Scientific American Column: 'It's Not Cold Fusion...But It's Something' (scientificamerican.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Scientific American magazine has published a guest column on low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) [putting] into context the history of what was mistakenly referred to as cold fusion and what happened. The bottom line is that there is compelling cumulative evidence for nuclear reactions taking place, including shifts in the abundance of isotopes, element transmutations, and localized melting of metals. Furthermore, those reactions do not have the characteristics of either nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Despite sharp criticism from much of the scientific community after the 1989 announcement by Fleischmann and Pons, the Department of the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center and other reputable organizations continued the research and published many papers. The article reports that "to the surprise of many people, a new field of nuclear research has emerged," adding that even in the early 20th century, atomic scientists were already reporting "inexplicable experimental evidence of elemental transmutations."

Comments

"Guest Blog"

[Stephan Schulz]

It's a guest blog contribution, not an article by Scientific American staff. Unless it's backed by some real science, it's not significant. The first author, Steven Krivit, is a journalist with a long history of publishing borderline claims on "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions", the newish euphemism for "Cold Fusion" - i.e. he makes suggestive claims, but keeps just south of complete bullshit, to maintain some kind of intellectual deniability.

Notice how in this article he name-drops Chandrasekhar to bolster the reputation of Lewis Larsen and thus the so-called "Widom-Larsen theory" without explicitly endorsing it or claiming it explains the purported experimental evidence.

Re:As usual

[NormalVisual]

Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle.

I think the poster boy for this is Ignaz Semmelweis. The scientific community dismissed his results out of pride, and thousands died as a result.

Initial Energy Problem Too.

[Roger W Moore]

But what about the gamma? No explanation there.

This isn't the only dodgy thing about this theory the whole electron-mass argument seems dubious looked at from a simple energy standpoint. They are claiming that the electrons in the metal hydride have a mass of well over an MeV for this to work. This is a HUGE amount of energy, about 6 orders of magnitude higher than any chemical energy. Basic energy conservation requires this mass to come from somewhere so where does it come from? Energies that large (by the time you have multiplied it by the number of electrons) are usually pretty obvious - it should be about 5-6 orders of magnitude higher than the energy stored in a battery of the same size.

Re:Justice.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also worth pointing out that even fusion in stars isn't anywhere near as concentrated an energy source as regular chemical reactions. The energy production by fusion in the center of the sun is estimated to only be about 275 Watts/m^3. Less than human metabolism (average human body is less than 0.1 m^3 and gives off about 100 Watts), and about the same as a compost heap. So when you're talking about low energy nuclear reactions, you're talking about really, really low energy levels. Possibly so low as to be of no practical use other than explaining some minor discrepancies in energy measured by certain very sensitive experiments.

Stars have a low power density because they stabilize at a dynamic equilibrium where the pressure of the star's core is exactly balanced with the gravitational force of the gas around. Increasing power density increases the temperature, which increases the pressure. The core then expands because of the overpressure, which lowers the power density. That's why sun-sized stars burn their hydrogen so constantly over billions of years. The bigger the star, the higher the pressure, i.e. the power density is higher. Large stars burn their fuel much faster for that reason. Without this stabilizing effect, stars would go off like a cosmic hydrogen bomb the moment they form.