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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...
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?
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I remember I was at a nuclear power trade conference the week the Pons-Fleischman announcement was originally made.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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
You think the reason alternative energy projects are moving slowly is lack of money? Please.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
...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!
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.
Mod parent up. P&F weren't *wrong*, however, they just made those WAC's that weren't supportable. There *is* something going on in these experiments [I've read some of the DOE and DOD papers on it], but it *ain't* cold fusion, and we really don't know what it is.
Imagine - oil would no longer have much value, and so the Middle East would no longer be a constant battleground.
While it would indeed solve the worlod's energy problems, I have to disagree on the above point. The Middle East was a battleground long before oil meant anything. Perhaps what you meant was it would no longer be a battleground that the US cared about. Without oil, it would be more like Rwanda...bad shit would still happen there, but the developed world would not care.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
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.
i'm not saying they were wrong.
it went like this. they announced discovery. then the majority of people couldn't reproduce results and their theory was unsupported.
ok pause there. everyone thought they were big dorks. why? i'm saying it wasn't because they were wrong (ie no one could reproduce the results), it was because they announced first, then peer review.
the parent of my post then asked, now that P&F might have be "right" should we say P&F are ok guys and did the right thing?
my answer is no. the reason they didn't do the right thing was because they skipped the peer review, which is still the case now.
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
Just because people are not published does not mean they are wrong. There have been plenty of cases where people have been refused publication because of political views--the world revolving around the sun being one of them that comes to mind. What impressed me the report is they targeted the issue of why it appears there is such a discrepancy in the results, not that there was one. It appears we have a lack of understanding of how to cause the deuterium to bind in sufficient amounts to palladium. Even if Cold Fusion remains a simple curiosity, at a minimum we now know that not all catalytic bindings are the same. It makes me wonder if catalytic converts for cars could be made substantially better with these understandings.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
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.
please, no more mod points for this drivel.
honestly, the whole 'cold fusion' debacle needs to be looked at without a single, narrow link. there is something there, to be sure, but noone is entirely sure what. the stigma that came from the original announcement is still there, and that stigma won't die anytime soon.
but really, turning all of it into *yet another* Bush-Bash is just fucking sad. honestly, grow up. the current Administration is bad, but you slashbots would have the world believe that its the worst thing to ever happen, ever ever ever ever ever.
and that's just tired and petty.
moreover, tell me that you wouldn't be sitting there whining if a different Administration was still making bad decisions. Americans do one thing well, bitch (this is why lawyers and politicians hold all the cards). everything else that Americans want done, they'll get the rest of the world to do for them, because the rest of the world will do it without demanding wages to fufil a pie-in-the-sky lifestyle preached 24/7 through print, radio and televised media.
that was a real rant.
If the USA spent 10% of it's military budget on alternative energy sources then this nut could be cracked quickly...
So the reason Cold Fusion doesn't work is now ALSO the USA's fault?
You people are amazing.
-Styopa
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
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.
Well, when JFK said he would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, he did it.
"go to the moon" was a problem with a clear path to the desired result. In the R&D department it required a whole lot more D than R. We already knew we were going to stick those guys on a rocket full of life support and guidance equipment-- it was just a matter of designing and testing the rockets and equipment.
The problem of "find an alternative energy source" is mostly a question of research, and research is usually pretty open-ended. Once they find a usable non-dilute source of energy, then it will be comparable to the JFK/moon thing. At present, we have no idea what the suitable alternative will be, much less how we'll deploy it.
Perhaps it's not just lack of money but lack of the vision and determination to try hard enough.
Determination isn't the issue. We have to discover the path to the goal first. Until that's done, no amount of urging people to run faster will get us closer to the goal. True, no progress can be made with no funding, but beyond a very basic minimum level of necessary manpower and equipment, the timetable of discovery can't be halved by doubling the funding.
As for "vision", yeah, I suppose you could say there's a lack of vision, but that assumes there's something to "see" that nobody's looking at, and all we're lacking is enough people with this "vision" skill to see it. Even if you try to brute-force the problem by hiring every scientist in the world to think about it all day, there's no guarantee of success because the goal is too dependent on advances in secondary technology to even be within reach. You could hire every scientist in the 18th century to work on it, but none of them would have the "vision" to see the technological path to a fission reactor.
Basically, elapsed time till results doesn't scale to money spent when it comes to research.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.