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Cold Fusion Rears Ugly Head With Claims of Deuterium-Powered Homes

Posted by timothy on from the let's-go-with-polonium-instead dept.

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 ...

4 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Just by tripleevenfall · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, I think we can safely assume solar doesn't have the potential Deuterium does for warp drive applications.

  2. Cold fusion works. I know it by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  3. Re:Hmmm .... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Informative

    Personally, I think he's mistaken or lying. I just wanted to make sure that we considered the reasonable alternatives.

    I'm pretty sure in reading TFA there is little chance he could be "mistaken":

    The secret sauce seems to be ultra-dense deuterium, "D(0)" whatever that means. Looking through the author's other papers, it looks like he's claiming to have made metallic hydrogen, which would be a Nobel Prize right there. And it's starting to look a little bit suspicious that no other labs have replicated the work in the intervening eight or ten years.

    While metallic hydrogen probably exists inside the core of Jupiter, no lab on Earth has succeeded in making metallic hydrogen repeatably, although it's been postulated to be possible since 1935 and many have tried. Teams at Cornell and the French Atomic Commission have both given it a shot, and failed with pressures as high as 3.2 million atmospheres.

    Well, no labs except [Holmlid]'s. It must be true, though, because it's on Wikipedia! It says right there that the [Holmlid] lab made metallic hydrogen using "Rydberg Matter". We'd never heard of this stuff, so we followed that Wikipedia link down the rabbit hole, only to find some mumbo-jumbo that we didn't understand and citations of papers nearly exclusively by, you guessed it, [Leif Holmlid].

    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.
  4. Conflict of Interest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.