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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 ..."
Well, if "bubble fusion" can produce neutrons, I'm willing to give them the opportunity to explain themselves.
no. P&F weren't reviled because they were wrong. they were reviled because they circumvented the whole publishing and peer review part of science and went directly to the 'make wild-ass claims to the press' part.
that said, being wrong didn't help them either.
The parent was refering to a very old joke.
sig
RTFA
"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."
The energy found cannot be explained by chemical reactions, and nuclear products, namely HELIUM, _are_ found in the reactions.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
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.
It produces helium-4, 4 being the weight, 2 protons, 2 neutrons, deuterium, is heavy hydrogen, with 1 proton, and 1 neutron. 2+2=4.. at least in most math.
What's wrong with that sentence? Phonons underly many theories of condensed matter. For example, superconductivity (the normal sort) is produced by a phonon-electron interaction in a metal lattice.
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.
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!!
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.
Watch this video from Kevin Smith to learn more about flying cars!
There's another article on the subject in this month's issue of Physics Today: DOE Warms to Cold Fusion
I was a physics student (undergrad Physics for Engineers course) of Dr. Steven Jones when this whole thing broke loose. About 3 weeks before the Pons & Fleischman announcement, he announced some interesting results that were very similar to the cold fusion announcement.
At the time, Dr. Jones was a peer-referee for the article that Pons & Fleischman were writing, and it turned out that their research was following similar lines that he and other researchers at BYU were following. He asked for permission (and was granted) to break the confidentiality agreement with the publisher to share research information. (Details of this are well documented elsewhere, including things I saw on the PBS-TV show Nova about this episode.... I can confirm this so far as this is what Dr. Jones mentioned to our class prior to the whole fiasco breaking loose).
Dr. Jones was following an earlier line of research where he was studying Muon-induced fusion (where a Muon would take the place of a normal electron and bring atomic nuclei closer together under certain conditions... potentially triggering a fusion reaction). He was also studying natural phenomina including a speculation that there might be some other process besides nuclear fission and meteoric landfall that causes volcanic hotspots around the earth. I'm not here suggesting that cold fusion causes Mauna Loa, but some isotopic measurements of gasses emitted by that volcano contained traces of Helium-3 and Helium-4 that could not otherwise be accounted for. The speculation was that perhaps a limited form of fusion might also be taking place.
The key element of Dr. Jones' research was that he was indeed measuring emitted particles instead of measuring heat. Some graphs he showed to our class (after the big fiasco) included some very telling information about some of the particles being emmitted, but at levels so low that it seemed improbable that a calorimeter would be able to measure the effect.
When all was said and done, the best that could be offered by the researchers I talked to afterward was that this research could be used to make a neutrino emmitter that could be turned on and off electronically. Now that does indeed have some interesting uses, but neutrino detectors are another problem. As a futuristic energy source, there were many other much more productive lines of research to consider.
The other nice thing about cold fusion was that it didn't require huge laboratories to study the effects, which is convient to relatively underfunded universities for research activities (like BYU), it also brings out the weirdos, scammers and crooks. As a result, research discussions tend to have a very low S/N level. This makes finding information all that more difficult.
It is also something to note that BYU is also where Philo Farsnworth did his final research on the Fusor technology. In fact, the cold fusion research was conducted in the very same laboratory (buried underground just south of the HBLL library). They were indeed worried about radiation damage, and chose to buy $20,000 worth of pennies to build a cheap radiation shield. I'm not sure if they ever put them back into circulation, but it was a sort of joke when walking into the lab and it looked more like the inside of a bank vault.
I'm not a nuclear physicist, but I think the reaction is more like;
2.0147 + 2.0147 = 4.00260324 + (0.02679676 * C^2).
This is actualy a considerable amount of energy.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I was at the U of U about 15 years ago. Pons and Fleischman worked for the Chem dept. I took quite a few physics courses and basically all the physics profs thought they were nuts. And no they could not reproduce the results. They were sore of let go.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
They were wrong, had you read their work you would have seen their energy balance was screwed. They did not include all the energy going in to the their experiment but did include all going out, that is how they were caught.
Stupid mistake.
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.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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.
Note that there is no way to control which of these reactions occurs, so half the fusions should produce neutrons. The other half produce protons which are also relatively easily detected, usually with a kind of silicon diode.
RTFA:
Experiments that produce excess heat also have yielded helium-4, one potential product of the fusion of two deuterium nuclei, in amounts that correlate with the 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."
Seems they are producing all He4 (your 3rd possibility which current theory says should be produced at about 0.0001% of byproducts of D+D fusion).
FreeSpeech.org
Not if they want a quick and easy way to abstract SQL datasets using a syntax that looks and feels like HTML (so as not to shock the linguistic sensibilities of your graphic artists). CFML is still tops at that.
Though I've seen some JSP tag libraries that come close.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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.
Be very careful here. Conservatives tend to preach abstinence as a solution because they believe it is the morally correct thing to do. It is nice that it has the side effect of reducing STD incidence, but above all, they proclaim, abstinence is morally correct. Condoms, on the other hand, are immoral because they promote sex even though condoms reduce STD incidence as well.
Uganda slashed AIDS infections because the women got together and pulled a Lysistrata - The Aristophanes play where the women of Athens stop having sex with the men until the men stop fighting the Peloponesian war. In this case, the women said no sex until the men stopped having extra-marital sex and started using condoms. Abstinence was a temporary ploy used to get the men's attention and force some behavioral changes. It had zero to do with abstinence as the moral choice that conservatives have tried to foist on the world. And it worked in large part because the campaign also included a large dose of sex education (something conservatives don't like either) which empowered the women by letting them understand the choices they could make along with the consequences of those choices.
Merely stating that abstinence works is too simple. It is like proclaiming cold fusion exists in the absence of a theory that can predict the experimental results.
FreeSpeech.org
Actually, we can do _really_ cold fusion already, at around 3 K. You can use muons (sort of a very heavy electron) as a fusion catalyst and get fusion going. Problem is, muons are consumed in the process (even if they didn't decay in microseconds) and it takes about 5 times as much energy to produce them as you get from the reaction.
Dyolf Knip
Don't coat them with rocket fuel then.
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
You'll find more info under "New Hydrogen Energy", but not that much more. Asian countries have been toying with it a little bit. If you have the right latice structure you can get an excess heat reaction, but too much heat and the latice deforms, and the reation dies out. If I remember right, there was some hit and miss results with nickel, better thermal tolerances, but almost impossible to get the alloy right in the first place.
Sounds almost as bad as the hot fusion guys and their trying to get the right hydrogen pellet configuration for the lasers to ignite.
Maybe all in all a good thing that noone has gotten one or the other to go. Look at the trouble coal and oil have gotten the world into so far. If people are drunk on energy that's this cheap, what sort of mess will you have when you have fusion to play with ?