http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVPsBmhgjTk
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Rocket scientists are just compensating for their small wieners.
Oh mah gawd a persecuted Israeli, who ever heard of such a thing. Well, good job anyhow.
I thought they were accounting for the mass as well. Nuclear fusion and coal do not produce excess anything, they change energy forms.
Er...
Energy is completely conserved. What's being referred to is the useful work. If you put say 10MW in and only get 5MW of usable power out of it, that still adds up to a total of 15MW. The goal of current fusion experiments is to obtain a Q value of >1, where you get more usable energy out of the fusion reaction than you used to start and contain the reaction in the first place.
The energy produced also comes from converting some of the mass. No violation of thermodynamics whatsoever... this is basic basic stuff.
I don't know much about the cold fusion experiment, but like I said, I thought it was energy unaccountable by the mass reduction. I thought it had something to do with the the mysterious excess energy they would need to overcome the repulsion of the nuclei without a catalyst.
Well with cold fusion I haven't heard of any peer-reviewed evidence from a reputable source for it actually occurring, much less any mechanism that would lower the activation energy for the reaction, unlike Muon-catalysed fusion.
In any case, thermodynamics states that the reaction pathway is irrelevant when it comes to the total energy released in the reaction. So if the same reaction released different amounts of energy through different pathways that would indeed be a violation of thermodynamics.
"you need a certain temperature to overcome the activation energy required to overcome the electrostatic repulsion of the nuclei"
Why so confused? It's pretty simple bro.
Your off topic (although this topic is off topic lol). The experiments in question when someone says "Cold Fusion" do not use such catalysts. Also, muons do not "rearrange" the electromagnetic force, they bring the nuclei closer together by replacing electrons in atoms.
"Rearrange" might not be the best word, but catalysts do change the required activation energy, which is my point. Also, you don't necessarily need a traditional catalyst. For example, a well-designed particle accelerator could achieve net gain fusion without needing a high ambient temperature in any non-negligible space*.
*Technically, you could say that an individual particle has a certain temperature depending on its energy, but that's a big stretch. Temperature, as a concept, is meant to talk about large numbers of particles.