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Cold Fusion Rears Ugly Head With Claims of Deuterium-Powered Homes
szczys writes: Ah, who can forget the cold-fusion fiasco of the early 1990s? Promises of room-temperature fusion machines in every home providing nearly-free energy for all. Relive those glory days of hype with this report of Deuterium-Based Home Reactors. Elliot Williams does a good job of deflating the sensationalism by pointing out all of the "breakthroughs," their lack of having any other labs successfully verify the experiments, and the fact that many of the same players from the news stories in the '90s are once again wrapped up in this one. I'm still waiting for the neighborhood E-Cat to arrive ...
Just get solar inexpensive enough and I'll be perfectly happy. It sure isn't there yet.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm still waiting for an independently verified e-cat which measures the energy input/output properly rather than "look - steam - it's obviously working"
So, either Leif Holmlid is a lying, attention-seeking media whore ... or he's really made a revolutionary breakthrough.
But if he can't demonstrate that it works in such a way as to be repeatable by someone else, then he must be a lying, attention-seeking media whore.
I know which one my money is on.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
All you really need are a few good blocks of redstone. Just watch out for those creepers when mining it.
We've already got e-cats!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Rather than "heavy" hydrogen, (one neutron) you'd do better with two of them (heavy, heavy...)
Less velocity (lower temperature) is required to overcome the EM force and get close enough for the strong force to take over.
Of course, acquiring it is more problematic than the regular "heavy" stuff. But once you're producing a good flux of neutrons you could shield with water then refine and extract the fuel.
Ref the 1991 publication by Knopfler et. al., wherein the hypothesis is presented.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I think this announcement is scheduled for October 21, 2015. Just fire up your Pizza Hut rehydrator and make sure all your fax machines are clear for the announcement.
The original press release indicates that this is a laser-induced hot fusion process; completely unrelated to the soi disant "LENR".
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/adva/5/8/10.1063/1.4928572
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/rsi/86/8/10.1063/1.4928109
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319915016018
Might be of interest to someone interested in what it might be.
But as they mention in the article, he mostly cites his own previous work.
So, why can't you also let go of the 1960s space fantasies?
Why is it that Free Energy True Believers can barely produce a coherent sentence?
Last post!
If you lie about cold fusion with experiments no one can replicate: bad
If you lie about climate change with experiments/models no one can replicate: hero
Of what has come of "science"
I use the "I want five blades" Fusion.. It works even when rinsed with cold water. I have seen a Ford Fusion in Minnesota in dead winter. It is time to stop denying. Cold Fusion works.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That didn't follow the 5,7,5 patter of Haiku, you happy numbskull. It should go something like this ...
A man's stiff penis
In another man's anus
Those fucking faggots
Pics of reputable, independent third parties replicating your results under repeatable conditions, or it didn't happen.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It must suck for any genuine scientist who might come up with an interesting idea as it relates to small scale or cold fusion. I can just see the grant request meeting:
So you have filed a grant form on researching neutron production at low temperatures?
Yes
Isn't that cold fusion by another name?
Not really but...
You're fired, we are stripping your PhD, and we are having the art department make funny cartoons about how much of a loser you are.
But I only asked for a $2 grant.
We are also requesting retractions on all your papers including ones that have been lab verified by over 1000 independent researchers.
But.
We also just burned your house down and killed your dog.
I don't have a dog.
The really sad thing is, cold fusion (LENR) was never really discredited. There were three primary groups involved here. One, the US government. Two, MIT. Three, CalTech. Then there is the many labs around the world which tried to reproduce.
MIT was caught with scientific fraud. Their experiment actually recreated the experiment. MIT had a party celebrating the "death of cold fusion" before they even created their experiment. Once they conducted their experiment, they never checked their results. This according to one of the people involved in the research. When they were called on their fraud, they checked their research and confirmed they did find an thermal anomaly as predicted by Pons and Fleischmann.This can be observed in the graph they bury in their own paper.
CalTech made an effort to reproduce the experiment. They were unable to do so. They were told they were not properly doping their material. CalTech was sure they were. CalTech now admits they were not properly doping their experiment. CalTech has now, years later, successfully recreated the experiment.
Lastly was the government. They government had a conflict of interest in that the people voicing opinion all had vested interest in existing nuclear technologies. No one who offered opinion had knowledge of the details and simply said it was impossible because they said so. Period.It was a massive conflict of interest.
The combination was the government, MIT, and CalTech all coming out saying it's impossible.
Lastly we have various labs around the world. Many would not reproduce the experiment while some could. Turns out we now know why. There was two primary suppliers of palladium wire to these labs. The primary supplier had contaminated palladium which prevented doping. Which means all of these labs inadvertently recreated CalTech's failed experiment. CalTech simply failed to dope properly. The other labs had contamination which prevented proper doping. The labs which obtained their wire from the secondary supplier were largely able to reproduce the experiment.
At this point LENR has been successfully reproduced in over 200 labs around the world; including some heavy hitters in particle physics labs. This also includes IBM and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. DARPA has two success LENR projects and one of them has successfully obtained funding for a second round. The basis for funding was, "increase efficiency of LENR effect." The National Academy of Sciences (IIRC, this is the right group) has recently changed it's policy and is now offering LENR grants because so many scientists have put pressure on them because of positive results in their own experiments.
Long story short, we have been living in a post-fossil fuel world since the 1980s. The sad thing is, thanks to MIT's scientific fraud, the federal government’s conflict of interest, and CalTech's inept best effort, the world simply doesn't know.
I'm all for it, but so far none of it appears to be real.
I'd love to be wrong on this, but so far there doesn't seem to be anything to get excited about.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I don't need room temperature fusion, I'd be happy with pizza oven temperature fusion, or automobile engine temperature fusion.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
than fusion can only happen with high temperature are mistaken. Anything that increase the probability of the nucleus fusing will work. Something as simple as replacing the electron with a mu meson works.
I thought everybody had moved on to Wordpress and Drupal years ago.
#DeleteChrome
Promises of room-temperature fusion machines in every home providing nearly-free energy for all.
I dont know about the rest of you but my Mr. Fusion works just fine. I mean, it just came out this year but I havent had many problems with it. hell, even sold my old one to some elderly guy and a kid driving around the town in an old delorean.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Why is it that Free Energy True Believers can barely produce a coherent sentence?
You have that question backwards. Ask the correct question, and it answers itself.
I believe it when I see a mushroom cloud in his general direction.
"Don't worry - I'll be seeing you... I'll be seeing you REAL soon!" -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* It's a GREAT FULL EPISODE, & actually on-topic (about COLD fusion)...
(My favorite from "THE OUTER LIMITS")
APK
P.S.=> "It's so simple - they're asking the right question, but expecting the wrong answer..." - Seth Todman
... apk
Sounds interesting. Do they have any estimate of the maximum rate of fusion? I can well imagine cold fusion being a reality that happens, but never produces enough energy to bother with.
And, of course, any limits they estimated at this time would be subject to improvement..
Not having a lot of capability of investing in something rather speculative, I'm going to consider this something more interesting than useful until someone with plausible knowledge says otherwise. (And I still won't be investing, but then I'll follow it with more interest.)
P.S.: SRI has, in the past, put effort into some rather questionable research. They hire a lot of people and some of them aren't above inflating their results. But they also do lots of really excellent work. You just need to remember that some of their researchers aren't exactly indifferent about the success of their research.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Because they are working a scam that's been in existence for a VERY long time. This particular scam has been around for thousands of years as the perpetual energy machine.
Just remember the source of all the claims you've seen. They have worked with cranks much as has every institution, but this does not mean their research was necessarily questionable. Wikipedia is the worst source for this sort of thing.
They lack the energy for the brainpower required.
Uhm its 2015, this is the year that "Mr Fusion" becomes available to the general market.
Not sure why nut-jobs focus on easily detected fusion scams when Thorium is clearly the way to bridge us from our current reliance on fossil fuels to actual REAL fusion.
LFTR technology and the Thorium fuel cycle can be done now, and can help us clean up the mess that the Uranium fuel cycle has left us with (all those 'spent' uranium fuel rods become initial fuel for a Thorium fuel cycle, and are converted in the process to perfectly safe low level radioactive elements that we know how to dispose of with ease).
Here is an interesting interview with a Navy Physicist, published today, In which they explicitly state that they have working cold fusion devices and that they predict the behaviour of their cold fusion systems successfully with density functional theory calculations.
here
http://www.e-catworld.com/2015/10/06/louis-dechario-of-us-naval-sea-systems-command-navsea-on-replicating-pons-and-fleischmann/
So maintaining you connection and keeping enough energy available to in in case it rains should cost what?
Don't forget to add in the Peaker Generators.
I followed the link to the original paper. It's a bit sketchy. But on a skim I don't get quite as much of a "what did he do" as the author of that piece did.
What it looks to me like he did is:
- Made some "ultra dense" duterium - apparently by the same method as F&P: Using electricity to force it into palladium by electrolysis, with the solid palladium holding it at high density and in particular orientations.
- Hit it with a laser.
- Got muons out - with energies above those that could be explained by the laser excitation, and apparently with energy totalling substantially more than spent on the laser and the electrolysis drive power.
Now if this is real, and can be repeated and engineered:
1) High-energy charged particles, at well-defined energies, emerging from a well-defined location, and with adequate lifetimes to last through a few microseconds of the process, can easily have most of their kinetic energy collected as electricity by pretty trivial equipment.
2) Muons catalyze fusion - at room temperature (or even liquid hydrogen temperature). They replace an electron in a hydrogen atom/molecule - but are heavy so the resulting muonic atom/molecule is much smaller, allowing the nuclei to come within fusion distance. The fusion kicks the muon off and it repeats the process. This has been known for decades: Just point a muon beam at some hydrogen and watch the fun.
The problem has always been that it takes a lot of energy to make a muon and it has a tiny lifetime - long enough to do maybe four fusions before it decays. So muon-catalyzed fusion (using accelerators to make muons) would never approach breakeven. If this guy has figured out how to make muons in a simple cell, with the energy to make the muon coming from a fusion reaction, it could change the game big-time.
Also: If muons manufactured by such a process were a step in the very sporadic, looked-like-fusion, effects seen by the people trying to do cold fusion, it could explain why the effects were sporadic - and understanding the process might lead to being able to produce it reliably and consistently.
So maybe this is just another will-o-the-wisp. Or maybe it's something that could lead to substantial repeatable interesting physics. Or maybe it could lead to real energy-producing reactors on a less-than-tokamak scale.
And just maybe it's a missing piece of a real room-temperature fusion process that led to the cold-fusion flap and might become practical. Wouldn't that be nice?
Regardless, this just got published within the last month or so. If it's real it should be pretty easy to reproduce, and from there not too hard to figure out. So let's see what happens. Maybe nothing, maybe little, just the off chance of another roller-coaster ride. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Ah, who can forget the cold-fusion fiasco of the early 1990s?"
Uh, it was the 1980s first.
... just probably to a few atoms an hour in the whole world ...
The claim is about fusion in exotic matter triggered by a laser turning it into a plasma. Fusion in heated plasma != cold.
So the "deflation" is based on a heap of bullshit and misunderstanding, not worthy of reading. This is even worse than the popular and often repeated misunderstanding about the EM drive*. (that a null test generated thrust thus invalidating any result of the experiment - but the null test in that experiment tested one hypothesis of how the device would work and was not a dummy-test. The dummy device produced no thrust in the same experiment.)
(* the EM drive is of course still magnitudes less likely to actually work than an _actual_ cold fusion design. Again: we aren't talking about either in this thread)
IFF this work as claimed it could make fusion reactors considerably easier - while the construction of Rydberg matter is a problem (as it tend to be unstable) generation of muons from the fusion reaction itself would significantly lower the energy barrier required to maintain the fusion (see: muon catalysed fusion).
But as usual a claim like this requires verification from outside sources before believing.
And yet they still get money from people from time to time. That is something i never understand. No working examples, but trust me and bingo they get cash from suckers.
Oh wow i just go an email from a Nigerian prince. I have to go.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Deuterium powered homes is for sissies. Real manly man live in Tritium powered homes.
but hopeful. When I found out that this had been reproduced even ONCE it piqued my curiosity. When I found out that DARPA was funding research I became intrigued. Whether or not it will ever be a useful means of producing power, there is a pretty significant amount of evidence that there is something going on that can't be explained by conventional chemical reactions. Do I think that it will ever be a source of power so cheap and easy to build that it will be in every home? No.. but the more we learn, the better off we are in all fields of endeavor.
I thought Haikus were supposed to mention the seasons?
A man's stiff penis
In another man's anus:
Spring time for faggots.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I call it a zero energy loss microstar reactor, yes it might work at room temperature. Ithe only variable i am concerned about is the fuel-it needs to be able to power the containment device.
Believing in cold fusion is about as sensible as trying to communicate with beings of fundamentally different biology, aka aliens. A lot of hooey.
Perhaps he's making flakes of Rydberg matter, floating in a near-vacuum.
(If I understand it correctly) this is matter where the individual atoms have been NEARLY ionized, by pumping an electron up to ALMOST, but not quite, the energy needed to free it from the atom, leaving an ion. (You can do this with a laser tuned to the energy difference between the ground state, or the state the electron WAS originally in, and the state you want it in.) If you get the electron into one of the high, flat, circular orbitals, it looks almost like a classic Bohr atom (earth/moon style orbit), and the state lasts for several hours.
Atoms in such a state associate into dense hexagonal clusters. (19-atom clusters are easy and heavily studied, and clusters of up to 91 atoms are reported.) The electrons bond the atoms by delocalizing, forming a metallic, hexagonal grid, similar to a tiny flake of graphite sheet. You can't make them very big. (There's some issue with the speed of light screwing up the bonding stability when the flakes get too big.) But you can make a lot of them, creating a "dusty plasma".
So hitting gas with the right laser pulse could end up with lots of flakes of this stuff, with deuterons held in tight (dense!) and well-defined flat hexagonal arrays by a chicken-wire of delocalized electrons, with zero (or tiny) net charge, floating around in a near vacuum and suitable for all sorts of manipulation. (Like slamming them into each other, for instance.)
Now how this interacts with substituting muons for electrons (something analogous to an impurity in a semiconductor crystal?), missing or extra electrons (ditto?), occasional oddball nuclei (again ditto?), or perhaps how it might generate muons when tickled by appropriate laser pulses, all look like good open questions for active research.
The point is that it's pretty easy to get these long-lived, self-organized, high-density, stable regular geometry, crystal flakes of graphite-like deuterium floating in a near vacuum, where you can poke at them, without any pesky condensed matter to get in the way.
Easy as in maybe you can do it on a desktop with diode lasers, producing "maker" level nuclear physics experiments. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I thought it was about the other ColdFusion. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).