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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 ..."
I remember I was at a nuclear power trade conference the week the Pons-Fleischman announcement was originally made.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
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!
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.
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
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!"
I'll believe it when I see it running my car. Actually, I probably won't believe it even then.
... in his What's New column on April 2:
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.
Then we could just ignore them. Like Africa.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
You would have to pump a *lot* of deuterium through
a palladium cell at quite a high efficiency for quite a long time in order to pay for the mass of palladium. While it has been obvious to me that cold fusion was real, on the basis of the published papers, since 1990, it seems equally obvious that it is not a sufficient basis for a commercially viable power technology, without substantial further innovation.
Leave alone the cost of palladium, which is probably going to exceed that of gold in the near future, any effect that is so sensitive to uncontrolled conditions as to allow the James Randis of the world this much freedom to make fools of themselves is not likely to be commercially useful except in the construction of magic eightball devices.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
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?
"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?
I can't speak personally about Pons, but I was amazed at Fleishman's gung-ho attitude. I attended a lecture he gate to the "Royal Society" in Southampton UK about a year or so after the collapse of the original claims. To be honest, even my most half-hearted fabrication of results for high-school chemistry put his case to shame. The evidence was laughable, his recording pathetic and the almost obviously dishonest results he was theorising about had spurious order-of magnitude arithmetic errors on his hand-drawn slides. It was unbelievable!
While academics at the event lambasted his unprofessional conduct - all I could say is that whatever Dr. Fleischman had been working on, it had no hope of supporting his highly unusual theories.
It was as crass as the infomercial's that tell you to "order now! time is limited! only ten minutes left!"
Even if they had a good idea, they established all the credibility of the hawkers of weight-loss formulas.
Ain't no gettin yer dignity back from that....
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
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.
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
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.
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.
And an unfortunate sidenote is that P&F had planned for pier review. However, their university president thought Carnegie-Mellon had discovered the same thing and was going to beat them to the announcement, and put immense pressure on P&F to head straight to the press.
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No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
...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.
So, as other posters have asked, where are the neutrons? I've had the opportunity to as Fleishmann himself that question, and watched others ask it as well. He didn't have an answer, and didn't even understand import of the question.
It goes like this: if I give any light nucleus more than a few MeV in a metal lattice, it's going to knock neutrons loose left and right. It doesn't matter if it's a proton, a deuteron, tritium, 4He, whatever. And it doesn't matter if I give it that energy via fission or fusion or waving a magic wand. No matter what I do, such a particle will produce neutrons. This is as close to a certainy as anything in this life can be.
Hand-waving plausibility arguments regarding lattice recoil won't do. Either show me the neutrons, or show me a way of dumping 20-odd MeV into a light nucleus in a metal lattice and NOT producing neutrons. Cold fusion advocates have done neither.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.