Fleischmann to Work on Commercial Fusion Heater

deeptrace writes "California company D2Fusion has announced they are hiring Dr. Martin Fleischmann (of 'Pons and Fleischmann' fame). The company belives that they can produce a commercial fusion based home heating prototype within a year. They are also looking at other applications, such as using it as a heat source for a commercially available Stirling electrical generator."

Comments

Hmm...come to think about it...

[sznupi]

A lot of businesses rely on stupidity of people. Usually on stupidity of consumers. This one just relies on stupidity of investors...

"Within a year"

[A beautiful mind]

Most of them say that. "Within a year". "Within two years". "Within four years".

But never "now", or "in the stores next week", or "come, see this working!"

What a load of crap

[hairykrishna]

A company press release explains that, in brief, "cold" fusion involves the fusion of two nuclei of deuterium or heavy hydrogen into a single helium atom, accompanied only by a burst of heat. Unlike "thermonuclear hot fusion" that requires the plasma-inducing inferno temperatures of the sun or a hydrogen bomb, solid-state fusion reactions can be produced at normal temperatures in certain hydrogen-loving metals without unleashing hot fusion's dangerous radiation.

Genius. They can't detect any excess neutrons so obviously there's a new, radiation free, type of D-D fusion going on.

Re:What a load of crap

[barawn]

That's kindof the crux of the problem, actually. Assuming their measurements are right (that's a bit of an assumption, but there are quite a few people who claim that Pd-D cells generate excess heat, so maybe it's not THAT crazy) they're correct that it has to be nuclear - the energy density required is too high for it to be chemical.

But it doesn't have to be -fusion-. Palladium is past iron, so -in theory- you can gain energy by transmuting it downward, and some of them are claiming that they're seeing elements after the cell was run that weren't there before.

I'm not saying they're right, of course. It's still physics that would break with standard nuclear physics, but I'm always surprised that they keep pushing it as -fusion-, when they clearly don't understand (and admit that they don't understand!) what (if anything) is going on.

Note, incidentally, that if you read, for instance, the DOE report on anomalous heat from D-Pd cells, that both sides of the discussion are at fault here. A fair number of the criticisms ("your explanation doesn't agree with current theory, so it must be wrong!" even when the explanation is essentially "it must be nuclear, but we have no idea how") and arguments on both sides are pretty crappy.

Re:...Fusion in a ... year?

[hey!]

Lets hope Dr.Martin Fleischmann doesn't embaress himself again.

What has he got to lose? Work out the possible scenarios

1. Fleischman is a crank and...
1.1 He succeeds by accident.
      Success through monumental incompetence is indistinguishable from briliance to the general public.
      See Christopher Columbus. Fleischman will spend the rest of his life unjustly rubbing his
      detractors' noses in their public humiliation.
1.2 He fails.
      Nobody's opinion of him changes. The only people who profess to believe him are credulous people
      and those who would exploit them. The people who've been saying he was a crank will be vindicated.
      The wait and see people will also feel vindicated, and continue to wait and see, as it's no skin of
      their proverbial noses.

2. Fleischman is a misunderstood genius and ...
2.1 He succeeds by dint of preserverence.
      Vindication is sweet. Fleischman will spend the rest of his life justly rubbing his
      detractors' noses in their public humiliation.
2.2 He fails through no fault of his own.
      Nobody's opinion of him changes. The only people who profess to believe him are credulous people
      and those who would exploit them. The people who've been saying he was a crank will be vindicated.
      The wait and see people will also feel vindicated, and continue to wait and see, as it's no skin of
      their proverbial noses.

The moral of the story will either way: it never pays to give up. The only thing at stake is whether future generations of school children will be forced to produced earnest essays drawing this conclusion from the story.

Re:neutrons

[barawn]

Wait, that's a crappy argument. I mean, a really, really crappy one.

By that argument, you could say that Ray Davis's experiment didn't work, because it didn't agree with the Standard Model, so it obviously must have been wrong.

Ray Davis built the first neutrino detection experiment and found that there was only about a third of the neutrinos coming from the Sun that you would expect.

We now know that he was right - the Standard Model was (slightly) wrong, although in hindsight it should've been relatively obvious.

Saying "their experiment doesn't work because it doesn't agree with the Standard Model" is horrible science. The Standard Model is a theory. It doesn't describe reality. It's a -guess- for how the world works - a well founded, well supported guess, and the best one we have, but still a guess. If you find that the world works in a different way, that doesn't mean your experiment must be wrong.

There are plenty of other reasons to criticize cold fusion (the lack of repeatability being the main one) but "it doesn't agree with current theory" is about the worst criticism you can give.