“Rossi presented what he claims are third party results that verify that the ecat can generate temperatures of up to 1200 degrees Celsius.”

Apparently, the Swedish investors that had $84-million to invest brought a competent engineer consultant to the Hot Cat test. Could be the engineer informed the potential investors of the well-settled fact that an ordinary 30-Watt tungsten filament incandescent bulb generates temperatures over 2,000 C. Commercial viability of a potential heat source is mostly related to how much heat it produces per unit of time over sustained periods; not to how hot it gets. The Swedish group saw no evidence that Rossi’s Hot Cat contraption was putting out any more heat than they would unexceptionally expect from the scale of input current. There was no reason to speculate about whether the Hot-Cat contraption internal temperature was 1,200 degrees or not. Rossi was saying, “See, it’s 1,200 degrees, and it’s radiating more energy than the electrical input” and the investor group’s engineer was saying, “Yeah, but it doesn’t seem to be putting out any more energy than you are putting into it. What’s the point?” If Rossi’s contraption really worked as claimed, all he would have needed to do to get the big money is to have put a water jacket on it and measured temperature rise in a known mass of circulating water. The village fool could see by simple inspection looking through the cylindrical contraption’s end holes that the interior was glowing red hot, which was plenty hot enough to name it a Hot Cat and to suppose it could produce at least some small amount of turbine grade steam. Are we supposed to believe that with $85-million at stake, Mr. Rossi, thinking to himself that his contraption works as he claims, didn’t want to go to the trouble to install a simple water jacket. That doesn’t argue well for Mr. Rossi’s sanity.

There is an obvious alternative explanation for the lack of a water jacket. Mr. Rossi knew the water jacket would show no net energy production, and that would be less likely to win the $85-million than the Niagara of complex technical mumbo-jumbo that he supplied.

From this point forward it will prove increasingly difficult for Mr. Rossi to find major investors without melting several garbage pails of crushed ice or at least doing some simple mass flow calorimetry. One would think that with $85-million at stake Mr. Rossi would make his best effort demonstration. Seems reasonable to suppose that’s just what he did. Before this latest failure to convince potential investors I would have guessed there’s maybe a 5% chance E-Cat actually works as claimed; now I’m thinking a better guess would be 0.5%.

If the “LENR industry” has any contraption that actually produces significant “excess energy,” there is nothing challenging about measuring it. Just circulate water through the contraption and a garbage pail of crushed ice and weigh the melt water and notice the time required. A wristwatch, bathroom scale, and a few empty gallon jugs would give measurement precision of output power greater than 10%. It’s very difficult to fudge energy output when melting ice. Most any HS physics class given an assignment of developing schemes for fudging input power to LENR gadgets could readily measure input power to better than 10% precision with a kitchen thermometer, bucket of water, and 50-cent wire wound ceramic resistor.

The great challenge the LENR promoters face is trying to make inconclusive tests seem conclusive to persons that have some modicum of scientific or engineering competence. The basic scheme of the reported Hot-Cat test was scientifically absurd, and it proves nothing except Rossi is again trying to convince technically naive persons his contraptions actually produce significant amounts of over-unity heat. There was zero direct calorimetry. The Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law is a 4th power law. That means small changes in absolute temperature produce large changes in radiation emission. Rossi’s Hot Cat test purported to measure not temperature, but infrared radiation levels, which would be very sensitive to relatively small changes in source black body temperature. A slight miscalibration of the radiation meter would produce a large error in reported results. Let Rossi heat some shopping malls in the Canadian winter with his original E-Cat concept (which would certainly make him a billionaire and generously fund further rapid development of Hot Cats, and then come talk to us about raising electrical power plant turbine steam with his Hot-Cat. I’m guessing Rossi doesn’t melt ice because he doesn’t know how to make it convincingly seem like “excess energy” is melting the ice. No point of beating on why no E-Cats are heating shopping malls.

Len says: “Is a 3:1 return better than what we get from damming a river to generate hydro?”

That’s a good question, but a tough one; it’s really not a market economy issue. Hydropower is nearly always economically justified on the multiple basis of flood control, crop irrigation, river navigation, municipal water reservoirs, recreational impoundment, regional development, and electrical power. In many instances the power production is less significant than the other considerations, which might well justify the dam and impoundment even if no power at all were produced. Opinions are going to vary widely, but from a purely energy engineering perspective, I’d say a “good” energy project is one that produces at least 10-times more power output than input. But with something like the completely benign E-Cat, which produces only low-grade non-polluting heat, for many applications, it would make a lot of economic sense with a COP of 3 or better. That could virtually eliminate chemical combustion as the primary source of comfort heat. With temperatures higher than 500 C steam turbines producing electricity come into the picture, and there COPs better than 6 seem needed to compete with NG.