Safety concerns regarding the E-Cat have to be of primary concern to Andrea Rossi as he pursues his commercialization strategy. His explicit goal is to install E-Cats in millions of homes to provide heat and (eventually) electricity — in order to do this there will have to be assurances to customers and regulators that the devices pose no safety risk to users.
Rossi has said that his Leonardo Corporation is in the process of seeking certification for from Underwriters Laboratories in the US and are in the process of submitting the E-Cat for safety testing. Rossi recently made the following comment regarding safety when asked if it was possible to use an E-Cat safely in an apartment:
1- The E-Cat is absolutely safe, does not emit absolutely any kind of radiation in the room: we made thousands of hours of tests. You can install with absolute safety an E-Cat inside your room.
2- There will never be any kind of gamma emission, but our control panel will detect any kind of radiation anyway, and in case of detection of any kind of radiation above the background will stop the E-Cat. But, again we never detected radiations above the background outside the E-Cat ( Background radiation is the radiation you have in your room right noew, coming from the Universe).
Rossi has consistently refused to provide details of what is going on inside the E-Cat reactor, but he has mentioned that gamma rays have been detected. Recently in a video interview when asked about whether the E-Cat was a ‘cold fusion’ technology he said, “we have found traces of fusion because we have found 511 kev gamma rays at the output, which is the emission of a positron and an electron, and a positron is the product of a proton turning into a neutron, so we have some kind of fusion inside, but I do not think this is the main energy source.” Exactly how these gamma rays are shielded is not clear, but Rossi has mentioned in the past that lead is used.
So Rossi seems very confident that they have solved the safety problem, but it will be down to regulators, who will no doubt be very rigorous in their examination of this new kind of nuclear reactor, to give it a seal of safety approval.
