Italian company to sell portable cold fusion plant deliverable next year

Italian company Energy Catalyzer (shortened to ECAT) has announced that it is right now taking preorders for its ECAT 1MW portable cold fusion plant. Founded by Italian scientist Andrea Rossi, the plant has the scientific community shaking its collective head—it's never been peer reviewed and neither Rossi nor anyone else at ECAT has ever published a single paper regarding cold fusion or describing how the plant works.

Cold fusion, is of course, a theoretical means of harnessing enormous amounts of energy by fusing atoms together. Normal fusion is what powers the sun, but it of course, is very hot. Scientists have been working for years to come up with a way to cause fusion to come about in a way that doesn't require a huge amount of heat—thus the name cold fusion. Unfortunately, to date, no one has been able to figure out a way to do it—no one but Rossi, that is, if his claims turn out to be true.

Rumors of how ECAT's plant works suggest it's little more than a simple tube that utilizes an unknown nano-sized nickel type catalyst. When hydrogen is added, heat and perhaps copper, is produced. According to ECAT, the plant does nothing more than produce heated water and/or steam. Those that purchase the plant are free to attach it to a turbine to create electricity. The plant is small—just 20x20x1 centimeters, but each unit can be stacked. The company has put 106 of the units in a shipping container and all together they make up the ECAT 1MW Plant, selling for a cost of $1.5 million to anyone that wants and can afford one.