I thought this was a rather interesting Q&A from the Journal of Nuclear Physics from November 3:
Gabriel berra
November 3, 2017 at 5:59 PM
The results of the 1 year 1 MW test seem impressive ! I appreciate that you think the QX will me much better but with COP of about 80 it would appear that the original ECat set up was good enough to be attractive and marketable. All the bestAndrea Rossi
November 3, 2017 at 10:08 PM
Gabriel Berra:
No, because to get that result I had to live 352 days inside it 16 hours per day, from 6 P.M. to 10 A.M of the following day, and two other persons, one engineer and one electrician, had to cover from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M., not to mention when I had to stay for 20 hours and the others of the Team had to reach me in the middle of the night for problems . It was a prototype, not a product, but the experience we made with it has generated the QX. We had strong problems and probably, from what we analyzed after the stop from all the components, it was close to die in short time after the end of the test. It was not ready to be a product, but it was a dam good prototype, by means of which an enormous experience has been made.
Warm Regards,
A.R.
As most of us can recall, soon after the test was over, Rossi filed his lawsuit against Industrial Heat, and the plant was soon padlocked by both Rossi and IH. Once the settlement was agreed upon, Rossi got access to the plant again, and started to do a post mortem, taking it apart and examining it closely. From the sounds of it, the plant was not in very good shape.
Rossi seems to be saying here that in order to make it through the year-long test the plant required constant attention and frequent intervention, and despite the reported COP which averaged around 80, he doesn’t consider it suitable for industrial use. It sounds like all attention is now being turned to the E-Cat QX (which Rossi began development on during the 1-year test) and we will probably never see AR build another plant like the one used in Doral.
