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Cold Fusion Back From The Dead
misterfusion writes "Looks like the IEEE is warming up to cold fusion with the latest story "Cold Fusion Back from the Dead". This has been a good year for this field with several leading science journals (Physics Today, MIT Technology Review, etc) contributing stories. Things are warming up and if science Research & Development funding can be stimulated with a positive DoE report (due soon), it might be an interesting rebirth."
That's what I thought too...
I thought why?
There are some many better things now.
Let it stay dead man... just die a noble death.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Waffle waffle
Cold fusion regarded as a joke for ages
waffle waffle
"THE FIRST HINT that the tide may be changing came in February 2002, when the U.S. Navy revealed that its researchers had been studying cold fusion on the quiet more or less continuously since the debacle began. "
waffle waffle
"At San Diego and other research centers, scientists built up an impressive body of evidence that something strange happened when a current passed through palladium electrodes placed in heavy water. "
waffle waffle
"Other researchers are finally beginning to explain why the Pons-Fleischmann effect has been difficult to reproduce. Mike McKubre from SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif., a respected researcher who is influential among those pursuing cold fusion, says that the effect can be reliably seen only once the palladium electrodes are packed with deuterium at ratios of 100 percent--one deuterium atom for every palladium atom. His work shows that if the ratio drops by as little as 10 points, to 90 percent, only 2 experimental runs in 12 produce excess heat, while all runs at a ratio of 100 percent produce excess heat. "
Summary: Cold fusion wasn't reproducible because not all factors were accounted for, and millitary scientists think they nailed it.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
bleh. i did CF development for 6 years before moving into IT security. CF is still quite qidely used in the private (bank of america, etc) and is extensively used in public sector shops. the majority of DoS and many DoD sites use it (and they port it to linux, so pbbt.) don't confuse their questionable products like flash and shockwave with a really solid, open standard web application language.
Cold Fusion Back From the Dead
U.S. Energy Department gives true believers a new hearing
Later this month, the U.S. Department of Energy will receive a report from a panel of experts on the prospects for cold fusion - the supposed generation of thermonuclear energy using tabletop apparatus. It's an extraordinary reversal of fortune: more than a few heads turned earlier this year when James Decker, the deputy director of the DOE's Office of Science, announced that he was initiating the review of cold fusion science. Back in November 1989, it had been the department's own investigation that determined the evidence behind cold fusion was unconvincing. Clearly, something important has changed to grab the department's attention now.
The cold fusion story began at a now infamous press conference in March 1989. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, both electrochemists working at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, announced that they had created fusion using a battery connected to palladium electrodes immersed in a bath of water in which the hydrogen was replaced with its isotope deuterium - so-called heavy water. With this claim came the idea that tabletop fusion could produce more or less unlimited, low-cost, clean energy.
In physicists' traditional view of fusion, forcing two deuterium nuclei close enough together to allow them to fuse usually requires temperatures of tens of millions of degrees Celsius. The claim that it could be done at room temperature with a couple of electrodes connected to a battery stretched credulity [see photo, "Too Good to Be True?"].
But while some scientists reported being able to reproduce the result sporadically, many others reported negative results, and cold fusion soon took on the stigma of junk science.
Today the mainstream view is that champions of cold fusion are little better than purveyors of snake oil and good luck charms. Critics say that the extravagant claims behind cold fusion need to be backed with exceptionally strong evidence, and that such evidence simply has not materialized. "To my knowledge, nothing has changed that makes cold fusion worth a second look," says Steven Koonin, a member of the panel that evaluated cold fusion for the DOE back in 1989, who is now chief scientist at BP, the London-based energy company.
Because of such attitudes, science has all but ignored the phenomenon for 15 years. But a small group of dedicated researchers have continued to investigate it. For them, the DOE's change of heart is a crucial step toward being accepted back into the scientific fold. Behind the scenes, scientists in many countries, but particularly in the United States, Japan, and Italy, have been working quietly for more than a decade to understand the science behind cold fusion. (Today they call it low-energy nuclear reactions, or sometimes chemically assisted nuclear reactions.) For them, the department's change of heart is simply a recognition of what they have said all along - whatever cold fusion may be, it needs explaining by the proper process of science.
THE FIRST HINT that the tide may be changing came in February 2002, when the U.S. Navy revealed that its researchers had been studying cold fusion on the quiet more or less continuously since the debacle began. Much of this work was carried out at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, where the idea of generating energy from sea water - a good source of heavy water - may have seemed more captivating than at other laboratories.
Many researchers at the center had worked with Fleischmann, a well-respected electrochemist, and found it hard to believe that he was completely mistaken. What's more, the Navy encouraged a culture of risk-taking in research and made available small amounts of funding for researchers to pursue their own interests.
At San Diego and other research centers, scientists built up an impressive body of evidence that something strange happened when a current passed through palladium electrodes placed in h
Over the years, a number of groups around the world have reproduced the original Pons-Fleischmann excess heat effect, yielding sometimes as much as 250 percent of the energy put in.
(snip)
Other researchers are finally beginning to explain why the Pons-Fleischmann effect has been difficult to reproduce. Mike McKubre from SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif., a respected researcher who is influential among those pursuing cold fusion, says that the effect can be reliably seen only once the palladium electrodes are packed with deuterium at ratios of 100 percent--one deuterium atom for every palladium atom. His work shows that if the ratio drops by as little as 10 points, to 90 percent, only 2 experimental runs in 12 produce excess heat, while all runs at a ratio of 100 percent produce excess heat.
Something is going on here that we don't understand, and it looks like it can be reproduced. Yeah I would say it would be worth looking into further. The 250% heat output sounds like a good thing (especially if no toxic by-products are produced) so how does that compare to other types of heat generation I wonder?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I haven't made any great study of what happened, but I'm not sure any apology is in order.
As I understand it, they made an astonishing scientific claim. That claim, while it might be absolutely true, was not substantiated by the experiment they describe.
There is more to good science than turning out to be right.
-Peter
Oh, shit! This again and again.
Cold fusion is impossible and Physics have long demostrated it.
Robert L. Park, the President of the American Physical Society, wrote a book that deals with this and explains it clearly: Voodoo Science. He will probably treat this "rebirth" of the hype on his What's new science column.
How long until the USA Government understands they cannot beat the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
As I understand it, they made an astonishing scientific claim. That claim, while it might be absolutely true, was not substantiated by the experiment they describe.
If you read the article (I know, this is Slashdot...), you'd note that some of the problems in reproducing the effect have been discovered. One problem turned out to be the "density" of deuterium atoms in the palladium electrodes. Above a certain threshold, you'd see the excess heat every time. Below that, even by only 10%, you'd only see excess heat in one out of every six trials.
From this, it seems like the problem wasn't that the experiment was made up, but that the problem was the researchers had no precise concept of what steps and requirements were necessary to repeat it accurately.
perpetual: Lasting for eternity.
there is no 'until' in eternity. The Universe is more of a 'motion for a very very long time that is almost perpetual but not quite machine'. Just to split hairs.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
While apparently hard (but not impossible) to reproduce, and not well understood, there is now credible evidence that something happens that generates heat and helium out of hydrogen.
If the phenomenon is real, and we manage to reproduce it reliably, it probably is fusion, albeit only a couple of atoms at a time (which has the side effects of (1) no harder-to-control chain reaction over vast amounts of fissible material and (2) trivial to contain generation).
Might not be too easy to use, though. I could see how the heat could be made to give energy to a conventional steam turbine though.
At any rate, your quip about dead from radiation poisoning is a strawman. Even if all is as the researchers hope, we are observing the fission of minuscule amounts of atoms at a time (hence the manageable heat) and what little radiation escapes from the reaction medium unabsorbed and unconverted into heat is most likely unmeasurably small and completely drowned out by the background radiation we live in.
-- MG
The article is a good look at the whole CF phenomenon as of 1993.
You know, you would think that. But Julian Schwinger pointed out that there is no good reason to come to that conclusion ie. that the same nuclear reactions that are favored at high temperatures are favored at low temperatures. There is no reason, per se, to expect neutrons.
Further more, he pointed out, that because of the spin state of the nucleus, dipole transitions would be forbidden - read no gamma rays.
Here is where you can find a lot of the last 15 years of research - If you are the sort to read scientific papers.
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
Nice try, but here's an exercise for you: go and look up `finite square well' in a quantum mechanics textbook. Calculate the tunneling probability for a typical barrier. Become enlightened.
Think quantum mechanics/quantum probabilities. 'Tunneling' is a very real possibility. Electron tunneling is widely used in electronics.
My thinking is that the palladium matrix is somehow modifying the quantum probability functions such that when the matrix is sufficiently saturated with deuterium nucleii, it allows superposition, which gives rise to fusion. I actually came up with this explanation years ago when some people had success and others failed, now it turns out there may actually be evidence to support it.
Well I have karma to burn so I'll respond to the troll:
News flash HungSoLow - energy production will always be expensive and produce pollution. There are no magic ways to avoid paying the toll for power! There is simply no way that a couple of electrodes (the production of which produce quite a bit of pollution) and some carefully refined heavy water (the process of refining produces quite a bit of pollution) produce more energy than goes in. Right now this is all pie in the sky science - some fusion is taking place maybe (cold fusion is not new to science, but producing energy with it would be) but there is simply no way that this will ever turn out to be some sort of magic power source that never runs out. And then your segue into military technology is priceless - if somehow we did create power from basically nothing, your worry is that the military might use it??? You're not worried about the fact that every economy would probably crash overnight, that war would almost certainly follow, and that it wouldn't be a dinky war but something along the lines of WWIII?
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Yes, but think of the scale here. On the atomic level, it may be possible to have tiny, localized areas where particles can be accelerated to very high speeds. Granted, it would be extremely rare and definitely not generate energy on the scale of hot fusion, which basically depends on having a "nuclei soup".
n g_launcher/ring_launcher.html. Only a small force is actually added to each element, but the whiplash effect accelerates the last object to high speeds. What if the forces between palladium and deuterium are such that the deuterium atoms are arranged in straight rows and matrices on the surface of palladium? And what if the applied electrical current tugs each atom slightly, which when released allows a cascading whiplash effect on rows millions of atoms long? Pure conjecture, but it illustrates a mechanism by which a few atoms might be accelerated to very high speeds, and in a somewhate accurate linear way (as opposed to hot fusion which hopes for accidental collisions between randomly moving nuclei).
How could we get a massive acceleration using only objects that repel each other? This is an interesting experiment: http://www.scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/ri
No, they don't magically get around the coulomb barrier. Its just that the potential across the surface of an electrolytic cell is enough, in theory, to overcome it. We did the calcs in freshmen materials science.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
I'd highly recomend the wikipedia article on cold fusion, here.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
There is a huge difference though. Most fusion research focuses on the plasma state of the fuel, cold fusion focuses on the liquid state. I don't think anyone is saying that the electric forces do not need to be overcome, but that the probability of overcomming them is great in a liquid. Essentially, imagine 3 people in a 10'X10'x10' room running and jumping around blindfolded as fast as they can. That's "hot fusion". Then imagine 100 people being piled into a 10'x10'x10' room maybe they don't run fast, but there is a lot greater chance one of them is going to get a bloody nose. That's "cold fusion". It doesn't mean it's cold, it just means it's not plasma.
Aside from that, the charges balance out in cold fusion thus effectively removing the need to add energy for the majority of the collision path, once the nuclei get close enough the cancelling effect becomes very small and then you need to increase the pressure... which is exactly what the electricity is doing.
I also am not a nuclear physicist, but I think I know the answer to your question (if I'm wrong, hopefully someone will correct me.) There are two, interrelated problems. The first is that the plasma where the fusion occurs is incredibly hot, so as you said it needs to be contained. In tokamaks this is done with a toroidal magnetic field. The problem with this is that, since plasma have very low densities (basically a necessity for it to be a plasma) there's not really all that many nuclei in the contained volume that can undergo fusion. So, the reactions tend to be very short, and we don't get back as much energy as we put in. That's why the tokamaks they're building to get to break even are so huuuge--larger contained volume means more fuel means more energy out for the amount we had to put in. Some researchers are also trying to figure out how to continually inject more fuel into the contained volume and keep the reaction running that way.
Anyway, this is my understanding of the main problems in the field from the outside looking in.
"Why should there be a "war surcharge"?"
Because they're private companies profiting from multibillion dollar wars. They, and we, ought to be paying the price through higher per-gallon gas taxes.
Instead, we have artificially low gas prices undercutting what would otherwise be "better" (cleaner, more efficient, etc) fuel sources.
Actually there are a lot of examples where people and their theories were ridiculed before they were ever proven correct. Look at Galileo, he was hounded by the church and scientists. Though from what I remember, the church wasn't hounding him for his theories as is popular opinion. There is a good precedent that new theories that disrupt the status quo end up getting short shrifted by the established scientific community until fresh blood with open minds come in and prove it.
Cold Fusion is simply Fusion at a lower macro-temperature (as in a room-temperature room). Fusion clearly is possible, unless you care to explain atomic weapons, stars, nuclear power another way (do I hear giant government conspiracy maybe? matrix-like pseudo-reality?).
Cold fusion may or may not be possible, but clearly science hasn't proven it either way. And as another form of Fusion, it certainly does not violate the 2nd law.
Let's not forget the other uses for oil, such as plastics, lubrication, and just about anything in organic chemistry.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Oil companies currently have it pretty good - why would they want to actually have to go out and *compete* if they don't have to?
Oil companies do compete, and heavily so. There are a lot of oil companies out there, and all of them want to make a profit. Unocal got out of the post-extraction business in the mid 1990s (though they licensed the trademarks such as the 76 logo to Tosco, who also bought much of the refining and retail operations) because competition in that arena was simply getting to be too difficult. Other companies work solely in refining, or solely in retail, because competition is so fierce in the industry.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Ahem, RTFA. The point of the article is that the excess heat effect HAS been replicated now plenty of times, and the researchers are trying to figure out how it happens and why. Also, why they so rarely detect the generation of helium and tritium that one would expect from an actual fusion reaction. What is happening may not be fusion, but the point of the whole article is that it would be beneficial to understand what is going on here with the Pons/Fleischmann effect. If it isn't fusion, then what the hell is it? And can this really be developed into an inexpensive source of energy?
I agree that Pons and Fleischmann essentially sabotaged their careers with the ill-conceived press conference, rather than have their work peer-reviewed as most scientific research is done, but the point of the article (again RTFA) is that quite a few well-credentialed researchers have been working on this for the past decade and have come up with some startling results. And they are doing it right by presenting their peer-reviewed work at scientific conferences.
I thought it was the Senate who chose not to ratify the treaty. If so, wouldn't they need to change their biz model to, "Let's bribe the whole Senate?"
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
"...The only thing in the body that heavy water might affect is osmosis, so I think that is a very unlikely suggestion..."
No Nobel prize. Not even a White Owl. Here's a more knowledgeable view of heavy water toxicity
To quote:
"When body deuterium reaches about 50%, it inhibits mitosis because spindle microtubules won't form (some hydrogen bond effect inhibiting self-polymerization, I think). So all eucaryotic cells are poisoned about about these concentrations, or a little higher (bacteria can survive full deuteration-- they just grow half as fast). The consequences of failure of cell division for an intact animal like a rodent, are somewhat like those of radiation or chemo-- the bone marrow and gut lining cells suffer. Animals die of infection or diarrhea. "
T&K.
Political language
Insightful? Would wondering if Val Kilmer might steal her research from her get me a '+1, Informative' moderation?
I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens. --Isaac Bashevis Singer
It gets better. Pons et al had figured out a way to make a denser pellet, and had a trade secret worked out with a palladium supplier that provided their samples. They were trying to make money off their discoveries, and in so doing, didn't disseminate their trade secrets. Of course, when the hot-fusion-funded universities tried to reproduce expirements based on photographs and interviews, they failed and cried FRAUD! The media, feeling they had been suckered, promptly turned and smeared Pons-Fleischmann.
Of course, if I remember correctly, Pons-Fleischmann didn't help things by exaggurating their claims and having inaccurate graphs.
Can't find the link just yet where I read that tidbit. Here's a good one, though, at wired. Just how do you explain an excess of Helium with anything but nuclear processes?
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
I read a lot about cold fusion when the controversy first erupted and in the next few years. It's much more difficult to evaluate than you would think.
The problem is that there is a pre-loading phase where you are running the current and nothing is happening. This is when the hydrogen is being taken up by the palladium electrodes. Then after a while you start to get some heat, often sporadically.
But is it excess heat? Or are you merely recovering energy you spent in the pre-loading phase?
This question is the subject of calorimetry, or heat measurement, and it is one of the most difficult types of measurements to do precisely. Making it harder is the fact that the experiments run for several days or even weeks and you have to monitor the energy spent and recovered throughout that time. Some of the early experiments went bad because the stirring of the water by convection wasn't properly taken into account. That's how subtle and difficult it is.
It seems clear that at least some of the early cold fusion results were merely calorimetric errors. Now, it's possible that they have improved their experimental technique and that the new data is more convincing. But the nature of the experiment - long periods of feeding energy in, then short bursts of heat out - makes it inherently difficult to come up with convincing proof of what is happening.
On the contrary, it had several reproducible results, immediately, at MIT, Texas A&M, and many others. But the /rate/ of reproducibility remained low and the conditions in which it occurred were and still are poorly understood. Since then, reproducibility rates for deuterium-deuterium and deuterium-metal reactions have climbed really high (some Japanese researchers with Mitsubishi have near 100 percent).
What we do know is that nuclear cross sectional areas increase dramatically at lower energies, 10 keV or less. We suspect that, in very general terms, the electronic structure of metal lattices is playing a role in reducing the Coulomb barrier. And we know that palladium, like used in the Pons-Fleischman experiments, doesn't work if it's pure, and it's the addition of impurities like calcium oxide that contribute to the reaction.
As for a conspiracy to shush it up, it's somewhat true. It's more like mob behavior and fear. Hot fusion research has been extremely threatened, as well as parts of the energy sector, and both have a lot of clout with the DoE. That matters if you're a researcher trying to get funding.
The history of cold fusion really needs some clarification. It was really discovered in 1986, not 1989, by Steven Jones of BYU. If you want, you can request a copy of the relevant minutes from the research group meetings back then: they even called it cold fusion, which might be somewhat of a misnomer, now that the processes are understood a bit better. Pons and Fleischman came across it independently, and the DoE asked Jones to review their work. Their avenue of approach focused a lot on calorimetry, while Dr. Jones had been focusing on looking for nuclear products (neutrons, tritium, helium-3, etc).
Since the two groups had been working on it at the same time and Jones had looked over Pons and Fleischman's stuff, they had made an agreement to publish simultaneously. BYU being so close to the UofU, they were going to meet at SLC Int'l Airport and send in their papers to Nature together. That was to be on March 24th, 1989. Instead, Pons and Fleischman had a press conference on March 23rd, completely stabbing Jones in the back. And worse, they were extremely sloppy, and later unethical. They had a data chart which showed an energy spike at 2.5 MeV, and when somebody pointed out to them that it should have been 2.2 MeV for a d+d reaction, they adjusted the chart downward for their next presentation. The ensuing aftermath nearly completely crippled the field and gave everybody working in it a black eye.
Gratefully, there have been quite a few who decided to continue working in the field. Researchers from Los Alamos, MIT, Naval Research, all over Japan and Italy, BYU, for a good while Texas A&M (there was some controversy there), and elsewhere have made significant progress in the 15 years since that fiasco. I've been working in the BYU group for a year now, and we've had elemental transmutation in varied experiments Sr --> Y, Mo, and I can assure you, the effect is real. And it HAS been published in peer-reviewed journals. Unfortunately, most peer-reviewed journals, because of the stigma the field had gained, automatically rejected anything that sounded like it had anything to do with cold fusion.
For more information about research that's been happening in the field itself, see www.lenr-canr.org
You've missed my point entirely.
I am focussed completely on the question of "How does the energy wind up as heat?"
I will grant you any number and type of exotic processes to create the energy in the first place.
But I will not grant you any new physics with regard to converting that energy into heat, because all of the scenarios posited ultimately involve either excited nuclei, or nuclei moving in the lattice, and we know with as much certainty as we know anything what happens when we have excited nuclei or nuclei moving in the lattice.
So you have two completely unrelated problems: one is that there is no known mechanism that can produce the energy in the first place. The second is that once the energy is created, there is no known mechanism that can convert it into heat without a clear-cut radiation signature. That is, even if you have pure d+d->4He fusion, you will always still get both nuetrons and x-rays (and gamma rays, in some cases) due to standard slowing down processes or de-excitation.
No matter what process produces 4He plus a few MeV, the same physics governs the thermalization process, and you have to invoke entirely new physics to govern this process in this case, as well as entirely new physics to govern the generation of the energy in the first place.
So it isn't the lack of explanation of the generated energy that is the big concern for most nuclear physicists. It is the fact that once the energy has been generated, the reaction products have to behave in ways that are completely contrary to a huge body of existing knowledge, both theory and observation.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Pons and Fleishman told of trying an experiment in a portable cooler; when no positive results were immediately apparent, the cooler was put into a closet and forgotten about for years -- until there was a fire which the arson investigators deduced started in the closet, in the cooler....
Pons and Fleishman were clear (to me) in saying the "apparatus" had to spend years "charging." Their words.
Right after their announcement, a Palo Alto, CA laboratory charged with trying to replicate their experiment used the same brand cooler and put it in a closet for years.... Students graduated, professors retired or moved on, and suddenly, there was a fire in the lab, which investigators reported started in a closet....
(This based on contemporary news reports carried in the SF CHronicle.)
I doubt the PA replication experiment was designed to start a fire inadvertently, but that appears to be what happened.
Pons and Fleishman's explanation of their apparatus was MORE accurate than most of the doubters realized or even accepted.
It appears to me (an interested amateur) that the battery uses time to somehow attract a Deuterium atom to each palladium atom, at which time, according to the article, energy amplification ("cold fusion") occurs 100 per cent of the time.
The big fuss over cold fusion came about the same time as the bogus theory that water had a memory. If you can believe that the water in your next can of Pepsi (or Coke) "remembers" that it was most recently in your bladder, more power to you, but it's this same quackery that gives us homeopathic remedies. Let's not confuse what we would like to be, with what is reality. Bad science is just that and wishing that it wasn't doesn't make it so.
--When it's my time, I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather -- not screaming like all the passengers in his car