A New Kind Of A Russian Nuclear Reactor

[kowalskil]

A New Kind of a Russian Nuclear Reactor

 

Link to my article: http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/reactor419.html

 

Feel free to share it with all who might be interested, especially with students.

 

Ludwik Kowalski, Ph.D.

Edited March 13, 2015 by Ludwik

[pgrmdave]

Montclair State! Went there for CS, graduated a few years ago.

 

That reactor is interesting - has it been reproduced anywhere yet? Do you have plans to attempt to reproduce Parkhomov's results?

[CraigD]

Because tens of millions of US dollars were spent by many public institutions and private companies on similar research to reach the conclusion that schemes like this were not useful, no plausible scientific theory explains their claimed behavior, and evidence of the claimed behavior may be an artifact of unintentional mistakes or intentional deception, I’m skeptical of claims of practical power supplies based on cold fusion/low energy nuclear reactions.

 

Like most other skeptical followers of this subject, I would be convinced by a demonstration of a system that actually produced useful power, such as by powering an electric generator that produced enough power to heat the device at operating temperature and produce excess electrical power that could be used like that of a conventional electric generator. However, despite many well-funded efforts, there has been no such demonstration.

 

Alexander Parkhomov experimental setup seems to me to be unnecessarily difficult to get reliable data from. It measures the mass of water condensed from steam that escapes the device, multiplying that mass by the heat of vaporization of 98.64 C water at 1 ATM pressure, 2260000 J/kg, to calculate its energy output. The heat of vaporization of water varies greatly with pressure and liquid water temperature, however, which Parkhomov doesn’t measure. A more reliable setup would, I think, be to measure the temperature change of a large volume of cool (7-50 C) water.

 

As you say in your paper, Ludwik, Parkhomov’s “reference to Andrea Rossi in the title of the report is puzzling … the two reactors differ in many ways.” Rossi claims his “e-cat”device transmutes ₂₈Ni into ₂₉Cu, and suggests that it gets energy from this. In his paper (google translation from Russian to English here) Parkhomov writes that his device has more ⁷Li and ⁶²Ni and less ⁶Li and ⁶⁰Ni in its “spent fuel” after than before it’s run – that is, that both the Li and Ni absorb neutrons. I don’t find any speculation as to the source of the neutrons.

 

You write “Discrimination against CF was not based on highly reproducible eperimental data; it was based on the fact that no acceptbal theory was found to explain unextected experimental facts, reported by CF researchers.” I don’t think this is accurate. Much well-funded public and private research into CF was done in the 1990s. That this research was eventually much less well-respected and funded was not primarily, I think, because nobody could explain well how various claims of CF might be possible, but because nobody could engineer a system to get useful energy based on any of the CF schemes advanced (the Wikipedia article Cold fusion gives a concise history).

 

In your paper, you draw a parallel between the Fermi’s 1942 reactor (Chicago Pile-1) and Parkhomov's device. I don’t think such a parallel is very apt, because CP-1 unambiguously released a lot of energy during its brief (28 minutes self-sustaining) operation, with no energy input. It’s unclear if Parkhomov’s device, in the 11 days of its operation, during which steam output was measured for about 2 hrs, produced more heat than can be accounted for by the electric heater it contained. There was little doubt before or after CP-1 that a nuclear reactor could generate usable power, and the physics of how one worked was fairly well-understood. There is no accepted explanation for how various claimed CF devices work, and outside of small fringe groups, much doubt that they can generate usable power.