But they overcame the repulsion by having a clasping bubble that is so violent that heat and light are released. You could visibly see it.
Hmm, I spent a while wandering around and asking the grad students questions. What I saw was positive and negative electrodes, one of which was palladium, bubbling away in what would be best described as fish tanks.
The Palladium electrodes had been soaking in deuterium or something before being used and then it was just like electrolysis to get the fusion reaction going. What they were doing was measuring the temperature in the tank (uninsulated) and comparing its temp to the electricity they were putting in.
According to one of the grad students, occasionally one of the electrodes would heat up and start bubbling the water like mad. That was when they guessed that they had achieved fusion. Invariably the electrode would be ruined and the process halted after the electrode became pitted.
They were trying all kinds of variations to try and consistently get the reaction to occur, but they never could. I am pretty sure that it was a faulty power supply, as simple and odd as that.
I do remember reading something about the collapsing bubbles, but it would have had to have been the bubbles from the electrodes. Could they have been shorting and emitting light? I don't know.
The one I saw actually had ultrasound introduced to the heavy water with a charge added to the water.
The hydrogen would bubble and then collapse suddenly crushing the hydrogen.
Let me see if I can find you a link.
This isn’t a very good link, but I just did a quick look
http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php/15802-Cold-Fusion-Bubble-Experiments-Verfied
These experiments were at least reproduceable if not fruitful.
I think there are two lines of research being confused here.
Pons and Fleischmann were working in the solid state, where the Palladium crystalline structure was trapping comparatively large numbers of Hydrogen atoms. (This high solubility is well known, and is being investigated as a safe means of H storage for fuel cells—electric cars and all that.)
The theory was that (1) The Pd structure was holding the H atoms much closer than a gaseous H would exhibit at any realizable pressure; (2) Thermal excitation—still at moderate temperatures—would drive H atoms still closer to one another, here and there, now and then; and (3) Quantum tunnelling would allow some H atoms to interpenetrate and fuse.
The other cold fusion experiments being described here utilized the cavitation of bubbles, I presume contaning H or D; I don’t think P&F were working along this line.
Bubble collapses in the cavitation process are known to produce extremely high instantaneous pressures, very localized in space and time. These, it is speculated, create opportunities for fusion.
This effect seems to me a little like the inertial confinement and laser ablation of small D-H droplets in laser fusion research, but microscopic bubbles in a liquid rather than tiny droplets in air.