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Successful Cold Fusion Experiment?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the so-cold-it's-hot dept.

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."

17 of 387 comments (clear)

  1. Elium-4? by kyriosdelis · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:Elium-4? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Elium-4? by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    3. Re:Elium-4? by bargainsale · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Latin "h", originally pronounced like English "h", eventually ceased to be pronounced at all; in the modern languages descended from Latin it is has been lost and is found, if at all, only in words borrowed from other languages.

      So Latin "homo" "person" but Italian "uomo", Rumanian "om" and so on.
      (The "h" in French "homme" has never been pronounced and is only there in the spelling by analogy with the Latin word).

      In the time of the later Roman Republic and early Empire (when most of the famous Latin literature comes from) whether "h" was pronounced was a class thing; dropping "h"s was supposed to be a mark of ignorance or low status.
      People insecure about their status would put in "h"s where they didn't belong (the poet Catullus has a whole poem mocking somebody who does this).

      Even those who prided themselves on their education were already getting it wrong by then, though, and some of their mistakes got perpetuated:

      "humerus" "upper arm" should be "umerus"
      "anser" "goose" should be "hanser"

      We can deduce a remarkable amount about how Classical Latin was pronounced; there's a good book about it:
      "Vox Latina" by W Sidney Allen

      --
      Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
    4. Re:Elium-4? by Mr.+Underbridge · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, that was certainly the most interesting etymological post I've seen on slashdot lately! Certainly more interesting than an article on physics posted in an Italian business magazine, which seems to have been the original topic.

  2. Two more reports... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  3. Peer-Reviewed Articles by DancesWithBlowTorch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  4. Re:Neutrons anyone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's cold fusion, from H (1P+1N) to He4 (2P+2N).
    Thus no Neutrons. Much safer.

  5. How about neutrons? by coobird · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:How about neutrons? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The simple answer is that 2H + 2H --> 4He doesn't happen.



      As shown in the link I posted to Wikipedia in my original post, you'll see that 2H + 2H --> 4He does not happen with any significance. In other words, that reaction doesn't happen enough to make it a significant source of the reaction. Nuclear physics doesn't exactly work like arithmetic.



      The primary d-d reactions are listed as follows in the important reactions section of the nuclear fusion article at Wikipedia:


      1. 2H + 2H --> 3H + p
      2. 2H + 2H --> 3He + n

  6. Re:A world changing experiment... by coldmist · · Score: 5, Funny

    or at best, it's a "word changing experiment". ;)

    --
    Don't steal. The government hates competition.
  7. Why not? by jcr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."
    1. Re:Why not? by mcelrath · · Score: 5, Informative

      Cold fusion isn't ruled out by any known laws of physics

      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.
  8. english.it by Dr.+Cody · · Score: 5, Funny

    In my personal experience, machine translation has long since surpassed your average Italian English speaker.

  9. Just an idea... by OpenSourced · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  10. There is more than only this experiment by JochenBedersdorfer · · Score: 5, Informative
    If you would follow this field more closely you would find that there is a small but steadily growing number of scientists from around the world working in this field.

    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/

  11. Unofficial translation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here is an unofficial translation by an
    Italian reader .. I apologize for my English :)
    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.