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Excess Heat
Drs. Fleischmann and Pons between them had decades of academic and laboratory experience in the field of electrochemistry. Among other positions and awards, Dr. Fleischmann is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Dr. Pons was Chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of Utah.
When they announced the discovery of 'cold fusion' in 1989, a scientific travesty occurred. Nuclear physicists declared that because no nuclear products could be demonstrated, the measurement of excess heat was flawed. This is completely irrational. The measurement of excess heat stands on it's own merit. If any assault is to be made, it must be upon the methodology used to measure the heat. The quantity of heat measured was in fact too large to be accounted for by mechanical or chemical means.
The Pons and Fleischmann experiment was never a simple 'kitchen chemistry' endeavor. The calorimetry measurements and heat accounting is difficult to master. Electrochemical knowledge and experience is an absolute must. The electrochemical cell represents a complex environment and there were unknowns associated with the palladium cathodes. As a result, early attempts at replication failed.
The nuclear physicists in question did not possess the knowledge or experience in electrochemistry and calorimetry to demonstrate any problem with the heat measurement. They did not enter the laboratory and, hands-on, find the alleged error in heat measurement. Instead, they resorted to the irrational argument above and to ridicule. They prevailed due to their prominent position in the federal government and the esteem of them held by publishers of the scientific publications. Unfortunately, they managed to derail an exciting turn in the history of science.
All of the above and more is to be found in the Charles G. Beaudette book, Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed. With the forward penned by Sir Arthur C. Clarke and introduction by David J. Nagel, Ph D, the book runs 365 pages cover to cover and is replete with references.
The book covers the initial discovery and the quick dismissal by the DOE Energy Research Advisory Board. The board issued it's final, negative report in a mere 8 months. Contrast that to the time period between the discovery of superconductivity and the decades taken to elucidate the theoretical underpinnings. Most of the points refuted by the author can be found at www.ncas.org/erab/sec1.htm.
The role of particular nuclear physicists is clearly described and dissected. The part played by the major, popular science journals, such as Nature, is elucidated.
Six cold fusion type experiments are presented, all of which produced excess power under mild conditions. Pertinent details are presented, such as a description of the apparatus and/or graphs of the measurements/results. The results of some of these experiments have been published in peer reviewed journals.
The measurement of "nuclear ash" is reported from other cold fusion experiments expressly set up for the purpose. Again, some of these results have been published in peer reviewed journals.
Other chapters consider scientific protocol, more on the role of the skeptics, and premature attempts at commercialization.
It is now obvious that any critic of cold fusion will have to do more than present illogical arguments or simply ridicule the scientists involved in the research. If they believe the calorimetry is flawed, they will have to present evidence, preferably from their own experiments, but at least from participation in a cold fusion experiment. They should have any critique peer reviewed by scientists well versed in the practice of calorimetry and/or electrochemistry, then published. Same goes for criticism of evidence of nuclear products, although this is an area where some of the skeptics could actually do some science.
The author presents detailed arguments. This is mostly good, but I found it difficult to attend to some of the more lengthy passages.
All in all, I very much enjoyed the book. If you find the neutrino problem, the Big Bang, the steady state theory, the double-slit experiment wiih only one photon in the apparatus, dark matter, more than four dimensions of space-time, or the modification of the laws of gravity to get rid of dark matter facinating, then you will enjoy this book also. It is a light directed to a partially opened door that connects what we think we know with what we don't.
You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek. And for a taste of what's up in cold fusion research, take a look at the May, 2000 ICCF.
Unfortunately, your reply is in the same vein as all the other criticisms (on both sides) in this sorry tale. The whole affair has focussed on people, and what they did right and what they did wrong. Who the hell cares!?
For a true scientist, there should have been only one issue worth discussing in all of this mess, and that was the fact that a number of experiments (but not all) found an unattributed heat excess. To solve that mystery and hence attribute the heat to something old or something new would have been Science. Everything else was bollocks.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Your arguments are so strong and persuasive that I think we can, from now on, dismiss the possibility of ever finding any new reactions or methods in the area of fusion research.
It's so refreshing to know that we'll no longer be troubled with all this terrible uncertainty about the future, since scientific investigation in nuclear issues is now closed. I guess there's no point talking about quarks and superstrings and other such balony, since who knows, it could one day lead towards understanding how to fuse nuclei without emitting neutrons, which we know is impossible, so any such fundamental research must be bad science too. Well done!
Those pesky F&P, I bet they were descendents of Galileo, the blighters!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Tipler's homework problem is a good handle-cranking exercise for students, teaching them about known properties of standard models of nuclear physics. It won't help them though when those models need to be extended through progress in science. All it says is that, under the conditions and reactions investigated so far, neutrons have been seen to be emitted in said quantities. Fine, but please don't suggest that that is the whole story and that nuclear physicists can now retire.
Your item knocks down a straw man. F&P and everybody else on the proponent's side knew damn well that even if this was indeed fusion, no way was it fusion of the ordinary kind. Indeed, in many ways they brought their problems upon themselves by calling it any kind of fusion at all, rather than inventing a new name.
Unfortunately, as a result of that bad move and others, even if there was a new physical effect of some sort present (which is likely, given that knowledge in that area is far from complete), we'll now not discover it in this generation because nobody with a reputation worth preserving dares touch the subject with a barge pole anymore. That sucks.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The local bookstores still has a magazine by die-hard believers called "Infinite Energy".
I don't read it, but it tells what is still going on.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Actually, the most significant evidence was that the orbit of the planet Mercury fails to follow Newtonian mechanics. There are alternative explanations to the Michelson-Morley experiment results, however none of them explain the orbital mechanics of Mercury.
Ah - cold fusion as a great coverup/conspiracy to surpress.
What a crock. Cold fusion has the same status as alien abduction, Loch Ness and the Yeti in scientific circles. Or maybe the Piltdown man and von Danaken's theories.
Well, the fact is that nobody has ever shown that cold fusion exists. All we have is an experiment with anamolous results that have been reproduced. A thorough investigation of the anamoly turns out to have identified the source of heat as being a thermocouple power supply. Yet even today we find this crap on systems like slashodot. Systmes that purport to cater to some sort of intellectual elite.
The interesting question is do memes like this persist, especially in places like this.
My guess is that is a failure of a general education to instill a capacity of rational thought and scientific skepticism in vast majority of the populace. We still have the need to debunk urban legends about organ harvesting, so why not similar legends about cold fusion?
Fleischmann and Pons blew it. Get over it.
Caractacus Potts wrote:
Unfortunately for your argument, most of the really bad jornalism and fossilized public opinion was pro-P&F. They had a very seductive argument (which you are, largely, now repeating) and an awfully attractive carrot if you bought their claims.
Relying on the likes of USA Today and Newsweek (and even Discover) for your news about hard science is like relying on Slashdot for news of international politics: you may hear of some things, but don't expect accuracy or precision.
For the record, at the time that Pons' and Fleischmann's first claims were reported in the press, I did some back of the envelope calculations on the probable reduction of the electrostatic force between deuterium nucleii 'disolved' in the surface of a platinum crystal. My calculations showed that, within an order of magnitude, their claims for room temperature fusion were believable.
I was 'guardedly optimistic' about cold fusion at the time, but I had failed to take into account the necessary by-products of a deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction (neutron radiation) and the effect it would have had on nearby people (lethal dosage in a few hours). Had I considered the radiation problem, it would have been obvious that Pons' and Fleischmann were either liars or concealing one or more dead bodies. (and probably suffering from massive radiation burns themselves)
In retrospect, it is hard to understand why more scientists didn't bring up the problem of neutron radiation at the time that Pons Fleischmann made their initial claims. All the fuss about calorimetry and vacuuming helium out of the cieling tiles seems just silly if you don't see lethal doses of neutron radiation from an unshielded fusion reaction.
Even a second year undergraduate physics student can see that Pons' and Flieschmann's claims for cold fusion where severly overstated, if not simply fraudulent. Their obsession with inaccurate and difficult measurements suggests that they were, indeed, attempting a cover-up, but the cover-up was for the obvious fallacies in their own experiments.
The suggestion to persue either more accurate calorimetry (an error prone process even under the best conditions) or the search for 'nuclear ash' (better known as helium) are straw men to distract researchers from the easier to measure (and patently missing) by-products of a fusion reaction: neutrons! (and the dead lab workers caused by the neutron flux near the aparatus)
The following homework problem, taken from Physics for Scientists and Engineers, volume 2 third edition, by Paul A. Tipler, Worth Publishers, chapter 40 Nuclei, page 1336:
and with 50 percent of the reactions going down each branch, how many neutrons per second would we expect to be emitted in the generation of 4 W of power?If one-tenth of these neutrons were absorbed by the body of an 80.0-kg worker near the device, and if each absorbed neutron carries an average energy of 0.5 MeV with an RBE of 4, to what radiation dose rate in rems per hour would this correspond?
How long would it take for a person to receive a total dose of 500 rems? (This is the dose that is usually lethal to half of those receiving it.)
The answers are:
Without the most obvious by-product, neutrons, of the most likely nuclear reaction, the one suggested by Pons and Flieschmann themselves, as measured by an easily obtainable metric, dead or dying lab workers (or graduate students), the searches for any of the more esoteric by-products is a pointless waste of time.
Which is half the reason the physics community thinks P&F are idiots.
One: they didn't have the equipment to detect neutrons. They claimed it because they knew they had to.
Two: Someone right friggin' beside them in the physics department with a running neutron detector at the time when their experiment was running didn't see any excess neutrons.
The smoking gun, IMHO, is the fact that P&F aren't dead. Regardless of what reaction is occurring, you're going to produce high energy reactants that are going to do severe genetic damage. They're not dead - therefore, they didn't produce squat.
Hey!
Go fig, this is exactly what all of us reading the NYT's article from last Tuesday are wondering re: "we have demonstrated the existence of a repulsive dark energy via supernovae observations."
What the hell were they thinking making such a bold claim? I definitely agree with you. You never - ever - ever claim something until you have one hell of a mountain of data behind you.
Otherwise you end up looking like an ass, just like P&F, the Weber bar experiment, and California's monopole - all great examples of why physics works best as a peer reviewed process.
I could be wrong, you know. If I am, I'll join you over in California tomorrow using a maglev utilizing monopoles where we can solve their power problems using cold fusion and worry about how we're going to survive in a few days when the black hole at the center of the galaxy finishes consuming all the stars in the known universe. Of course, the cosmological constant will come and fix all of our problems. No tongue in cheek here...
There are lots of examples of this phenomenon:
- 1950s: Electronic "calculators" are invented; the invention is squashed by the pencil and paper industry.
- 1960s: "Tang," an inexpensive artificial orange-flavored breakfast drink is invented; the citrus industry keeps the invention a secret.
- 1970s: Computer scientists develop a protocol for connecting computers for exchange of information; the post office and Ma Bell join forces to strangle this so-called "Internet" in its cradle.
Indeed, most readers are probably mystified by the previous post's reference to the tobacco industry. It turns out that smoking tobacco doesn't ease breathing and prevent colds; in fact, it can cause some nasty diseases. But because the tobacco industry put the kibosh on all that research, none of you knew that.Remember, kids, there's no such thing as "pseudoscience": big corporations only want you to think that. In my next post I will explain how big corporations really don't need to use animal testing but continue to do it because they hate fluffy bunnies.
The confinement scheme you are talking about (commonly referred to as an "electrostatic confinement" or a "Penning trap") is actually closer to hot fusion than cold fusion. The device works by making a spherical electrostatic potential that both confines ions and causes them to oscillate about the center of the device. If the electric field is sufficiently strong that the relative speeds of the ions is high, then collisions among the particles can, on occasion, lead to fusion reactions.
This link takes you to web pages describing (and showing nice color photos of) an ongoing Penning trap fusion experiment being conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The main drawback to devices of this type for power production is that one is limited in the number of ions that can be confined (the Brillouin limit) due to space-charge effects. Even without achieving breakeven, these devices are still very interesting, however, as enough fusion reactions take place in a small enough package to make the Penning trap devices attractive neutron sources: unlike radionucleides, you have both an on-off switch (making them easier and safer to handle and operate), and you can dial the flux of neutrons you want (making them more flexible).
Now, as it happens, all of the candidate reactions using deuterium as a fuel generate neutrons as a side product. It doesn't really matter how you combine the Deuteriums, whether you combine them with other Deuteriums or with Tritium, or how you manage to overcome the electrical repulsion of the nucleus. If you induce fusion in the fuels they used, you will get neutrons. A lot of neutrons.
Sorry to pick nits, but your claim that every fusion reaction involving deuterium leads to neutron production is not true. The following are the most obvious examples:
D + D -> T (1.01 MeV) + p (3.02 MeV)
D + He3 -> He4 (3.5 Mev) + p (14.7 MeV)
D + Li6 -> 2 He4 + 22.4 Mev
All of these reactions are exothermic, so they could, at least in principle, be candidates for anomalous energy production. However, upon closer examination, they each have problems explaining the data, so your original point--that one has no business calling something fusion without being able to measure any of the fusion products--still stands. Take the first reaction: it produces tritium, which could then react with the deuterium and make 14 MeV neutrons. Moreover, about half the time the D + D reaction branches instead into an He3 and a neutron, so neutrons seem to be inextricably linked with the first candidate reaction. The third, D + Li6, is not a good candidate if one has no lithium in the system to begin with, and if one doesn't produce any measurable He4 at the end of the day. Regarding the second candidate reaction, a drawback to explaining the Pons and Fleischmann results as being this reaction chain is that, given He3's relative paucity on Earth, one finds it difficult to imagine how He3 got into the experiment by accident.
Does anyone have any information about the Farnsworth Fusor, outside of these links?
e x.html
http://fus.x0r.com/
http://songs.com/philo/ind
http://www.farnovision.com/
There seems to be very little information available about this man - Tesla is downright famous compared to him.
For a little background, supposedly Farnsworth (Philo T. Farnsworth - true inventor of electronic television) invented a method of creating a possible fusion reactor of sorts using a strange form of vacuum tube device that contains and accelerates electrons in a magnetic "cage" of some sort (like a mini tokamak, I guess), causing the possible end result of fusion to happen (ok, my description is probably all botched to hell, but look up and read the sites for more info)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
It's true that it's a common argument of pseudoscience apolosgists. However, that doesn't mean it's not true. I think it was Bohr who said something to the effect that new theories largely take hold only because the defenders of old paradigms die off.
I don't mean to imply that such is the case here, just a general observation.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
IANANP, but from what I've read, it is true that neutrons are released from all known suitable fusion reactions which occur in the plasma phase. However, supposedly there is another reaction that produces gamma rays and helium that can only occur in a solid phase. Since hot fusion does not operate in the solid phase, this reaction has been widely ignored. However, in the P&F cell, helium appears to be produced. Now, there is a lot of debate about whether the helium is actually being produced or just absorbed from the environment through diffusion. Also, the gamma rays have not been observed. I don't think it's appropriate though to dismiss this out of hand, as there is substantial evidence for the helium being produced in the cell, and the only way this could happen is with a nuclear reaction.
I just felt like responding to your tagline:
I find it interesting that you would blame the courts and not the half of the populace who didn't bother to vote at all.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
In summary, the Pons & Fleishmann experiments were significantly flawed.
Of interest to Slashdotters, the cold fusion episode was probably the first major episode of pathological science which had active internet participation by many of the principals (except for P&F). This led to rapid replication of experiments, and many far more careful experiments including those with closed calorimeters (using catalysts to recombine the D2 and H2 products). Although there were occasional reports of excess heat or nuclear products, there were no consistent findings. Furthermore, as is typical in pathological science, the more careful the experiment, the lower the statistical significance of any results found.
Another interesting aspect of this whole affair is that a physicist, Dr. Steven Jones, also in Utah (at BYU, not UU), was about to publish his own cold fusion results using electrolysis (and did publish about the same time). This empending publication may have stampeded P&F into their actions.
However, Jones was operating on a different theory. He was trying to explain the (still unexplained AFAIK) excess amount of He3 released by volcanic eruptions. His theory was that a small amount of fusion was taking place deep in the earth, producing the He3. He tried to duplicate this with a "soup" of chemicals, and to generate the "pressure" using electroylysis in a palladium (I believe) electrode.
In contrast to P&F, Jones was very careful in his experiments. He kept seeing slighly significant excess neutron emissions. However, whenever he tooks steps to refine the experiments by reducing the neutron background (going into deep mines, and a tunnel under the Alps), the neutron emissions followed suit... the excess was a slight excess over the background, no matter the background. This ultimately led to a "no effect" conclusion. This is also characteristic of pathological science.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Is this a late April Fool's Joke? Okay I know Slashdot has essentially no editorial standards and no regard for fact checking and accuracy when it posts a story, but I thought it would have some sort of minimial threshhold for stories.
What's next? How the powers that be are suppressing the existence of the Loch Ness monster?
The University of Utah was a respected school in Chemistry, and Pons and Fleischman were respected researchers when the cold fusion thing was released.
I remember well the wait for someone to reproduce the experiments. Being at the James Franck Institute of the University of Chicago at the time [interdisciplinary institute for chemists and physicists], I knew that 1) chemists were pretty sure that Pons and Fleischman had seen something -- they weren't the sort to hallucinate energy; 2) physicists were sure within 24-48 hours or so that it couldn't have been fusion.
As it turned out, Cal Tech and other top schools failed to reproduce the experiments. Some schools did get something. However, the schools that could reproduce some heat were not top schools, unless you counted their football programs.
The idea that Pons and Fleischman weren't given fair treatment is pretty empty. Its just that there are enough conspiracy theorists out there that can't believe that if something sounds too good to be true -- it almost certainly is.
In times past a "scientist" found someone that was willing to support his/her research. This usually involved convincing your new source of cash that your theory is correct. This also meant spending some time shooting down your opponents theorems. After all your sponsor was paying you to be right, so it behooved you to prove competing theorems wrong. In these times it was the court of your sponsor's opinion that swayed the science (by means of the pocket book). Sometimes when we are not careful that holds today.
People like to think of the pursuit of science as a pure ideal. You have a theory, you test and are reviewed by your peers. The truth involves a lot more money and politicking than the pure ideal, as does any human pursuit.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Hey moderators, this is NOT a troll.
Quite frankly, cold fusion, at least in the sense that Fleischmann & Pons used it, has been utterly disproven. According to the reviewer, the book says that "nuclear physicists declared that because no nuclear products could be demonstrated, the measurement of excess heat was flawed." That's not quite right. They did say that, but then nuclear physicists then went on to explain where the excess heat was probably coming from -- definitely NOT fusion. They never got a chance to prove it for sure, because Fleischmann & Pons wouldn't ever tell anyone exactly how cold fusion was supposed to work.
It is quite obvious from the review that the book makes a lot of outrageous statements that, quite frankly, amount to straight lies. For example, the reviewer has learned from the book that "it is now obvious that any critic of cold fusion will have to do more than present illogical arguments or simply ridicule the scientists involved in the research." Oh my god. The whole problem with the cold fusion "discovery" was that Fleischmann & Pons refused to allow their work to be peer-reviewed! By not doing so, scientists had to slowly work to duplicate their experiment piece by piece, on the way doing a lot of speculating about what Fleischmann & Pons had done. Those two, along with some stupid members of Congress and the media, were the ones who dragged the whole thing through the mud.
There are probably any number of GOOD scientific books on the subject of this whole scientific debacle. I would direct readers in particular to "Voodoo Science" by Robert Park. It's a fairly good book anyway with an excellent long section about cold fusion.
I do not mean to insult the reviewer, but I would speculate he just isn't qualified to really judge most of the scientific statements made in the book he reviewed. I hope he explores the literature a little further to perhaps obtain a more reasonable perspective.
Remember that Columbus thought it was India! Hence the name "Red Indian" which persists today.
Sounds like a pretty damn good analogy for what seems to have happened, thinking about it. No matter what the process actually was, something interesting did happen. So despite them being (possibly) wrong about what it actually was, it's still worth investigating.
Grab.
There is a great book on cold fusion by Gary Taubes called Bad Science. Really a fascinating read. He details the interplay of carelessness, need for funding, fraud, and flawed science that produced cold fusion.
One point he makes is that scientists and journalists are distributed in a bell-shaped curve just like measurement errors. Therefore, he predicts, one will always be able to find kooks three or four standard deviations from the mean who will still claim that cold fusion works.
Looks like his prediction was correct...
If this is the kind of story I can expect to see more of on Slashdot, maybe it's time to change that picture of Einstein to something more appropriate. Art Bell perhaps?
Yeah he proved it (I believe he even drank a beaker of the bacteria just to prove his point) all right but does it make a difference? I understand that many doctors still don't believe that ulcers are caused by bacteria. Antibiotics are the cure. So his work is all for naught.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Producing electrodes (which appear to need to contain palladium, rhodium, and several other trace elements) would be quite expensive, and would produce only a very limited amount of energy.
If this isn't complete BS then it sounds exactly like a chemical reaction which eventually uses up whatever component of the "productive" electrode is supplying the energy. This is certainly more believable than claims of fusion without neutron production.
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Pot, Kettle, Black.
It's helpful to remember here exactly what cold fusion is attempting to do, and why it should be so easy to prove.
Fusion occurs when two D nuclei get close enough together for the strong nuclear interaction to take effect; they combine into a 3He nucleus, discard a neutron, and oh yeah give off about 3 MeV of energy, which is the point.
But your two D nuclei are both positively charged, so they repel each other very strongly until you get them close enough for the strong force to take over. This is why very high temperatures are necessary; you get the nuclei moving fast enough, and sheer momentum overcomes their mutual electrical repulsion until they are close enough to complete the reaction.
Now, the point behind cold fusion is to use the molecular structure of the electrode and the force of the electrical current to push the two nuclei together without relying on momentum (high temperature). I have always had trouble believing in this, but some of the math seems to say it is possible, so whatever. OTOH once you get the two nuclei together, by whatever method, guess what should happen? Yep, 3He + n + 3.07 MeV, just as if you had done the same thing with high temperatures.
Now, it's important to understand how many neutrons you are going to get. 3.07 MeV is a lot of energy from one atom, but it's not a lot of energy. You have to pop quite a few of those puppies before you start making a noticeable effect on a macroscopic thermometer. I don't know exactly what kind of temperature rise is being claimed, but if it's noticeable at all you will have thousands of neutrons per second. That is not a difficult flux to detect at all. And explaining them away is no small matter; once a free neutron is formed it tends to sail right through ordinary matter for some distance until it happens to get close to another nucleus.
We understand these reactions well enough to blow very impressive holes in the landscape, and the claim that fusion is occurring without neutrons is far, far more unbelievable than the basic premise of cold fusion itself, which is already on pretty shaky ground IMHO.
To me, with a background in physics and engineering, this is how the website reads: "We are working hard on this pill to turn water into gasoline, and we have gotten the car to consistently coast further than should be physically possible based on the energy we used to push it. Furthermore, isn't it wonderful that our tests on this new gasoline from water also show that it doesn't create greenhouse gases."
That isn't emotion speaking, it's training and experience. No chemist worth his salt would swallow the gasoline from water story, and no physicist worth his salt swallows fusion, cold or otherwise, without neutrons.
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Zero. You have to overcome the electrical repulsion of the nuclei, which is simply enormous.
It might be worth noting here that merely chemical explosions are not even powerful enough to get fusion going; you have to use the chemical explosive to set off a nuclear explosion, and use the energy from that to set off the thermonuclear (fusion) reaction.
but muon catalysed fusion also proceeds in a similar way (as far as I can tell).
Only because the muon cancels out the charge of one of the protons, so they can approach one another. Unfortunately, muons are themselves enormously difficult and expensive to make.
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Muons can catalyze fusion because of the known reaction whereby the muon cancels out the electrical charge of one of the nuclei, which allows it to approach another nucleus with the same casual ease a neutron would. None of the stuff you suggests, including "a lot of wierd shit," really promises to cancel the electrical charge of a nucleus. Muons do that. Momentum overcomes it.
You need on the order of 100 MeV to push two protons close enough together for fusion. Chemical reactions supply at most 5 eV or so per atom. That's the bottom line. How are you going to push them together? We know how muons do it, and unfortunately muons are themselves enormously expensive and difficult to make. So what other mechanism do you propose is at work here?
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I can rattle off one reason why it didn't work: No neutrons. (Thanks much to the guy who calculated how many would be produced. Even I did not know how bad it was.
The CF proponents are not just proposing a way to force two D nuclei together without using temperature/momentum, they are also proposing that their interaction in some magic way does not produce neutrons. Now while I certainly have an open mind for things which are "supposed" to be impossible, there are limits.
The original conception of CF, remember, is based on using an unusual method to trigger a known reaction, a reaction that will produce a whole shitload of neutrons. Today's CF proponents are adding to the first implausibility the much more implausible claim that they are getting, not these expected reactions, but some new magic kind of fusion that doesn't create neutrons.
I'm glad that none of you nay-sayers ever worked on developing lasers, semiconductors, or superconductors
When you look at those developments, almost always you will find they hinge on ONE revision of thought apiece, and that they quickly showed unambiguous results in experimental setups. CF is in no way similar.
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The great blessing of our experiments is that so far NO energetic penetrating radiation signatures including neutrons and gammas have been observed in our unique SSDR experiments.
In other words, whatever they are doing it isn't fusion. But they do use a lot of big words:
These reactions have been profoundly demonstrated using experiments including those involving catalysis, nano-technology, electro-chemistry, glow-discharge, and ultrasonic cavitation.
Ooooh I am sooooo impressed. Actually the tipoff is "nano-technology," a buzzword sure to impress the readers of Popular Science but which has absolutely no meaningful application in research like this.
I didn't go deep enough into their claims to see if they're just deluded or running a scam, but when the first thing center top is the revelation that you have no neutrons, then it's obvious you have no fusion.
And puh-leeze don't give me the usual rap about some "mysterious new form" of fusion. These reactions are pretty well understood; there aren't that many ways a few light elements can be made to combine. If the phun pholx who gave us H-bombs were that ignorant, you can trust me, we would not have H-bombs.
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Nuclei do not know what phase of matter they are in. Solid/liquid/gas/plasma are determined by the electron shells of atoms, not nuclei. There is absolutely no difference between how a nuclear reaction will proceed just because it is in a different electrochemical state. This is why Lithium-6 Deuteride can be used in H-bombs -- the chemical bond between the Lithium and Deuterium is completely irrelevant in a nuclear reaction.
"Supposedly" there is a big dinosaur-like animal in Loch Ness, too. Take it with an equivalent grain of salt.
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Fusion does not work by magic. There are specific reactions and side reactions which occur depending on the fuel and the manner of combination. Now, as it happens, all of the candidate reactions using deuterium as a fuel generate neutrons as a side product. It doesn't really matter how you combine the Deuteriums, whether you combine them with other Deuteriums or with Tritium, or how you manage to overcome the electrical repulsion of the nucleus. If you induce fusion in the fuels they used, you will get neutrons. A lot of neutrons.
And nobody, not Pons or Fleischmann, not any of the people who attempted to duplicate their work, detected neutrons. Ipso facto, whatever they may have been measuring, it wasn't fusion.
Perhaps there is some obscure chemical reaction which was catalyzed by their setup; if so, it is finicky and not a source of large amounts of energy, as fusion would be. The mistake Pons and Fleischmann made was announcing their finding as fusion, rather than "mysterious extra energy release." They might have been credited with discovering a new catalytic property of platinum instead of become laughing stocks of the physics community.
While the idea behind cold fusion is certainly worth investigating, claiming that it has occurred when you have no neutrons is, to a physicist, like telling a chemist you have invented a pill to turn water into gasoline. He doesn't have to hear the details of your scheme to know it won't work; he knows it won't work because it would violate a lot of well established principles if it did.
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The problem with the F&P setup was that the thermocouple itself had a power supply and was adding heat to the mixture. This was conclusively demonstrated when an exact duplicate of the F&P setup was run with heavy water and a control version with light water with identical 'excess heat' measurements.
The Rutherford Appleton laboratory had a good experiment in which they could swap from light to heavy water with the same electrode and measure in both circumstances. The Rutherford Experiment took rather longer than the 'amateur' copies because Perkins and the RA management made the experimenters stack up lots of concrete bricks before they started to protect them from the neutron flux if the experiment worked.
The lack of neutrons and the fact that the control experiment behaved identically conclusively demonstrate that whatever F&P were observing was not cold fusion.
Now that does not disprove the possibility of cold fusion. It is generally accepted that muon catalysed fusion is genuine for example - albeit not a viable source of energy since muons have a short lifetime and require incredible amounts of energy to produce.
Unfortunately those working in the field will now have to deal with the assorted conspiracy theorists, cranks, astrologers and the like drawn to it by the F&P media circus. A similar thing happened when the English parliament set up the longitude prize. Amongst the whacky schemes proposed was the 'sympathetic potion' which when administered to two dogs caused one to feel any pain felt by the other. One dog was carried on the ship, the other remained at Grenwich and was cerimonially kicked at 12 noon on the Grenwich meridian, causing the dog on the ship to bark, thus allowing local time to be measured.
Similar things happen all the time without becomming media circuses. I remember a group of researchers who thought they had found a very heavy neutrino. The neutrino appeared in a duplicate of the experiment with completely different equipment at another university. It turned out that the measurement was due to a very obscure software/hardware error in the counting device they were using.
Ultimately F&P have to receive the blame for the media circus. They rushed out their press release after they discovered another experimenter (the reviewer of their paper as it turned out) had been working on the same idea and was close to publishing results. The grad student who actually did the experiments was inexcusably left of the list of authors of the paper.
If a means of achieving cold fusion is found it will be in spite of F&P. Many people will sensibly avoid the field because of the numerous cranks who attached themselves to it. The book being reviewed was likely written by one of them. Of course that may be an unfair assesment of the work. However the ultimate legacy of F&P is that they have ensured that anyone who tries to do legitimate work in the same field is likely to recieve the same response. If I had infinite time I might maybe read stuff likely to be from a crank, however the ad-hominem crank filter is indispensible for any mortal.
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