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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."
The article clearly notes that this is nowhere near break-even. Yet, as it notes, there are many applications beyond positive energy production. If it is a good source of neutrons, then it is well worth the effort.
I am optimistic. We have a slightly-puritanical mindset that we have to work for everything. Well...we are coming upon an easy and elegant solution to our energy problems. Even fission needs to be explored more as we find newer ways to contain the radiation (nuclear batteries lasting years could come soon if we get over our hangups).
Transcend Humanity. Please.
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.
Does a duplicate post count?
OMG, I'm on slashdot!!
/sorry
//had to
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
From the article:
Instead of using high temperatures and incredible densities to ram protons together, the scientists at UCLA cleverly used the structure of an unusual crystal.
That crystal wouldn't happen to be Dilithium would it?
*ahem*
From the comment:
In other words, an article in the Christian Science Monitor -- a fine newspaper, but not a scientific journal by any stretch -- in which the reporter casually asserts without citation that "other scientists" have "reviewed" the results, does not an independent confirmation make.
You can't just wave your hands and say "oh yeah, others have repeated it, others have reviewed it, we're done here." Who are these others? What exactly did they find, and how closely did everything match the original inputs & outputs? What kind of "review" did they do? We're still just dealing with anecdotes and hearsay, not scientific analysis.
What the grandparent poster implicitly asked for, reasonably, was [presumably refereed] articles in [presumably credible] scientific journals documented that other [presumably non-pseudo-science] researchers had taken the procedure described here, replicated the experimental apparatus, conducted their own trial of the experiment, and then verified that the results they obtained were in agreement with the ones predicted by the original researchers. If all that happens, then, and only then, are we getting somewhere.
Until then, this doesn't sound like much more than yet another cold fusion pipe dream.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL