Cold Fusion Heating Up

Physics Today ^ | April, 2004

[Waldozer]

DOE Warms to Cold Fusion

Whether outraged or supportive about DOE's planned reevaluation of cold fusion, most scientists remain deeply skeptical that it's real.

Hot air? The cold fusion claims made in 1989 by B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann didn't hold up. But they did spawn a small and devoted coterie of researchers who continue to investigate the alleged effect. Cold fusion die-hards say their data from the intervening 15 years merit a reevaluation-- and a place at the table with mainstream science. Now they have the ear of the US Department of Energy.

"I have committed to doing a review" of cold fusion, says James Decker, deputy director of DOE's Office of Science. Late last year, he says, "some scientists came and talked to me and asked if we would do some kind of review on the research that has been done" since DOE's energy research advisory board (ERAB) looked at cold fusion nearly 15 years ago. "There may be some interesting science here," Decker says. "Whether or not it has applications to the energy business is clearly unknown at this point, but you need to sort out the science before you think about applications."

DOE is still working out the details, Decker says, but a review of cold fusion will begin in the next month or so and "won't take a long time--it's a matter of weeks or months."

Turning up the heat Last summer, after the 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion in Cambridge, Massachusetts, participants came away energized, says the conference's organizer, MIT theorist Peter Hagelstein. About 150 people attended the conference; the number of people working on cold fusion or, as some of them prefer to call it, low- energy nuclear reactions, is perhaps several hundred worldwide, most of them outside the US. Says Hagelstein, "Everyone was convinced things would start changing. The question on the table is, Can we establish to the satisfaction of the scientific community that there is science here?"

"The field has made a huge amount of progress," Hagelstein says. "In 1989, it was not clear if there was an excess heat effect or not. Over the years, it's become clear there is one. It wasn't clear if there was a low-level emission of nuclear products. Over the years it's become clear that, yes, there is. In addition, other new effects have surfaced."

"It's either my good luck or my bad luck, but I discovered there was something worthy of pursuit," says Michael McKubre, an electrochemist at SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, California. McKubre's experiments are along the lines of Pons and Fleischmann's. A typical setup consists of a palladium cathode at the center of a helical platinum anode in a solution of heavy water with lithium salt. An applied current dissociates the deuterium, and deuterons load into the palladium. Experiments take a couple of weeks and "leaving them to sit is where most of the tricks are," says McKubre. Among the tricks, he says, are loading the palladium with sufficient concentrations of deuterons and increasing the signal-to-noise ratio in heat and helium measurements. "The numbers are what you expect for two deuterons fusing to produce helium-4, with about 24 MeV per helium nucleus. There is a nuclear effect that produces useful levels of heat. I know it's true."

"With knowledge comes responsibility," continues McKubre. "We know that this has economic implications and, potentially, security implications. The main application that cold fusion enthusiasts foresee following from their work is a clean source of energy; transmutation of nuclear waste and tritium production to augment weapons are also on their list. But, says McKubre, to solve "the various problems in scaling up the effect to make it more easily studied and potentially useful, we have to involve the scientific community."

[El Gato]

If "cold fusion" really is a source of low cost, unlimited energy, then government intervention is not necessary, epecially for such low-cost, benchtop research as "cold fusion." Government only has to subsidize the losing technology; the winners are self-sustaining in a capitalist society. Therefore the hearings are a waste of time and money.

You would agree then that the Lewis and Clark expedition was a "waste of time and money"?

High risk research is one area where the government probably needs to get involved. Even though the cost is relatively low, it's not low for a small business, and large ones rarely do anything without at least thinking they know what the application to there bottom line will be, as opposed to what it could be.

In a way you can think of such research as a scientific equivalent of intelligence gathering.

Once it's determined that the phenomenon is real, private industry will take over from there.

[Doctor Stochastic]

An applied current dissociates the deuterium, and deuterons load into the palladium.

Spectrographic results I have see show that the deuterium isn't dissociated (which is weird term for the author to use, ionize would make more sense in this context). The deuterium inside the palladium is just ordinary D2 sitting there. Same for platinum and titanium.

[Lessismore]

It appears that fusion during sonoluminescence is real. Of course, this is not "cold" in the sense that the temperature of the collapsing vapor bubble goes to millions of degrees. But the overall apparatus is cold.

Additional evidence of nuclear emissions during acoustic cavitation

R. P. Taleyarkhan,1 J. S. Cho,2 C. D. West, R. T. Lahey, Jr.,3 R. I. Nigmatulin,4 and R. C. Block3

1Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA
2Oak Ridge Associated Universities, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37830, USA
3Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180, USA
4Russian Academy of Sciences, 6 Karl Marx Street, Ufa 450000, Russia

(Received 13 May 2003; published 22 March 2004)

Time spectra of neutron and sonoluminescence emissions were measured in cavitation experiments with chilled deuterated acetone. Statistically significant neutron and gamma ray emissions were measured with a calibrated liquid-scintillation detector, and sonoluminescence emissions were measured with a photomultiplier tube. The neutron and sonoluminescence emissions were found to be time correlated over the time of significant bubble cluster dynamics. The neutron emission energy was less than 2.5 MeV and the neutron emission rate was up to ~4×105 n/s. Measurements of tritium production were also performed and these data implied a neutron emission rate due to D-D fusion which agreed with what was measured. In contrast, control experiments using normal acetone did not result in statistically significant tritium activity, or neutron or gamma ray emissions. ©2004 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v69/e036109

[GretchenM]

fyi

[alnitak]

I think we'd better get cracking on this, or the Arabs will beat us to it!

[monocle]

BTTT

[Waldozer]

Dissociation is what the hydrogen does from the oxygen. Ionization would be when an ion is created. When the deuterium atom is adsorbed into the host lattice, it shares electrons in the conduction band, I would expect, so it is not an ion.

Loading ratio is the ratio of hydrogen atoms to host lattice atoms. In electrolytic cold fusion experiments, the loading ratio is measured by several methods and determined to a high degree of accuracy. Remember, this kind of electrochemistry was done long before Fleischmann and Pons became famous. The methods have been around and are well accepted. Loading ratios above about 0.85 were considered by many cold fusion scientists, like Edmund Storms of Los Alamos National Lab, to be approaching nuclear active. That is, one would not expect to observe excess heat until the loading ratio exceeded about 0.85. This requires that the lattice be of an integrity that will sustain the loading, yet lattice imperfections play an important role in creating active sites. The materials science involved is not to be underestimated, and not easy to investigate.

So, to address your issue, the number of hydrogen (deuterium) atoms per palladium atom in a typical successful cold fusion experiment might be as great as one (there were some marginal claims for loading exceeding 1.0). If the lattice sites were host to two atoms of hydrogen, the loading ratio would be two.

All of the cold fusion related spectroscopy I recall did not identify molecular hydrogen.

[Doctor Stochastic]

All that I have examined did show the hydrogen in molecular form. I found no published evidence that the hydrogen shared electrons with the lattice.

Likewise, no explanation of the lack of 14mev neutrons has been given. The neutrons momentum is also a problem.

[Waldozer]

Besides appearing in the APS publication you quoted, an article appeared in the flagship journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (arguably the most prestigious scientific society in the world). See http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/hottopics/bubble/index.shtml

Sadly, most of the prestitious and all of the big scientific journals ignore the cold fusion work, then the mainstream scientists opine that if cold fusion were real, it would be published in journals they read. My guess at the scientific politics is that since the rise of relativity and quantum mechanics, and the detonation of nuclear bombs, the physicists took the banner of discovery away from the chemists, who had done so much to bring new science into society. So, a physicist like Taleyarkhan (et al.) can get credit for innovation when very similar experiments with very similar results done by cold fusion scientists (who are mainly chemists) years before get ignored. But they'd probably drop him like a plutonium potato if he cited such prior work. No main stream publication, no prestige, no funding.

To add further strangeness to the political conundrum, both the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society have invited cold fusion scientists to their annual meetings, and the scientists have obliged them. It is mainly a token gesture, IMO, because few of the APS and ACS scientists dare show real interest, for fear of being shunned by their peers. The politicians in these organizations know that they need to cover their bases just in case cold fusion becomes respectable.

Incidently, the name "cold fusion" was coined by Stephen Jones, who was investigating something quite different, muon catalyzed fusion. The name got associated with Fleischmann and Pons work, through no fault of their own, and it stuck. It is better termed Low Energy Nuclear Reactions or Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions (but those don't make good names for URL development software, so we're stuck). Is it cold? Well, it takes place in a reactor vessel that is a lot colder than the sun or a nuclear bomb. Electrochemistry is colder than a tokomak. At the actual point of fusion, however, temperature is a fairly useless concept. Temperature is a statistical concept, applying to collision rates among groups of particles. The reactions of the cold fusion genre certainly appear to be a lot more interesting than simple fusion.

There's a good photo of Jones with some famous cold fusion scientists. Jones used to shun cold fusion researchers, but has been persuaded to take it more seriously. Maybe he can read the writing on the wall, like the APS and ACS.

http://www.newenergytimes.com/home.htm

There is also a link to a good introductory lecture by Dr. David J. Nagel of the George Washington University (the same guy who wrote the introduction to the US NRL report quoted in one of these threads).

[Waldozer]

Physics Nobelist Julian Schwinger in a lecture on cold fusion shortly before his death invoked a mechanism along the lines of the Mossbauer Effect, which refers to the resonant and recoil free emission and absorption of gamma radiation by atoms bound in a solid. The energy transfer is into phonons. Schwinger pleaded that before rejecting the empirical evidence on theoretical grounds, his colleagues should consider that the Rutherford ratio, which is used to calculate neutron flux, is known to be valid in plasma, but may not be valid in solid state nuclear reactions.

I am not a spectroscopist. The spectroscopy I have seen is, for example, of the gas produced by heating the electrolyzed cathode in a hard vacuum. Of course, molecular hydrogen may form after it leaves the host lattice. How does the method to which you refer see into the lattice?

As I said, this is not a forum for deciding experimental validity. It is a forum for pointing out that our government officials are responsible for correcting their mistakes.

Ridicule does serve some useful social functions, but only if based in knowledge (not directed at Dr. Stochastic).

[edwin hubble]

'If "cold fusion" really is a source of low cost, unlimited energy, then government intervention is not necessary, epecially for such low-cost, benchtop research as "cold fusion." Government only has to subsidize the losing technology; the winners are self-sustaining in a capitalist society. Therefore the hearings are a waste of time and money.'

The motivation to succeed is powerful. The esteemed Phil Morrison of MIT said of cold fusion "If it is confirmed, it will be the greatest discovery of man since fire."

I certainly agree with you ---that if they ever get it right it will pay for its development cost a billion times over, without government support.

[Waldozer]

Correction.

It was Dr. Frank E. Gordon who wrote the Forward to the US Naval Research Lab report on cold fusion.

Dr. David J. Nagel was Superintendent for Condensed Matter and Radiation Sciences Division for Naval Research Laboratory. He wrote the introduction for Beaudette's book _Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Prevailed_.

It is hard to imagine a more appropriate background for studying cold fusion than Nagel's, except perhaps Edmund Storm's:
http://home.netcom.com/~storms2/index.html

[Lessismore]

My recollection of the press announcements in March surrounding the Physical Review E publication is that Taleyarkhan and his team were keenly aware of the need to muster the right combination of collaborators in order to gain the most credibility. They had already suffered one round of having their earlier results branded as irreproducible by an Oak Ridge team. The politics of science is as complex as any other kind.

[Waldozer]

It is not a matter of complexity or collaborators. It is a matter of ethics. Just as with patents, a scientific claim without proper attribution of prior art is improper, although not uncommon. That, by itself, in the long run, will undermine Taleyarkhan's reputation.

It may be that Taleyarkhan's work was approved for publication specifically because neutron detection is an art (measuring levels not far from noise levels) and mistakes occur with it, such as the one admitted by Fleischmann and Pons immediately after their March 23, 1989 press conference. A paper like Taleyarkhan's can be useful for muddying the water for some time to come. And ultrasonic cavitation results are not highly reproducible, either. It took a long time for sonoluminescence to win acceptance after the initial claims. In other words, it may have been published in high-profile journals just because it can easily be an object of much contention, unsupported by the hard-core cold fusioneers.

It is ludicrous for the journals to publish this non-replicated evidence of anomalous nuclear reactions when much, much firmer evidence, replicated in quantity, from highly credible persons is ignored. For instance, evidence of tritium or helium from within the cathode is highly anomalous and seen in many cold fusion experiments. Tritium is just not considered a possible contaminant, unless one happens to be close to a fission reactor, but even then, it would have to find its way into the cathode with concentration increasing with depth into the cathode (citing Bockris), and it would be measured in the gas above the electrolyte in high concentration. Forget it.

Finding tritium is de facto evidence for nuclear reactions.

[Waldozer]

There has to be a distinction understood between basic research and new technology. Basic research, which is the stage that cold fusion is at now, has no application to a new technology. It may soon or it may not. If it does not get funded, it almost certainly will not proceed into new technologies because basic research is expensive and offers no return on investment (which is why government has to support it, or at least allow patents to be granted). If an investor sees no ROI, he sees no investment.

The motivation to succeed may be overwhelming, but if the path to success is unknown, nobody gets there. Sure, the value of a cold fusion engine might be virtually infinite, but it has to be built first, and that is going to take more than naked capitalism. It will take lots of scientific work and innovative thinking. And that is if it can be done at all. We simply do not know because we are not at a point in knowledge development yet where that is truly known.

[edwin hubble]

"It will take lots of scientific work and innovative thinking. And that is if it can be done at all. We simply do not know because we are not at a point in knowledge development yet where that is truly known."

Yes...In the words attributed to Farraday, (in answer to the Crown's minister who scoffed at his electrical 'parlor tricks') "someday you will tax it".

[Doctor Stochastic]

The Pons and Fleischmann neutron problem wasn't near the level of background; the amount of power P&F claimed would have produced enough neutrons to kill everyone in the room. This should have been fairly easy to detect.

[skinkinthegrass]

Slow news day. Ping....Thanks, Excellent reads...so far. :)

[Waldozer]

The neutron measurement problem I referred to in the last post was not with Fleischmann and Pons, it was with Taleyarkhan's work. Low levels of neutron flux measurement requires experience. Neither Fleischmann nor Pons were very experienced with it, being chemists, and they made a mistake that they immediately admitted shortly after their initial claim. The original claim was for very low numbers of neuetrons, much less than the lethal doses expected for typical deuterium-deuterium fusion reactions. This was seen as a major weakness to their claims, and remained so until Schwinger reminded the physics world that this is not unprecedented (Mossbauer Effect, which refers to the resonant and recoil free emission and absorption of gamma radiation by atoms bound in a solid -- few or no neutrons emitted, because of the putative non-adherence to the Rutherford ratio!).

In other words, empirical data does trump theoretical arguments, particularly when the empirical data is supported by other theoretical arguments and lots and lots of replications. Regardless, if you are serious about your physics, you should do your homework. The politics can be an indication that something is wrong with the dominant physics community's view. That's a clue, not proof. Proof is found in the quality reports produced by NRL, Storms, McKubre, etc.

What I am arguing for is that people who are competent should argue with people who are competent. What we have in cold fusion, from my years of witnessing up close, is scientific bigotry (to borrow Mallove's term). Just take a few minutes to look at http://www.newenergytimes.com/critics/critics.htm
What you see there is that the "experts" just do not want to talk about cold fusion, except to disparage it while ignoring the evidence. When I talked to Doug Morrison about the recent evidence at a cold fusion conference, he told me that there was still insufficient evidence of neutrons, like it was still April, 1989. It's called a stonewall tactic. If you want to be a brick in that wall, just let me know. If you want to understand what is happening, just look.

[Right Wing Professor]

Sadly, most of the prestitious and all of the big scientific journals ignore the cold fusion work, then the mainstream scientists opine that if cold fusion were real, it would be published in journals they read.

I think you're misunderstanding the source of the prejudice. I attended a couple of conferences right at the time Pons and Fleishmann's preprint was circulating, and many of the scientists I talked to about it, including a couple of near'household names', were quite open minded about it. What killed CF (or nearly killed it, depending on your point of view) was the realization of how shoddy Pons and Fleishmann's work, and the early attempts to reproduce it, were. Scientists really will accept radical findings, but when radical findings are combined with methodogical sloppiness, Occam's razor tells you to blame the former on the latter.