Excess Heat

Reader Jim Driggers contributed this review of a book which reopens a topic considered embarrassingly closed for several years. The debate over cold fusion after a couple of Utah scientists made some startling announcements about their non-traditional fusion experiments showed how quickly new ideas can appear, be hailed as world-changing, then be abandoned by most of the scientific community. This book raises the excellent question of whether such a rush to judgement may do more harm than good, and specifically whether there's more to cold fusion than the scoffing allows.

Excess Heat author Charles G. Beaudette pages 365 publisher Oak Grove Press, LLC rating 8.5 reviewer Jim Driggers ISBN 0967854814 summary A book that casts new light on the possibilities and implications of cold fusion, and assails the too-quick rejection of that concept by the scientific community a decade ago.

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.

Comments

Science by Press Release

[Black Parrot]

I think the first and foremost reason those guys got dogpiled on day one was that they were practicing the increasingly popular methodology of science by press release:

Bah! Peer review is for people who doubt their own work! Let's cut out the middle men and publish it in the New York Times.

When "scientists" take this approach, skepsis is the best approach to their work until it is independently confirmed.

--

Why Cold Fusion is Bull

[dutky]

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:

47. In 1989, researchers claimed to have achieved fusion in an electromechanical cell at room temperature. They claimed a power output of 4 W from deuterium fusion reactions in the palladium electrode of their apparatus.

1. If the two most likely reactions are [fusion of two deuterium resulting in a Helium-3 nucleus, a neutron, and 3.27 MeV]

and

[fusion of two deuterium resulting in a Helium-3 nucleus, a hydrogen neucleus, and 4.03 MeV]

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:

1. 3.42 trillion neutrons per second emitted by the generation of 4 W of power.
2. 493 rems per hour absorbed by an 80.0 kg worker standing near the aparatus.
3. 1.01 hours for the worker to receive a lethal dose.

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.

Re:It's not the calorimetry, it's the neutrons

[Claudius]

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.

Pons & Fleishmann Experiment very flawed

[mesocyclone]

The authors, as quoted in the review, imply that the calorimetry used by Pons and Fleishmann was not understandable by physicists. But the entire Pons and Fleishmann effort was flawed in ways that don't require a deep electrochemistry background to understand:

• Their paper made claims of great excess energy production, but in fact they got this by the all-too-common error of dividing by a small difference of large numbers. Unfortunately, the paper was not available until a while after the claims were made.
• They used open cell calorimetry (their reactors were open to the atmosphere). That meant that the heat loss in the system due to evaporation, convective transport, etc. had to be calculated from dangerous assumptions.
• Their claim was for heavy water (D2O), but with open cells, normal diffusion at the water/air interface rapidly replaces the D2O in an open cell with H2O. Not only does this defeat their original fusion hypothesis , it also, once again changes the denominator since the hydrolysis energies of H2O and D2O are different.
• They measured the temperature in the cell with a single sensor. This did not account for stirring (caused by the bubbling of the electrolysis) or other nonuniformities in the temperature of the cell.
• They measured average voltage and current using simple voltmeters and ammeters. Experiments that I did showed that the bubbling causes a significant AC component in both signals, affecting true power measurements.

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.

Reviewer needed some real science know-how

[Logic Bomb]

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.

a GOOD book on cold fusion

[e_lehman]

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...

Re:The (lack of) Evidence Behind the Effect

[localroger]

From the website linked:

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.

A nucleus does not know what phase it is in

[localroger]

However, supposedly there is another reaction that produces gamma rays and helium that can only occur in a solid phase.

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.

It's not the calorimetry, it's the neutrons

[localroger]

The reason the physics community leapt on Pons and Fleischmann so quickly is simple: Nobody found neutrons. If the physicists who tried to duplicate their experiment weren't up to their standards of electrochemistry, then neither were Pons and Fleischmann up to the standards of a person with a physics background.

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.

No neutrons, no excess heat either

[Zeinfeld]

The F&P experiments were duplicated by many major laboratories, none of the major labs observed the claimed 'excess heat'. None observed neutrons either.

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.