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Successful Cold Fusion Experiment?
An anonymous reader writes "The italian economic journal 'Il sole 24 ore' published an article about a successful cold fusion experiment performed by Yoshiaki Arata in Japan. They seems to have pumped high pressure deutherium gas in a nanometric matrix of palladium and zyrcon oxide. The experiments generates a considerable amount of energy and they found the presence of Helium-4 in the matrix (as sign of the fusion). I was not able to find other articles about this but the journal is very authoritative in Italy. Google translations are also available."
I found this article on the demonstration:
http://physicsworld.com/blog/2008/05/coldfusion_demonstration_a_suc_1.html
A little more here:
http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo.htm
Not a first hand account, but still.
Wouldn't that be nice? After years of delays for a new experimental fusion reactor (ITER) because they could not agree on where it should be built, a Japanese professor finds a way to get cold fusion to get work and the reactor is obsolete before built! Science can move ahead in strange and unpredictable ways as well...
italian words for Hydrogen and Helium are Idrogeno and Elio. These translitteration comes from latin, where they didn't have an H phonema. The symbols H and He start with H because the name of the atoms are derived from greek where they did have H starting words.
It might come to a surprise to you, but not all words come from english; eventually it's the other way round.
It's cold fusion, from H (1P+1N) to He4 (2P+2N).
Thus no Neutrons. Much safer.
The article seemed to be sparse on the details of what was actually going on, but if indeed the only evidence that they had a fusion reaction happening is the presence of helium-4, then they may have just detected naturally occurring helium that is present in the atmosphere (0.000524%).
A better test to see whether fusion reactions are taking place is to try to detect the a stream of neutrons which are being produced. The neutrons flux and the energy should be able to be used to differentiate the fusion neutrons from the background neutron sources, such as those caused by spontaneous fission events of heavy elements like uranium. Also, nuclear fusion reactions tend to produce high-energy, or fast neutrons (upwards of 14 MeV with deuterium-deuterium fusion) which isn't too common unless you have some type of nuclear reaction taking place. (Here's a list of important nuclear fusion reactions important fusion reactions for those who are curious.)
Detecting helium on the other hand, seems not so out of the ordinary since there is helium in the atmosphere.
Well, actually the Greek doesn't have an H letter (AFAIK there was an H sound, but it didn't have its own character, but an appropriately accented vowel indicated that is was to be spoken with an H before it; I think those accents don't exist any more in modern Greek). OTOH, Latin definitively does have an H letter, although the Romans probably didn't speak it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Since cold fusion has such a bad reputation, they are calling it Low -Energy Nuclear Reactions. It's not only a better name, but it describes more accurately what those scientists are seeing: Transmutations and excess energy in low energy conditions.
The offical LENR webcine New Energy Times has all the info:
http://www.newenergytimes.com/
Here is an unofficial translation by an .. I apologize for my English :)
Italian reader
Moreover, the article is very focused on
telling the amazing story and embellishing
it with Japanese stereotype. The "Sole 24 ore"
is a well reputed economical journal, but
it is nothing about technical.
Indeed, they miss any reference to the original
news.
The revenge of the Samurai.
Yoshiaki Arata, 85 years old is a Japanese Professor Emeritus,
a leading pioneer of the advanced nuclear program in Japan and one of the fathers of research about hot fusion.
He is a strong NATIONALIST (he speaks only Japanese in public),
awarded by the Emperor and has now won his 20 years long battle as a Samurai.
He never gave up about the topic [cold fusion] since 1989, when Fleishmann and Pons announced a possible "constrained" fusion of deuterium inside a palladium cathode.
[They use] lightweight molecules, made traveling by a moderate anode-to-cathode electron flux in the fluid towards
palladium exhagonal structures.
There, they collide, pushing over themselves and trapping them causing the spontaneous pressure to reach million of atmospheres,
and then breaking nucleus, producing heat and finally converting into Helium-4.
A genuine nuclear fusion, obtained without the need of the big, high energy toroids as Iter, just like it happens
in stars.
Instead, they needed just a bottle with a little "heavy water" (easy to find in nature), a rare metal and the
same electric power you need at home.
Without radiations and with the final production of a inert gas, helium, useful to fill balloons.
Too beautiful to be true. Fleishmann and Pons shocked the whole community but they never managed to reproduce an experiment that would have changed
the life of humanity , if not in a few, sporadic cases.
They were defined cheaters, pretenders, not scientific, together with their entourage, up to being marginalized by the scientific community.
But samurai Arata went straight along the line. Also because
since the fifties he was amazed by the deuterium supercompression technique,
due to anomalies that happened using certain metals. So he decided
to take another line of research while working on low-energy fusion, the
one of electro-chemic. By simply pushing the deuterium inside palladium
nanoparticles with more and more atmospheres, up to creating the
same "crowded" situation and pressure increase of that experiment.
Today [5/22/2008] he made a public demonstration of his reactor in
Osaka, moving a Stirling engine with a few grams of palladium.
The reactor has been partially realized using ideas of Francesco
Celani and his group at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics
(INFN) in Frascati: the second-ranked laboratory actively working on Arata's line.
In the next few days Arata will try to increase the amount from 7 to 60
grams of palladium, expecting hundreds of Watts in thermal power, that is,
enough for your house lights for months.
But the very outstanding news, given in front of a multitude of scientific
reporters, someone coming even from the USA, is to have proved the production,
inside palladium hexagons, of a non-neglegible quantity of Helium-4,
the sign of deuterium transmutation and nuclear fusion.
This resulted in the reporters' crowd started talking about the "Arata
Phenomenon", a term he kindly accepted taking a bow, just like an old Samurai.
No, cold fusion is ruled out by basic Quantum Mechanics.
The electrons are irrelevant since their density is so low, and nuclei must be within 10^-15 m to fuse. This only occurs at temperatures of hundreds of millions Celsius. If these experiments were generating temperatures this high, one could easily tell because they would also emit X- and gamma-rays.
Explanation of "cold fusion" phenomena (if these experiments are real and reproducible) would require a significant modification of Quantum Mechanics. This is exactly why physicists are so quick to dismiss the experiments. Few papers have been published "ruling it out" because it's so simple. However here is one: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v63/p191. The theoretical literature claiming to come up with exotic ways to allow the phenomena to happen are quite extreme, in my opinion.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.