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Cold Fusion Conference Counts Eleven Labs
James Salsman writes: "From an American Physical Society conference session held a week ago, there appear to be now eleven institutions actively publishing cold fusion results: Research Systems (Arlington, VA), SRI International, ENEA (Italy), JET Energy (Welleslley, MA), Middle Tennessee State Univ., Russian Academy of Sciences, U. of Il. at Urbana-Champaign, U.S. Navy's SPAWAR Systems Center in San Diego, First Gate Energy (Woodside, CA, and a few blocks from my house), New Energy Research Lab. (NH), and MIT. Credible or crackpot? You be the judge."
Academic orthodoxy and political correctness
has blinded the physics community to the
accumulation of evidence in favor of some sort
of CF process, from excess neutrons, to impeccable
calorimetry. The bottom line is that the hot
fusion industry is big money for big science, and
CF is percieved as a threat to a lot of grants.
Really, the only respectable excuse for this
blindness is the subtlety of the materials aspect:
The reproducibility of CF experiments is amazingly
sensitive to the origin and process application of
the Pd electrodes. This makes it genuinely
difficult to generate consistent results, in the
absence of consistent experimental apparatus.
Those who discount CF on this basis have retained
some credibility.
The greatest lesson of the CF saga is simply
that press releases are a double-edged sword,
because popular press sensationalism created an
enormous antipathetic backlash against CF.
It seems most likely at this point that classical
CF is some sort of lattice-distributed analog of
sonoluminescent fusion, which also has been
demonstrated to produce excess neutrons.
I think that if Pons and Fleischman had chosen
not to release their results publically, progress
in this area would have been much more rapid.
I don't blame them for feeling obligated to make
such a fundamental breakthrough public knowledge,
but in retrospect, it was an enormous tactical
mistake. Even if (and it is by no means a given
that this will ever happen) one day a practically
useful powersource can be developed from CF or
sonoluminescent fusion, it will be a huge uphill
struggle to reverse the entrenched biases of
even the public, let alone the well-heeled hot
fusion lobby.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
The people who have published positive cold fusion results post-1989 have not claimed any excess neutrons or other hard radiation. At least two of the abstracts (by Talbot Chubb and Scott Chubb) addressed that particular point. The "radiationless" nature of cold fusion is perhaps its most important aspect, and probably the most confounding to the mainstream. The reason cold fusion does not produce any radiation more energetic than about 20 keV is that the fusing deuterons are somehow filtered against relative spin, so the angular momentum, being the same as neighboring deuterons, transfers the energy to about 800 of those neighbor deuterons instead of emitting a gamma and neutron. Until the mainstream understands this phenomenon altering the branching ratios of classical fusion, cold fusion will be religated unfairly to the fringes. Read the abstracts!