I have a paper on heavy water, and will post it soon.. Cold fusion is not even proven possible,, the last paper written on it, by some sientist in England.. had almost got it to work.. but not quite..
Yes heavy water was used by the germans in their neuclar experiments.. From what I can remember it never proved usefull..

 

The amount of energy that it takes to produce the hydrogen makes it not worthwhile yet.. fuel cells are used in space for their size and weight.. and in NASA money is not a problem..

 

The last well drilled by the local city water company did not hit water till 305 feet... 60 years ago you could hit good water at 10 to 12 feet...

But, you will say,, we get ours from the man made lakes and from the rivers... Right now there are law suits between Alabama and Georgia about the water in the river that runs from Georgia to Alabama,, The jest of the legal tangle, is that Alabama says that Georgia does not have the right to the water that is flowing into Alabama..

Long time past there was laws.. federal waterways laws that said you could not stop the flow of a stream, nor could you put a fence across even a creek if it was large enough to take a boat down..

Those laws went out the window long ago.. Citys suck up the water out of a stream, with little thought about those below them on that water way.... So they go to court.. There are so many questions about TVA that you could write many books.. and they have..

 

Same here in NY Nympho, but it has dropped today...it's 8:20 pm and 33 degree F, we did have snow showers today, I'm going to register the snowmobile next week...so it better get snowing..lol.
Last year I didn't bother with the sled, I rode it around the house about 5 times, the whole season...just to keep it moving...lol.

 

Whoa! This happens to be something I'm up on, and I'd like to see your source for this information. Yes Japan and India are spending millions (note: simply millions, not the tens or hundreds of millions devoted to serious energy research) on zero point energy, but they have yet to prove that it even exists, much less that it can actually be used to power anything.

There are, however, certain discoveries that the press has touted as "zero-point energy" that are, in fact, nothing of the sort.

 

So much to say . . .

1) Here in Nothern Colorado we're having the first decently cold and snowy winter in over a decade. Our first snow was in early October and our daytime temperatures are generally in the 50's unlike being in the 70's at this time last year.

2) Yes, there have been fusion reactions which have produced enough energy to power the world for over a year. They are known as hydrogen bombs. Tapping that energy is a completely different problem. However, last I checked we're at least only 15-20 years away instead of the 20-25 years away we have been since the 1960's. For what I consider to be the best of the current fusion project see http://www.iter.org/

3) The last Cold Fusion research shut down in 2002. Cold Fusion doesn't exist, though the press has falsely reported hydrogen fuel cell research as involving cold fusion.

4) The problems involved with Nuclear Fission power aren't physical or social, but purely economic. Nuclear Fission is too expensive to compete with other forms of alternate energy (even Solar is cheaper these days), much less fossil fuels. If it weren't for the US government subsidies it would have died a long time ago (in the US).

5) Heavy water has a greater than normal complement of deuterium, a type of hydrogen with one proton and one neutron instead of just one proton. It's easier to fuse two deuterium atoms and get an atom of helium and a lot of energy than it is to fuse four atoms of normal hydrogen and get the same. Deuterium is no more common in seawater than anywhere else hydrogen exists.

6) If you turn one gallon of seawater into hydrogen and oxygen you can burn it to produce the equivalent of three gallons of gasoline. However, the energy to convert the seawater in the first place still has to come from somewhere.

 

toJAW: the source for my zero point energy comment was a book by
Dr. Brian O'Leary, former astronaut, entitled MIRACLE IN THE VOID.
ISBN 0-9647826-0-X. I have an autographed copy, and at the seminar where I bought it there was a video of a working motor done in India. I dont think
it was faked. I am a retired engineer among other things.

 

I think the folks from down-under may be feeling the heat. Here's part of a story from the Christian Science Monitor....
BOURKE, AUSTRALIA – The once mighty Darling River, Australia's longest waterway, is dwindling by the day beneath a blazing blue sky, its sluggish waters an unhealthy shade of pea-green.
The Darling is the lifeblood of Bourke, one of Australia's most celebrated outback towns. Located in the parched west of New South Wales state, the expression "back o' Bourke" is understood by all Australians to mean in the middle of nowhere. But the town's legendary resilience has been pushed to a breaking point by six years of drought, the worst "big dry" since the British settlement of Australia in 1788
The drought has prompted an intense debate in Australia about the effects of global warming and whether some areas are becoming too dry for farming. But the government, which like the US has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, insists there is no proven connection between climate change and drought.

 

After doing an extensive search for scientific reviews of Miracle in the Void I've come up completely blank. There are no reviews in the magazines I trust, no independent comments by scientists, nothing to make me think there's anything there at all. That's a fairly damning indictment. The Cold Fusion boom proved how scientists are more than willing to jump on energy possibilities, and when something gets ignored there are good reasons for it (even if only that it was published in a language that's not known to the scientists working in that field). In particular scientists love things which can't be explained, if for no other reason than the person who does the explaining is guaranteed lifetime employment. On the other hand, having spent a great deal of time learning enough to understand the majority of Tesla's broadcast energy experiments and results, I also understand how that particular research is continuously distorted and misinterpreted, and can extend that to other areas. I've also done some research on science scams, and this shows all the earmarks. I'll look for the book, but I don't hold out much hope for anything substantive.

Now, so far as the specific excerpts I've read online that deal with zero-point energy are concerned they neither prove the existence of zero-point energy, nor do they demonstrate that useful energy can be extracted from it. At the best all that's demonstrated is that an unknown process is generating energy, and that more energy is required to generate that energy than can be extracted. Since "zero-point energy" sounds so much better than "unknown process" or a name given by the inventor however, that's what used for publicity purposes even if there's nothing to actually link the device with the name. (It may be worth mentioning that "unknown processes" are used in actual science all the time. The most recent example is "dark energy" which was named only this year after several years of just being labeled unknown. I expect it won't be long before engines supposedly making use of Dark Energy to produce power are created.)

Anyway, for a look at current fusion research I ran across http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7544 today which people might be interested in. Particularly the growing opinion that the problems involved in nuclear fusion are insoluble.

 

Thanks for the link.

 

As my physics professor friend said to me: "Nuclear fusion is the power source of the future...and it probably always will be."

 

off the topic but has anyone is George W has ever learned to say nu-cle-ar, instead of nuc-yu-lar.

 

I have a VERY healthy scepticism about Global Warming - fuelled largely by a superb book (fiction) called State of Fear by Michael Crichton - the guy that wrote Jurassic Park - raises a hell of a lot of good questions about blindly accepting that global warming is really going and what could be causing it.

 

Actually State of Fear promoted a series of questions that were either answered or irrelevant by the time it was printed. (OK, there were a few good points, but they were buried in slush.) Michael Crichton is normally a decent writer, but State of Fear is horrible.

Here's another article on this topic that I ran across today:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0CD49ECD-E7F2-99DF-3CAAC6A116763415

 

J A W - you are probably right - there was no where near enough fucking in the story! Kimiko would have improved the plot!

 

You covered it, and very well,,, and heavy water is found naturally, another thing why use sea water to break down?? OOPs probably because sea water will conduct electricity better.. TR

 

I always assumed they separated out heavy water by gas diffusion, similar to the way the separate U-238 from U-235, but I don't know for sure. I seem to recall that the main german heavy water facility during WWI, in Sweden, was built around a spring associated with some radioactive ores, not on a shoreline.

 

Just briefly, it was seperated in towers , and by the slighltly different weight.. Yes it was in Sweden, and I do not remember anything about radioactive ores.. Had a discussion about it with VonBraum back in the early 60's, but can't remember all that much.

 

The country was Norway.. not Sweden..

 

It was WWII not WWI.