Warming Up to Cold Fusion

The Washington Post ^ | Sharon Weinberger

[Arkie2]

On a quiet Monday in late August -- a time of year when much of the Washington bureaucracy has gone to the beach -- a panel of scientists gathered at a Doubletree Hotel set between the Congressional Plaza strip mall and a drab concrete office building on Rockville Pike. The panel's charge was simple: to determine whether that idea had even a prayer of a chance at working. The Department of Energy went to great lengths to cloak the meeting from public view. No announcement, no reporters. None of the names of the people attending that day was disclosed. The DOE made sure to inform the panel's members that they were to provide their conclusions individually rather than as a group, which under a loophole in federal law allowed the agency to close the meeting to the public.

At 9:30 a.m., six presenters were invited in and instructed to sit in a row of chairs along the wall. The group included a prominent MIT physicist, a Navy researcher and four other scientists from Russia, Italy and the United States. They had waited a long time for this opportunity and, one by one, stood up to speak about a scientific idea they had been pursuing for more than a decade.

All the secrecy likely had little to do with national security and more to do with avoiding possible embarrassment to the agency. To some, the meeting would seem no less outrageous than if the DOE honchos had convened for a seance to raise the dead -- and in a way, they had: Fifteen years ago, the DOE held a very similar review of the very same idea.

[MCH]

Thanks for the post & link. I remember reading in the cold fusion Usenet group back in the early 90's where various researchers were going down to Georgia to do measurements and review ongoing experimental results, for what I assume was the earliest prototype for what is now Hydrodynamics product. It's based in Georgia, so it's almost certainly one and the same. I don't remember the main researcher's name from that time, but none of the names on the management page of the Hydrodynamics web site looked familiar.

I'm assuming no viable scientific explanation for "shockwave power" has ever been advanced. True? This company is an interesting example of engineering harnessing unexplainable science for commercial success. Interesting.

[swolf]

Popular Mechanics ran a big article on this one recently. Basically, DOD and DOE have told the American physics community to get their heads out from their ***s and get their act together.

[lepton]

A respected mentor of mine said that engineers know what they know, but scientists know what they don't yet know. Far too many scientists are so wrapped up in what they do know...they forget what they don't.

Ah....the Dichotomous Rummy. :)

[Malsua]

I remember reading in the cold fusion Usenet group back in the early 90's where various researchers were going down to Georgia to do measurements and review ongoing experimental results, for what I assume was the earliest prototype for what is now Hydrodynamics product.

Yes, it's the same. A couple years ago, when I found HydroDynamics, I went though usenet and various web sites and through some papers that were on CompuServe and linked the two. Now much of that Archival stuff is scrubbed, so it would be more difficult to draw the correlation between the two. It doesn't say so on the HD website, but I believe the inventor got out of the business or at least one of the guys responsible for the early designs.

I've always said, if you can prove ZPE/Over Unity Energy, it has just becomes an issue of engineering and time.

[boris]

All I know is that the Japanese keep issuing patents for CF, and I have never known them to waste money on bad ideas.

--Boris

[Wonder Warthog]

"In fact it's in use daily quite close to nealy all of us as we drive around (Used as a catalyst for vehicle emission reduction in (at least) US and Canadian vehicles - for decades)."

Methinks those are mostly platinum rather than palladium. But palladium is more abundant than platinum so the point "is" illustrative. Still better if it works in titanium, too.

[TXnMA]

No doubt, you are feigning ignorance here, in order to make a joke... ;-}

It is the exothermic chemical combination reaction of hydrogen with oxygen to form water that releases copious amounts of energy. Of course, water (the reaction product) is not a fuel. It is the remains ('ash') of an exothermic reaction that has already occurred.

Of course, the (mis) use of the word, "creating" in the sentence to which you responded is ludicrously funny:

"(the blast had nothing to do with fusion; hydrogen mixed with oxygen, creating the equivalent of rocket fuel)."

The ignorant reporter should have used "acting as" instead of "creating"...

And of course, using "mixed with" instead of "reacted with" makes the reporter's sentence even more misleading...

Where do they get those ignoramuses who call themselves "reporters"? :-(

[syriacus]

It is not meaningful at all

Perhaps it's only meaningful to little me. I like to have authors make meaningful comparisons, even in cases where they are handling fictional matters.

If the author insists on revealing the number of times the experiments were allegedly successful, it would be nice to know the total number of times the experiments were run, rather than the hours consumed by experimentation.

[JasonC]

Yes yes we are not nimnuts, we can read. Even if they had provided comparable figures it would not support the desired conclusion.

[syriacus]

Even if they had provided comparable figures it would not support the desired conclusion.

Which desired conclusion? Aren't we just after the truth?

[Final Authority]

I wrote reply 34 before I read the full text of the article. In the article tritium is mentioned as a detectable product of CF and is a marker that proves nuclear activity.

[Constantine XIII]

Have you actually looked at the process they propose? It just doesn't make any sense.

I mean, how can running a current through something cause nuclei to fuse? It would be like trying to merge two rampaging elephants by throwing baseballs at them! :P

[Constantine XIII]

This is why good science populizers are worth their weight in gold. We'd be doomed if we had to rely on journalists to tell the public about science. :P

[JustDoItAlways]

We are going to need new sources of safe energy in the near future.

Despite all the work that is going on around the world, no energy source has come forward or appears promising in terms of passing the tests of financial, environmental and safety viability.

I believe "that new energy source" will:

1. Totally come out of left-field, be very exotic and a physicist will develop it (quantum field energy, harnessing gravity, cold fusion would fit in here but it doesn't seem to be a real process); or,

2. It will be based on current technology and current processes and someone will just develop a new twist on it (like the new refining process from Changing World Technologies which just uses higher temperature and higher pressures to refine any non-metalic substance (wood, straw, coal, animals, rubber, garbage) into oil.)

[Constantine XIII]

Those guys with the super critical water reactor might have something. Oil from turkey guts! Just in time for the winter heating oil squeeze. :D

[mikegi]

What kind of fundamental breakthroughs has the physics community achieved since quantum mechanics?

I'm one of those anti-QM crackpots. I think QM is a disaster for physics. As an engineering theory, it's fine. It connects two end states while ignoring all the intermediate mess. Similar to modelling capacitors as a simple frequency-dependent device. In reality, a capacitor has electromagnetic waves bouncing around inside.

I wrote a paper giving a classical explanation of the Compton Effect. Its mostly a compilation of the work of others. My only contribution is adding the third party interaction idea, which is the key to the electron actually being ejected from the material. Anyway, here's a link: Classical Photon.

[JasonC]

That there is any excess heat production. The truth about empirical measurements of statistical constructs is that in any moderate sized set of cases, outliers are expected, following definite statistical laws as to frequency and subset mean - without rejection of the null hypothesis by the ordinary rules of statistical inference.

[Diogenesis]

Cold fusion is real despite your handwaving.
McKubre (the only data sets discussed in the article)
has yet to give public demonstrations as others have,
probably because his system is neither the most robust
and certainly not the most reproducible.
As for the theories, they are numerous
-- and will be sorted out in time by experimental tests.

[Diogenesis]

You might take a look at some of the papers from ICCF10 and ICCF11.
This is not just "current through something".
This involves the loading of deuterons into the palladium to very high atomic (D/Pd) ratios
which is actually a rather difficult-to-achieve matter.

[JasonC]

You can't fool me, I've seen the actual data they publish in places like Science and Nature. None of which can remotely support their claims. Irreproducible result is a standing joke, and applies here.