Posted on 03/24/2004 11:52:23 PM PST by neverdem
Cold fusion, briefly hailed as the silver-bullet solution to the world's energy problems and since discarded to the same bin of quackery as paranormal phenomena and perpetual motion machines, will soon get a new hearing from Washington.
Despite being pushed to the fringes of physics, cold fusion has continued to be worked on by a small group of scientists, and they say their figures unambiguously verify the original report, that energy can be generated simply by running an electrical current through a jar of water.
Last fall, cold fusion scientists asked the Energy Department to take a second look at the process, and last week, the department agreed.
No public announcement was made. A British magazine, New Scientist, first reported the news this week, and Dr. James F. Decker, deputy director of the science office in the Energy Department, confirmed it in an e-mail interview.
"It was my personal judgment that their request for a review was reasonable," Dr. Decker said.
For advocates of cold fusion, the new review brings them to the cusp of vindication after years of dismissive ridicule.
"I am absolutely delighted that the D.O.E. is finally going to do the right thing," Dr. Eugene F. Mallove, editor of Infinite Energy magazine, said. "There can be no other conclusion than a major new window has opened on physics."
The research is too preliminary to determine whether cold fusion, even if real, will live up to its initial billing as a cheap, bountiful source of energy, said Dr. Peter Hagelstein, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been working on a theory to explain how the process works. Experiments have generated small amounts of energy, from a fraction of a watt to a few watts.
Still, Dr. Hagelstein added, "I definitely think it has potential for commercial energy production."
Dr. Decker said the scientists, not yet chosen, would probably spend a few days listening to presentations and then offer their thoughts individually. The review panel will not conduct experiments, he said.
"What's on the table is a fairly straightforward question, is there science here or not?" Dr. Hagelstein said. "Most fundamental to this is to get the taint associated with the field hopefully removed."
Fusion, the process that powers the Sun, combines hydrogen atoms, releasing energy as a byproduct. In March 1989, Drs. B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, two chemists at the University of Utah, said they had generated fusion in a tabletop experiment using a jar of heavy water, where the water molecules contain a heavier version of hydrogen, deuterium, and two palladium electrodes. A current running through the electrodes pulled deuterium atoms into the electrodes, which somehow generated heat, the scientists said. Dr. Fleischmann speculated that the heat was coming from fusion of the deuterium atoms.
Other scientists trying to reproduce the seemingly simple experiment found the effects fickle and inconsistent. Because cold fusion, if real, cannot be explained by current theories, the inconsistent results convinced most scientists that it had not occurred. The signs of extra heat, critics said, were experimental mistakes or generated by the current or, perhaps, chemical reactions in the water, but not fusion.
Critics also pointed out that to produce the amount of heat reported, conventional fusion reactions would throw out lethal amounts of radiation, and they argued that the continued health of Drs. Pons and Fleischmann, as well as other experimenters, was proof that no fusion occurred.
Some cold fusion scientists now say they can produce as much as two to three times more energy than in the electric current. The results are also more reproducible, they say. They add that they have definitely seen fusion byproducts, particularly helium in quantities proportional to the heat generated.
After a conference in August, Dr. Hagelstein wrote to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, asking for a meeting. Dr. Hagelstein; Dr. Michael McKubre of SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif.; and Dr. David J. Nagel of George Washington University met Dr. Decker on Nov. 6.
"They presented some data and asked for a review of the scientific research that has been conducted," Dr. Decker said. "The scientists who came to see me are from excellent scientific institutions and have excellent credentials."
Scientists working on conventional fusion said cold fusion research had fallen off their radar screens.
"I'm surprised," Dr. Stewart C. Prager, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin, said. "I thought most of the cold fusion effort had phased out. I'm just not aware of any physics results that motivated this."
Actually, it is NOT a source of neutrons at room temperature.
Off by a few MeV. The reaction are closer to 20 MeV, consistent with the excited nuclear state of helium.
Furthermore, the gamma radiation (which is technically forbidden, but IS observed at hot fusion temperatures)
does not occur near room temperature, which instead shifts the reactions to the infrared (think, skin depth).
We had to give up our sedan for a minivan. I like the minivan - I just hate the reason we had to get it.
The way it seems to go for physicists is that they learn how to do something and then go off to form their own lab to conduct research or development on their own if they see business potential. None have done so. There is a clue there.
It surely would be great if there were.
Even if there's something really here, I don't see any easily harvested pools of deuterium. There could be some useful applications of sono-luminescence discussed in the earlier comments.
Of course it won't... because if it is found that you can generate energy by running electricity through water, the cost of water will skyrocket.
:rolleyes: Yup, it's a verifiable certitude that scientitists are immune to the human fioble of politics. "Hot fusion" physicists who investigated the implications of Pons' and Fleischmann's work never once contemplated the implications on funding for "hot fusion" research ($15 billion since 1950). /sarcasm
Who knows if "cold Fusion" research could ever lead to a commercially viable energy source, but scientific hyptheses are wrong more often than they are right. Good science embraces failure as valuable and learns from it.
The funding history for "hot fusion" research is something like $15 billion since the beginning. The funding history for cold fusion research is three orders of magnitude less. Apparently measurements of fusion products and energy production from cold fusion are now repeatable.
Continued research is a no brainer. God forbid that new theory be necessary to explain the results - where would that get us. (Oops, more sarcasm.)
False. On account of their much higher miles per gallon, turbodiesels have *lower* emissions per mile. What you might be thinking of is the particulates (i.e. soot) in diesel exhaust. But with particulate filters, the gas coming out a diesel's tail pipe can actually be cleaner than the outside air. (We're behind Europe on this partly because they have removed the sulfur from diesel fuel.) This is why the Passat turbodiesel (with particulate filter) was recently ranked the #1 environmentally-friendly touring car with a high transportation capacity. See
Environmentally #1 Passat TDI with particulate filter
In this way you can have your cake and eat it too. My '98 TDI Jetta averaged 53 mpg over 7k, including highway and city driving. My best mileage was 60 mpg when I went from Saint Louis, MO to Syracuse, NY (906 miles) on 15 gallons. And that was burning 50% biodiesel made from soybean oil, with my wife and two children in the car, and the trunk stuffed with luggage and more biodiesel for the return trip. No way an Insight or even a new Prius can do that.
given the reaming it was subjected to by various sgts...I supect it's compressive force is fairly low.
My point is, if "anything" is possible...shouldn't we be able to make it work? Even with just an eensy bit of compressive force?
I realize that is not exactly (i.e. "anything" doesn't mean "anything" that a nimrod with a loose @$$ sitting at a computer could dream up to mock your arguement) but that is what you wrote.
There's a really great book called "At the Fringes of Science" that deals specifically with this question- here's a link to a review: http://members.aol.com/steamdoc/writings/friedlander95.html
The author of the book discriminates between "Wierdo" ideas- i.e. "I might be able to turn coal into diamons using the compressive strength of my fundament" and "unlikely but plausible ideas."
I guess I just have a strong gut reaction against the idea that there are no rules...if that were true, why bother learning physics/material science etc. at all? Why not just make up your own facts?
I'm not willing to come right out and say that the money for research on hot fusion has been an out and out waste - even if the initial promise has been diluted by the develpoment of difficulties as time has progressed. My comment about the comparison between funding for hot and cold fusion research was simply context in reaction to those who posted about the supposed waste of funding for cold fusion research.
For a variety of reasons, I whole-heartedly support the renewed interest in cold fusion - not the least of which is my disgust at the unfortunate treatment of Martin Fleischmann (and his family) after the ineligant announcement of the preliminary results in 1989. I hope (perhaps in vain) for the vindication of Pons and Fleischmann.
Much more could be said.
Respectfully,
Dave Koert
Biodiesel retail fueling sites
And yes, the exhaust smells like freedom fries!
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