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 ..."

Comments

OMFG, what if

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Bit late

[16K Ram Pack]

Haven't most people switched to PHP or ASP now?

WMDs and cold fusion

[britneys 9th husband]

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.

Re:WMDs and cold fusion

[ThisIsFred]

Excellent! That means we'll have cold fusion before November 2nd.

Where are the neutrons?

[sphealey]

I remember I was at a nuclear power trade conference the week the Pons-Fleischman announcement was originally made.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

Re:Where are the neutrons?

[Teancum]

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.

Re:Where are the neutrons?

[another_henry]

Helium alone isn't sufficient. Assuming there is no tritium in the reactants, the only possible reactions are deuterium-deuterium reactions and these must produce neutrons.

The possible reactions are listed below:

D+D -> T (1.01 MeV) + p (3.02 MeV) (50%)
-> He3 (0.82 MeV) + n (2.45 MeV) (50%) <- most abundant fuel
-> He4 + about 20 MeV of gamma rays (about 0.0001%; depends somewhat on temperature.)

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.

Furthermore if enough fusion is occuring to give a measureable temperature increase then the thing will be really roasting with neutrons and protons. It should make a geiger counter go nuts from activation products alone.

As nice as cold fusion would be, it doesn't work. And wishing it did won't help any.

N.B. I am omitting hydrogen-hydrogen reactions as those take place so slowly that it's not feasible. Also they'd be easy to check for simply by using non-deuterated water or acetone.

Atomic Laptops:

[Upaut]

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...

USDOE Likes It?

[geomon]

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).

Is there a physicist in the house?

[Len]

According to Peter Hagelstein, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT...

Once again, cold fusion is championed by someone who's not a nuclear physicist.

I'll believe it when I see it running my car. Actually, I probably won't believe it even then.

Re:Is there a physicist in the house?

[TigerNut]

There are lots of people in the nuclear physics field that are plugging away at cold fusion, though, and they wouldn't be doing that if it was proven to be a crackpot science. Historically, a lot of ground-breaking discoveries have been made by people from outside the established group of experts in the field.

The facts are that a lot of people are seeing unexplained excess heat generation when they do these experiments. Whether it's fusion or not, unexplained results eventually lead to fundamental theoretical insights, and that's all to the good.

Re:Where did I put that thing?

[ed__]

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.

Re:Solve the world's problems

[Dun Malg]

If the USA spent 10% of it's military budget on alternative energy sources then this nut could be cracked quickly

You think the reason alternative energy projects are moving slowly is lack of money? Please.

Links on Polywater

[goombah99]

here are some links:

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.

Re:Not good enough

[Esion Modnar]

I want an atomic powered FLYING car.

Yeah, it'll look great in your garage right next to your atomic powered flying pig.

What the fark???

[WwWonka]

...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! ;-)

Re:Solve the world's problems

[Anixamander]

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.

*Sounds* like cold fusion

[novakane007]

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."

It's funny to watch people react here..

[xtal]

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.

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. :sigh:

Re:It's funny to watch people react here..

[Minwee]

Carl Sagan put it best: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Being persecuted for your beliefs doesn't make them right. Sometimes, it just means that you really are a crackpot and that the other children are right to laugh at you.

Re:Not good enough

[Adriax]

atomic powered flying pig

Mmmmm, pre-nuked bacon to go...

Re:Solve the world's problems

[argStyopa]

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.

Thoughts from a physicist

[Rotiahn]

Alright, for the moment I'm going to give this article a little benefit of the the doubt, and see what comes out of it:

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.

Re:Cold Fusion possibly already achieved!

[DuckDuckBOOM!]

But does it not seem coincidental that one of the two suddenly owns an island and the other vanished?

Yep, the secret vanished, to the same place where hides the 100 MPG carburetor, the Dean Drive, and the rest. Just for the record, let me point out the teeny flaw in reasoning common to this class of conspiracy theories:

Scenario 1:

1. Pons and Fleischmann discover a source of effectively unlimited energy that is relatively safe and easy to manufacture, and portable in the bargain!
2. Exxon and Ford investigate, and discover that the process works and is commercially viable.
3. E & F decide that this incredible discovery must be suppressed for the sake of their businesses. They buy off Pons for an island and $whatever, on condition that he become a permanent recluse. Fleischmann refuses to cooperate, and "vanishes".
4. Exxon's profits sag as OPEC jacks up the price of crude yet again. Ford ups its factory rebates to hang on to its market share.

Scenario 2:

1. Pons and Fleischmann discover a source of effectively unlimited energy that is relatively safe and easy to manufacture, and portable in the bargain!
2. Exxon and Ford investigate, and discover that the process works and is commercially viable.
3. Exxon and Ford gain exclusive licenses for the process from P & F for a few US$billion each. Pocket change for them.
4. Exxon builds huge CF generators to pump hydrogen and electricity into the grid at one third of current prices, and its net profit jumps by a factor of 20 as Westinghouse, GE, BP/Amoco, and OPEC go bankrupt. U.S. pollution and CO2 emissions drop 30%. CEO honored at Sierra Club's annual convention.
5. Ford immediately retrofits entire product line for CF power at 30% above current sticker prices. New Expedition gets 11,400 miles per gallon of heavy water with zero emissions and near-zero maintenance (grease the suspension and empty the tritium cup every now & then). Ford's market share increases to 90% in three years. US pollution and CO2 emissions drop another 40%. Members of employee stock purchase program retire and buy yachts, CF-powered of course. Ford CEO honored at Greenpeace's annual convention.
6. Pons and Fleischmann are multi-billionaires and Nobel Prize winners. Forever after revered in history books as saviors of mankind.

Flippancy aside, which scenario do you consider more plausible?