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DOE Report on Cold Fusion
thhamm writes "The DOE Report on Cold Fusion (mentioned here too) is out. Take a look at it on the DOE Website. Well, looks like there is nothing really new since Pons & Fleischmann in 1989, because "While significant progress has been made in the sophistication of calorimeters since the review of this subject in 1989, the conclusions reached by the reviewers today are similar to those found in the 1989 review.""
I read somewhere that also uranium will be depleted at 60 - 80 years from now, at current rate. More fission reactors in use will bring that day even closer.
That is obviously why fusion research is so very important, if/when the breakthrough is achieved we'll have almost unlimited amounts of fuel.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
If I recall correctly from Science News several months or year ago, such phenomena have been observed in other experiments. Specifically, sonoluminesence (not spelled correctly) in certain solutions has had the the proposed origin in cold fusion. note that cold fusion in this sense would have no real practical application because the scale is sooo small that the only observable result is flashes of light
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Twelve years ago fusion prize award legislation was proposed. It had the support not only of cold fusion researchers but of one of the three primary founders of the US fusion program supported the legislation. Prizes actually work. Let the DoE go ahead and do its skeptical measurements and the let private sector do what it does best -- take risks and compete -- peacefully -- while we still can compete peacefully.
Seastead this.
Something over a year ago I came up with an alternative to the Pons-Fleischman testing apparatus that eliminated some of the problems with their design. (The biggest problem is that the operation of the cell pumps large amounts of heat into it, orders of magnitude larger than the amount being measured, making it difficult to detect the effect.) I was too lazy to set it up as an experiment so I made it available to the public. I also sent it to a few of labs doing research in cold fusion. Never heard back, so I guess they're deluged with ideas from other crackpots too. :-D
Can't be rich if you're dead, and the oil companies will get their hitmen right on you the second you make a breakthrough.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
and no, it isn't just taking place in people's basements. folks at Oak Ridge and the russian academy of science have both repeated experiments involving ultrasound ...
I first read about this (sonoluminescence - putting ultrasound into specially prepared water in a spherical beaker causes a small bubble in it to emit light) in the February, 1995 issue of Scientific American. In the column The Amateur Scientist, it tells how to do it. It is quite an interesting phenomenon with no good explanation of what causes it. It had been known decades earlier, but only recently had a method been developed to consistently generate it.
In the last year or two I read an online science article that speculates the light is caused by the bubble becoming so highly compressed and reaching such a high temperature (apparently during the peaks of the ultrasonic wave - the frequency is tuned to the resonant frequency of the beaker, which then focuses all the acoustic energy into a point in the center) that for a brief moment nuclear reactions take place. But last I read this is yet to be verified.
After writing the above (I'd rather just correct it than rewrite it) I did some online research: Nuclear reactions are NOT suspected as the source of light, but it is believed that the setups to make sonoluminescence can momentarily achieve the temperature (a million degrees) and pressure required for fusion.
Here are two relevant links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence Wiki article on Sonoluminescence
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/15/4/8 "Bubble Fusion" claim at Oak Ridge
It's nothing like the Pons and Fleischmann style cold fusion and has NO relation to it.
Tag lost or not installed.
Remember, according to standard nuclear physics, the deuterium should not be doing anything either. So, what is there to forbid and H-H reaction? It would have to be something like,
H + H = D+ positron
OR
H + H + electron = D + Energy
Where the energy is released into the lattice as a whole, which is one of the better CF theories out there, imho. If we don't know how something works, we can't say much about how it works. H-H reaction is not forbidden.
They agreed to review it, and the composition of the reviewers was understandably nuclear physicists... many of whom are deeply in hot fusion research. That means they stand to lose a lot by CF's successes.
Whether or not there is enough excess heat to be useful is one question. Whether there is nuclear transmutation is yet another. I've spent the past year doing research with Steven Jones at BYU, and in surveying the literature and conducting our own experiments, we've seen some very intriguing results. Sr + d -> Y, Zr, Mo. If you look at Japanese research, Iwamura has had Cs -> Pr, which is a rare earth and you DON'T get Cesium dropping in proportion to Pr's increase by any sort of environmental contamination. Especially not when it's in a sealed vacuum chamber with d2 gas permeation through the metal complex (Pa, CaO) the Cs is deposited on.
There's data from a Japanese researcher (Ikegami) in Sweden (University of Uppsala) who has found that with deuterium ion beams at various target metals, the nuclear cross sectional area for capture increases dramatically at 10 keV and just gets larger the lower you get. He wasn't even doing CF research, but it's quite interesting to see that you don't require enormous energies in order to achieve d+Z transmutation.
Perhaps at this point it would be smart to realize that foreign researcher are leaving us in the dust. Myself, I have real doubts about the usefulness of any supposed excess heat, but low energy nuclear transmutation has a lot of intriguing stuff. At the very least, we need to look at the effect of electronic structures in metal lattices on the coulomb barrier for d+Z reactions. In Iwamura's experiments, for example, he got null results when he did it without CaO, when he used H2 instead of D2, etc. What did the addition (in thin film deposition) of an impurity like CaO do to enable a reaction that straight palladium couldn't do?
Anyway, yeah, there's SOMETHING going on.
Of course after the war Heisenberg claimed that the only reason why the Germans couldn't get a reactor going was that he was making sure their efforts wouldn't succeeed, and thus Nazi Germany would not develop nuclear weapons.
His claim didn't convince everyone. Many think he did his best and failed.
This controversy is the topic of the play "Copenhagen". If it plays in your city do yourself a favor and go and see it.
Unless you post your sources, including a handwritten and signed statement by Dr Pons himself, your comment will be considered hogwash. After all you're making an extraordinary claim here, so we want extraordinary evidence.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
There were no new experiments done. Scientists selected by the Department of Energy simply did a peer review of several experiments which had been done over the past ten years by various labs.
18 scientists were selected to review the collected studies.
According to the report. .
So basically, the jury is split. And if the DOE's sampling of experts is a fair yard stick, then it would seem that when the question is put forth, about half the scientific community would say that there is compelling evidence supporting Cold Fusion. --And given the massive bias and fear related with the subject, (where scientists do not want to be associated with unpopular theories for fear of losing their jobs and professional credibility), the results of this peer review are especially intriguing.
In any case, this is a rather different picture than the one usually painted around here where most Slashdotters foam at the mouth and yell absurdities about it being impossible to get something from nothing, despite the fact that there was never once made any such claim regarding Cold Fusion.
The real reason is that Heisenberg got his theory/sums wrong. He thought that the size of the lump of Uranium 235 that you would need to get a chain reaction going would need to be a ball equal in diameter to the mean free path of a neutron in Uranium 235. This leads to needing huge quantities of U235 to start the chain reaction. In reality it only needs to be half this which leads to a much smaller lump of U235, which is practical to drop from a plane. From memory he calculated you needed something like 100000kg of U235 to make a bomb, which ment there was no delivery system for a bomb even on the horizon.
After the war he claimed this was a deliberate mistake to stop the Nazi's making a bomb. My opinion is that this is a convenitent excuse to cover up his embarising mistake.
One can compute the rate of fusion at low temperature using straightfoward quantum mechanics (it's not even relativistic). Steve Koonin et al. published this in Nature shortly after the ruckus started.
The result? Rates are undetectably low, many orders of magnitude too low to explain the putative results.
But it's actually worse, since once fusion occurs the result (in the sense of the fusion products produced) should be independent of how the nuclei got together (for a given excitation energy). This means cold fusion of deuterium, if by some miracle it could occur, would be pumping out lots of neutrons. Cold fusion of protons + deuterons would be producing energetic gammas. None of these are seen at rates consistent with the putative energy production.
Physics rightly conclude that experimental error, incompetence, or fraud are the most likely explanations, when the phenomena can't be reproduced at will and would require multiple miracles to occur at all.
As a former (hot) fusion researcher, I have to comment on this. No one that I have worked with has been dismissive of cold fusion efforts. Highly skeptical, yes. But not dismissive. The prevailing thought is that calorimeters can lie -- there can be unforseen chemical reactions at work. But if you can measure neutrons of appropriate energy (or other fusion products, depending on the reactants) then some nuclear reaction must be taking place.
That said, I don't believe that any hot fusion scientist fully trusts the methods of the cold fusion researchers. The cold fusion concepts don't mesh very well with the proven hot fusion body of knowledge. BUT - show me some neutrons and I'll consider almost anything.
Oh, and having also worked on sono-fusion, yes there was (and still is) a lot of controversy simply because the neutron yields were so low (little above background). But again, that controversy is giving way as more data is taken.
- Jim
#include "humorous_pop_culture_reference.h"
If you are worried about lunar mining operations becoming the next DeBeers of the Helium-3 extraction, there really is nothing unique about the Moon itself. Any relatively large body without a sustainable atmosphere (sorry neither Mars nor Venus is a candidate) will have similar concentrations of Helium-3 in its soil, regardless of where it is found in the Solar System, and there are a couple hundred decent candidates in the Asteroid Belt alone, not to mention both Phobos and Deimos. That will put an absolute cap on what Lunar Miners can charge for their product in the long term.
It will be more expensive to get Helium-3 from one of the asteroids than from the Moon, but not significantly more so. And no single country will be capable of claiming and controlling all of the asteroids... there are too many of them and it would take a space navy 3x (or more) the size of the U.S. Navy, in terms of capital warships and space "sailors". I don't see that happening any time soon.
The real control issue is going to be the entry/exit process to and from the Earth, and that will indeed be under control of terrestrial governments, although some enterprising South Pacific nations may take advantage of their status and make it easier for people to do space travel from their islands. In short, there is no reason to worry about a monopoly due to interests in space for at least fusion projects.