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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.""
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
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.
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.