[ExI] solar is looking better all the time: was RE: Efficiency of wind power

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl
Subject: Re: [ExI] solar is looking better all the time: was RE: Efficiency
of wind power

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 03:37:31PM -0700, spike wrote:

>> Oh wait.  Do you suppose the undergrads thought of this trick, and 
>> slipped some nickel plated copper into the lab (labeled pure nickel) 
>> when the professors weren't looking?

>"The professors" are crooks. Much simpler explanation

>http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=198040


OK thanks Eugen.

I am interested in how these kinds of things can be done from a technology
point of view: all the many anti-gravity machines for instance, that draw a
bunch of gullible investors from a demonstration, after which the inventor
flees with the money, or perhaps is involved in a terrible and suspicious
accident, in which the body is never found, that sort of thing.  I am old
enough to have seen plenty of these over the years.

I did some looking at nucleon energies of nickel and copper.  If someone is
starting with a clean sheet of paper to convince investors they had figured
out cold fusion, those two metals would be the chosen ones.  Nickel is super
abundant and cheap.  It doesn't take much of it to create a lot of energy if
you could somehow get muon-catalyzed proton capture to work.  

Nickel and copper are chemically compatible enough that one can electroplate
nickel onto copper granules and *I think* copper could be plated onto nickel
granules.  I have never tried to copper plate nickel, but we used to flash
nickel onto copper surfaces in order to make gold/lead/tin interfaces which
minimize galvanic action in high-reliability electrical interconnects in
satellites.  I know that copper and nickel like each other.

When these "professors" get caught, I hope the technical details come out:
did they bother with copper plating nickel?  Or did they nickel plate
copper, then use the device to dissolve the plating?  The trick is that
copper plated nickel would be durn near impossible to distinguish
non-destructively from pure copper granules.  Similarly, nickel plated
copper would be near impossible to distinguish from pure nickel.

I still never did figure out how they suggested any *stable* copper isotope
could be formed by proton capture from any nickel isotope common enough to
be relevant.  Perhaps they are hoping we have forgotten how to read our
nucleon charts?  I haven't forgotten.  General rule: if you look anywhere on
the periodic table, choose any element and take the stable isotope with the
most neutrons.  Add one proton (by some mysterious means), moving one
position to the right on that table.  The resulting isotope will in general
be radioactive, or almost certainly less stable than the previous nucleus.
But don't worry, muons don't live long enough to reach out and grab a
proton.  Too bad for us. 

spike