20 Years After Cold Fusion Debut, Another Team Claims Success 373
New Scientist is reporting that twenty years to the day since the initial announcement of a cold fusion discovery another Utah-based team is trying again. This announcement is being taken a little more seriously than the original, although some might say it is just more available wishful thinking. "Some researchers in the cold fusion field agree. 'In my view [it's] a cold fusion effect,' says Peter Hagelstein, also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Others, though, are not convinced. Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, has been following the cold fusion debate for many years and also spoke at the ACS conference. 'Their hypothesis as to a fusion mechanism I think is on thin ice ... you get into physics fantasies rather quickly and this is an unfortunate distraction from their excellent empirical work,' he told New Scientist. Krivit thinks cold fusion remains science fiction. Like many in the field, he prefers to categorize the work as evidence of 'low-energy nuclear reactions,' and says it can be explained without relying on nuclear fusion."
Bad headline (Score:5, Informative)
There, fixed that for ya.
Hagelstein Is A Heavyweight (Score:3, Informative)
Cold fusion, or energy-positive fusion (Score:5, Informative)
Can somebody explain this to me? (Score:3, Informative)
Can somebody explain all the discussion and discrepancies here? After all, that kind of effect does not seem to require too much effort to reproduce, compared with hot fusion or particle physics.
So -- is there some disagreement about whether the effect is there and measurable or is the disagreement just about how to explain the effect? Is there some agreement on what the energy source *could* be? Obviously if there is an effect but you reject the hypothesis that cold fusion is the cause, something else must cause the effect -- and some material must chemically react or similar.
It is a bit weird in my opinion that there is still so much disagreement about this after 20 years.
Re:Odd (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Odd (Score:5, Informative)
According to the journal article:
Advantages of CR-39 for ICF experiments include its insensitivity to electromagnetic noise; its resistance to mechanical damage; and its relative insensitivity to electrons, X-rays, and gamma-rays.
So they chose it because it would give more reliable data, less prone to interference.
Re:Some objectivity needed (Score:2, Informative)
The only real danger I've seen is labeling your work "cold fusion" -- which you should not do if you want to be taken seriously. (Similar to how, if you were to come up with a legitimate scientific curriculum for grade schools, using the term "intelligent design" anywhere will not help people take you seriously.)
Nearly all of these "cold fusion" projects are easy enough to write off as nonsense on objective scientific grounds. Nobody has suggested a mechanism for action that has any reasonable physical basis, nor demonstrated that such a mechanism exists. Sometimes they conjure up theories that have neither experimental confirmation nor a reasonable physical mechanism (which means it's a worthless theory), or they build a single device that has some weird behavior, which isn't physics research.
Re:Cold fusion, or energy-positive fusion (Score:4, Informative)
True. Muon-catalysed fusion[1] has been demonstrated in the lab as early as the late '50s and is an example of cold fusion. It occurs spontaneously as a byproduct of some experiments which produce muons, but in very small quantities. The energy required to produce the (very short-lived) muons needed for the reaction is orders of magnitude higher than the energy released by the fusion. If the muons stayed around for a few hours, then it might be energy positive, but they decay incredibly quickly.
[1] Muon-catalysed fusion works by replacing the electron around the hydrogen atom with a muon. This has the same charge but a much smaller orbit. This means that two muon-proton atoms will get much closer before their charge repels them, often close enough for the two protons to get close enough that the strong attractions overpowers the electromagnetic repulsion and causes fusion.
Mosier-Boss and Fleichmann? (Score:4, Informative)
Hey, look who Dr. Mosier-Boss authored a paper [sciencedirect.com] with!
Not a Utah based team (Score:5, Informative)
According to the article, the team is based at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California. The announcement was made at a conference in Utah.
Re:Some objectivity needed (Score:1, Informative)
Actually it's hard to say if anyone was able to replicate the results or not. It turned in a giant witch hunt in the end [wired.com]:
Still, Taubes's report in the June 1990 Science magazine clearly suggested that Packham might have added tritium to fake his results. This reassured many people that cold fusion had been bogus all along. Packham received his PhD, but only on condition that all references to cold fusion be removed from the body of his thesis. Today he works for NASA, developing astronaut life-support systems. "I don't know why Gary Taubes wrote what he did," he says. "Certainly I did not add any tritium in my experiment." (emphasis added)
People like Taubes went around accusing other scientists of falsifying results even though he had no evidence to back up his accusations. The bolded part of the quote above shows that people were forced to choose between continuing to investigate the phenomenon or keeping their jobs.
As today's news shows, there could be something very interesting worth studying, but people have been so scared away from testing it due to all the "liar liar" shit-slinging that research into the subject has been unnecessarily delayed for decades.
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:4, Informative)
There still is heat given off, harvestable heat. The key is that you don't need to run the reaction at the sort of temperatures you find in the sun. That's a huge, huge benefit. The biggest problem, however, is finding out whether what's going on is actually fusion. And that's proven to be far more challenging than it would at first appear.
Re:Read the DOE Report on 'Cold Fusion' =They fund (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go [lenr-canr.org].
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:3, Informative)
OK, but it would have to be hot relative to the surroundings in order to gain any worthwhile energy.
It's the "surroundings", or rather the conditions whereby fusion is initiated, that are why it's called "Cold". Every other form of fusion we know about requires tremendous heat and pressure throughout before fusion begins. Like a magnetically contained plasma heated to 100 million C, or a mass much greater than that of Jupiter, before fusion will even start.
From what I understand, even the faux experiment didn't succeed in boiling water. If you don't boil water, I'd guess that it's not hot enough. I can only guess that the assumption was that if this experiment was truly a success, that it could be scaled up dramatically.
The very idea that you could ever get a net-positive amount of energy out of it, regardless of size, is the real assumption. So far that hasn't come close to happening, so, yeah... Even if it is "cold fusion", i'm not holding my breath on it becoming a power source. Maybe a high-energy neutron source, which is still useful (even if it isn't fusion that creates the neutrons).
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Informative)
I know you were joking about the lights, but you do realize that is exactly what an air conditioner does right?
There is no such thing as 'cold', just heat and varying amounts of it. Cold is truely just a lack of heat energy, which your air conditioner removes by absorbing it post condenser and emitting it outside pre-condensor.
Your cynicism is out of date. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.physorg.com/news10682.html
Re:Cold fusion (Score:5, Informative)
It may have been science fiction to the general public (which includes all non physicists), but it did in fact have a sound theoretical basis. (Unlike cold fusion.) It didn't take a war to make them work, it took a war to spur their engineering development. They would have worked regardless.
You weren't inspecting any such things because they never existed. Nor can there be such a thing as an atomic rifle grenade - as the minimum mass for a practical fission explosion far exceeds what a rifle can project.
Not as far as you fantasize they were 45 years ago. (You don't seem to have kept up with the field, at lot has been declassified since 1963.) I invite you to check out Carey Sublette's excellent Nuclear Weapons FAQ [nuclearweaponarchive.org] and then join us on the Usenet group alt.war.nuclear for further discussion.
I can envision plaid polka dotted elephants - but their only basis in fact is the consumption of psychoactive chemicals.
Yeah, when all else fails - invoke a conspiracy theory. It relieves you of dealing with the really hard questions... Like the lack of a theoretical basis for cold fusion. Like the fact that despite twenty years of trying, the experiments cannot be replicated on a reliable basis. It's all Big Oil and their evil minions.
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:3, Informative)
I can't find their original presentation or press release anywhere online - but one of the authors of this paper previously authored on with Fleischmann and they explicitly link their work to the cold fusion work of Pons & Fleischmann... So it's not hard to make the inference.
Re:Agreed, TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Informative)
Since we're getting into semantics, an AC unit actually removes moisture from the air. That's why it is called a Air Conditioner, not an Air Cooler. The cooling effect is just a byproduct of the moisture removal.
Exactly opposite. An air conditioner [wikipedia.org] cools the air by passing that air over the cooling element, which is made cool by compressing a refrigerant [wikipedia.org]. It is the refrigerant undergoing phase changes within the sealed coils that causes the cooling.
The removal of water from the air (condensation) is a byproduct of the cooling.
Re:Some objectivity needed (Score:3, Informative)
yes I know about muon catalyzed fusion; it works because the muon is able to form a "molecule" which tightly binds two deuterium or whatever you are fusing together. the molecular interactions occur on a scale that is roughly 200x shorter than any interactions in solid materials. To allow any fusion reaction to occur in such a material you would need to negate/overcome the repulsive force between the two nuclei all the way down to the scale of atomic nuclei. If we found a particle which was stable and could do the same thing that muons do then we could discuss cold fusion seriously but right now I don't see much evidence in favor of the phenomenon.
Re:Cold fusion (Score:3, Informative)
An atomic rifle grenade would be physically impossible, since the minimum critical mass for pure weapons grade material is on the order of ~10 kg.
Historic bomb material like Pu-239 and U-235 aren't the only fissile (or even fissionable) isotopes out there, some of the others (most artificial) have quite significantly smaller critical mass. (On the other hand, they also have relatively short half-lives which make them less than ideal for practical munitions - but they may well have been used in experimental devices.)
And the mass you quote is for a simple sphere, ignoring things like neutron reflectors, compression, and exotic triggering mechanisms.
Re:Cold fusion (Score:5, Informative)
You weren't inspecting any such things because they never existed. Nor can there be such a thing as an atomic rifle grenade - as the minimum mass for a practical fission explosion far exceeds what a rifle can project.
Well, I'm with you with the rifle grenade, but the "Davy Crockett" [wikipedia.org] was real and could have probably stretched to 1kT.
Re:Cold fusion (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I forgot about the Davy Crockett.
Re:Sting theory isn't science, cold fusion is. (Score:2, Informative)
The exception is the so called "neutron bomb". The U238 tamper and case is replace with lead or some other material that will not produce fission. It is a relatively small yield bomb, but produces much neutron radiation.
As a power source fusion will produce neutron radiation. This will make the surrounding equipment radioactive. The one exception to this is fusion with He3. ( Helium with an atomic weight of 3 ). It is very rare on earth. In a fusion reaction ( I think with deturium ) it will produce no neutrons. It is truly a clean source of energy. The sun has been producing He3 and expelling He3 for billions of years. Surprise, the moon has an abundance of He3 in the regolith. Once we have a viable fussion power plant, that is why will be on the moon.
Disclaimer. I am not a nuclear physicist. I just have too much time on my hands.