A fantastic invention or fantasy?

kowalskil

An Italian inventor, Andrea Rossi, claims that a 1000 MW nuclear reactor, being constructed in Greece, will become operational in October 2011. I hope he is right; how can one not be happy to have electricity which is ten times less expensive than from coal, and without any pollution? But I am skeptical. Why? Read this paper:

http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/rossi.html

But many reputable people take his claim seriously, as illustrated in these two posts:

http://www.rainews24.rai.it/it/video.php?id=23096

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzL3RIlcwbY

How can such optimism be explained?
.
.

Ludwik Kowalski (see Wikipedia)
author of: http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/life/intro.html

phinds

I didn't watch the vids in the links. Are any of these "reputable people" physicists? Cold fusion has be a staple of crackpots for some time. I don't know that it will never be possible, but if he has done repeatable cold fusion, it would be known all over the world as soon as it was confirmed.

Drakkith

We'll just have to wait and see. There are plenty of reasons to be highly skeptical, but in the end we will just have to wait.

russ_watters

See our skepticism and debunking forum for recent threads on this. It doesn't qualify for the engineering forums - there is no engineering to discuss.