Andrea Rossi had been reporting recently on the Journal of Nuclear Physics that his team at Leonardo Corporation had been testing two E-Cat SK reactors rated at 10 kW each to see if they would be suitable for building the first industrial E-Cat plants.
Rossi says that last night (Saturday, September 8th 2018) they decided that they have decided to use the SK reactors instead of the smaller 1kW QX E-Cats. He had said that they would run a 10-day test, but it apparently only was six days, having started on Monday.
Rossi had admitted that moving ahead with the E-Cat SK does entail some risk, since it has not been put through the months-long Sigma 5 testing that the smaller QX reactor went through, but it is a risk he is willing to take apparently. He stated
“the Sigma 5 reaches with the Ecat QX helps the trust in the SK version.”
So what happens next? I asked Rossi this question and his answer was simply “industrialization.” As far as when the first plants would be delivered to customers, he wrote to Gerard McEk this: “We will begin to deliver in 2019, surely not in January. By January we would start the production.”
As best as I can understand things, the actual starting of industrial production had been on hold until Leonardo had decided which reactors they would be building. Now that decision has been made, one would expect that they would start to move onto production.
We will have to wait and see how things progress now. The next important public event will be the product introduction of E-Cat products which Rossi has said he hopes to hold in January. I don’t think he will hold that event unless they have had success with the production process by that time.
