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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I remember I was at a nuclear power trade conference the week the Pons-Fleischman announcement was originally made.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
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
There's another article on the subject in this month's issue of Physics Today: DOE Warms to Cold Fusion
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Scenario 1:
Scenario 2:
Flippancy aside, which scenario do you consider more plausible?
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
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.
Uh, I hate to break this to you, Mr. "Scientist", but abstinence is proven to be very nearly 100% effective in preventing AIDS, a conclusion that in no way flies in the face of science, but instead, simply stands to reason.
That's astounding, since abstinence is only about 20% successful in teenagers. See, 80% of the time, abstainers will get horny and screw anyway.
African countries are now pushing abstinence because *it works*, and if they don't, most of their population will be dead in 20 years.
Of course, if it does work, then 100% of the population will be dead in 60-80 years.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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
...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.