Fusion Reaction?

[Theocrat]

I glimpsed sometime ago on the news that some guys have managed to create a working and stable fusion reaction?

Have u guys heard anything?

[johneffay]

Do you mean the cold fusion thing? It nobody has been able to replicate it and I believe that it is generally considered to be a hoax.

[PsychicWarVeteran]

I don't recall any news about a successful fusion reaction, but there was a story recently about a company called Steorn that claimed to have come up with a machine capable of perpetual motion. You can watch a video about it here (via BoingBoing).

Of course, the first law of thermodynamics makes Perpetual Motion impossible, but that doesn't stop people from trying to accomplish it. As always, though, the experimenter arrives at the same inevitable conclusion:

When I was a teen, I thought I had come up with a perpetual motion machine which relied on magnetic fields like this one does. The ring that moves around is a magnet on a wheel with the outside all of one polarity. It is attracted to one pole of a horseshoe magnet, as magnets of opposite polarity are, then repelled by the other pole as it moves past. The idea is that the attraction and repulsion of the magnets allow it to spin forever, and could allow a little energy to be drawn off to use for something else. The problem is the magnet on the wheel will instead come to rest caught between magnetic fields. It doesn't work unless the horseshoe magnets are electric so they can be turned on and off, and that takes more energy than can be extracted. My Dad, a physicist, let me build my machine and see the problem for myself. Nice to see I wasn't the only one fooled by the idea.

Still, it's interesting to listen to these guys at Steorn blab on about the impossible as if they had actually achieved it.

[johneffay]

Didn't Pyat come up with plans for a perpetual motion generator? If only someone had had the foresight to back him...

[Theocrat]

Still, it's interesting to listen to these guys at Steorn blab on about the impossible as if they had actually achieved it.

So it's a hoax, or what?
Sure to attract market attention.
Theres alot of weird talk going on about fuel cells nowadays. I'm not really that interested either. I'm 30 years old, and I don't have a drivers license or a car. Driving classes are just too expensive, and too difficult (too many rules which no driver really adheres to when they are on the road). Fuel and insurance really takes chunks out of a singel guys economy too.
But I have no immediate need for a car...

I think there are incentive programs here in Sweden to use ethanol and hybrid cars.
It gets my brother, who's really an amatuer expert on cars, really steamed up (i.e. angry) when I try to talk about it. I don't know why? Maybe its just petrolium addiction.

So I don't know much about it really.

It's a strange thing that modern world production habits originate from automobile production trends. From Ford to the Toyota, from the production floors to the office building to society. Weird world..

[David Mosley]

The only 'fusion' I've heard of recently is this one:

[Theocrat]

The only 'fusion' I've heard of recently is this one:

The company I work at supplies Gillette with the steel for their razors.
We are one of their main suppliers.
I work at a Cold Roller Mill at a stripped steel plant.