My best guess about what is going on with the Ecat, based on recent comments and answers that Andrea Rossi has been posting on the Journal of Nuclear Physics, is as follows.
Preorders for the Ecat SKLep have slowed down, and Andrea Rossi has the sense that unless he does something new, he is not going to reach the 1 million pre-order threshold. At one point Rossi had stated he had around 800,000 pre-orders, but I think that number has been reduced, since he has stated that some of the big buyers that he had been counting have turned out not to have the financial wherewithal to back up their preorders.
So he has now come up with a Plan B, which is apparently to show a live stream of an Ecat SKLep in operation for an extended period of time. Here is a Q&A from this weekend:
Raphael
July 3, 2022 at 8:10 AM
Dr Rossi:
Did I correctly understand that the plan B is hypothesized as a full time 1 year long broadcasting od an ECAT SKLep in operation in the site of a Leonardo Corporation’s client ?
Thank you if you can answer,
RaphaelAndrea Rossi
July 3, 2022 at 8:12 AM
Raphael:
Yes,
Warm Regards,
A.R.
There has been no date set about when Plan B will be put into operation, when I asked him about when it might happen he said that he thinks it will be this year.
There have been lots of readers on the JONP who have given Rossi reasons why they think he does not need to hit the 1 million pre-order target. His response has always been the same, and he repeated it today:
Andrea Rossi
July 5, 2022 at 2:38 AM
Wilfried Babelotzky,
As I said many times, we need orders for one million pieces for economy scale and for avoid the reverse engineering prematurely,
Warm Regards,
A.R.