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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.""
Finally, a news that is "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.".
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Only old koreans use cold fusion. Everyone else has moved to J2EE and then LAMP
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
How about the Department of Fish and Game releasing their report on Bigfoot? That coming soon?
I think it is commendable that so much effort is being put into a field of research that there has been little result in in the past 20 years. The results simply are not important, as we have seen in the race to defeat The NP Problem, it is the struggle to further the scientific knowledge. Even bearded terminal hackers should bow to the (surely bearded) physics hackers who thanklessly work on this day and night
We salute you!
Lots of people felt the same way about nuclear energy in the 40s (both for war and peacetime use). Just because we can't make it work now doesn't mean that will be the case in the future. Nor does it mean we should abandon all avenues of research pertaining to it.
DOE! /ducks
Oh dear!
Cold fusion here!
Unknown host pong.
You want real progress? An X-Prive for cold fusion or something. Offer a million bucks and suddenly everyone's falling over themselves to spend 2 million in order to win.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
What about all those environmentalists who respond with "What about Chernobyl?" every time someone mentions nuclear fission?
While the theory of fusion seems great, fission is possible now and should be explored further. If we are ever to move to a hydrogen economy, we'll have to start soon and we can't wait for fusion.
Actually, that was the second draft. I believe the first draft read: "Despite committing some of the best minds in Physics to the task, we seem to have been one-uped by a bunch of chemists who clearly know more about energy than the er, Department formerly known as 'Energy.' We apologize for wasting tax payer money." "Ok guys, shut those experiments down. Steve got cold fusion. Turns out that the reaction only occurs in people's basements." Damn. Time for a career change. -WF
... to provide evidence for low energy nuclear reactions. These experiments involved low energy deuterium beams impinging on deuterium loaded metal foils such as titanium.
In moments like these I'm glad I bought the tin foil hat and not the more luxurious titanium one.
After all the years and all the hundreds of millions spent you have to wonder if fusion is a practical answer. It appears that a commercial reactor is fifty to a hundred years off. By all accounts we have maybe fifty years before our energy needs hit a critical point with things starting to go down hill in another twenty. No one has yet proven that a reactor can function at better than break even. Should the efforts be redirected at existing technologies? Solar, wind and methane solutions exist now. Isn't it better to solve our short term problems before counting on long term solutions that can't be implemented in time to avoid disaster. Won't this force us to resort to coal and nuclear when oil runs out or is that the plan?
The "conclusion" is in this PDF document: Looks like it's a mixed bag. Apparently 1/3rd of the reviewers were very intrigued by the new results [and at least one reviewer was convinced].
Funding recommendations are similarly indecisive:
Charge Element 1: Examine and evaluate the experimental evidence for the occurrences of nuclear reactions in condensed matter at low energies (less that a few electron volts).
Two-thirds of the reviewers commenting on Charge Element 1 did not feel the evidence was conclusive for low energy nuclear reactions, one found the evidence convincing, and the remainder indicated they were somewhat convinced. Many reviewers noted that poor experiment design, documentation, background control and other similar issues hampered the understanding and interpretation of the results presented.
Charge Element 2: Determine whether the evidence is sufficiently conclusive to demonstrate that such nuclear reactions occur.
The preponderance of the reviewers' evaluations indicated that Charge Element 2, the occurrence of low energy nuclear reactions, is not conclusively demonstrated by the evidence presented. One reviewer believed that the occurrence was demonstrated, and several reviewers did not address the question.
Charge Element 3: Determine whether there is a scientific case for continued efforts in these studies and, if so, to identify the most promising areas to be pursued.
The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for experiments that address specific scientific issues relevant to the question of whether or not there is anomalous energy production in Pd/D systems, or whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at energies on the order of a few eV. These proposals should meet accepted scientific standards, and undergo the rigors of peer review. No reviewer recommended a focused federally funded program for low energy nuclear reactions.
Maybe one day this cold fusion nonsense would lead to progress in something - maybe calorimeters... I'm an optimist - so shoot me :)
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all i could think of was the wonderfully done cinimatic on Starcraft where they open up the case to the bomb, and they have a bunch of beer cans being kept cool by cold fusion. Of course the beers would be completely frozen, but a funny cinimatic nontheless...
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
for basement mad scientists is that the attachment to the doc finally has a clear diagram for building a cold fusion cell. I know that when this all splashed fifteen years ago, the biggest gripe other scientists had was the lack of a clear experiment plan to replicate. Well, now we've got the diagrams and the electrolysis Palladium loading protocol. So if you really wanna find out for yourself, you can.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
Proven reserves of uranium ore (consisting of U3O8 in combination with varying other elements) are in the millions, possibly billions, of metric tons worldwide. Even at relatively low grades (~2% seems to be a common level), a billion tons of ore would result in some 20 million tons of U3O8, which could be separated and enriched enough to provide power for centuries, especially when combined with breeder reactors that allow existing low-grade material to be enriched which could extend the fuel's useful life to thousands of years. Uranium mining operations are at work at least in the US, China, Australia, and Canada, and I imagine in a number of other nations around the world.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
Sadly, it is still questionable if it works right.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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
Even Pons admitted it. A few months into cold fusion's hayday in the 1989s, a scientist asked them to use regular water instead of heavy water, as a control. They did--and got the *exact same results*. Hydrogen will NOT fuse with hydrogen except under extreme circumstances--deuterium might. Of course Pons covered it up and cold fusion went from foolishness to fraud.
"Two-thirds of the reviewers commenting on Charge Element 1 did not feel the evidence was conclusive for low energy nuclear reactions, one found the evidence convincing, and two disappeared in a pair of 340 kiloton thermonuclear blasts"
APS is the American Physical Society. They had a short session on cold fusion, and Chubb was the session chair. The skepticism surrounding this research is so great; my impression was that these people are driving themselves half mad with their efforts to get anyone to take them seriously. But addressing the data presented at that session alone, I would agree with the DOE's findings. I think it is good for the DOE to recommend funding for peer reviewed research. But, I cant imagine what clear eyed researcher with a sufficiently broad perspective would be tempted to invest their time and reputation in this research, given the attitude of the scientific community in general. Too risky.
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.
Look more closely at what I wrote: U3O8 -- three uranium atoms and eight oxygen atoms, or uranium oxide. That's the most commonly-cited form I've found in terms of ores (though there are various other molecules, I'm sure.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
From this page-
Sound barrier:
"The term sound barrier is often associated with supersonic flight. In particular, "breaking the sound barrier" is the process of accelerating through Mach 1 and going from subsonic to supersonic speeds. The term originated in the 1940s when researchers discovered a large increase in drag that seemed to indicate that an infinite amount of thrust would be needed to fly at the speed of sound. In other words, some believed that a physical barrier existed that would prevent an aircraft from ever being able to travel at supersonic speeds. Since there obviously is no such barrier, the term sound barrier is outdated and really should not be used any more. Nevertheless, it has become a popular part of the human language, and continues in use."
Obviously the people who believed this were using flawed methods of reasoning. However, claiming there were none who thought this way is simply denying history. The Wikipedia article has a good synopsis. Yes the fact that bullets were known to travel at supersonic velocities should have clued these people in as to the errors in their equations. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in another reply, scientists sometimes choose to ignore factual data that contradicts their preferred theories.
Science is ideally ground-up observation, hypothesization, experimentation, observation and so on. However, if some "ideal" factoid is intruded into the process, it can convert the lazy and unimaginative worker from a properly scientific sceptic to an authoritarian priest of current dogma.
Once this happens the only means of progress is by waiting for the old guardians of the faith to die of old age, or by shooting them earlier. The "sound barrier" had the magical authority of an equation behind it, "natural law" expressed in mathmematics. Given the ritual efficacy of a mathematical equation at freezing thought processes, it's a wonder we aren't STILL flying at less than the speed of sound. Actually, I suppose that generally we still are, but we know we don't have to.
Similar situations have occurred repeatedly in science. It's why we actually need crackpots. Occasionally the effort of debunking them can open up entire new vistas.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Well, I guess we're out of luck for cold fusion, so now let's all throw our support to zero point energy! Come on, Tesla believed in it! And he invented the radio and alternating current!
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.
I believe (from hearsay in the field) that the reason cold fusion has been investigated so long is that oil companies in the US are required to invest in alternative energy research.
Where better for them to put their money than in an area firmly believed by most nuclear pyhsicists to have a near zero chance of challenging oil.
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I don't know how that reads to you, but to me it sounds like they've been consistently observing this dramatic effect for 15 years and they can't explain it. I think this is exactly the right thing for scientists to muck around with. I'm not saying it's cold fusion, but it's something they can't explain. So they had better get cracking and explain it!
"Bottom line: technologies like antigravity and cold fusion will continue to be ignored because their implications on the modern military-industrial complex. Can you imagine a world where anyone can fly anywhere in under an hour for FREE? I would love to see that world, but unfortunately the powers that be don't."
Or they just don't work. Frankly if such a thing was possible in the 60s or 70s wouldn't you think that Russia or China would be using antigravity to get ahead of the US? or do you think they are in on it as well. There where lots of outlandish ideas in the 40s 50s and even 60s. I have some books that talk about atomic airliners that use iron vapor for a reaction mass. Underground cities to protect them from atomic bombs. And the atomic car that never need gas... Wow it must be hard to live in a world where you are sure that these marvels are being hidden from you...
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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"