Cold fusion is back in the news.
If cold fusion can be made to work, it could power the world cheaply on a virtually limitless supply of seawater. But scientists don’t even know if it’s possible.
Now a new study has produced evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the new name for the controversial process labeled “cold fusion” two decades ago.
Fusion is the energy source of the sun and other stars. It occurs when atomic nuclei are combined. Today’s nuclear plants employ fission, the splitting of nuclei. Scientists have been striving for decades to tap fusion to produce electricity from an abundant fuel called deuterium that can be extracted from seawater. Fusion would not come with the radioactive byproducts of fission.
At a meeting of the American Chemical Society, the scientists described today what they claim is the first clear visual evidence that LENR devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists view as tell-tale signs that nuclear reactions are occurring.
In all, 30 papers on the topic will be presented at the meeting this week as part of a 20th anniversary nod to the first description of cold fusion.
Today’s announcement was not just a birthday wish, however.
“Our finding is very significant,” said chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, Calif. “To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from an LENR device.”
That is very interesting. So far all the cold fusion guys have been able to do is to create low grade heat. Good enough for warming your coffee. Not good enough to boil water. In any case understanding what is going on will probably be useful one way or another.
I like this fusion method when it comes to generating mass quantities of energy:
Bussard’s IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained
Why hasn’t Polywell Fusion been fully funded by the Obama administration?
Cross Posted at Power and Control
Welcome Instapundit readers
Comments
8 responses to “A New Hope: Cold Fusion”
I was a physics grad student when cold fusion hit the news. Lots of the PhDs weighed in on the subject. What struck me was how many supposed scientists were able to dismiss the idea BEFORE trying to replicate it experimentally. Not really the scientific method that I learned, that’s for sure.
In any event, I’ve followed the research these last 20 years and I’m fairly convinced that some sort of nuclear reaction is occurring. Unfortunately, the mechanism isn’t clearly understood, which is why the experiment isn’t always reproducible. And the possibility exists that even if the theory gets ironed out, it might not be scalable.
I was a group leader in a physics lab at a very famous university when we heard about “cold fusion.” The result was very puzzling. They had taken no precautions against radiation and were claiming one Watt of nuclear power, yet they were still alive. They should have been dead of radiation poisoning already.
Then we did what real scientists do, pulled out the heavy equipment and tried to reproduce the results with all the instrumentation we could think of, a lot more and a lot more sophisticated than available to a couple of chemists. After six weeks, nothing. This scenario was repeated all around the US, Europe, and everywhere else that had the scientific capabilities. The claims were falsified. End of story.
As someone said, the experiment was tried a thousand times, 990 got it right, 10 got it wrong. Science worked. Too bad the same can’t be done to the fraudulent “science” of global warming. That’s the problem with observational rather then experimental science.
I remember those days too. There were two reports out; one from P&F and the other from Jones at BYU (Jones has since gone somewhat nuts, I’m afraid). The BYU paper was very hard to read–a fax of a fax of a fax of a fax–but it made sense that at the higher hydrogen densities found in palladium you could get a slightly higher muon-catalyzed or even spontaneous fusion rate. Not much higher, but maybe enough to probe interesting details of nuclear structure.
The summary report that came out several years ago was rather interesting: different researchers have tried different approaches, and some find anomolies and some don’t, but the tell-tale neutrons have been scarce.
That some found extra heat and some didn’t is odd, and leaves me wondering if we need a little research into phase transitions in high-pressure/high-temperature palladium. The deuterium is dissolved in the metal. If the structure of the metal lattice changes, the distance between deuterium atoms might change too…
James,
I believe the effect has been found in other hydrogen/deuterium absorbing metals such as nickel.
Physicist,
Currently reproducibility is running about 50%. Will this effect (some think it is a D-metal reaction rather than D-D) ever be useful on its own? Doubtful. Understanding how it works may prove useful though.
Not really the scientific method that I learned, that’s for sure.
And I was in grad school working on organic semiconductors when the Schon/Lucent debacle occurred, and it was sort of just the opposite, in that everyone hopped on even when the theory made no sense, largely on the weight of reputations of some of the senior scientists involved.
I’m an industrial scientist now, and almost all of my life is spent trying to keep people from leaping to conclusions one way or the other before the data is in, or the experiments understood.
The claims were falsified. End of story. I am reminded of some of the early chemistry of brominations that were clouded for a long time by free radical contamination so that in the end, both camps were correct- they just did not have identical experimental conditions. I am still plenty dubious, but there is at least a chance that what you did and what they did was not the same thing. Now, that is still a problem, but there keeps emerging weird reports, through reasonable, peer-reviewed channels. This one is intriguing because they indeed do see some neutrons, so I am ready to wait and see.
I’m an industrial scientist now, and almost all of my life is spent trying to keep people from leaping to conclusions one way or the other before the data is in, or the experiments understood.
There is a lot of that going around.
When the issue was hot, the late Petr Beckmann reported in his old Access to Energy newsletter that he had seen a poster session paper at a conference that he believed explained the excess heat from the Pons-Fleischmann setup. The claim in that paper was that the excess heat was caused by metal fracture of the palladium, fractures caused by the palladium being subjected to voltage. That explanation might also fit with the long-observed phenomenon that only palladium catalysts that had been processed a certain way (I believe they were annealed, but memory is hazy) ever produced the excess heat.
The same team has been reporting evidence of cold fusion for quite a while now. They seem to be well respected in the business, but if history is any indication, they’re not onto anything.
For example: 2007 they said the same thing:
http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/101ns_001.htm
Kowalski seems to have done the same experiment and drew much different conclusions. Mind you, all this excitement is over a couple of microscopic holes in a chunk of plastic. It’s not a slam dunk detection of neutrons by any means:
http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/347new.html