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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."
Must have been a very successful experiment. All the "H" are indeed gone!
I don't mind dating a girl that has been with everybody, as long as she had a good shower afterwards.
i mean, i would have looked for helium-4 as a proof of cold fusion, but elium-4?! that's incredible! did they use dilithium crystals to do that? adamantium? unobtanium?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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not agree on where it should be built, a Japanese professor finds a way to get cold fusion to get work and the reactor is obsolete before built!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...
...and what do we get on Slashdot? Nothing but posts about a fracking typo in the summary. Grow up and get some perspective.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Not everyone speaks or uses English or its way of spelling.
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
It's all fun & games until someone loses the game.
That's why Slashdot has editors to clean up the submissions, and discard the dupes.
Oh, wait...
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Shouldn't they been using neutron detector to prove that nuclear fusion tuck place?
As a physicist, I am a little perplexed as to why a story with such signifigance would be published in an Italian economics journal. Why not Physical Review, Nature, or one of the other journals typically used for such groundbreaking work?
Apparently the original peer reviewed article in Japanese is here: http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jhts/33/3/142/_pdf
Now, i don't understand much about Japanese or high temperature physics but as far as i can see, there isn't even a mention of Helium-4 in the article's English abstract or the picture and graph subtitles. This makes me wonder quite a bit about who put this hyperbolic spin on the story. Maybe the He-4 discovery is just a recent and unexpected find they decided to (too) eagerly emphasize?
Could someone who knows Japanese and some physics post his/her views on the article?
If found older (English) peer-reviewed papers by this Author here and here. He doesn't seem to have published much on this since then, except for a very vague patent application to be found here.
It seems unlikely to me that the first move an earnest discoverer of a new energy source in Japan would be to call an Italian newspaper. All the more since he seems to be working in academia and would thus have a strong incentive to publish in a peer-reviewed journal first (you don't get the Nobel prize for an article in "Il sore 24 ore"). But, here are the papers. Form your own opinion...
I want to believe!
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
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.
here http://atomic-motor.blogspot.com/
A huge breakthrough of a japanese scientist... ... end of as a story in a italian economy newspaper?
Doesnt that seem a bit fishy?
See me again when they actually published something somewhere...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
http://physicsworld.com/blog/
Of course! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The New Energy Times describes itself as "The leader in news and information on low energy nuclear reactions".
;)
Isn't that like going to a Nationalist Socialist website to learn about the holocaust?
Ah, crap. Godwin. I always do this.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Everyone knows those are unstable. What were you thinking?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes. It will be the day when they'll have nothing to lose any more.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I am willing to bet 1 USD on the fact that this invention will not turn out to be churning out energy using nuclear fusion. Payments will be done through paypal if anyone is willing to bet 1 USD on that this invention will prove to be generating energy from nuclear fusion.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
Cold fusion isn't ruled out by any known laws of physics, so I'll keep an open mind about it until it's proven one way or another. Pons and Fleischman may not have succeeded, but that's no reason to quit. As long as the people trying to make it work are doing so with their own funds, more power to them. If someone succeeds, then a lot of the scarcity in the world can be solved.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In my personal experience, machine translation has long since surpassed your average Italian English speaker.
Firstly, let's remember that so far, cold fusion has been a con. A rip-off. A fraud.
None of the above, actually. It's been a failure to date, but who's been defrauded? Can you show that anyone who funded it was lied to about the difficulty of bringing it to market?
Investments in basic research are a long shot, and long shots can pay off very well if they come through.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There appears to be something happening - but as long as we don't know the mechanism there is nothing to be said about kinetics.
From the article (and some other links in the comments), and assuming fusion really takes place, I would guess that this is some surface-related mechanism. Some unknown mechanism where the D-atoms are first adsorbed on the Pd, and then fusion takes place. If so it can very well be a relative slow process. I have not read the articles in much detail, I'm a chemist, not physicist. The articles also mention that imperfections in the Pd crystals appear to play a major role - again limiting the available area where such a reaction could take place.
And on top of it all, this reaction takes place at much lower temperature than most fusion reactions, thus the movement of the atoms is slower.
All in all, don't let the very slow kinetics put you off the idea that atomic fusion may take place, the most interesting fact reported is that the experiment produces energy over a long period of time and that I think is worth further investigation. First of all of course reproduction of the very experiment by some other scientists, and then improving the efficiency and figuring out what REALLY is going on.
Bush and his Shadowy Masters(TM) are going to look pretty stupid if a cheap and plentiful power source suddenly appears. How much has the occupation of Iraq cost, so far? We may need to start working on getting that Lunar Helium, though. Maybe they should have invaded the Moon.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Could we please restrict all further "cold fusion" articles to at least the level of "cold fusion experiment of X successfully reproduced by Y"?. That would help keeping the noise level down.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
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/
It seems likely that this will turn out to be a poorly-understood conventional exothermic chemical reaction. It might still turn out to be useful and/or enlightening. If nothing else, it serves to remind us that there's quite a lot of fairly basic chemistry that we haven't quite figured out yet.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
'ere guv, 'ave some 'elium-4 :)
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
Is at http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jhts/33/3/33_142/_article. You will need to be able to read Japanese, but at least it's the actual research.
Setting aside the fact that a journal being more or less "authoritative" doesn't add nor subtract anything to the experiment itself , you are correct when saying it's quite a journal in Italy.
In Italy, in which an university professor of mathematics publicly pointed out that some articles published on the paper don't report factual lies, but they don't necessarily tell the whole story as well or report it very accurately.
Particularly, when it comes to articles that may or may not suggest some people to invest in privately owned pension funds, a good faith omission may quickly turn into a financial disaster for the little investor.
Nobody is saying that anybody is being paid or rewarded for emphasizing only some aspect of reality and not others, not at all! That would be so unethical that many of the prestigeous writers on IlSole would never sell out for money! Never, professionals don't sell their integrity for money.
... not the opinions.
No, you don't get Nobels for publishing Japanese cold fusion work in Italian economics journals. You don't get them from publishing any cold fusion work in any peer reviewed physics journal because they don't get published as such, for much the same reasons that make people claim absence of evidence is evidence of absence even though the evidence was only absent in some of the replications. You do, however, publish articles about Japanese cold fusion work in an Italian economics journal when a Japanese company is building cold fusion equipment in an Italian factory purchased from Fiat, said company having hired Pons and Fleischmann as design consultants.
Neutron flux is a sign of some fusion reactions, but not all. 2 * (1p + 1n) --> (2p + 2n): two deuterium go to one helium. The energy released is from the conversion of mass of two deuterium (2 * 2.014 = 4.028) into one helium (4.002). The difference (.026) is is given off as energy measured in ergs, calculated from the amount of mass "lost" in grams times the speed of light in a vacuum in centimeters per second times itself. The source of the energy is the release of binding energy in the nuclei; the binding energy required grows at a lesser rate than the number of nucleons. This is the mass difference stated in another way. The energy is this particular reaction comes.
And if cold fusion were as much a hoax as those educated by hearsay rather than science would have you believe, then you wouldn't have symposia on the subject at scientific conferences hosted by the selfsame journals that refuse the publish such articles unless they're written so speculatively as to seem almost fiction, and the phenonemon examined is called something else.
Regardless of the barriers caused by pathological disbelief masquerading as skepticism, or worse, education at the hands of the pathological disbelievers, over 3,000 articles peer reviewed articles on cold fusion have been published. Enough evidence has been accumulated to convince both the US Many and the US Dept. of Energy that the phenonenon is real, though inadequately understood, and deserved more investigation and funding.
Those who are so certain that cold fusion is bogus would probably be glad to know that once the bogus cold fusion reactors built at the bogus Fiat plant are primed they crank out 270 kiloboguswatts over 90 bogusdays with no additional input of energy.
Answer for yourself: if you had something important, but the mention of it made those who were the supposed experts in the field run screaming, just how would you go about bringing the knowledge out into the open without getting quashed? Through many different kinds of channels, a tiny bit at a time, which would by necessity mean some of the announcements would be of results and discoveries from some considerable time prior. The SETI people assert this is how alien contact and/or news of such would proceed and nobody blinks at that. Claim that this same process of being used on news of replicable tabletop physics and their eyes get stuck wide shut.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Indeed, one of the main issues with ITER-type fusion powerplants is actually building a confinement vessel which can stand up to such a massive barrage of radiation without becoming so radioctive or physically degraded that it has to be replaced too often.
FRAUD? It has been known for more than 40 years, maybe much more, that putting Hydrogen or Deuterium into Platinum or Palladium causes some interesting effects. The metals absorb a huge amount of Hydrogen.
Apparently the only purpose for this that has ever been found, however, is confusing Slashdot editors.
There are a large number of people claiming to be "working" on cold fusion. No one has ever been able to demonstrate anything interesting.
However, there are also a lot of schemes to steal investor money. In my opinion, this is probably fraud, as others have been.
If one looks at the past research on palladium, there are many explanations for energy release, all chemical, none nuclear.
Using Occam's razor, it's a whole lot more likely this guy's results are due to well-known chemical reactions, not anything nuclear.
Nuclear reactions are easily discerned by the generation of Gamma rays and neutrons. The fact that these were not mentioned in the article suggests nothing exciting is going on.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
I remember my college materials science professor telling me that hydrogen atoms can exist in the matrix of palladium metal at a density (naturally, number of hydrogen atoms per cc) higher than can ever be reached with pressure exerted on hydrogen gas. That reason makes me bet cold fusion could happen.
Don't worry, I'll get modded down once the U.S. Slashdotters start logging on. Americans whose great-great-grandparents came from Sicily will see me talking shit about "Italians" and think that I was talking about them.
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.
This is a much better report of the same story: Arata-Zhang LENR Demonstration.
It's an old story, from February 2008. Quote: ' "The demonstrated live data looked just like data they reported in their published papers (J. High Temp. Soc. Jpn, Feb. and March issues, 2008)..." '
Quote: ' "Some people say we have reached the end of science, that there are no more great discoveries that remain. In my view, nature always has more secrets to reveal," Arata wrote.' My translation: "Please believe in this particular fantasy."
Apparently Slashdot editors don't do any research.
It might come to a surprise to you, but not all words come from english; eventually it's the other way round.
That's all great and interesting and all, and the other posts on etymology are interesting too, but you see, the thing is, the Slashdot article summary is written in English, for a primarily English speaking audience. In English, the word begins with an "H".
I'm all for respecting the languages of others, but the English word is spelled "Helium". Or, do we now get to use the spelling and pronunciation rules of whatever language we choose?
Putting moderation advice in your
Bush and his Shadowy Masters(TM) are going to look pretty stupid if a cheap and plentiful power source suddenly appears.
Bush already looks very stupid even before he invaded Iraq.!!
Apparently the blog story was stolen from New Energy Times: Arata-Zhang LENR Demonstration, May 22, 2008
Yoshiaki Arata works for the Welding Research Institute of Osaka University. He is not a physicist, apparently.
Old story: He's been reporting this kind of thing since before October 13, 2006: A New Energy caused by "Spillover-Deuterium". Quote: "Intermittent operation over a period of two years using this structure proved the complete reproducibility of these results."
I hope no Slashdot reader invests in this. Would it be too much to ask Slashdot editor Scuttle Monkey to do a little research before he posts stories?
This is not the first complaint about Scuttle Monkey: Who is Scuttle Monkey?
Please. The oceans are full of the stuff. In theory, yes, extreme fusion use boils the planet. But in theory, we all die with the heat death of the universe. 10% efficient fusion using seawater hydrogen could be the exclusive provider of all worldwide energy and it still wouldn't make a noticeable difference in sea level for thousands or even millions of years.
Refusing to use fusion because it might one day affect the oceans is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Our current energy usage is destroying the planet now. It would be utterly insane to refuse to use a clean, non-destructive alternative just because over-use will start having some small impact some kilo- or mega-years in the future. Nothing is perfect. If this works (and I am, as I said, quite skeptical) then it would be vastly better than any known alternative.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
...or any other target language, you should at least try to do a proper and complete job of it, not a half-assed job, else you risk presenting yourself as only partially literate and perhaps less than knowledgeable about whatever it is that you're trying to write.
"It may not be "cold fusion" but they have proof of excess heat and other signs of nuclear process."
..."
"Excess heat" is not a sign of nuclear fusion. It is a sign of something that has been known for more than 40 years, that Platinum and Palladium absorb Hydrogen, and sometimes heat is generated when experimenting with that.
Wikipedia: Palladium. Quote: "Incredibly, when palladium is at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, it can absorb up to 900 times its own volume of hydrogen,
The people who "demonstrate" "cold fusion" never seem to be physicists. This Slashdot story is about someone who works for the Welding Research Institute at Osaka University.
Typical molecular binding energies are on the order of electron volts. The energy barrier hydrogen isotopes must overcome to fuse is on the order of 10000 electron volts. While there are ways to reduce this barrier, simply putting the atoms in a crystal lattice seem unlikely, given that the electrostatic forces needed to overcome the barrier would tear apart the atoms of every known material.
One method of cold fusion which does work is to inject muons into the sample. Muons are like electrons, but significantly heavier. Their negative charge in combination with their large mass causes the nuclei of Deuterium molecules to move close enough to one another that quantum tunneling becomes a strong possibility and the nuclei eventually fuse. Unfortunately you lose a lot of muons either through radioactive decay ( muons are radioactive ) or because they get trapped by the positively charged helium nucleus produced. Consequentially you end up spending more energy to produce the muons than the fusion reaction produces.
Finally I like to add that achieving fusion is not very hard. The potentials required are only a few thousand volts, and desktop neutron sources based on fusion reactions have been available for decades. Heck, it is simple enough that hobbyists have built their own fusion devices. The difficulty is to get the fusion reaction to produce more energy than you need to sustain it.
You can download the english paper written about the experiment. It is very detailed. You could even try it
http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchieste/documenti/Fusione_Fredda.pdf
There are a lot of other infos (mostly written in Italian) on this page:
http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchieste/19102006_rapporto41.asp
Also this site covers two researchers that transformed tungsten to gold and other elements:
http://www.ioriocirillo.com/ita/index.php
I hate to tell you this sparky but we do have a large amount of cheap energy. Not as cheap as it was just a few years ago but we do have a lot even now.
They restict you making alcohol fuels at home because you can drink it and they tax that a lot.
They don't at least in most places in the US restrict bio diesel or even cooking oil use.
Anyway cheap energy would be great and the goverment would love it.
You give me enough super cheap electricity and I will make you all the oil you want from water and air.
Not only that but I will make you all the fresh water you want as well.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The only thing these videos bring to the table are constant allegations of conspiracy theories. These do not qualify as evidence worth considering before passing judgment. They are merely pop science.
Tell me, if all of this was immediately confirmed and replicated across the world, why haven't I heard of it? I'd expect better evidence to the contrary than an episode of a tv series on the paranormal.
You sound pretty confident, but the first link you included says Yoshiaki Arata is a distinguished japanese physicist. There is also an article on wikipedia about him... says the same...
This link also says he has been nominated for a life member of the International Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science.
Now I am really confused... can you provide more details on him being a welder and not a physicist?
That's the fun about stupid. You can only look smart to a point, but there is no end to idiot.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo.htm
With some photos!
It doesn't matter what "orientation" the hydrogen atoms have. What matters is the distance between them. The strong nuclear force, which is what pulls protons together to fuse and make helium (and release loads of energy) has an incredibly short range, roughly 100,000 time smaller than the size of a hydrogen atom. Unless you can get the protons this close, they do not feel the strong force, and they cannot possible fuse.
The difficulty with getting them that close together is, of course, the fact that they strongly repel each other because they're both positively charged. The potential energy of two protons almost close enough to feel the strong force is roughly equal to the kinetic energy per particle in a gas at temperature of a million degrees or so.
That is, it requires a staggeringly huge force to push protons close enough, against their mutual electrostatic repulsion, for them to finally feel the strong force and fuse. This force hugely exceeds that available in chemical bonds of any type, in any arrangement. You can get that force by raising the temperature to a million degrees, which increase the momentum of the protons so much that they supply the force themselves, when they crash into each other. But any material at all would fracture, vaporize, disintegrate long before it supply that kind of force. Which means pretty much any kind of cold fusion that depends on solid-state material properties is impossible. It's all bullshit, the usual magic catalysis/perpetual-motion kind of scam.
There are ways to get fusion going at lower temperatures, the most interesting of which is to catalyze it with muons. Google muon-catalyzed fusion for more info.