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Cold Fusion Gets a Boost From the US Navy
Tjeerd writes in to alert us to the publication in a highly respected, peer-reviewed journal of results indicative of table-top fusion. The US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, CA (called Spawar) has apparently been conducting research on "cold fusion" since the days of the discredited report of Pons and Fleischmann. They are reporting on the reproducible detection of highly energetic charged particles from a wire coated in palladium-deuterium and subjected to either an electric or a magnetic field. Their paper was published in February in the journal Naturwissenschaften (which has published work by Einstein, Heisenberg, and Lorenz). New Scientist also has a note about the fusion work but it is available only to subscribers.
You can bet the Navy is interested in any portable, high-power energy source that could exceed the efficiency of fission reactors. Those rail guns they're pimping probably take a lot of power to operate.
More power to em (literally and figuratively).
is the work (also funded by the navy) undertaken by Dr. Bussard (of interstellar spaceship fame). His design for an electrostatic inertial confinement machine shows more promise than the heavy, expensive tokamak prefered by the internatinal ITER project, and has been built and tested in the lab, but not yet to an energy-return scale. The work was kept secret due to the source of funding, for the last 12 years, so it is only now that we're hearing aboutu it. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846 673788606 - Lecture given by Bussard at google, giving an overview of the project. 1:30 long, so if you don't have time, read:
http://www.askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/2006-9%20IAC %20Paper.pdf - Summary paper, outlining the research and results so far. The real research paper is yet to be published, but that's what he's working on now.
I have no
The "Cold Fusion" field has seen many more experimental successes: detection of neutrons, tritium, helium, transmutations of heavier elements, non-natural-abundance isotope ratios, detection of ionizing radiation. The best place to visit for an overview of the field is http://www.lenr-canr.org/.
Though the experiments are remarkable, no concensus on the theory has emerged yet. Nuclear reactions are clearly happening, but it is doubtful that it is conventional fusion, that is, nuclei moving fast enough to surmount their mutual Coulombic repulsion. Something seems to be screening or catalysing the reactions.
So maybe I've had a few tonight, but I'm thoughtful enough to not go texting people at this hour. I'll just bug all of you instead.
I feel like I've been reading about cold fusion for as long as I've been old enough to read about science. I can't shake the feeling that cold fusion research is the modern equivalent of alchemy. That is to say that it's kind of a dead end in itself, but the amount of work being done to that end is yielding all kinds of results that will be beneficial to other scientists at some other point.
As to why I just had to come on here and spew this, I will refer you to my colleague, Professor Daniels.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
The method of recording nuclear tracks is a solid is an old one but it has the advantage that the recording material can be placed very close to the reaction. This has lead to the discovery of very short lived particles that might be long sought axions in a recent accelerator experiment: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0954-3899/34/1/009. The plastic detectors used in the SPAWARS experiment can be placed close to the electrode
so that background is a smaller part of the overall signal. Their method of electrode fabrication is also impressive. It seems to work just about
every time.s -selling-solar.html
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The most amusing comment was that they were able to recreate Fleischman and Pons 'excess energy' - but pointed out that the palladium electrodes became more resistive when absorbing hydrogen and that they were using constant current power supplies (hint: Fleischman and Pons weren't monitoring the power supply voltage).
Keep in mind that the purpose of military R&D isn't to develop working products; it's to get funding to continue work. This is especially true for the pseudoprivate military contractors like Boeing and Raytheon, but also partly true for groups like Spawar... who tend to be less greedy but also less concerned with actually making something that works. Military R&D labs and contractors don't manufacture products; they manufacture grants.
... but they kept at it, because they were getting paid to do it by people unconcerned with whether or not it *would* work.
Saying "They must be on to something, because they're still doing the research" isn't valid, because they're only still doing the research because they can get money for it.
I had an engineering professor who once worked on Reagan's Star Wars program. He admitted that everyone in his team knew for a fact, based on sound science, that what they were doing would never work
Have you ever served on a sub? I question your knowledge. The way you detect a nuclear sub is still by noise, normally the cooling pumps for the reactor. Cold fusion would eliminate those pumps and the noise that goes with it. A diesel electric has always been the quitest boat under the sea and anyone can sneak up on a surface task force. We used to joke about the skimmers pinging away like they could find something with active sonar, what a joke! We could hear them pinging over 50 miles away, with that kind of head start did they stand a chance of finding us? Hell NO!. Every exercise with a USN task force or RN ended with us inside the screen and execise shots passing under the flagship. Nobody ever tracked us thermally because it mixes with the surrounding water to fast. Now a P3 with a MAD unit (magnetic anomally detector) was a bitch to get away from! That was the only thing that could ever find us when we didn't want to be found. The Soviets were always 3 generations behind in quieting and sonar.
signed - a cold war sub sailor
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