Slashdot Mirror
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."
Lets hope Dr.Martin Fleischmann doesn't embaress himself again. I very much doubt this too be true, but fusion in a year would be great!
A lot of businesses rely on stupidity of people. Usually on stupidity of consumers. This one just relies on stupidity of investors...
One that hath name thou can not otter
My first though was "What is it, April 1st?" heat a home with fusion?? Hmm nope, not april 1st. Rent is not due.
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!"
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Perhaps it will fuse hydrogen atoms with oxygen atoms - after all, no one said anything about nuclear fusion, now did they ?-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Genius. They can't detect any excess neutrons so obviously there's a new, radiation free, type of D-D fusion going on.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
You have to admit, subjecting these claims to the marketplace should prove whether or not there's anything to them. The number of people willing to believe their houses are warm when they are cold is probably a lot smaller than the number of people willing to believe they've been cured by quack medicine.
But... the more things change...
In 1945, The World Publishing Company published a nice little volume, The Atomic Age Opens edited by one Gerald Wendt and helping explain to the public what recent events meant. Along with quotations by military people who had witnessed the Trinity test, tutorials on neutrons and protons "doing their stuff" (as George Orwell once phrased it), and so forth, were some predictions for the future:
"Dr. R. M. Langer, physics research associate at the California Institute of Technology, said five years ago in _Collier's_ magazine that U-235 could create a civilization in which man would dwell underground for better living....
[In the future] 'Light is generated by fluorescence which occurs around U-235 and is piped under the house through transparent plastic sheets along the interiors of rooms,' Langer said. 'The household supply of U-235 is stored and used slowly in the chamber where plants are grown. Appropriate portions are automatically delivered through a tube-distribution system to stations where they are needed to provide heat or power for machinery or cooking....'
Families will travel short distances in automobiles powered by small chunks of U-235 in a water tank inside the car, he said....
Admitting that none of the ideas he envisioned have yet been worked out in practice, Langer declared that the difficulties were those of detail...."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I've a fusion powered home heating source already.
It's a south facing window.
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.
>
Do you know what your helium footprint is?
Are you producing excess helium with your basement fusion unit just so you can run your massively overclocked Intel Macintosh on your zero refresh time flat screen monitor at enough frames per second to keep you alive in Duke Nukem Forever?
What about all that helium produced when you're charging up your jet pack or opening the wormhole to your new office in Tokyo?
We're producing so much helium now that that the earth is lighter than its ever been! People are speaking in high pitched voices remote regions of New Jersey, and there are reports of rain falling up! Soon, we could see the earth become light enough that its mass is no longer in balance with its speed and our orbit of the sun increases, causing a new ice age! And its your fault! Stop the madness, burn fossil fuels.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
There is no question that Pons and Fleischmann discovered some kind of previous unknown phenomena in their U Utah lab in the late 1980's. The question is what? If Pons and Fleischmann send in their research to scientific journals saying we did this experiment and we regularly got excess heat we can't expalin and we don't know why, Pons and Fleischmann are heroes to the scientific community.
Where Pons and Fleischmann made their mistake was rushing to the press to stick a label "Cold Fusion" to their unexplained phenomena that they even admitted they didn't really understand.
Whatever the phenomenon Pons and Fleischmann discovered is, too many people have repeated similar work and been successful getting similar results.
Mendel did a lot of great work on genetics and heredity without knowing a thing about DNA. I have a feeling the Pons and Fleischmann work will be a similar situation. They found an experiment that proves something in a science we are incapable of analyzing yet.
On August 18, 2005, the Company acquired D2Fusion Inc. ("D2Fusion"), as a wholly owned subsidiary in exchange for a five (5) year convertible debenture in the amount of two million dollars ($2,000,000) and an agreement to advance up to two million two hundred thousand ($2,200,000) in the form of loans over the next twelve (12) months to capitalize D2Fusion' initial business plan. The stock purchase agreement further commits the Company to assist D2Fusion to have direct access to public markets within the next six (6) months for the purpose of raising additional funds in excess of those committed by the Company. D2Fusion is a research and development company staffed by scientists and engineers working toward the delivery of proprietary solid-state fusion aimed at entry level heat and energy applications for homes and industry. Solid-state fusion is a technology more widely recognized under the name "cold-fusion." Unlike the reactions in "cold-fusion," D2Fusion technology uses much simpler and more reliable solid state processes more akin to high temperature super-conductor physics to produce and control radiation-free fusion reactions. In this simplest form of fusion two deterium atoms which are contained and constrained under solid state conditions fuse to form a single helium atom. Each new helium atom created is accompanied by an enormous energy release. Under ideal conditions, one gram of hydrogen fuel is equivalent to billions of watts of energy. Russ George and Dr. Tom Passell, who head the Palo Alto based company, have been involved with solid state fusion research since 1989. Successful experimental prototypes have been tested at Stanford Research Institute. The immediate intention of D2Fusion is to produce kilowatt scale thermal prototypes which will be further tested and refined by collaborating research groups in the Silicon Valley, Los Alamos, the US Navy, and Frascati, Italy. D2Fusion's ultimate goal is to produce heat and electricity at a fraction of today's cost with no emissions. The Company is well aware of the controversy surrounding "cold fusion" technology. However, the Company believes that there is sufficient global evidence that the risk/reward ratio merits investment. Should D2Fusion's prototype technology be scaled to commercial size it will help solve much of the world's energy, water, and pollution problems.
That "successful experimental prototypes have been tested at Stanford Research Institute" line looks very suspicious. For one thing, there is no "Stanford Research Institute" today. It's been "SRI International" since 1970.