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.

Comments

Figures

[DrMrLordX]

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).

Re:Figures

[MancDiceman]

Talk about xenophobic racism.

Read the post. That journal is one of the best journals in the World - look at the previous contributors mentioned in the post and tell me it's not a decent journal. Just because it's German, it doesn't mean it's "sub-par". Your post should be modded down for trolling, but unfortunately I expect it'll bubble up as "Informative".

Also, most US/British journals would refuse to publish not because they doubted the ability of the scientists to produce good quality data, but because they have a knee-jerk reaction that cold fusion is junk science.

Well done to this journal for actually taking it on.

Re:Figures

[ShooterNeo]

You might be interested to know that this isn't actually the case. A few hundred kilowatts of generating capacity is sufficient to fire rail guns. Why? Calculate the total energy content of 2 tons of explosives. That's how much kinetic energy a rail-gun shot might yield, and it isn't actually very much energy. (just released all at once : is why the rail-gun power supply would need to have massive accumulators of some type)

Re:Figures

[smilindog2000]

"Cold" fusion means cold relative to the temperature of the Sun (hot enough to fuse hydrogen). "Cold" fusion in theory could potentially boil water, and drive the turbines. However, a basic quantum physics result is that there is basically no way in heck that cold fusion will ever work, unless there is some new unknown physics taking place. While possible, it's unlikely, which is why most respected journals shy away from it, in addition to the large number of quacks the field has attracted. I put more hope in the Polywell stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

Re:Figures

[pallmall1]

Why choose this Journal?

From wikipedia

In 1991, Eugene Mallove who was the chief science writer with the MIT News office, said that he believes the negative report issued by MIT's Plasma Fusion Center in 1989, which was highly influential in the controversy, was fraudulent because "data was shifted" without explanation, and as a consequence, this action obscured a possible positive excess heat result at MIT. In protest of MIT's failure to discuss and acknowledge the significance of this data shift, he resigned from his post of chief science writer at the MIT News office on June 7, 1991. He maintained that the data shift was biased to both support the conventional belief in the nonexistence of the cold fusion effect as well as to protect the financial interests of the plasma fusion center's research in hot fusion. Also in 1991, Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger said that he had experienced "the pressure for conformity in editor's rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous reviewers. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science". He resigned as Member and Fellow of the American Physical Society, in protest of its peer review practice on cold fusion.

--bold added

Re:Figures

[qrad]

Perhaps the authors chose this journal for its historical significance. In 1938 Naturwissenshaften reported the work of Hahn and Meitner which was later referenced in establishing the existence of fission.

qrad
Ph.D. Student in Nuclear Science and Engineering
MIT

Far more exciting

[ab8ten]

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.

Low Energy Nuclear Reactions

[Eukariote]

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.

Re:Low Energy Nuclear Reactions

[ResidntGeek]

Shit... "nuclear catalyst" - there's a phrase to put fear into the heart of anyone who knows what a catalyst is.

Doubtful

[IvyKing]

About ten years ago, I met a couple of guys at NRAD (Navy Research And Development) in San Diego who were doubtful of the work being done on cold fusion. One of the them was making comments about dadiation being detected with some ancient technology (e.g. electroscopes) but not with more modern radiation detectors.

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).

Re:in case you were wondering the Navy's connectio

[BCW2]

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