Cold Fusion Gets a Boost From the US Navy

Tjeerd writes in to alert us to the publication in a highly respected, peer-reviewed journal of results indicative of table-top fusion. The US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, CA (called Spawar) has apparently been conducting research on "cold fusion" since the days of the discredited report of Pons and Fleischmann. They are reporting on the reproducible detection of highly energetic charged particles from a wire coated in palladium-deuterium and subjected to either an electric or a magnetic field. Their paper was published in February in the journal Naturwissenschaften (which has published work by Einstein, Heisenberg, and Lorenz). New Scientist also has a note about the fusion work but it is available only to subscribers.

Figures

[DrMrLordX]

You can bet the Navy is interested in any portable, high-power energy source that could exceed the efficiency of fission reactors. Those rail guns they're pimping probably take a lot of power to operate.

More power to em (literally and figuratively).

Far more exciting

[ab8ten]

is the work (also funded by the navy) undertaken by Dr. Bussard (of interstellar spaceship fame). His design for an electrostatic inertial confinement machine shows more promise than the heavy, expensive tokamak prefered by the internatinal ITER project, and has been built and tested in the lab, but not yet to an energy-return scale. The work was kept secret due to the source of funding, for the last 12 years, so it is only now that we're hearing aboutu it. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846 673788606 [google.com] - Lecture given by Bussard at google, giving an overview of the project. 1:30 long, so if you don't have time, read: http://www.askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/2006-9%20IAC %20Paper.pdf [askmar.com] - Summary paper, outlining the research and results so far. The real research paper is yet to be published, but that's what he's working on now.

Re:Figures

[MancDiceman]

Talk about xenophobic racism.

Read the post. That journal is one of the best journals in the World - look at the previous contributors mentioned in the post and tell me it's not a decent journal. Just because it's German, it doesn't mean it's "sub-par". Your post should be modded down for trolling, but unfortunately I expect it'll bubble up as "Informative".

Also, most US/British journals would refuse to publish not because they doubted the ability of the scientists to produce good quality data, but because they have a knee-jerk reaction that cold fusion is junk science.

Well done to this journal for actually taking it on.

Re:Far more exciting

[WarJolt]

Last I heard richard bussard is still looking for funding. I bet even if he was being funded we probably wouldn't hear anything about it anyway. It's rediculous that no one would fund $200 million to create a working fusion reactor. Relatively thats not much money and if we could put it into our powerplants we would reduce the need for oil.

Re:Figures

[ShooterNeo]

You might be interested to know that this isn't actually the case. A few hundred kilowatts of generating capacity is sufficient to fire rail guns. Why? Calculate the total energy content of 2 tons of explosives. That's how much kinetic energy a rail-gun shot might yield, and it isn't actually very much energy. (just released all at once : is why the rail-gun power supply would need to have massive accumulators of some type)

Low Energy Nuclear Reactions

[Eukariote]

The "Cold Fusion" field has seen many more experimental successes: detection of neutrons, tritium, helium, transmutations of heavier elements, non-natural-abundance isotope ratios, detection of ionizing radiation. The best place to visit for an overview of the field is http://www.lenr-canr.org/ [lenr-canr.org].

Though the experiments are remarkable, no concensus on the theory has emerged yet. Nuclear reactions are clearly happening, but it is doubtful that it is conventional fusion, that is, nuclei moving fast enough to surmount their mutual Coulombic repulsion. Something seems to be screening or catalysing the reactions.

Re:Figures

[smilindog2000]

"Cold" fusion means cold relative to the temperature of the Sun (hot enough to fuse hydrogen). "Cold" fusion in theory could potentially boil water, and drive the turbines. However, a basic quantum physics result is that there is basically no way in heck that cold fusion will ever work, unless there is some new unknown physics taking place. While possible, it's unlikely, which is why most respected journals shy away from it, in addition to the large number of quacks the field has attracted. I put more hope in the Polywell stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell [wikipedia.org]

Re:Low Energy Nuclear Reactions

[ResidntGeek]

Shit... "nuclear catalyst" - there's a phrase to put fear into the heart of anyone who knows what a catalyst is.

Call me ignorant (but considerate)

[xerxesVII]

So maybe I've had a few tonight, but I'm thoughtful enough to not go texting people at this hour. I'll just bug all of you instead.

I feel like I've been reading about cold fusion for as long as I've been old enough to read about science. I can't shake the feeling that cold fusion research is the modern equivalent of alchemy. That is to say that it's kind of a dead end in itself, but the amount of work being done to that end is yielding all kinds of results that will be beneficial to other scientists at some other point.

As to why I just had to come on here and spew this, I will refer you to my colleague, Professor Daniels.

Method

[mdsolar]

The method of recording nuclear tracks is a solid is an old one but it has the advantage that the recording material can be placed very close to the reaction. This has lead to the discovery of very short lived particles that might be long sought axions in a recent accelerator experiment: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0954-3899/34/1/009 [iop.org]. The plastic detectors used in the SPAWARS experiment can be placed close to the electrode so that background is a smaller part of the overall signal. Their method of electrode fabrication is also impressive. It seems to work just about every time.
--
Get solar power for what you pay your utility now: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html [blogspot.com]

Re:Figures

[Anna Merikin]

the first occurrence of cold fusion was a bottle making bubbles.

Not so. The first occurence (the discovery itself) was caused by a fire in the lab where the experiment was housed; the starting point of the fire was the closet that contained the cooler with the heavy water.

Several years later, probably the first replication of the effect was marked by a fire in the Palo Alto Lab containing the experiment. (To this day, both Stanford and the City of Palo Alto deny there was such a fire, but the local newspapers including the SF Chronicle carried the story.)

So, yes "cold" fusion can provide a source of heat. Obviously.

Re:Figures

[pallmall1]

Why choose this Journal?

From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

In 1991, Eugene Mallove who was the chief science writer with the MIT News office, said that he believes the negative report issued by MIT's Plasma Fusion Center in 1989, which was highly influential in the controversy, was fraudulent because "data was shifted" without explanation, and as a consequence, this action obscured a possible positive excess heat result at MIT. In protest of MIT's failure to discuss and acknowledge the significance of this data shift, he resigned from his post of chief science writer at the MIT News office on June 7, 1991. He maintained that the data shift was biased to both support the conventional belief in the nonexistence of the cold fusion effect as well as to protect the financial interests of the plasma fusion center's research in hot fusion. Also in 1991, Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger said that he had experienced "the pressure for conformity in editor's rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous reviewers. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science". He resigned as Member and Fellow of the American Physical Society, in protest of its peer review practice on cold fusion.

--bold added

Doubtful

[IvyKing]

About ten years ago, I met a couple of guys at NRAD (Navy Research And Development) in San Diego who were doubtful of the work being done on cold fusion. One of the them was making comments about dadiation being detected with some ancient technology (e.g. electroscopes) but not with more modern radiation detectors.

The most amusing comment was that they were able to recreate Fleischman and Pons 'excess energy' - but pointed out that the palladium electrodes became more resistive when absorbing hydrogen and that they were using constant current power supplies (hint: Fleischman and Pons weren't monitoring the power supply voltage).

Not unexpected.

[Entropius]

Keep in mind that the purpose of military R&D isn't to develop working products; it's to get funding to continue work. This is especially true for the pseudoprivate military contractors like Boeing and Raytheon, but also partly true for groups like Spawar... who tend to be less greedy but also less concerned with actually making something that works. Military R&D labs and contractors don't manufacture products; they manufacture grants.

Saying "They must be on to something, because they're still doing the research" isn't valid, because they're only still doing the research because they can get money for it.

I had an engineering professor who once worked on Reagan's Star Wars program. He admitted that everyone in his team knew for a fact, based on sound science, that what they were doing would never work ... but they kept at it, because they were getting paid to do it by people unconcerned with whether or not it *would* work.

Re:Figures

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that "a basic quantum physics result is that there is basically no way in heck that cold fusion will ever work" but this is untrue. Long before the Pons and Fleischmann, muon-catalysed fusion experiments had been successfully conducted and neutrons detected. The basic idea is to replace the electron in a hydrogen atom with a muon, which is 207 times heavier. This allows formation of a 'muonic atom' which makes a regular chemical bond with another atom, but with the nuclei much closer together. The nuclei are close enough that a (low probability) tunneling effect can allow the nuclei to fuse. The chief problems with the scheme are 1) muons don't hang around that long and 2) nobody has ever tried to produce them in the large quantities needed to make a productive reactor.
Fusion is easy, the trick is always making an energy producing reactor with it.

Re:Figures

[qrad]

Perhaps the authors chose this journal for its historical significance. In 1938 Naturwissenshaften reported the work of Hahn and Meitner which was later referenced in establishing the existence of fission.

qrad
Ph.D. Student in Nuclear Science and Engineering
MIT

Re:Far more exciting

[b00tang]

There have been a couple posts like this already so I'll take the bait and ask:
where has the polywell fusor been "universally deemed to be the proven method of fusion". If you want to learn more about people who currently are doing IEC research and are in fact funded by the DOE to do so (the Navy doesn't fund ITER to my knowledge things like that go through the DOE), then check out the website from at University of Madison:
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/ftisite1.htm [wisc.edu]

It should give at least a brief introduction to what people who have funding tend to use IEC for (neutron generation and maybe someday energy through the D-He3 reaction if we had He3).

I can't tell you exactly why the Navy isn't funding Bussard but I can ask a question that I bet the Navy asked. Bussard wants $200 million dollars to scale up his fusor based on the few results he found before the fusor broke. Why not apply for a grant to rebuild the device and actually demonstrate results? If thats not good enough why not scale it up slightly before going for the whole $200 million dollar large scale system? There are hundreds (thousands?) of small research companies with great ideas all competing to have their ideas funded and those companies often only ask for $100,000 (approximately an average phase I grant). Is it worth gambling $200 million on something that hasn't demonstrated results when that money could go to so many other ideas that have? I'm not sure how big the grant for this cold fusion research was but I am willing to be its pretty small.

I won't even go into all the side benefits of ITER (large scale international collaboration, developing new technology on U.S. soil, wide spread support from the majority of fusion scientists), but I will say that all these conspiracy theories that no money goes to anything but ITER should google "innovative confinement concepts"

Sorry I guess this was pretty off-topic, but really, look at my karma, how much worse could things get? ...

Re:in case you were wondering the Navy's connectio

[BCW2]

Have you ever served on a sub? I question your knowledge. The way you detect a nuclear sub is still by noise, normally the cooling pumps for the reactor. Cold fusion would eliminate those pumps and the noise that goes with it. A diesel electric has always been the quitest boat under the sea and anyone can sneak up on a surface task force. We used to joke about the skimmers pinging away like they could find something with active sonar, what a joke! We could hear them pinging over 50 miles away, with that kind of head start did they stand a chance of finding us? Hell NO!. Every exercise with a USN task force or RN ended with us inside the screen and execise shots passing under the flagship. Nobody ever tracked us thermally because it mixes with the surrounding water to fast. Now a P3 with a MAD unit (magnetic anomally detector) was a bitch to get away from! That was the only thing that could ever find us when we didn't want to be found. The Soviets were always 3 generations behind in quieting and sonar.
signed - a cold war sub sailor