Cold Fusion Back From The Dead 635
misterfusion writes "Looks like the IEEE is warming up to cold fusion with the latest story "Cold Fusion Back from the Dead". This has been a good year for this field with several leading science journals (Physics Today, MIT Technology Review, etc) contributing stories. Things are warming up and if science Research & Development funding can be stimulated with a positive DoE report (due soon), it might be an interesting rebirth."
Almost had a heart attack! (Score:5, Funny)
Phew!
Re:Almost had a heart attack! (Score:3, Informative)
I thought why?
There are some many better things now.
Let it stay dead man... just die a noble death.
Re:Almost had a heart attack! (Score:4, Insightful)
Right now, CFML is the only language that will run on either a Java Server or the .NET framework [newatlanta.com]
Sure, there are better cheaper tag-based languages out there, but CFML is still one of the easiest languages I've ever come across. If anything, it's too easy, that's why there is so much disdain for it, in many ways, it's so easy -- it doesn't feel like a real computer language.
Re:Almost had a heart attack! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Almost had a heart attack! (Score:3, Funny)
Moreover, when I hear about a site written in C# , I want that to mean a composer orchestrated the score for the site in a beautiful, somber key evocative of Brahms later symphonies.
Also, when I hear about a site written in java , I want that to bring to mind a picture of some nut on the floor of a coffee house wri
Come on... (Score:5, Funny)
What if Slashdot was right... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What if Slashdot was right... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What if Slashdot was right... (Score:5, Informative)
Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Cold fusion was dropped because it could never be replicated, and perhaps because of Pons and Flesichmann's attitude. Science is not done by press conference, and you don't call an anomalous heat effect 'cold fusion' and cause a global hoo-hah without some damn good evidence.
Stop the scientific madness! (Score:3, Funny)
We all know that these kinds of experiments opened a blackhole in
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should there be a "war surcharge"?
Fossil fuels are not subsidized in the USA, just taxed at a lower rate than European countries choose to tax gasoline.
Price at the pump is based on the owners of the oil selling it profitably. If they can do so even during a war, more power to them.
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm, Not sure what the first deduction is all about, so really couldn't say.
The second they mention is a "cost of doing business" thing. Every company in the USA gets to deduct that sort of thing from their taxes (when my employer buys me a new test box, it gets the same kind of deduction).
The third is the tax credit for alternative fuels! So you're complaining because oil companies are making ethanol/gasoline mixtures, and getting tax credits for it?! Wow, if you were to
Conspiracy theories (Score:4, Insightful)
I love this notion that "the POWERS THAT BE suppressed the IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE for their own evil ends!" It's such a charming fantasy.
The Evil Vested Interests of the world are regularly blindsided by new technology. The usual pattern (*cough*RIAA*cough*) is that they ignore it until it really starts to hurt them, and then they try to make it go away through legal action. Those folks do not have a magic ability to predict the future. In fact, they demonstrably suck at it.
When "cold fusion" was announced, the people who discredited it were academics who tried like hell to reproduce the effect, and found it to be irreproducible based on the information they had at the time. This is called "peer review". Scientists are supposed to be profoundly skeptical. In that respect, they differ from conspiracy theorists.
If you RTFA, you'll notice that no extravagant claims are being made. If it turns out that there's something there which really is both reproducible and interesting, we'll hear more about it.
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, lets just judge the science on its merits, not on conspiracy theories. If it has merit, you can be pretty sure theres lots of investors are going to start seeing the potential for a lot of zeroes after those $$$ signs and jump on it, and that probably the first companies to jump on the bandwagen will be the energy companies you claim are holding it up.
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
The only people who claim there is a conspiracy to shush up cold fusion are crackpots.
The physics community would have carried Pons and Fleischmann on sedan chairs to Sweden if they'd really discovered cold fusion. But they didn't, and they ignored all scientific process. They refused to share details of their experiment and refused to acknowledge errors in their experiments.
Read Taubes' _Cold Fusion_ or Huizenga's book for a clear understanding.
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's the rub, isn't it? It doesn't matter if it's a nuclear effect "in your mind". Your mind doesn't enter into it. Neither does Pons or Fleischmann's minds. What matters is whether nuclear fusion is actually occurring, and that is to be settled by experiment.
Pons and Fleischmann might have seen a real effect. Certainly, carefully-constructed experiments have consistently given hints of excess heat. But that doesn't make them "right". Lucretius wrote about "atoms" centuries before Dalton. That doesn't mean the ancient Greeks invented modern chemistry.
Pons and Fleischmann violated just about every tenet of the open, peer-reviewed scientific process. In so doing they abandoned any claim to legitimacy. If this effect turns out to be real, they didn't "get it right". They just got lucky. And if this effect turns out to be real, it will be the paintstaking, not-by-press-conference slow work of real researchers who understand how science works, that will ironically provide actual justification.
Re:Easy to see why this has had so much resistance (Score:3, Insightful)
To be fair to them, I think that the media storm that erupted from their first press conference took them completely by surprise, because I never saw it as being pushed by traditional media. I was in college at the time, and Cold Fusion was the first big 'internet phenomenon' that I can remember. If you were a reader of Usenet (as a great many scientists we
Re:RTFP: He said "aneutronic". (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please. "Creation science" isn't science at all. Science makes predictions based on theories, and often has applicable uses. "Creation science" just attacks an evolutionary strawman. Nothing useful has come out of it, and no predictions can be made from it, and its practicioners don't follow the scientific method of empirical research.
To believe that crap, you have to discard physics (radioactive dating), astrophysics (age of the universe), biology
Would that rebirth include... (Score:3, Interesting)
...apologies to the pioneers of cold fusion, like Pons and Fleischman? Seems to me like a positive finding in a DoE report would at least be some verification that they might deserve one.
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:5, Informative)
As I understand it, they made an astonishing scientific claim. That claim, while it might be absolutely true, was not substantiated by the experiment they describe.
There is more to good science than turning out to be right.
-Peter
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:4, Informative)
If you read the article (I know, this is Slashdot...), you'd note that some of the problems in reproducing the effect have been discovered. One problem turned out to be the "density" of deuterium atoms in the palladium electrodes. Above a certain threshold, you'd see the excess heat every time. Below that, even by only 10%, you'd only see excess heat in one out of every six trials.
From this, it seems like the problem wasn't that the experiment was made up, but that the problem was the researchers had no precise concept of what steps and requirements were necessary to repeat it accurately.
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, that is precisely the hallmark of junk science: experiments that appear to show amazing results that cannot be explained by conventional theory and as a result the exact requirements to duplicate the experiment are unclear. The crackpots are then free to argue that negative results by other researchers are due to a problem with their experiment. Scientists have good reason to be skeptical of discoveries with these characteristics.
Now, Pons and Fleischman may have just been unlucky in having discovered a real effect that happened to have these characteristics. On the bright side, if they turn out to have been right their place in history is secure.
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:5, Interesting)
sPh
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. Apologies are for scientists who publish their work in good faith in peer-reviewed journals. Apologies are for scientists who submit a short manuscript to Phys. Rev. Lett. saying that under such-and-such conditions we observe extra heat and neutrons.
Apologies are not for scientists who first present a phenomenon they don't understand at a press conference and enjoy being media darlings until other people can't replicate their
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Would that rebirth include... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but that didn't exactly happen by accident...
Article Summary for lazy people (Score:5, Informative)
Cold fusion regarded as a joke for ages
waffle waffle
"THE FIRST HINT that the tide may be changing came in February 2002, when the U.S. Navy revealed that its researchers had been studying cold fusion on the quiet more or less continuously since the debacle began. "
waffle waffle
"At San Diego and other research centers, scientists built up an impressive body of evidence that something strange happened when a current passed through palladium electrodes placed in heavy water. "
waffle waffle
"Other researchers are finally beginning to explain why the Pons-Fleischmann effect has been difficult to reproduce. Mike McKubre from SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif., a respected researcher who is influential among those pursuing cold fusion, says that the effect can be reliably seen only once the palladium electrodes are packed with deuterium at ratios of 100 percent--one deuterium atom for every palladium atom. His work shows that if the ratio drops by as little as 10 points, to 90 percent, only 2 experimental runs in 12 produce excess heat, while all runs at a ratio of 100 percent produce excess heat. "
Summary: Cold fusion wasn't reproducible because not all factors were accounted for, and millitary scientists think they nailed it.
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean Pons-Fleschmann used the 100 percent ratio? Why in the world didn't the other scientists use this exact same setup when trying to reproduce the results? If you're trying to repeat a result, don't you make sure all variables are the same?
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientific papers and experiments are just as susceptible to bugs as software. Generally peer review and repetition and further work on the subject of the papers catches these eventually, but it can take time. The claims of cold-fusion were so startling (and hyped), there wasn't an awful lot of attempts to sort mistakes and understanding out before it was declared unscientific.
Best analogy I can think of is a software project that launches, claiming it will revolutionise user interface or something, but that only works on the developers own system, as they've hacked up much of their OS and hardware. It could be years before the software would work on a general computer, but if nothing works to start with, then most people won't be interested in developing and improving it.
Look how long it took to get the linux kernel reasonably mainstream supporting common hardware, and compare to Hurd...
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily. They could just have been extraordinarily lucky.
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:5, Insightful)
If you believe that you are studying the effects of an electrical current on two metal electrodes submersed in water then you would make note of the current strength, the composition and dimensions of the electrodes, the temperature of the water and that kind of thing. You don't often record what kind of shoes you are wearing when you set up the equipment, what you ate for lunch or how long the fluorescent lights in the room had been on before you started taking measurements. Why not? Because it never occurs to you that it would be important.
Good experimental procedure is to document everything as well as you can, but if you are investigating something entirely new you can't always know what matters.
Sometimes even very smart people overlook small things that turn out to be important. Ask Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee about that if you see them.
Re:Article Summary for lazy people (Score:3, Interesting)
IMNSHO (see profile for why I don't have a humble opinion on this) fusion may or may not be happening, but energy might be released by some mechanism, so it's certainly worth funding proper research into it as a possible energy storage or generation mechanism.
Slow Already, Article Text (No Karma Whoring) (Score:3, Informative)
U.S. Energy Department gives true believers a new hearing
Later this month, the U.S. Department of Energy will receive a report from a panel of experts on the prospects for cold fusion - the supposed generation of thermonuclear energy using tabletop apparatus. It's an extraordinary reversal of fortune: more than a few heads turned earlier this year when James Decker, the deputy director of the DOE's Office of Science, announced that he was initiating the review of cold fusion science. Back in November 1989, it had been the department's own investigation that determined the evidence behind cold fusion was unconvincing. Clearly, something important has changed to grab the department's attention now.
The cold fusion story began at a now infamous press conference in March 1989. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, both electrochemists working at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, announced that they had created fusion using a battery connected to palladium electrodes immersed in a bath of water in which the hydrogen was replaced with its isotope deuterium - so-called heavy water. With this claim came the idea that tabletop fusion could produce more or less unlimited, low-cost, clean energy.
In physicists' traditional view of fusion, forcing two deuterium nuclei close enough together to allow them to fuse usually requires temperatures of tens of millions of degrees Celsius. The claim that it could be done at room temperature with a couple of electrodes connected to a battery stretched credulity [see photo, "Too Good to Be True?"].
But while some scientists reported being able to reproduce the result sporadically, many others reported negative results, and cold fusion soon took on the stigma of junk science.
Today the mainstream view is that champions of cold fusion are little better than purveyors of snake oil and good luck charms. Critics say that the extravagant claims behind cold fusion need to be backed with exceptionally strong evidence, and that such evidence simply has not materialized. "To my knowledge, nothing has changed that makes cold fusion worth a second look," says Steven Koonin, a member of the panel that evaluated cold fusion for the DOE back in 1989, who is now chief scientist at BP, the London-based energy company.
Because of such attitudes, science has all but ignored the phenomenon for 15 years. But a small group of dedicated researchers have continued to investigate it. For them, the DOE's change of heart is a crucial step toward being accepted back into the scientific fold. Behind the scenes, scientists in many countries, but particularly in the United States, Japan, and Italy, have been working quietly for more than a decade to understand the science behind cold fusion. (Today they call it low-energy nuclear reactions, or sometimes chemically assisted nuclear reactions.) For them, the department's change of heart is simply a recognition of what they have said all along - whatever cold fusion may be, it needs explaining by the proper process of science.
THE FIRST HINT that the tide may be changing came in February 2002, when the U.S. Navy revealed that its researchers had been studying cold fusion on the quiet more or less continuously since the debacle began. Much of this work was carried out at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, where the idea of generating energy from sea water - a good source of heavy water - may have seemed more captivating than at other laboratories.
Many researchers at the center had worked with Fleischmann, a well-respected electrochemist, and found it hard to believe that he was completely mistaken. What's more, the Navy encouraged a culture of risk-taking in research and made available small amounts of funding for researchers to pursue their own interests.
At San Diego and other research centers, scientists built up an impressive body of evidence that something strange happened when a current passed through palladium electrodes placed in h
Perpetual motion ... (Score:5, Funny)
Let science work. (Score:5, Insightful)
With ITER in a political freeze, there is ample time to study cold fusion concepts further. I don't see how one can create fusion conditions at room temperature. But if we understand how to control the collisions of the atoms better, then we may lower ignition temperatures. If the temperatures required were only several tens of thousands of degrees, then we do away with the complex containment systems and have a very viable energy source without multi billion dollar energy stations.
Bottom line: Let real science work. The worst case scenario is that we have a better understanding of the atomic interactions that will be used in whatever fusion reaction processes that we eventually use.
Re:Let science work. (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue was not that "mainstream science" crushed down those noble researchers explorer "the bizarre". Contrary to popular myth, most scientists are delighted at the unexpected discovery of new phenomena, even if they pose a threat to established theory. But there are rules that have been evolved, over several centuries of painstaking effort, to
Back from the dead? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Back from the dead? (Score:5, Funny)
For the last time we did not steal it, we borrowed it. We fully intend to give it back one of these days.
Re:Back from the dead? (Score:5, Funny)
How do they know it's fusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Aha! This must be cold fusion."
Is it just me, or does that seem to be a bit of a leap of faith? After all, if one sets light to petrol one gets more energy out than a match puts in. Surely there are other possibilities.
Occam's razor [princeton.edu] anyone?
I'm not sure about "strong evidence" from a single research laboratory either...
Re:How do they know it's fusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
Will anything major pop out of this research? Maybe, maybe not. But we are learning. At the very least, this should train another generation of people to not buy into hype one way or another. First it was "COLD FUSION IS HERE!" then it was "COLD FUSION IS A TOTAL SCAM!". Neither is correct. But with the attention span of the media this is all you will get.
Be patient. Let science work.
Re:How do they know it's fusion? (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing that we know with certainty is that whatever is going on, it is not a nuclear effect.
It goes like this: in any nuclear effect, you wind up with lots of energy being dumped into a single nucleus. That energy can come out in only a small number of ways, because no matter what process produced the energy, all energy is created equal. And the nucleus is a well understood system.
So either you get gamma rays, neutrons, or nuclear recoil. The suggestion that you get lattice recoil, as occurs in the Mossbauer effect, does not hold water as it would require the lattice to behave in ways that are contrary to known physics, and again: all energy is created equal. Simply because an exotic process produces the energy does not allow us to suspend the rest of the laws of physics once that energy has been created.
If you have gamma rays or neurtrons, particularly in the quantities implied by the rate of energy creation, they are easily detectable. If you have nuclear recoil, you also, necessarily have neutron creation, because given the energies involved you'll knock nuetrons off the recoiling nucleus or the lattice nuclei. Again, it does not matter what exotic unknown process makes the nucleus move: once it is in motion in the lattice we can predict quite accurately how many neutrons will be produced.
Nothing like the expected numbers of neutrons or gamma rays are produced. Ergo, whatever is happening is not a nuclear process.
For what it's worth, IAANP, I have heard Fleishmann speak, and was peripherally involved in some early experiments to (in)validate the 1989 results. I've not thought much about the subject in the past decade, and hope not to do so for another decade. There's too much real science to think about instead.
--Tom
Re:How do they know it's fusion? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How do they know it's fusion? (Score:3, Insightful)
LOL! you just keep living that dream. (yes, i AM a particle physicist)
Re:How do they know it's fusion? (Score:5, Informative)
You've missed my point entirely.
I am focussed completely on the question of "How does the energy wind up as heat?"
I will grant you any number and type of exotic processes to create the energy in the first place.
But I will not grant you any new physics with regard to converting that energy into heat, because all of the scenarios posited ultimately involve either excited nuclei, or nuclei moving in the lattice, and we know with as much certainty as we know anything what happens when we have excited nuclei or nuclei moving in the lattice.
So you have two completely unrelated problems: one is that there is no known mechanism that can produce the energy in the first place. The second is that once the energy is created, there is no known mechanism that can convert it into heat without a clear-cut radiation signature. That is, even if you have pure d+d->4He fusion, you will always still get both nuetrons and x-rays (and gamma rays, in some cases) due to standard slowing down processes or de-excitation.
No matter what process produces 4He plus a few MeV, the same physics governs the thermalization process, and you have to invoke entirely new physics to govern this process in this case, as well as entirely new physics to govern the generation of the energy in the first place.
So it isn't the lack of explanation of the generated energy that is the big concern for most nuclear physicists. It is the fact that once the energy has been generated, the reaction products have to behave in ways that are completely contrary to a huge body of existing knowledge, both theory and observation.
--Tom
Should be looked at regardless (Score:5, Informative)
Over the years, a number of groups around the world have reproduced the original Pons-Fleischmann excess heat effect, yielding sometimes as much as 250 percent of the energy put in.
(snip)
Other researchers are finally beginning to explain why the Pons-Fleischmann effect has been difficult to reproduce. Mike McKubre from SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif., a respected researcher who is influential among those pursuing cold fusion, says that the effect can be reliably seen only once the palladium electrodes are packed with deuterium at ratios of 100 percent--one deuterium atom for every palladium atom. His work shows that if the ratio drops by as little as 10 points, to 90 percent, only 2 experimental runs in 12 produce excess heat, while all runs at a ratio of 100 percent produce excess heat.
Something is going on here that we don't understand, and it looks like it can be reproduced. Yeah I would say it would be worth looking into further. The 250% heat output sounds like a good thing (especially if no toxic by-products are produced) so how does that compare to other types of heat generation I wonder?
Re:Should be looked at regardless (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Should be looked at regardless (Score:3, Informative)
From Wiki [wikipedia.org]
Wrong, Re: Heavy water toxicity (Score:3, Informative)
"...The only thing in the body that heavy water might affect is osmosis, so I think that is a very unlikely suggestion..."
No Nobel prize. Not even a White Owl. Here's a more knowledgeable view of heavy water toxicity [yarchive.net]
To quote:
"When body deuterium reaches about 50%, it inhibits mitosis because spindle microtubules won't form (some hydrogen bond effect inhibiting self-polymerization, I think). So all eucaryotic cells are poisoned about about these concentrations, or a little higher (bacteria can surv
Bob Park (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, shit! This again and again.
Cold fusion is impossible and Physics have long demostrated it.
Robert L. Park [bobpark.com], the President of the American Physical Society [aps.org], wrote a book that deals with this and explains it clearly: Voodoo Science [amazon.com]. He will probably treat this "rebirth" of the hype on his What's new [aps.org] science column.
How long until the USA Government understands they cannot beat the Second Law of Thermodynamics [wikipedia.org]?
Re:Bob Park (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bob Park (Score:5, Insightful)
All hail Robert L. Park, the keeper of scientific orthodoxy!
I think the article sums it up -- there is clearly *something* going on to produce the excess heat. Apparently the researchers have now figured out how to get more reproduceable results, so others may now verify the effect and thereby focus on studying the effect itself rather than just trying to reproduce it.
Now what that *something* is, is another matter. Maybe it is a chemical reaction of some sort, or maybe some other energy-release mechanism based on the thermophysical or thermochemical properties of the palladium substrate. Or maybe it is some unusual type of catalyzed nuclear reaction ("cold fusion".) Or maybe it is something else heretofore unknown. Now that the effect appears to be more reliably reproducible, it will now be possible to study the effect itself and solve the mystery. Although I am skeptical it is "cold fusion", it nevertheless appears to be interesting enough to study it in earnest.
Regarding "the Second Law" as Mr. paugq mentions, I suggest he brush up on his thermodynamics since I assume he is uttering it with respect to energy conservation, which comes under the First Law.
Re:Bob Park (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing is impossible. If you think the limit of our knowledge is already in textbooks, you have quite a rude awakening coming.
Re:Bob Park (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah!?! What about Cold Fusion! Hah!
Re:Bob Park (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about creating energy from nothing, it's about finding a suitable high entropy form of energy to convert to lower entropy kinds, thus allowing physical processes to occur. Physics cannot prove anything impossible by the way, but it can measure how unlikely something is.
Impossible? I call BS (Score:3, Informative)
Cold Fusion is simply Fusion at a lower macro-temperature (as in a room-temperature room). Fusion clearly is possible, unless you care to explain atomic weapons, stars, nuclear power another way (do I hear giant government conspiracy maybe? matrix-like pseudo-reality?).
Cold fusion may or may not be possible, but clearly science hasn't proven it either way. And as another form of Fusion, it certainly doe
Re:Bob Park (Score:3, Insightful)
It is impossible to say with scientific rigor that cold fusion is "impossible". It doesn't seem likely under current theory, but one can never rule out errors in our current theoretical understanding. The quantum mechanics of solids (like the palladium lattice) are complicated. It's possible (t
Pseudoscience Warning Signs (Score:5, Interesting)
Utah Connection (Score:5, Funny)
What's the bet that this "re-birth" of Cold Fusion has something to do with SCO?
Judge: Mr McBride, do you have anything to say before the jury adjourn to find you guilty and sentence you to death by stoning?
Darl: Look! Excess neutrons!
Jugde: Where? [Looks away]
Darl: [Exit, stage left]
Slow down (Score:3, Insightful)
It does not describe the entire economic input. That palladium and tritium has to come from somewhere, and it's expensive.
Until this can be done with non-exotic materials, it will probably be a push as its worthiness.
Re:Slow down (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: use of exotic materials (Score:3, Insightful)
I beg to differ. Palladium only costs about as much as gold, and is used commonly for things like spark plugs and catalytic converters for cars. It's also not consumed by the reaction, so it's a one-time cost.
In regards to tritium, I'll agree that it's expensive now. This may not always be the case, though, especially if there's a use for it besides thermonuclear devices and glowing keychains. The article seemed quite optimistic about the possiblity of getting the needed heavy water from the sea ("Much
Re:Slow down (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, even that isn't the question. The question is "can we come up with a theory to explain "cold fusion"?"
Science working again? (Score:5, Informative)
The article is a good look at the whole CF phenomenon as of 1993.
Technology Review (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
Have ANY of you naysayers... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you had, you might have noticed that there have been papers posted from labs around the world with consistent, reproducible results, for the past 10 years. I realize it's fashionable in some circles to read Skeptical Inquirer and be devotees of The Annoying Randi, but an open mind and a real scientific inquiry is actually sometimes needed. Rejecting something out of hand because you don't understand what's occurring doesn't qualify as objective scientific inquiry, no matter what experts are doing the rejection. (And yes, that's exactly what the reaction was of many of the experts in both the fusion and fission communities... "I don't understand what's happening here and it contradicts all my pet theories, and, more importantly, may affect my sources of funding and research grants... so it MUST be a lot of crap. Even though I've never investigated it, I just know it.")
BTW, for the tinfoil hat crowd, shortly after the DoE announced that they going to reinvestigate the published research, the founder and editor of Infinite Energy magazine, Dr. Eugene Mallove, was found murdered in his home. Make of it what you will.
Cold Fusion probably from experimental mistakes (Score:3, Insightful)
About five different highly respected labs, including at UMD and
Caltech, tried and failed to reproduce the results.
BUT.
Here's the thing: at least one (maybe two?) of the labs noted that
Pons & Fleischmann's results could be reproduced if one neglected one
of the steps needed to reproduce it (stirring?). If one failed to do
that step, you would get a chemical reaction of about the magnitude
P&F described.
Note well that the likeliest reason for any other researcher to
observe the reaction P&F describe would be a similar carelessness.
Could it be cold fusion? Could be. But it's very, very, very
unlikely. The chances of human error are alot higher than the
chances that physical theory is so wrong.
There was one embarrassing mistake. The funding agencies had already
promised funding for cold fusion. Thus, a (sometimes persuasive)
constituency was created for keeping cold fusion research dollars
flowing. That constituency is basically being paid to keep the cold
fusion myth alive. That's anothing thing you should keep in mind when
you hear about cold fusion nonfailures (because it's as likely that
you'll see cold fusion generators as it is that you'll get a real
opportunity to own the Brooklyn Bridge...)
This could have been decided a long time ago. (Score:3, Interesting)
A former head of the Atomic Energy Commission's fusion program -- indeed one of the 3 primary founders of the Tokamak program, Robert Bussard, picked up that legislation and sent it to all members of the Congressional committees on energy as well as to the various physics labs. In his cover letter he admitted that the Tokamak program had been a sham program -- promoted in the wake of the Apollo program -- to try and get funding to try out all the "hopeful ideas" out there. The Tokamak program turned into a Frankenstein monster and instead started killing all the hopeful ideas they had originally set out to fund.
It's taken quite a while for the government to lose its fixation on the Tokamak.
Maybe now they'll reconsider my legislation -- especially now that the prize award approach has been largely vindicated.
Or will it take another Viet Nam, or worse, WW III for them to wake up to the stupidity of their energy policies?
What may be needed here (Score:3, Interesting)
really.. (Score:4, Insightful)
With all due respect to the above journals, they are not peer-reviewed journals where research results are reported. If the journals had been Nature, Science and Physics Review, then I'd be excited. But they aren't, so I'm not. Besides, I read the articles, and I didn't get the impression they were all that enthusiastic...
Phew... (Score:5, Funny)
Difficult to measure (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is that there is a pre-loading phase where you are running the current and nothing is happening. This is when the hydrogen is being taken up by the palladium electrodes. Then after a while you start to get some heat, often sporadically.
But is it excess heat? Or are you merely recovering energy you spent in the pre-loading phase?
This question is the subject of calorimetry, or heat measurement, and it is one of the most difficult types of measurements to do precisely. Making it harder is the fact that the experiments run for several days or even weeks and you have to monitor the energy spent and recovered throughout that time. Some of the early experiments went bad because the stirring of the water by convection wasn't properly taken into account. That's how subtle and difficult it is.
It seems clear that at least some of the early cold fusion results were merely calorimetric errors. Now, it's possible that they have improved their experimental technique and that the new data is more convincing. But the nature of the experiment - long periods of feeding energy in, then short bursts of heat out - makes it inherently difficult to come up with convincing proof of what is happening.
Re:Aaargh, not again! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. Physically impossible. It would be cool if you could just, oh, 'tunnel' through the barrier or something, but that would be absurd...
Re:Aaargh, not again! (Score:3, Informative)
My thinking is that the palladium matrix is somehow modifying the quantum probability functions such that when the matrix is sufficiently saturated with deuterium nucleii, it allows superposition, which gives rise to fusion. I actually came up with this explanation years ago when some people had success and others failed, now it turns out there may actually be evidence to
Ballpark figure: (Score:3, Insightful)
It takes 100,000,000 times that energy to get a proton just within 1E-13 m of another proton.
Now consider that the tunneling rate is exponentially dependent on the barrier. Uh-huh.
Re:Aaargh, not again! (Score:3, Informative)
How could we get a massive acceleration using only objects that repel each other? This is an interesting experiment: http://www.scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/magnets/ri n g_launcher/ring_launcher.html [scitoys.com]. On
Re:Aaargh, not again! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This statement always scares me... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Probably not fusion . . . (Score:5, Informative)
While apparently hard (but not impossible) to reproduce, and not well understood, there is now credible evidence that something happens that generates heat and helium out of hydrogen.
If the phenomenon is real, and we manage to reproduce it reliably, it probably is fusion, albeit only a couple of atoms at a time (which has the side effects of (1) no harder-to-control chain reaction over vast amounts of fissible material and (2) trivial to contain generation).
Might not be too easy to use, though. I could see how the heat could be made to give energy to a conventional steam turbine though.
At any rate, your quip about dead from radiation poisoning is a strawman. Even if all is as the researchers hope, we are observing the fission of minuscule amounts of atoms at a time (hence the manageable heat) and what little radiation escapes from the reaction medium unabsorbed and unconverted into heat is most likely unmeasurably small and completely drowned out by the background radiation we live in.
-- MG
Re:Probably not fusion . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
What is with this idiotic groupthink that if its nuclear it must be radioactive? Not everything involving a nucleus is radioactive, and not everything radioactive causes cancer and kills people. For example, at princeton plasma physics labs, they deal a lot with fusion experiments, and there is radiation present... FROM THE TRITIUM AND DEUTERIUM THAT THEY STARTED WITH. The beginning materials in this case are radioactive. It's all this kneejerking nonsense about radiation that makes people pissy every time you try to discuss fusion research with a layman.
And for the record, until I see better results otherwise, I still think cold fusion is horseshit
Re:Probably not fusion . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
secondly, if it were as simple as this chemical reaction, then we would have known by now. We're incredibly knowledgable about studying chemical reactions, and could simply look at the terminal to tell if it were oxidized. Plain and simple.
Re:Better title... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Better title... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oil companies would be richer than ever if this pans out. The oil won't stop being needed, it'll just stop being burned. And quite a few "oil companies" have figured out that they are in the energy business, not the oil business. And would probably be in the forefront of providing high-grade deuterium for your cold fusion units.
"Mr. Fusion", anyone?
Other uses for oil (Score:3, Informative)
No... (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree.
The oil won't stop being needed, it'll just stop being burned.
The question isn't "will oil still be needed", it's "HOW MUCH oil will still be needed?" And the answer (quite obviously) is "much less than is needed right now."
Yes, some oil will still be needed, but the fact that a great deal of it is burned means that the *demand* side of the "supply and demand" equation will drop. Significantly.
And guess what happens then?
quite a
Re:No... (Score:3, Informative)
Oil companies do compete, and heavily so. There are a lot of oil companies out there, and all of them want to make a profit. Unocal got out of the post-extraction business in the mid 1990s (though they licensed the trademarks such as the 76 logo to Tosco, who also bought much of the refining and retail operations) because competition in that arena was simply getting to be too
Re:No... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then explain to me why the solar panels on my roof are made by British Petroleum [bpsolar.com].
The RIAA and MPAA aren't selling a product whose source will eventually run out.
Oil people might differ on when it'll happen, but every oil company CEO knows that eventually we'll run out of easy-to-reach oil and the rest will
Re:Better title... (Score:3, Funny)
So plastic will be much cheaper than it is now in the future. And that us a good thing, since plastic is fantastic!
Re:Better title... (Score:3, Insightful)
They also own massive amounts of coal and oil shale. And, believe it or not, they've done solar cell research in the past.
The only difference between ExxonMobil and the friendlier "oil majors" like BP is marketing. BP has gotten incredibly good at fooling gullible people into think that it cares about something besides
Re:Better title... (Score:5, Insightful)
The same thing happened to Henry Bessemer when he produced high-quality steel by blowing air through it. When others couldn't reproduce it on a regular basis, he had to go back and review what he had done. It nearly broke him, but in the end he found that by pure chance, he had used low-phosphorus steel in his experiments. Once this was shown, uptake was initially slow, but as soon as it was proven to be reproduceable, it caught on and allowed the widespread use of modern steel -- and allowed Bessemer to become very wealthy.
Re:Good news / Bad news (Score:3, Informative)
News flash HungSoLow - energy production will always be expensive and produce pollution. There are no magic ways to avoid paying the toll for power! There is simply no way that a couple of electrodes (the production of which produce quite a bit of pollution) and some carefully refined heavy water (the process of refining produces quite a bit of pollution) produce more energy than goes in. Right now this is all pie in the sky science - some fusion is
Re:Serious Question: (Score:3)
Pd is used all over the place as a catalyst (in car exhausts for one) so isn't particularly hard to get hold of. It's also believed to be a catalyst in the alleged reaction, so it isn't used up.
Decentralized Electricity (Score:4, Interesting)