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Cold Fusion in a Breadbox Instead of a Bottle
rawbytes writes "For the last few years, mentioning cold fusion around scientists has been a little like mentioning Bigfoot or UFO sightings. After the 1989 announcement of fusion in a bottle and the subsequent retraction, the whole idea of cold fusion seemed a bit beyond the pale. But that's all about to change. A very reputable, very careful group of scientists at the University of Los Angeles (Brian Naranjo, Jim Gimzewski, Seth Putterman) has initiated a fusion reaction using a laboratory device that's not much bigger than a breadbox, and works at roughly room temperature. This time, it looks like the real thing." From the article: "Scientists have gotten fusion to occur in the laboratory before, but for the most part, they've tried to mimic conditions inside the sun by whipping hydrogen gas up to extreme temperatures or slamming atoms together in particle accelerators. Both of those options require huge energies and gigantic equipment, not the sort of stuff easily available to build a generator. Is there any way of getting protons close enough together for fusion to occur that doesnt require the energy output of a large city to make it happen? The answer, it turns out, is yes."
Thursday April 28, @16:57
It was reported on in the press (MSNBC) and Slashdot had a lively discussion here and slashdotted a UCLA server. There is more at a (hopefully non-slashdotted) UCLA website.
More info here: http://rodan.physics.ucla.edu/pyrofusion/
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
That's a pretty heady group.
Putterman is particularly famous for his work on sonoluminescence.
Funnily enough, this is not really the core research of Putterman, his earlier work has largely been in the area of blackbody radiation, sonoluminescence and certain related quantum phenomena.
More technical details would be nice.
TFA typo'd. They're at UCLA.
First: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/2 7/1930218
2 8/1518226
0 7/1635251
Second: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/
And now Third: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I know that I would give more weight to the CSM's coverage of this story than I would, say, Fox News, The Washington Post or Slashdot.org.
The CSM deliberately limits its religious content to a few columns. They have their own international reporting offices. They ate lauded for their accuracy by people from all over the political spectrum.
For pity's sake, at least wiki something before you spouting off. You should change you nickname because "Stranger4U" now equals "Astonishingly Ignorant Fuckhead Bigot"
You'll never get the electric field strong enough to bring protons together - it is the same crap as bottled fusion.
Real cold fusion is about meso-atoms that are much smaller because muons are heavier than electrons. And so they could be moved closer to each other while being still neutral. Use Google - http://www.google.com/search?&q=mesoatom+fusion
There's no particular reason to doubt it, and assuming it's true, it's not even particularly exciting or promising as a way of producing useful energy. "Fusion" is a broad term. Particle accelerators fuse nuclei all the time, and there's nothing unusual about doing it with beams that have been accelerated by an electrostatic field. A small tandem van de Graaff accelerator can easily be fit in a small room, and some colleges run them for use in undergraduate and graduate lab courses. The thing is, nuclei are small targets, so the cross-section for fusion is extremely small. Virtually all of the beam particles stop in the target without undergoing fusion, and all the energy spent in accelerating them is wasted. In a typical nuclear physics experiment with a beam hitting a metal foil target, the power required to run the accelerator is many kilowatts, the power deposited by the beam's kinetic energy in the target is in the watt or milliwatt range, and the energy used up or produced in the actual fusion reactions is a many, many orders of magnitude too small to be detected as heat.
Find free books.
The problem was that it was unrelyable, impractical and highly dangerous. (A researcher at SRI was killed when a hydrogen cell exploded.) But it did work.
Peer review is not the only measure of a thing's veracity. Unfortunately, there is a great pressure to conform to what is accepted by the peers (or be discredited). It does not always happen that scientists will only base their opinions on recorded data. Preconceptions, credibility and politics come into play.
Cold fusion is an excellent example of it. Fleishman and Pons were not physicists but electrochemists. Controlled, fusion (by conventional high energy means) producing more energy than it consumed is still elusive (although correct me if I'm wrong, I think they managed to get slightly passed breakeven). Imagine the politics of having "newbies" in the field (as any physiscist would put it), manage with much less material investment what the best minds in the field haven't managed for decades and enormous investments. Before "peers" (or in this case, physicists, not their electrochemist peers) would accept it officially, they needed to have a theory... the numbers could not be accepted without a theory (which goes against the tenets of science, where if your observations do not match what the theory says, you have to start thinking if your theory is OK).
It wasn't trivial to reproduce the results. The proportion of electrode atoms and deuterons in contact had to be exact or from a 100% reproducibility you quickly fall to 10% reproducibility if you only have 90% saturation. But in the early days, much was still to verify... and because the peers couldn't accept the numbers you couldn't get favourably peer reviewed, although enough others got similar results to suggest that something was indeed happening, although it might not be trivial to reproduce. If it hadn't been for the media coverage, the whole thing would be dead now. Nobody would have heard of it, since it would have been killed before being published in a peer reviewed journal.
It does have striking similarities to the problems with fission. At first, uranium nuclei were bombarded with accelerated protons, but the energy threshold required to cause fission was too high. It was because of Leo Szilard's idea to use the neutrons to cause a chain reaction that fission was eventually made useful. Because Szilard was a physisist, and he had come up with the mechanism first his ideas were more readily accepted. The relative investment of time and money into fission was not comparable to the amounts invested in fusion. Other than that, the problem is similar. Breaking even is difficult when you ar trying to push protons together. finding a way to lower the threshold is the key.
For more info on Cold Fusion and current theories as to how this could be, check: http://www.lenr-canr.org/
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
If memory serves me correctly Fe fusion is actually endothermic, the reaction absorbs energy rather than giving off energy. I seem to remember iron-cycle fusion involved in supernovas, the star's core goes into the iron-cycle and cools/collapes so fast that the outer layers, remain behind and eventualy collapse as a shell which when it reaches critical density begins to fuse itself around the inner core, the explosion caused by the shell's ignition both blows off the shell, and causes the core to implode giving the energy to create elements heavier than iron.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This isn't cold fusion, in the region where the fusion occurs there are very high temperatures. This basically just increases the hydrogen gas pressure in a very small region thus "emulating conditions in the sun" by using electric forces rather than gravitational or magnetic. It's very cool, but it's not cold.
I would have to grant that "amature nuclear physics" is something that is widely discouraged by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, as is "amature chemistry". In other words, somebody who is not a part of the mainstream research community studying the subject but rather somebody who litterally tinkers in their garage trying new things just because knowledge is cool.
Other scientific disciplines have numerous amatures involved, notably astronomy, and to a lesser extent biology, and even computer science. Having a telescope in your backyard, while still making you a weirdo or a definitive "nerd", is not going to get you on the Dept. of Homeland Security's "watch list". They might raise an eyebrow if they think you are a "hacker", but that is peanuts compared to if they think you are making explosives. Or even hint that you are manufacturing pharmaceuticals without DEA permission (choose your poison on this comment).
Nuclear material experimentation is just over the top, and sure to get police involved. Unfortunately, the energies involved with nuclear energy are so large that a single individual can create a huge mess, and potentially cause a lot of radioactive debris, if not take out a small corner of the city they are living in.
In some ways this is too bad, as it is the amatures that come up with the really cool things, and a small group working in their basement or garage that often come up with new ideas that traditional research departments overlook. It is also a sad statement that some areas of knowledge are considered too hazardous for "ordinary people" to study and understand.
RE: Oil
The petroleum industry has a weakened influence in the USA, and becoming less over time. Part of this is because so much is imported that now oil reserves are considered a matter of the State Department rather than a Department of Energy or some other more domestic agency. While "big oil" is still influential in Washington D.C., I do see an end in sight for their influence, and that the petroleum industry will be focused more on lubricants rather than energy sources. The key to look for is how motor vehicles are taxed, and when you no longer pay for highway construction on a per gallon basis, you know that "big oil" is dead.
This is already a consideration and subject of debate in many state legislatures, as well as in the U.S. Congress.
Let's see -- they've talked about cracks in the electrodes, and stressed crystals.
...
Can we make a better fusion device using precise fabrication tools? -- produce exactly the right materials and spacing to create tiny little accelerators, artificial crystals, to optimize this procedure?
If so, can we make a "sea urchin" with a few thousand such little accelerators, all pointed precisely at a tiny pellet -- a miniature version of the giant laser devices currently being built?
Build the capacitor, the accelerators and the fusion core all on a little chip, wind it up
If so there'd be a nice pellet for for a fusion pellet gun to use to drive an Orion-type spacecraft. Even if it DID take more energy to manufacture than it'd produce, it'd be one heck of a good way to store energy for, um, rapid decomposition devices (things that go boom).
Or, a wholly different approach --
I've always wondered what would happen if someone manages to cause fusion to occur between a couple of Bose-Einstein Condensates.
Make them out of, on the one hand, tritium atoms, and on the other hand, deuterium atoms. Result, one large 'atom' of each element. Very large. Then clap your hands. Fusion?
Or better yet, use condensates of boron and hydrogen, of course.
The boron-hydrogen method is described as currently being worked on (not using Bose-Einstein condensates -- using something like the Philo Farnsworth accelerator), if I read it correctly, here:
http://www.focusfusion.org/energy2.html
Being without modpoints ill just reply.
Yes thats correct. Fe represents the balance point in the order of things.
As a star dies (runs out of H) It begings fusing the He and then Lithium... and will as it gets older, fuse heavier and heavier elements. this is responsible for the swelling of the stars size. Its a 2 stage effect. The difference between the required energy for H fusion and that required for He fusion. Once the H is used up the star begins to colapse, upon reaching the required temp/pressure for He fusion it suddenlt expands out as a new supply of energy is found to counteract gravity. Its outer layers get less dense and expand. While the inner core contracts getting denser as it fuses heavier nuclei. A "middle-sized" star will stop this reaction at Carbon. as there isnt enough energy ftom gravity to compress past this from the stars mass. But with large stars whis continues right up to Fe (Iron-56) and this reaction absorbs energy. And the inside of the star suddenly stops working and the whole star, no longer supported by the output of energy from its core collapses in on itself and goes Supernova.
Ahh Nuclear physics... such fun
XML - A clever joke would be here if