Posted on 03/30/2021 8:57:29 PM PDT by Kevmo
Whether Cold Fusion or Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions, U.S. Navy Researchers Reopen Case
By Michael Koziol
Posted 22 Mar 2021 | 19:00 GMT
After more than three decades of simmering debate in specialized physics groups and fringe research circles, the controversy over cold fusion (sometimes called low-energy nuclear reactions or LENRs) refuses to go away. On one hand, ardent supporters have lacked the consistent, reproducible results and the theoretical underpinning needed to court mainstream acceptance. On the other, vehement detractors cannot fully ignore the anomalous results that have continued to crop up, like the evidence for so-called “lattice-confinement fusion” adduced last year by a group at NASA’s Glenn Research Center.
Scientists at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indian Head Division have pulled together a group of Navy, Army, and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) labs to try and settle the debate. Together, the labs will conduct experiments in an effort to establish if there’s really something to the cold fusion idea, if it’s just odd chemical interactions, or if some other phenomenon entirely is taking place in these controversial experiments.
Photo: Ravel Call/APIn this 1989 photo, B. Stanley Pons left, and Martin Fleischmann display a large-scale model of the flask in which they say they created sustained nuclear fusion reactions.
In 1989, electrochemist Stanley Pons and chemist Martin Fleischmann published the results of experiments in which they claimed to observe anomalous heat, as well as fusion by-products like neutrons, in a simple, room-temperature tabletop set-up involving palladium and heavy water.
The claim was, to put it mildly, huge. Fusion is typically a high temperature, high pressure phenomenon. It requires a star, or, if you’re hellbent on making it happen on Earth, massive magnets and a lot of power.
Yet the promise of cheap, safe, and abundant energy was soon dashed when the vast majority of scientists failed to replicate their results.
But still, lingering interesting results continued to emerge. Aside from the recent promising findings from NASA, Google published a paper in Nature in 2019 revealing that the company had spent US $10 million to research cold fusion since 2015.
The company teamed up with researchers at institutions including MIT, the University of British Columbia, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The research group found no evidence of classic Pons-Fleischmann-style cold fusion, but it did find evidence of the larger umbrella category of LENRs—suggesting (as the NASA group also reported) that nuclear fusion may be possible in locally-hot sites in otherwise room temperature metals.
“We got our impetus from the Google paper appearing in Nature,” says Carl Gotzmer, Indian Head’s Chief Scientist. Gotzmer’s duties include keeping the Navy abreast of the latest scientific developments.
Gotzmer says his cold fusion/LENR interest developed after attending the International Conference on Cold Fusion in 2003. After a four-hour conversation with Fleischmann himself, and seeing presentations from across the world giving evidence of nuclear transmutations, he says he began to follow this field in earnest.“Quite frankly, [to] other folks who have tried this over the years, it was considered a career ender,” says Gotzmer.
But the Indian Head team decided that, as a government lab, they had a little more freedom to pursue a controversial topic, so long as it also offered up the prospect of rewarding scientific results.
Photo: Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indian HeadCarl Gotzmer (left) and Oliver Barham
“I’m not as worried about looking into something that is considered controversial as long as there’s good science there,” says Oliver Barham, a project manager at Indian Head involved in the effort. “The whole point of our effort is we want to be doing good science. We’re not out to prove or disprove anything, we’re out to assemble a team of scientists who want to take it seriously.”
Barham describes Indian Head’s role in the new project as that of an “honest broker.” “Our main task is to try and collect the data that’s going to come in from, for example, the US Naval Academy, the Army Research Laboratory, and [NIST],” Barham says. He explains that different laboratories—all together, five are participating in the investigation—can provide different detectors and other equipment suited to exploring particular research questions.
Indian Head can then coordinate materials and research between labs. And when the data starts to come in, the researchers at Indian Head can not only assess the data’s quality themselves, but ensure the other labs have that data available to review as well.
The Navy researchers are taking as their guiding inspiration the thirty years of literature that has been published on cold fusion, LENRs, and adjacent topics. They said a literature review of these results pointed them toward the best metals for their experiments, common refrains in experimental set ups, and so on.
The researchers say they hope to publish their initial results by the end of the year. “I think the most important thing is to reveal a mechanism by which the phenomenon works,” says Gotzmer. “Because if you understand the mechanism, then you can extrapolate into better experiments and make it more reproducible. There’s many mechanisms which have been proposed, but no one’s really nailed down completely what the nitty-gritty science is.
”Will a grand-unified theory of cold fusion or LENRs or whatever-you-call-it be completed by year’s end? Almost certainly not, say the researchers. “We’re just hoping that out of that brain trust we’re going to get some good analysis, because of this group of people we’ve brought together,” says Barham.
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I seen this on reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/LENR/comments/mg26uz/march_2021_us_navy_patent_on_thermiteinduced/
I have it on good authority that Cold Fusion is only 20 years away
What is the consensus opinion on Thorium LFTRs versus nuclear? ie thorium versus plutonium fuel cycles?
The Reddit date for that article is March 2021 but the patent date is from Sept 2019.
I think I’ll save it for later.
I ran across a paper recently on lattice confinement fusion possibly taking place in the core of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, assuming that they have iron/nickel cores and includes deuterium. It was presented as a possible cause of Jupiter radiating more heat than it receives from the sun.
Deuterium fusion, sometimes with involvement of lithium, likely occurs in brown dwarfs, objects that do not have enough mass to start the proton-proton chain of fusion, as what occurs in the Sun. Brown dwarfs are typically below 0.08 solar masses, or between 15 and 80 Jupiter masses.
There has never been a consensus on fission.
Since 3 Mile Island I think there’s only been 3 more nuke plants built.
The safety and disposal concerns have only increased, with the addition of Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters.
Somewhere, Stanley Pons is smiling.
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Th²³² absorbs a neutron then beta(-) decays into U-233 which is directly fissile. There are several reactor designs that are “different” than traditional commercial designs...if the NRC ever gets out of the way, we might begin to make up substantial ground with other countries.
Oh jeez. Not this crap again...
Somewhere, Stanley Pons is smiling.
—
Somewhere, Erwin Schrodinger is smiling or frowning.
I think I might have read that article. IIRC the theory has something to do with there being enough pressure to generate metallic hydrogen or even hydrogen-lithium lattice structures. It changes the rules of physics
such that the physics is no longer plasma-based but more condensed-matter based.
His cat is both dead and alive but Heisenberg is still uncertain.
Get lost. Go find some other topic to lay down your seagulls droppings.
On the plus side, we were way ahead of other countries when it came to nuke accidents. 3 mile island came before Chernobyl which came before Fukushima.
TMI is in no way comparable to either of the other two. To even suggest such is rediculous.
A Pycnonuclear reaction in ultra dense condensed matter is a different fusion process in which density is the governing factor of the reaction rate. The crystalline lattice provides an alternative mechanism to reach higher density.
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