in Florida, the place where we make the reactors, and in Greece they are making huge production lines for the production of these products in Europe.

H – That is exciting. So that is being done here in the United States then?

A – Absolutely, and of course we will try to create as many jobs as possible.

H – Alright. Good. Thank you very much for doing that. I am sure the state of Florida will appreciate that and so will the rest of the country.

H – Let me ask you, obviously as you are aware, you have your skeptics who still, you know, feel that this can't work, it doesn't work, the laws of physics don't allow it to work, whatever. How do you deal with that. You said you have a facility that has been.. you have heated your plant.. how do you deal with the skepticism and the criticism.

A – This is normal. You know when you make something that is completely new, it is unavoidable that there is skepticism. I myself would be skeptical if I was on the other side of the trench. And I think that the only way to overcome skepticism is to make plants, put them to work, put them to operation, let them work properly, and with the reactor you always win against the world.

H – Are there any show stoppers that you see? Are there any kind of either environmental concerns, technical issues, or financial issues that you think could cause problems that could set the program back?

A – This is a good question. You know, of course I do not have a crystal ball, and I cannot foresee unforeseeable events. For the foreseeable events, I think that there are no show stoppers around. I think that we have all the business necessary to develop this concern, and again the very important thing is that the plants that we are going to put into operation respect the environment, demonstrate with facts and not words that they do not have emissions of any kind. We have no smoke or gas emissions, no leaking emissions, we have no waste emissions, we have no noise emissions, no CO2 emissions, we have nothing of this. And it is important to demonstrate it in reality, in the facts so that I think this is going to have an exponential development I hope. And if for some unforeseeable obstacle will rise, we will ask for help even from you. 

H – Alright. Great! Lets… so you are in Miami, and working to actually create the very first large scale facility, I presume. When do you sort of anticipate doing delivery of the plant and that plant in Greece you know, being online.

A – October.

H – October.

A – October of this year.

H – This will be where in Greece.

A – Xanthi. It is in the industrial part of Greece which is about 200 miles north of Athens. It is in a mountainside.

H – Is this going to sort of remain in your view a small sort of niche energy curiosity, or in 20 to 40 years could we see very large E-Cat power plants for replacing you know, coal fire and maybe even nuclear power plants?

A – We will work to make, to get an exponential development. When you get an exponential development it is unforeseeable the speed of the development. You look at the computers. In 1995 computers were just a issue that was in the industries, you know… 90% of people did not have computers. After three years everybody had a computer on his desk or table, households, etc. It is unforeseeable. This is the kind of thing that we are not able to foresee.

H – Right.

A – The potential is very strong, because the energy costs.. You know here you can make a megawatt hour with ten dollars, all considered. And this is something that without pollution, without emissions, etc. So this should make a game changer as Bushnell said, but between the saying and the doing there is an ocean. 

H – Exactly. You brought up the issue of… I know people who are in the energy business will want to add or want to know.. do you have a sense of what the kilowatt hour cost of a facility will be?

A – One cent.

H – That is not kilowatt hours, that is kilowatts.

A – That is… sorry.. let me correct you. The energy is kilowatts. Kilowatt is power, so one plant that has a power of one kilowatt is a plant that can produce up to one kilowatt hour per hour. 

H – So typically, when they talk about construction cost of a power plant they talk about…

A – I said kilowatt. Okay.. so you want to know price per kilowatt. The price per kilowatt can be one thousand to two thousand dollars.

H – Wow. That is still…

A – I had understood that you wanted to know the price per kilowatt hour.

H – Well, both those numbers are important critical numbers. They really are, so wow. That is exciting. So look, please keep me informed I know my readers are going to want very much to keep track of how this develops.

A – Thank you very much, and continue your wonderful job with your information system which is very good.

H – Thank you so much and much luck.

A – Thank you.  

# # #

This story is also published at BeforeItsNews.

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