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U.S. Dept. of Energy Takes A New Look At Cold Fusion
lhouk281 writes "Technology Review is reporting that the U.S. Department of Energy has decided that recent results justify a fresh look at cold fusion. According to Peter Hagelstein, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, experiments performed under properly controlled conditions reliably produce more heat than standard theory predicts, and nuclear products show up in about the right amounts to account for this excess heat. Maybe we'll get those atomic-powered automobiles after all ..."
the same crackpots who brought you an Earth that orbits the Sun, an Earth that isn't flat, blackholes, gravity waves, etc turns out to be right about "cold" fusion - say it ain't so...
Surely Heat might be more useful :-)
Get the EULA T-shirt
I want an atomic powered FLYING car. Until they get those babies off the ground I'm not interested.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
But since it relies on dihydrogen monoxide, it'll never make it through congress
Haven't most people switched to PHP or ASP now?
Does this mean we have to give Ponz and Fleishman their dignity back?
You can't really criticize the government too much for doing this. We'll certainly have cold fusion before the Bush administration finds any WMDs.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
That still doesn't solve the issue of cost-feasibility on a scale that would power a metropolitan/regional/national area.
Unless it's an area like River Oaks in Houston or the MS campus in Redmond.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
I remember I was at a nuclear power trade conference the week the Pons-Fleischman announcement was originally made. And my first thought when I heard about it then was, where are the neutrons? A nuclear process that produces that much excess energy should also produce enough neutrons to kill everyone in the building where it is being tested.
So, I guess that is still my question. It always seemed to me that there was some sort of poorly understood reaction going on, but it was more likely a physical chemistry issue than a nuclear issue.
sPh
That extra heat is coming from an exogenous source: the bowl of the researcher's crack pipe.
An atomic reaction small enough to be contained within a laptop, providing months of continual power. Really gives "BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH" a whole new meaning...
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
I thought Flash 8 was supposed to have Cold Fusion built in...
I have a plan. Using mainly spoons, we'll tunnel our way out of the city...
I'm willing to advance the automotive art slowly... after reciprocating engines, I'd just like a turbine engine ... a 120hp engine with 450 ft-lb of torque available at 0 rpm ... hold on!
But consider yourself replied to now.
that's capitalism for you...
EXCRETUS EX FORTUNA
The difficult thing about a comment like that is that you're never sure if someone is trying to be funny or just a typical conspiracy theory nut.
"Over the past 15 years, enthusiasts have generated some 3,000 manuscripts on cold fusion, but very few were ever published in scientific journals.
Really?
I can't think why
Get the EULA T-shirt
Anyone remember the discovery of polywater. It was massively redidistlled water that developed weird almost homeopathing memory and strange viscosity.
Although it was considered unexplainable, repeated tests showed that the one and only thing inside the glass beaker was infact water. So it had to be a new form of water. A kind of ice-9 but for real.
It was eventually found to be accumulated soluble silica products from the glassware. Which of course was the one chemical that could not be tested for inside a glass beaker. Got people exited like cold fusion for a while, since like cold fusion is was not utterly implausible.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I just watched the movie The Saint this weekend on HBO. Then today, a cold fusion story on Slashdot. Coincidence? I think not!
... I think the Government's been watching cable too much lately ...
Elisabeth Shue's hot!
If this research turns out to be true, it can result in all-out war with every kind of weapon available. Power structures around oil are so entrenched, the oil producing countries and corporations will never allow their revenue to disappear.
Just my first thought
If reliable (and not too costly) cold fusion could become a reality, it really could solve many of the world's problems.
Imagine - oil would no longer have much value, and so the Middle East would no longer be a constant battleground. We would no longer have to worry about global warming because CO2 production would go right down. And increasingly resource hungry emerging economies like China and India would no longer be such a threat to "our" oil resources.
If the USA spent 10% of it's military budget on alternative energy sources then this nut could be cracked quickly...
Too much to hope for I guess...
Remember that this is the department who lost a classified hard drive. Not exactly a group packed to the ceiling with critical thinkers.
A colleague of mine walked into our DOE monitor's office one day to deliver a milestone report. That report was hand delivered to the DOE employee. The DOE employee sets the report down, engages my colleague in a bit of small talk, and then asks if he has the report ready for delivery.
DOE is a bureaucracy. It has some very bright and engaging people working in it's ranks. On the other hand, it has some "lifers" who haven't a clue. These poor souls are in a position to not only accidentily make policy decisions (see: a million monkeys), but they are also in a position to ignore good advice and strong scientific evidence.
I would put DOE's support for Cold Fusion down as one of those brain farts that they occasionally pull (much like the CIA's $200M experiment in remote viewing).
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Well, if "bubble fusion" can produce neutrons, I'm willing to give them the opportunity to explain themselves.
I'll believe it when I see it running my car. Actually, I probably won't believe it even then.
His idea is that the deuterium nuclei exchange vibrational energy, or "phonons," with the surrounding palladium atoms.
This guy must be a graduate of the Rick Berman school of physics.
You shouldn't feed the trolls, but if you're going to, at least take the time to point out the inconsistency of their positions.
The same people who say this is because we don't need oil anymore are also the ones who say we invaded Iraq to get their oil. Yeah, makes PERFECT sense that we'd immediately try to develop a technology that would make that investment obsolete.
Now watch for the pathetic attempts to say that this is just to discredit the "war for oil" argument for the November election, and that the program will be quietly shelved on November 3rd.
1. A naive female scientist who writes her formula on post-it notes
2. A Russian scientist who is forced to decipher the formula on said post-it notes
3. An international spy that uses names of saints as a disguise
Don't believe me? Here's proof!
But I never said we invaded for the oil.
> Maybe we'll get those atomic-powered automobiles after all ...
Yeah, reserve flying one for me.
Thanks.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
Infinite Energy has been asking for continued investigation of cold fusion for a long time. See Their press release on this story.
There are many more CF and LENR resources at their web site.
i'm either too geeky or not geeky enough...but it took me 4 times reading the article to figure out they were not talking about Cold Fusion development tools... /smack!
/shrug
I kept trying to figure out what the dept of energy wanted with Cold Fusion Tools...
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
... in his What's New column on April 2:
here and links to more links
it was called polywater because it was thought to be polymerized water. Because it had a much different freezing point polywater was the inspiration for the cat's cradle story. (ice9). It took a long time to figure out the problem because it was hard to reproduce and only minute amounts could be generated at a time.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A Cold Fusion Power Plant would not have the bad reputation that Nuclear Power Plants do (thank you Three Mile Island). With a new source of cheap and safe electricity people in the US can finally buy economical electric cars and use electric heating and begin to break the US dependancies on forign oil.
This of course assumes many things like Cold Fusion being practical, safe, and nobody screwing things up enough to create a Cold Fusion Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
...and nuclear products show up in about the right amounts
;-)
About? About?
Is that the kind of "precise" measurement that will lead to three eyed fish and babys with 12 toes in twenty years?
Man, I would give a volkswagon worth of dollars to have a more precise way of measuring nuclear by-products!
You mean we've been making fun of cold fusion for nothing all these years? What'll we make fun of now?
I think instead of Cold Fusion they should consider using Perl, PHP or J2EE. Why US governement still insists on using those proprietary formats?
----
>> SELECT SIG FROM USER WHERE ID='15607317'
NO ROWS RETURNED
deuterium- one proton, one neutron He-4 2 protons, 2 neutrons
the Fusion cools you.
Omg, i can't believe I just did that...
I guess that's what would make it attractive to the Bush administration, whose science policy has been called into question. Backing bogus research allows them to point at support of alternative energy sources without taking a risk of actually finding something that might threaten their oil company bedmates.
This is funny. I just watched The Saint on HBO2 (or some channel like it) on my DVR.
Yeah, it's a shame we ever allowed the oil companies to develop nuclear weapons. They've kept the American auto industry away from building cheap fusion-powered flying cars, ever since they nuked Honda & Toyota back to the Stone Age. And what can we do, except stay away from Canada (those Canucks with their straw-to-ethanol enzymes; you know they're getting blasted into atoms any day now! What were they thinking?!)
Damn oil-company overlords... I'll never welcome them! Never!
Got to go - I hear the medication cart coming down the hall.
Maybe we really WILL have Mr Fusion in time for 2015! Hmm, if thats true, then I better save up so I can put some money on the Cubbies!
Here is another article about cold fusion experiments. It uses sound cavitation to collapse acetone vapor. It sounds quite promising. I'm personally fond of the idea of using sound as a controlling force for the reaction. The experiments were funded in part by DARPA.
"The research team used a standing ultrasonic wave to help form and then implode the cavitation bubbles of deuterated acetone vapor. The oscillating sound waves caused the bubbles to expand and then violently collapse, creating strong compression shock waves around and inside the bubbles. Moving at about the speed of sound, the internal shock waves impacted at the center of the bubbles causing very high compression and accompanying temperatures of about 100 million Kelvin."
WURD!!
I'll believe it when my Mr. Fusion(TM) is using beer cans and banana peels to power the Flux Capacitor(TM) on my DeLorean(TM).
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
No it was this month :)
-A
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
was calling it 'Cold Fusion.' If you read the DOE or DOD papers on the subject, there *is* excess heat and nuclear material being generated, but it is eensy weensy amounts. Not enough to fuse the gum to the bottom of your chair, let alone H-->He.
It produces infintesimal amounts of excess energy.
At this point, it is a scientific curiosity that in need of an explanation, but not something that is going to produce enough energy to blow your nose.
I don't know if it will ever lead to anything practical or even useful, but it does beg explaining.
Look, everyone seems all full of their intelligence here - so why not approach things with a neutral opinion until proven one way or the other? This guy is not selling you anything. He has an experimental apparatus and theory behind analmous heat production and can reproduce it; Ergo, either something is going on or he made a mistake. This can be determined on the basis of his experiment.
:sigh:
When experiment and existing theory produce different results, you need a new theory. That's how science works. The universe is never wrong. If you want to critique this guy, then go show me how smart you are and pick apart his experiments or apparatus, or maybe propose a theory that could explain the results another way - and devise an experiment to test that theory.
People mocked astronomy, planes, cars, space travel, quantum physics, the atomic bomb, television, computers, you name it - as the work of the devil, impossible, blah blah blah.
Yes, he could be wrong, but that's for replicable experiments to decide. I applaud these guys for trying and more importantly publishing their results. Nothing like the herd mentality, though.
..don't panic
Maybe we'll get those atomic-powered automobiles after all ...
i really hope so. i have wanted an atomic-powered car since i was a kid...
so, is it bad that i am bleeding out of my belly button??
If energy becomes cheap how do we discard the byproduct of it use which is mostly heat?
One of the paths that Arthur C. Clarke went down exposed this issue with cheap and nearly unlimited energy.
CO2 would go down, but do we really know enough about how the enviroment works to say that that is the only cause or the biggest?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
And the strange thing about conspiracy nuts is that much of what they claim is grounded in truth. I am not claiming we have had this technology for years, but to simply dismiss the notion as lunacy is specious. The closer you examine history, the more you find that there is much strangeness afoot. I believe if we spent more money on alternative energy and less on defense, many of our problems would be greatly reduced. As a mental excersise, follow the breakup of Standard Oil and research the Rockefeller's ties to influential government positions.
harmonious design
We did not invade Iraq for the oil, we invaded Iraq because Sadam was about to release his own cold-fusion technology to the wide world, and we had to stop that at all costs.
What do you think all that talk of "nuclear weapons" was about? Bombs? nah! cold fusion!!
They're "investigating" it... What are the odds they loudly announce it's a scam and no one will get any grant money ever again if they even mention the term?
The Farnsworth fusion process got the same treatment (with some help from industry and the Patent Office) and it looked very possible given some research.
The government is bankrolling multibillion dollar fusion plants (that may never work and can't even in theory compete economically) while any suggestion of other methods is quickly denounced and buried.
Could it be they don't want small-scale power generation to work? If we were less dependent on the public utilities, might we be too hard to keep in line?
Is that the kind of "precise" measurement that will lead to ... babies with 12 toes in twenty years?
Think of the great tap dancers we'll get to see!
"Experiments performed under properly controlled conditions reliably produce more heat than standard theory predicts. Nuclear products show up in about the right amounts to account for this excess heat. "
"Theory predicts that the fusion reaction should generate 24 million electron volts (MeV) of energy per helium-4 nucleus. An analysis by Michael McKubre of SRI International detected energy of 31 MeV- a match within the experimental uncertainty of plus or minus 13 MeV. Skeptics had doubted the reaction was possible, but Hagelstein says McKubre's analysis of the experiments, reported at last year's cold fusion meeting, shows that fusion of two deuterium to yield helium-4 "is not as nutty as it initially seemed."
They found 1 helium-4 atom?!? For some reason, wouldn't feel confident betting my career on ONE ATOM! And thats there best candidate out of 3000 papers?
It was "Florida Wins the World Series in 1997" not the Cubs. (that was the eerie thing about that movie. Back when it was released, no one had evend conceived of the marlins; yet they accurately predicted the team's first world series win.)
I don't really belive we've really had it for 50 years but i see no reason why that theory is completely implausible or even unlikely. I think its at least safe to assume that there is SOME crazy technlogy that we've had for years under wraps. WHAT IF we did have easy cold fusion? Could we just let it in the open for al queda to go make a bunch of easybake warheads?
... why the Federal Government was making Macromedia Cold Fusion a web standard after reading that headline? Or an I just a web geek?
S
/usr/bin/grep -i -E meaning life.txt
We've had cold fusion since 1997. It was introduced to the world in the midst of a heating oil shortage in Russia. Some dude name Tretiak tried to keep it from happening; but Val Kilmer saved the day.
There's another article on the subject in this month's issue of Physics Today: DOE Warms to Cold Fusion
I knew I should have put a patent on this idea.
My Karma is so low that even my own postings are beyond my current threshold
You can't really criticize the government too much for doing this. We'll certainly have cold fusion before the Bush administration finds any WMDs.
It's much easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle then it is for a Bush to find any WMDs in Iraq!
Now I just hope I can cool my beer in my engine. Every evening after my commute I would let out a cry "Thank god for cold fusion", and crack a nice cold one.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
How long until the Mr. Fusion is available for my DeLorean?
We had these flying machines called Zeplins. They were big, full of hydrogen, and generally were most spiffy except once and a while they blew up.
Good thing is that with fusion you won't have 100 tonnes of kerosene on board. Let's face it, I can't see a Skoda making much of a dent in most buildings.
Makes a funky getaway without paying from terrace restaurants though...
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation
...I just want a laptop that will run forever without charging or changing a battery.
My weak little mind is still smarting from the Over-Unity engine story a couple weeks back. I was suckered.
But in a world with uranium-eating bacteria, I suspect there are a few surprises left for scientists and the rest of us. I for one will be happy if these experiments pan out and I can read about it in Science.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
Obligatory Futurama quote: "Some even call me mad. And why? Because I dared to dream of my own race of atomic monsters, atomic supermen with octagonal shaped bodies that suck blood..."
:)
Gotta love professor Farnsworth! I really hope they bring that show back!
Park mostly just makes fun of anything AND EVERYTHING that has not been fully proven or established yet. It is already well known that some chemical environments can change nuclear halflives. The fact is we don't understand QCD very well as it is highly nonlinear. If we listened to Park all the time, nothing revolutionary or counter-intuitive would EVER be discovered.
Even in jest, you must have surely meant "on" the sand.
Under the mid-day / early afternoon sun (at the hottest time of the day), though it's baking hot "on" the sand, it's always cool "in" the sand.
And that obviously goes for every desert, not just the Sahara.
A nuclear process that produces that much excess energy should also produce enough neutrons to kill everyone in the building where it is being tested.
As I understand it, the reason plasma-based fusion reactions tend to produce neutrons is that you need to dump the excess energy from the reaction product for the fused neucleus to "settle down" in the lower-energy bound state, and that means you need to spit out an additionl particle to dump the energy as momentum. Thus D+D -> T+n, or D+T -> He+n.
In "cold fusion" the reaction is taking place in a dense metal matrix - at a deuterium density far too low for the "normal" two-particle fusion rate to be significant. This implies that, if there is significant fusion going on, it's because of some interaction with the surrounding metal, or with other hydrogen neuclei. This implies that some of the normal D+D->He->D+D might stop at He by dumping the excess energy as a recoil off another D or the surrounding matrix of electrons and metal neuclei.
I want to see this experiment retried:
- In a large single-crystal.
- In a large single-crystal with a tiny trace of impurities.
- In a polycrystal of a very few, very large crystals (in case the reaction occurs at crystal boundaries and is enhanced by the size of the crystal).
- With the magnetic field tightly controlled - and varied in both strengh and directon with respect to the crystal lattice.
- With the electric field similarly controlled.
- With controlled electric currents through the metal in various directions.
- With sudden strong pulses of electric and/or magnetic fields once the metal has been "loaded" with deuterium.
- With small bombardments of various charged particles at assorted energies (in case some component of bacground or cosmic radiation is a trigger of a short chain-reaction).
When thinking about hypothetical cold-fusion mechanisms I'm constantly bothered by the similarity of the system to early point-contact diodes, and how quickly the junction transistor, and then the rest of semiconductor technology, fell out of the development of a physical model for the long-range, room-temperature, quanum-mechanical phenomena underlying electrical conduction within a highly-ordered, slightly impure crystal.
Pumping deuterons into a dense and potentially crystaline metal by electrical pressure seems to me to be just begging for the deuterons' wave functions to be stretched out and overlapped in a similar way to those of the electrons, resulting in lots of potential for interactions that would not be observed in the disordered environment of a plasma or liquid.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Years ago I tried to get the scientist I worked with to propose a "tepid fusion" project, but they looked at me like I was proposing we ask for funding for a "perpetuel motion" project.
Put the Piano Man behind the wheel in one of these things and you got a WMD on your hands.
I mean if they figured it out tomorrow what is the point? America is so riddled with animal and enviromental groups..the word "nuclear" would prevent it from being used. I mean why dont we use what we have already and create nuclear power plants now? These groups care nothing about the cause they serve, just the media..just like ACLU. If we created enough nuclear power plants today we can slowly stop importing oil...and give rise to electric cars..i mean they are stopping their own movement. Cheap energy...it aint with oil..we have the technology...so use it well, sorry if i am off topic...but well that is the way it is in my cube. Btw have they added 42 into their calcuations...always work for me when i am stumped.
Deserving got nothing to do with it.....shuffle
Just how reasonable does that sound if it's your office/home in the corner that up to get [sic] bonked (even if not dented as you say)?
Wouldn't exactly be pleasant to see a Skoda on your desk one fine time of the day would it?
YMMV of course.
just can't be, sorry. Several internet experts with made up names have stated over and over again, over the years on every forum that discussed it, that it isn't possible,that it is pushed by flat earther crackpots, it's perpetual motion,or "overunity bunkum", it "defies the *laws* of physics and the supreme court and their professor and mommies say so, so there" and other such pronouncements of authority, so that's just that, it's settled.
Back in 1996 I took a Small Business Economics course (cash cow definitions and all that) and the lecturer explained the story behind cold fusion.
Two scientists (physicists I believe) had apparently found Cold Fusion.
Of course, shortly after their claims were made public, one disappeared, the other owns a small island, and 1/3 of their research was missing. With the missing 1/3 many scientists attempted to reconstruct the experiments and concluded that it was not possible and cold fusion did not exist.
But does it not seem coincidental that one of the two suddenly owns an island and the other vanished?
Society changes slowly. A discovery like that, back then when the automobile industry was struggling and slowly recovering, would crumble such a vast infrastructure. Think about it; a new fuel! Would that not put thousands if not tens of thousands out of work? Yes, all those gas stations, oil refineries, mines (for fossil fuels), etc..., all no longer needed. It would be an economical disaster.
Now that it is well known the environment has taken a lot of abuse from fossil fuel usage the possibility of cold fusion reappears. Of course, after all the investment into Hydrogen power and Fuel Cells, we won't see Cold Fusion for a long while.
Just my suspicious/consipiracy theory $0.02 worth!
One of the reasons P&F were discounted was the way that they did their measurement. They used open calorimetry, which basically includes measuring the change in temperature of a water bath around the beaker (IIRC). The whole calibration of it is very touchy, and the results are open to a lot of error. When other people were trying to duplicate their results, P&F often claimed that their failures were because of calorimetry problems. I wouldn't be surprised if this guy, who is an electrical engineer, didn't get his calorimetry right either.
I am not claiming we have had this technology for years, but to simply dismiss the notion as lunacy is specious.
We have had fusion technology for 50 years, it's called the "hydrogen" bomb. And what the government learned is that there has to be some kind of boosting to get the tremendous step-up in pressure and heat to cause nuclei to fuse together. That is no longer a top secret. What we're asked to believe here is that there's some sort of spontaneous, low-temperature fusion that only happens in a lab, but nowhere else in nature (as opposed to naturally-occuring fissile atoms). Furthermore, nutjobs who propagate this conspiracy theory are in effect saying that given enough tax dollars, the government can change the laws of physics.
If there is always some truth behind all conspiracy theories, let's see some evidence from several credible sources about a top-secret government cover-up of working cold fusion. See, if they can't produce any evidence, we call that "just making it up", and the label of "crackpot" is justified.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
first off, there's no (practical) way to detect a single atom of anything in a reaction. i'm willing to bet what they were able to do was generate a detectable quantity of He4 and measure the total energy released, then just divide to get the energy per helium atom value. i'd imagine it was a very small amount of helium; that would account for the huge uncertainty of over 50%.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
SkyCar
It has 8 engines, that curently have a better power to weight ratio than a Rotax 2 stroke and a lower emission than a Honda four stroke. Burn some CWT TDP oil in it made from plants and we can use the large self regulating fusion generator that we orbit to power our computer controller no green house gas flying cars.
I guess the insurance claim will require some explaining...
"My PC was run into by a Skoda. It's in my office. On the 36th floor."
Brings a whole new light to the "The dog ate my homework" excuse.
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation
I'm not sure that this completely solves the safety issue. Large conventional reactors have been constructed for the sole purpose of generating heavy hydrogen. Is there another feasible source that I don't know about?
I'm also not sure that it solves any political issues either. Where does the metal for the catalyst come from? Wouldn't those countries that have it be in the same position the middle east is in now?
A B-25 smacked into the Empire State Building in 1945, and the damage to the building wasn't too severe. I doubt an SUV-sized vehicle with a few kilos of deuterium (enmeshed in palladium) could do anything close to even what that did.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
In the very early days of radio, it was common for hobbyists to use a geranium "cat's whisker" to demodulate signals. Nobody was sure how it worked at the time, so it was more of an art than a science. You would simply fiddle with the cat's whisker contact until you got the best signal possible. It wasn't until well after WW2 with the invention of the transistor that semiconductor physics were understood from a theoretical basis.
*IF* cold fusion is real, it may be much like that. They may have stumbed onto something, but the results are not reproducible, becuase we don't really understand what we are doing from even a theoretical, let alone an engineering basis. It is as if somebody had reported high temperature superconductivity before we had any theory explaining how may work, but couldn't reproduce it, since they didn't really know how to manufacture a high temperature superconductor, they just got lucky in the process.
Penicillin was discovered totally by accident, (contamination of a bacteria culture by a very rare strain of mould) but at least we could grow more of it to reproduce the results. Imagine how the results would have been laughed at if the original penicillin strain had died, and they tried to reproduce the result with other moulds.
My rights don't need management.
And abstinence AIDS prevention. I mean - the guys appointed to policy-making positions in this administration are all radical flatworlders and creation "scientists" - everyone in physics research thinks of cold fusion as an embarrassment on the order of the Piltdown Man.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Standard physics says cold fusion shouldn't work because photon exchanges result in nuclei repelling each other.
However, they think it works here because they think that the palladium atoms are aborbing all the photons which would normally result in the nuclei repelling each other. As a result the nuclei don't exchange photons, so arn't repelled by each other, so they can collide and combine into He.
So, they've somehow developed a lattice who's quantum structure results in creating a barrier between the two nuclei which repels photons, but allows the nuclei to pass through. The nuclei effectivly can't "see" each other until they've already collided.
I found it really interesting that they said they got better results with the impure samples. I did a quick search and discovered that Palladium Ore contains Platinum Certain isotopes of which are radioactive and produce alpha particles (alpha particles = helium).
So, if their impure samples are the ones that are producing the most helium and heat, its possible that it is simply the platinum in the palladium ore which is providing alpha decays, and that is skewing their results.
Its hard to guess if this is really the case though without knowing what kinds of numbers they are getting. How many helium atoms from how much palladium and how much deuterium.
No it won't. The oil producing countries are mostly politically weak and economically underdeveloped in everything except the oil industry. The corporations that manage oil won't have influence, because the moment an alternative is announced their stocks will go into the toilet (semi-justifiably).
If anything, wars would be sparked because there were no longer any economic entanglements to hold them back.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
It's real simple, if there's cold fusion then there's Helium being produced from Hydrogen. So where is it? All this stuff about ballance of energy etc is on the edge of verifiability and instrument callibration. Until you can detect Helium being produced then you don't have an kind of a convincing case. I'm still skeptical about these cold fusion measurements.
A B-25 is actually relatively small. About 1/3 the weight of an F-15. Small plane, strong building
Imagine what a SUV size thing would do to a current skyscraper glass wall. Not much to the building, but a couple of offices and floors are going to be trashed.
Don't be so sure...I'm remote viewing you right now...
They also claimed that 2 (formerly respectable) chemists must be failing to account for a chemical reaction in a jar containing about 4 elements with no molecules larger than 3 atoms.... The whole thing smelled of "not invented here" along with "don't cut our funding" to me.
Reading your Argument with sober eyes I don't really see much contradiction between between trying to conquer territories with known large oil reserves (Iraq) and funding research in alternative energy sources.
First, oil is a very valuable ressource even if we wouldn't need it to produce energy (cars, cars, power station). You ever wondered what plastic is made from? Fertilizers, paint, medicine, etc..
Second, given the exponential growth of oil consume and the phenomenon geologists name the Hubbert Peak of oil production (google for it!) it is an easy prediction to say that oil prices and the prices of oil products will basically explode in the next decade(s).
On the other hand, even if there is something about the "cold fusion" - how long would it take to build an energy production infrastructure from it? Something to feed the current levels of energy wasting in the industrialized countries plus the growing energy hunger of emerging economies like India, China, etc?
Id rather say that neither setting the world on fire (Iraq) nor considering to eventually fund some research on possible unconventional energy sources will do much to save the big energy wasting economies (with the US of A in the first place by far) from the coming oil price crisis.
Enjoy your car, why not buy another which burns even more petrol? Theese are the last years of cheap oil.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
Second page, about halfway down:
;)
"Theory predicts that the fusion reaction should generate 24 million electron volts (MeV) of energy per helium-4 nucleus. An analysis by Michael McKubre of SRI International detected energy of 31 MeV-- a match within the experimental uncertainty of plus or minus 13 MeV."
From what I understand, they have seen energy readings consistent with trace amounts of Helium. Perhaps they can't read the Helium directly because they don't have the money for the equipment.
I'm always skeptical about free, infinite energy as well. There's something compelling about the Laws of Thermodynamics.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
We really won't have achieved success
with automobile powerplants until I
can run my vehicle off of bananna peels
and coffee grounds.
I'm sure the alchemists ... stumbled upon many interesting things.
Phosphorus probably blew their minds: mix bones in boiling urine and you get a flamable white powder. What could that equation mean to them?
This is not my sig.
I'm just as skeptical, even moreso than most, I just find statements of absolutism from supposed learned people quite laughable, because historically they keep getting proven wrong in enough cases to "prove" that even the smartest guy sometimes is completely erroneous in what they consider to be some "law" of this or that. REAL smart guys know that they DON'T have all the answers, and most likely never will. The steps below the REAL smart guys levels are the ones you have to watch out for, arrogance seems to be a part of their DNA structure.
They know oil's running out and they know roughly when. This could be a bad sign that they'd fund something like this who's results my never come to bear anytime soon.
These cold fusion stories always tickle my imagination with visions of electricity too cheap to meter, a ctrl-alt-del on the world's economy, and awesome new industries that today are not feasible because of the expense of power. But its all fairy tales. This Economist article sums up how fusion is improbable, and throwing good money after it makes no sense until there is a real break through. It also gives overviews of some of the other big efforts to make fusion a commercial reality.
This space for rent.
Seriously though, this issue needs to be settled one way or the other, and I am inclined to believe that something is happening. But, it will change physics for ever if it is true.
As things stand, the palladium migt hold the odd atom of deuterium quite rigidly on its surface, but that is only a weak chemical bond and ought to break if you then try to force another atom into the same space to get the nucleii to fuse, because the potential barrier in the nuclues is many orders of magnitude bigger than any possible chemical bond. But, evidence is evidence.....
If this works, I wonder if it might be possible also to make a small fission device using a very sub-critical mass of, say, U235, and a catalyst? If things that we thought were chemical, i.e. limited to affecting the outer electron shell only, can really affect the nucleus, a whole range of new possibilities could arise. The controlled transmutation of fission byproducts to lead, preferably with the output of heat energy for good measure, would be one very useful outcome, if it could be achieved.
The truth of the original hypothesis, or otherwise, should only take a few years to establish, other developments will need to await a whole new theory being developed.
...has *always* been run by despotic regimes long before the US ever came into existance. The US is a target because the revolution of worldwide communications technologies have brought home the fact that the US and Europe are the "haves" to the extreme and the Middle East is the "have nots" to the other extreme. The youth of the Middle East now see this and would under normal circumstances want to be like the west and have the kinds of things that the west has, but the older generations in charge there now see this phenominon as a deadly threat to their very way of centuries-old established existance and brainwash their youth into villainizing the west and that the west must be destroyed at all costs or they will not survive. This is the real root of terrorism. That the US is "supporting despots and Isreal" is just propaganda to help fuel the fire, and this is effective. What the Muslims in charge don't see (or don't want to see) is that this wave of technological and social progress (especially the social progress) that the west has over them, was not "invented by the west"... it is a wave that is sweeping over all humanity on this planet. It is a part of natural progress of things and the west has merely learned to "surf" on top of it better. They need to learn to "surf" on it too, or it will eventually sweep over them and drown them and their centuries-old ways of life completely out of relevant existance. This is what they fear most, and is the main underlying driving force behind wanting to destroy the west. Until they either get swept under by this wave, or learn to otherwise accept it. They will always present a terrorism problem against the rest of the world.
So I suppose you think that when your car ignites gas, you're getting something for "nothing"?
A tiny bit of mass equals a great deal of energy, and it's very foolish of you to imply that anything significantly more efficient than what we use now is impossible.
Enjoy your car, why not buy another which burns even more petrol? Theese are the last years of cheap oil.
I remember when I was first told that. 1976, I think it was. I recall they taught us in school that it'd all be gone by 2000.
My father laughed about hearing it last in the '50s, when gas prices (adjusted for inflation) were higher than they are now.
cold fusion doesn't work, it loses a shitload of energy, everything you put in electrolyzing the cells. these are "atypical fusion" refrigerators, not "atypical fusion" generators.
show me one cold fusion researcher who has died of acute radiation poisoning while adding D2O to his cells, and I'll show you a pioneer worthy of a Nobel. you have to have enough neutrons out of one to transmute elements before you can show any net energy gain from the system.
in fact, CF cells look more like crack pipes than experiments. hmmm, can there be a connection???
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
when a cold fusion experiment blew up? Then the hot fusion brigade attacked, and wacked cold fusion to pieces, securing their research grants.
"Everyone knows Lenin had to setup a police state," Chomsky
Sending the the whole of the middle east into poverty is not a good way to prevent a war. That being said alternative energy is still worth researching, it just won't solve all of life's problems.
The B-25's empty weight is about 20,000 pounds -- far more than even the heaviest SUV. It also has more front surface area. An SUV would cause damage, yes, but not on too massive a scale.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
... not oil companies these days.
/ New_Delhi/documents/nd_05_gissing.pdf
If a new safe & abundant energy source was discovered (cold fusion, zero-point energy, nano-sized black-holes, whatever), their first question will be: "How can we make money off this?" Anything other than that would be irresponsible towards their stockholders.
If you look at BP, they've changed their tagline to "Beyond Petroleum". They invest a fair amount of money in the development of hybrid vehicles, fuel-cells, and so on. Why? Because the oil won't last forever, and they want the corporation to survive the drying up of their North Sea fields.
See: http://www.adb.org/Documents/Events/2001/RETA5937
Chip H.
I recall reading a few months ago in a major publication (e.g. Time Magazine, NY Times, etc...) that there is a researcher in Italy who was able to replicate the initial Cold Fusion results very early on. The publication was fairly balanced in that it showed how proof by public jury wasn't the best approach to any kind of scientific approach.
The long and the short of it, though, is that becuase of Italian public pride and Japanese money, this guy kept getting funding. Eventually, he found that "something" is happening and causing excessive heat during these experiments. Last I read, he was running experiments in some place under a mountain (to be sure of full control in the experiment), and he was able to produce consistent, replicable, predictable results. He's not calling it cold fusion, but he's calling it "something".
As proof that he's on the right track, he was invited to speak at some major international physics event a few months back. Apparently, his objective approach, and ability to produce results is leading to a resurgence in the field. I hope someone else can shed more light on this, because I was shocked and amazed when I read the article.
Jonty Yamisha
i want to live life, not just go through the motions
The Hutsi's and Tutsi's have lived there for a long time.
They are two distinct people groups.
They were never best friends, but after hundreds of years neighbours come to mutual understandings so that they can live in peace.
Have you ever looked at the African map?
Don't the borders look a little bit unnatural?
They are, because when the Europeans came they just split the place up however they wanted.
The natural borders which came into being after hundreds of years of war were now broken, and new wars will have to be fought to stabilize the region.
Also, in Rwanda's case it has been well documented how the Belgian authorities actively provoked the two groups against each other.
If some external power would have colonized Europe and abolished the extablished borders, creating pseudo-borders, for instance splitting france in two, combining it with belgium, a third of the Netherlands and a quarter of Germany, then I assure you many wars would be fought because of the created tensions.
And these wars have been fought in the past before the current day borders came into being.
If these well-established borders were abolished, it would take a long time and alot of blood before new borders are established.
In Africa's case it was Europe and Europe alone who abolished the natural borders.
So we only have Europe and Human, not just African, nature to blame.
No, Don't you see Cold Fusion IS Weapons of Mass Distruction!
Bah- dum dum
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
ARGGG! I hate classes! They make me miss perfect chances to get a +5 funny!
That's right. All your base.
It was massively redidistlled water that developed weird almost homeopathing memory and strange viscosity.
Scientist-with-degree-that-says-"Evergreen University": "I have a degree in homeopathic Medicine!"
Robot: "You have a degree in baloney!"
That's right. All your base.
How about the Casimir Effect? - "nothing", literally, pushes those metal plates together. Not much of something, but definately a something.
..don't panic
It is easy to imagine cold fusion experiments in solids generating massive temperatures and pressures. Constructive interference patterns of the myriad of large and small scale vibrations generated inside some lattices may result the same sort of "imposions" wich characterize so-called "bubble" fusion. A cursory search reveals that several recent peer-reviewed papers show nuclear reactions inside solids under conditions similar to those of traditional cold fusion. Including changes is the isotopic ratios of nickel atoms in electrodes before and after experimentation. Also, from a chemical perspective, it is easy to image the possiblity of lowering the activation energy of certain fusion reactions to generate results which differ from traditional fusion product ratios. In chemistry such catalyst mediated reactions are everywhere. Is it so outlandish to think that heavy nuclei brought together with light ones in the proper geometry could result in catalysis of fusion? Do yourself a favor, read up on the subject! It's actually real.
A bold discovery!
Fusion power is available today to heat your homes, put electricity on the grid and more!
You may think I'm joking, but I'm serious. In case anyone hasn't noticed, there is a HUGE fusion reactor located exactly 1 AU (Astronomical Unit) from your position.
The sun!
Just like in a small fusion reactor, you need some way to turn the radiant energy into useful energy. Why would we want to make another fusion reactor when we still can't fully take advantage of the energy that is radiating out into space every night.
We have a few billion years of fuel left so why not spend the $$ on developing more efficient means to use that energy, rather than building a lab reactor.
Deposit: 2 cents
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right. --Isaac Asimov
Watch the movie. And watch it again. He says "Cubs win world series, against MIAMI?". Nothing about 1997. Only about the 2015 series.
That's right. All your base.
Pons and Fleishmann's biggest deficit is that they were chemists, not physicists. Their little experiment encroached mightily on the physicists' hallowed domain, not to mention their billion-dollar funding for hot fusion. Rather than being viewed as an opportunity to discover new phenomena, cold fusion was treated as a threat. To be a physicist involved with the giant Tokamak and see these two lowly chemists with their glassware and palladium rods going to Congress for additional funding surely raised some hackles. This whole sad cold fusion affair proves once again that science is not driven by logic but by human ambition, with all its attendant territorialism and professional jealosies.
Don't be so quick to laugh at Bozo the Clown. His real name is Larry Harmon and he owns the rights to Laurel and Hardy. He has made a nice chunck of change on both his clown act and his investments. You should do as well...
...to actually be working, does this place cold-fusion in a scientifically more advanced state the hot-fusion? After all, hot-fusion has a theory and little scientific proof that it can actually work and be sustained. On the other hand, if it's proven to be for real, cold fusion is proven to work and is simply lacking strong theory to explain everything.
Seems to me, the more viable and truly scientific work is going on with cold-fusion.
On one camp, we have tons and tons of money and theory and no experiment shown to support that theory (AFAIK; correct me as needed). On spite of this, hot-fusion is thought of as accepted and proven science.
In the other camp, we can scientists performing experiments which are roughly meeting or exceeding expectations and simply lacking in some portions of theory which might explain everything that is going on. In spite of this, cold-fusion is ignored and rejected.
Which is real science? Science finding new things it doesn't understand and attempts to explain or science failing to prove which it hopes might work, one day, given enough funding. Seems to me, hot-fusion is looking more like snake-oil than cold-fusion ever did. Cold-fusion, during the early days of just plain fraud, was quickly shown for what it is. The fact that two guys were invalidated hardly invalidates a whole field of study. My point? Would seem that many "scientists" and failing to look beyond their ego to do real science. If it's being peer reviewed and being replicated, that's science.
Yes, this one is real, but it is not palladium-mediated deuterium fusion.
This process, which -is- reproduced reliably, irradiates deuterated acetone with neutrons, then prods the fluid with the right frequency of sound. This is occilated in the millisecond range. The result is a vacuum bubble containing deuterium expanding to 100,000 times its original size and collapsing, creating stellar core conditions, and they are getting neutrons, tritium and gamma rays.
It is a long way from breakeven as yet, so don't plan to disconnect from the grid based on this just yet.
Actually, most rigid airships met their ends in high winds. Some of the wreck photos are kind of surreal, since the ship often is mostly intact, just wrapped around a hill and bent into a weird shape.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well well, what de hell! Dat's de sun at the center of the earth...
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
I've got some old alchemy books (translations, actually) sitting between some of my old pharmochem books and my bartender's guides, @home.
If I was emperor, you would be flogged for that!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If PHP proves to be insecure, it's nice to know the DoE has a backup in place.
Well, the point is they were right in the seventies (Club of Rome) when they first brought that up and your answer reminds me of the shortsightedness of someone falling from a rooftop calmly contemplating that nothing bad happened for the last 40 floors he passed.
Oil exploration peaked in the sixties, oil production probably peaks about now and - unlike the metapher of falling - oil production won't just stop after that, but will decrease slowly while production costs rise.
There is a lag between exploration and actual production so even miraculous new findings now would hardly solve the coming problem.
But, quite to the contrary, large oil companies adjust their numbers in the opposite direction.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
I doubt an SUV-sized vehicle with a few kilos of deuterium (enmeshed in palladium) could do anything close to even what that did.
that any kind of DRM could stop a nuclear explosion?
i'm not suggesting fanon because he's absolutely right, but because his viewpoint is absolutely worth understanding and considering. so read:
Frantz Fanon
_The Wretched of the Earth_
it's a quick read, not very long, very worthwhile, regardless of your final judgement of the validity of his analysis; the fact is that his perspective existed, and still exists.
...and maybe Keanu Reeves and Morgan Fishburn will end up blowing up Chicago's south side. You never know.
Yes, I am aware of neutrino observatories...and I would hardly consider a mammoth installation in Antarctica that relies on ice buried over 1400 meters deep as a detector a "practical" or even particularly general method of detecting single atoms. I suppose a sensitive laser excitation atomic fluorescence spectroscopy setup could theoretically detect single atoms, but good luck getting it to actually work in the real world.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Wake me when they get to the iron/lead/scrap metal >> gold/platinum part.
Seriously, I wonder if they have thought to try mercury as a substitute for palladium. Maybe the alchemists really were onto something?
headsup:
6. Iraq bankrupts America. World melts down. P safe from apocalypse on his island, and the worlds only working model CF reactor, which is pressed into maintaining "Biosphere 10-a" (built for him by the CIA), big enough to house his harem, a fat load of bitches and riches with which to found a new super race, mostly blonde.
7. Humanity now serves the Pons.
All Hail Super-Emperor Pons and His Magic 'lectric Thingamibob!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
my scenario 3(a). at least had a reason for dressing up in costumes, sheesh...
but, the same can be said of so many mega-destructive technologies, you know... isn't this supposed to be the 'point' of terrorism and 911 and all that?
that life is freakin' fragile, and nobody should ever get so comfy that they can't deal with planes being crashed into so-called 'safe harbors'?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Enjoy your car, why not buy another which burns even more petrol? Theese are the last years of cheap oil.
> I remember when I was first told that. 1976, I
> think it was. I recall they taught us in school
> that it'd all be gone by 2000.
> My father laughed about hearing it last in
> the '50s, when gas prices (adjusted for
> inflation) were higher than they are now.
they laughed at Mr. Hubbert too, when he said that the production of oil would peak in the US in 1970..
they aren't laughing now...
oh, and btw, production of oil became supply - not demand - driven in 1999. And the world's total production of oil plateau'd in 2000. And china's demand for the stuff has grown by 8% a year.
we'll see how long it takes oil to reach $100 a barrel..
horos
"Basically, elapsed time till results doesn't scale to money spent when it comes to research."
Here's a little thought experiment. Imagine 2 research teams working on a problem. Team one gets $0 funding, Team two gets $1,000,000/year funding. Now which team is more likely to produce better results?
Hybrid gas/electric vehicles is a very good example. U.S. auto manufacturers are currently licensing hybrid technology from Toyota, because Toyota made a big invsetment in resarch and they now holds a number of very clever patents on this technology. It's a bad sign when the U.S. is falling behind in technology.
The States of Texas,West Virginia and most to the western US go bankrup with in a few months if this works. But that won't matter because the Global War that will be underway will make seem really a small thing. The first thing that would happen is Oil prices drop to nothing. Great huh? What about all lost jobs, the economies destroyed, the lives ruined. Next all of the oil and energy comapies would go bankrupt putting millions out of work. Including all of the support companies that live off of them. Then as the Gobal Deprssion gets underway well the refugees start to pour out of little oil dependant counties like oh I don't know Mexico. To bad they will be pouring into areas wiped out by non-existant oil revenues. About then a real Global War should get under way and that should about finish things off. Please read the book Power 1990 Bean books for some idea of the hell this would csuse if it worked.
> you want to give these same sycophants each the ability to cause their own little 9/11 with just a slight miscalculation in their laughable *judgement*?
Despite the stupid SUV comparison, Ryvar makes a good point. If it weren't for that, the post wouldn't be flamebait.
Pick a random person. You wouldn't let them on your network, would you? Hell no, they'll probably go download their favorite virus-riddled game. Network security is important. But you want to let these same morons move a tonne of metal through the sky? Above & next to your home? No thanks, I'll wait until people become more responsible. I might be waiting a few thousand years...
True, but I don't care if they fly above my house in a squillion tonnes (no, I have no idea the weight of an airplane) of metal being flown by a computer or a trained pilot.
Flying cars can work just fine from that standpoint. Just if you want to fly it yourself instead of sitting in it after telling it to take you to work, you've gotta be a pilot of some sort... Simple.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Let's get hands-free, computer-navigated cars working perfectly in two dimensions first.
My understanding was that they saw energy that is indicative of Helium, while you say that they haven't seen the Helium. We both agree that they haven't seen the Helium.
Neither of us will believe for a moment that CF is working until they can show:
1. Some by-products of fusion.
2. Energy readings beyond a miniscule amount plus or minus a strong breeze.
I'm sorry for assuming you didn't read the article; this *is* slashdot, so I just assumed you hadn't. Mea Culpa.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Furthermore, there are a number of prominent scientists that believe cold fusion is viable, so don't dismiss their claims as crackpot. Any hard evidence of a government coverup, if there is one, is securely locked away for years to come. All people can work on for now is anecdotal evidence. This is not a matter of breaking the laws of physics; it is simply discovering new ones.
harmonious design
You have failed.
You can't handle the truth.
common for hobbyists to use a geranium "cat's whisker"
That's some flowery prose.
My crystal set used a >germanium crystal, don't know about yours.
it's arguably not a "nothing" you're getting the something (so-called "vacuum energy") from. I'm far far far too tired right now to attempt an explanation of the physics of empty space, though...
The article failed to mention that the method used in the latest interesting cold fusion experiments has NOTHING to do with the controversial palladium electrode method.
... like a sonic jewellry cleaner only much much more powerful. The solution is also bombarded with neutrons.
... the bubbles being virtually a vacuum inside a liquid slams back down to nano-scale size, accelerated again by the sound waves.
The method that is producing real results involves an acetone solution containing deuterium.
The solution has a high intensity of sound waves of a specific frequency applied to it
nanoscopic bubbles are introduced into the solution. The intense compression and expansion of the sound waves caused the bubbles to expand from 50 or so nanometers upto a size big enough to see
This effect on an extremely small scale appears to create the pressures and temperatures needed for deuterium to fuse with a neutron into tritium.
Tritium is produced by the experiment fusion is occuring. Take away any one of the factors and it doesnt work.
In the future they hope to be able to enhance the sonic compression effect enough to allow them to drop the neutron bombardment, fusion using the deuterium and hydrogen in the solution, but they aren't there yet.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
MOD PARENT UP!
For anyone interested, I wrote a fairly indepth article on this topic, with plenty of links, and posted it here at SciScoop.
Looking for political forums? Check out "The World Forum".
You didn't consider that.
they laughed at Mr. Hubbert too, when he said that the production of oil would peak in the US in 1970..
they aren't laughing now...
No, now they're angry about the stupid knee-jerk reaction law that prevents them from drilling where the oil is. A whole lot of jobs are essentially being outsourced to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela by that decision. I thought you guys were AGAINST outsourcing?