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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 ...
Solar panels are going quite well. What would be nice is to see is battery capacity drop in price. Having charge controllers and inverters get cheaper, but still maintain the same level of quality and safety wouldn't be bad either.
Batteries are the weakest link in the solar equation. We get banks that are reasonably priced for individuals, have a long life, can handle charge/discharge cycles, and can store a decent amount of ampere-hours, and that will go a long way in helping with energy issues.
Of course, the ability to pull CO2 from the air and synthesize a fuel using solar wouldn't be bad either, especially if it were ethanol or a synthetic diesel. This would provide for long term storage in an energy-dense manner.
I'm pretty sure in reading TFA there is little chance he could be "mistaken":
If he can demonstrate this, then fine ... he's a super genius.
But I'm sticking with my "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."
It isn't up to the world to validate his outrageous claims. Put up or shut up.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In fact, there's a solar installer that will happily sell you a PowerWall with your rooftop system...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
$1.82 installed. It will take my 7kW array 2.5 years to pay itself off.
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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