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Posted on 03/30/2005 2:14:49 PM PST by Arkie2
Same here. Interest in cold fusion is a leading indicator as oil and gas prices rise .... Look for more cold fusion shows on Coast to Coast/Art Bell/George Noury. It's real and let's make it profitable.
The basic method for the advancement of science has been conjecture and refutation or conjecture and confirmation.
It's a basic principle that experiments must be repeatable.
However, there may be cases where an experiment was not written up properly, because there was some factor at work that the experimenters didn't notice or failed to write up. So the fact that an experiment couldn't be repeated may result from insufficient knowledge. That's basically why I'm inclined to suspend judgment in this case. I don't think these experimenters were deliberate charlatins. Either they convinced themselves that they had something that they hadn't, or there was some factor at work that they failed to nail down.
It's also the case that there's a known lemming effect among scientists. Once something like cold fusion has been subjected to disbelief and ridicule, it's very hard to go back and try it again. History says that numerous theories that have proved to be true were ridiculed at first.
Cold fusion doesn't seem very likely, but I don't think it's flat impossible.
Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of the raster scan method for television and arguably television itself, made significant progress toward a small fusion device. He even talked for an hour or so with Einstein about how could work and supposedly Einstein agreed it would work. See http://fusor.net/
for details.
That's why solar power will never go too far.
...............
Please excuse the off-topic, but...
I got literature from a solar power company last Earth Day who said they could install a 2.5 KW solar plant for my house. How much, I gleefully asked...
$2800 (iirc)! This sounded too good to be true so I kept digging. That's after government rebates and tax writeoffs. So had I gone for it, you would be helping me pay for it! TIA lol.
Plus, I was told I could make a deal with the local power authority- under some Jimmy Carter era laws, I can run my electric meter backwards and make my local company pay me at their top retail rate for the electricity, so my neighbors would also pay a little extra since the power company would be buying juice for what they sold it for, and would have to eat the overhead.
Without the tax breaks and Federal handouts the 2.5 KW plant came to over $11,500.
The point is, people do pay for solar, it's very expensive to get into. Drop the cost to where average folks can buy in without subsidies and lots of people's roofs will sprout panels.
If you don't care where the money comes from you can get solar yourself, using the same tax breaks and subsidies I found.
D + T - He-4 + n + 17.588 MeV
D + D - He-3 + n + 3.268 MeV
D + D - T + p + 4.03 MeV
He-3 + D - He-4 + p + 18.34 MeV
Li-6 + n - T + He-4 + 4.78 MeV
Li-7 + n - T + He-4 + n - 2.47 MeV
where D is deuterium, T is tritium.
Where are the neutrons going? And much of those MeV's?
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That is the problem. When researchers tried to repeat the first experiments, they naturally looked for 3.3 MeV neutrons and found none.
So now the theory has to include a mechanism to get cold fusion, without the neutrons but with the energy, since nobody can detect the neutrons.
If you are going to get power from DD, DT, DH, HH, or whatever process, making a mole of fusions is going to result in a mole or two of neutrons that must go somewhere, and they will activate stuff just like the neutrons from fission.
Read page 5 in this 1996 report from the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MilesManomalousea.pdf
At the very least, these folks have figured out a way to make helium appear where there was no helium before. Sounds nuclear rather than chemical to me.
The fact that they couldn't make it happen every time does not mean it didn't happen. There is a certain amount of that in research.
"The neutron produced in reaction 2 has an energy of only 2.45 MeV (similar to the faster fission neutrons), with the He-3 carrying 0.82 MeV. The division of energy in reaction 3 is 1.01 MeV for the triton, and 3.03 MeV for the proton. The two D+D reactions are equally likely and each will occur half the time."
However, the probability of the neutron being captured is dependant on how much material it is passing through, and the neutron capture cross section of that material. So if this is done in "laboratory glassware", some neutrons IMHO are going to get out, as opposed to a massive structure (comparatively speaking) of say a research fission reactor.
If you do get neutron capture (a.k.a. neutron activation), you will likely be getting some radioisotope formation: tritium, isotopes of oxygen, silicon and other elements making up the glassware. Also possibly Nitrogen-16 (occurs when Oxygen-16, the normal isotope, is hit by certain gammas), but n-16 is extremely short lived. N-16 is typically formed in water cooled power reactors, but most of it has beta-decayed to O-16 by the time it reaches the steam turbine. The plant still needs recombiner equipment to deal with the disassociated hydrogen and oxygen (quite exothermic).
The paper referenced in 48 tries to look at neutrons, but used Au and In foils which are very sensitive to thermal neutrons but not fast ones, as though the researchers did not really understand N dosimetry. 2.4 MeV neutrons are pretty penetrating and cross sections generally low away from resonances.
I'd like to see an experiment done first in an annular GeLi or BGO detector, then in a BF3 detector for N production. Do it with regular components, then deuterated.
Do you know of any?
Many people have predicted neutron rates but as far as I know nobody with a knowlege of particle detection has had a hand in the experiments. Surprising considering how key the issue is to the mechanisms.
http://atom.kaeri.re.kr/
Here's a great chart of nuclides, wih ENDFB and other cross section data.
It's those reaction equations given above why I have doubts about cold fusion. BTW, I'm an engineer, not a physicist, although I have some physics background.
Thanks for the post. I think it might be time for people to look into home distilleries to produce fuel grade alcohol, also. That is, if you can get a license.
I know, I know, that's way too simplistic, but there is going to come a time when anything is going to be on the table.
;^)
One time I linked an image, and instead of a red X, or a box that said "Hosted by Tripod", it said "I eat Poop." LOL!
I got a nice picture of a yo-yo; no red x.
Also, here is an article about subsidized solar.
I think we'll need a mix of technologies- two or three types of solar, garbage alcohol, wind, community based methane, petrochemical, and bio-methanol. I'd use wind, which is uneven, to generate and store hydrogen. Of course, society will look very different then!
And ya just never know, maybe "cold fusion" will move out of the "I think we saw an excess of .05W after thirteen days of staring at the meter" phase.
What I would like to see more of is garbage landfill methane. Collect and scrub the gas, run it into a portable gas turbine genset. Also a good way to deal with the real stinky landfills.
They do that at South Coast Botanic Gardens in Palos Verdes, CA- it's an old landfill, and there is a power plant running of the collected methane. I don't know how much power they get, though.
Each sewage plant could be a methane factory, too (though have you smelled the difference between aerobic and anaerobic fermentation?)
Works on my end. You might want to check your firewall settings or some such thing.
Okay, I'm still a skeptic, but you've gotta keep an open mind.
This passage reminds me of inserting a key into a lock . . . All the components in the key-lock analogy have to be oriented just so and, bingo!, the key goes in and you can open the lock.
So, what do the electric fields look like at the quantum level, anyway? I'm definitely no physicist or chemist, as anybody can tell. I'm just an ordinary layman and I'm wondering about this now.
Are the electric fields in the immediate vicinity of an atom smooth, continuous, uniform and round, like I've always supposed. Or are they discontinuous and jagged, just like the tumblers in a lock, waiting for the right key (i.e., atom) to come along and gain entry?
OK, time to make fun of the ignorant layman! :-)
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