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Posted on 03/30/2005 2:14:49 PM PST by Arkie2
It was the most notorious scientific experiment in recent memory - in 1989, the two men who claimed to have discovered the energy of the future were condemned as impostors and exiled by their peers. Can it possibly make sense to reopen the cold fusion investigation? A surprising number of researchers have already done so.
Almost four stories high, framed in steel beams and tangled in pipes, conduits, cables, and coils, the Joint European Torus (JET) claims to be the largest fusion power experiment in the world. Located in Abingdon, near Oxford, England, JET is a monument to big science, its donut-shaped containment vessel dwarfing maintenance workers who enter it in protective suits. Here in this gleaming nuclear cauldron, deuterium gas is energized with 7 million amperes of electric current and heated to a temperature of 300 million degrees Celsius - more than 10 times hotter than the centre of the sun. Under these extreme conditions atomic nuclei collide and fuse, liberating energy that could provide virtually limitless power.
High-tension lines run directly to the installation, but they don't take electricity out - they bring it in. For a few magic seconds in 1997, JET managed to return 60 percent of the energy it consumed, but that's the best it has ever done, and is typical of fusion experiments worldwide. The US Department of Energy had predicted that we will have to wait another five decades, minimum, before fusion power becomes practical. Meanwhile, the United States continues to depend on fossil fuels for 85 percent of its energy.
Many miles away, in the basement of a new retirement home in the hills overlooking Santa Fe, New Mexico, Edmund Storms, a retired scientist of the US Los Alamos National Laboratory, has built a different kind of fusion reactor. It consists of laboratory glassware, off-the-shelf chemical supplies, two aging Macintosh personal computers for data acquisition, and an insulated wooden box the size of a kitchen cabinet. While JET's 15 European sponsor-nations have paid about US$1 billion for their hardware, and the US government has spent $14.7 billion on fusion research since 1951 (all figures in 1997 dollars), Storms's apparatus and ancillary gear have cost less than $50,000. Moreover, he claims that his equipment works, generating surplus heat for days at a time.
Storms is not an anti-establishment pseudo scientist pursuing a crackpot theory. For 34 years he was part of the nuclear research establishment himself, employed at Los Alamos on projects such as nuclear motors for space vehicles. Subsequently he testified before a US congressional sub-committee considering the future of fusion. He believes you don't need millions of degrees or billions of dollars to fuse atomic nuclei and yield energy. "You can obtain fusion reactions at room temperature," he says, in his genial, matter-of-fact style. "I am absolutely certain that cold nuclear fusion reaction phenomenon is real. It is quite extraordinary, and if it can be developed, it will have profound effects on society."
That is an understatement. If low-temperature fusion does exist and can be perfected, power generation could be decentralized. Each home could heat or cool itself and produce its own electricity, probably using a form of water as fuel. Even automobiles might be cold fusion powered. Massive generators and ugly power lines could be eliminated, along with now expensive crude oil with its large contribution to the greenhouse effect. Moreover, according to some experimental data, low-temperature fusion doesn't create significant hazardous radiation or radioactive waste.
What is cold fusion and what does it mean to science and society?
Cold fusion is important because it promises to be a new source of pollution-free, inexhaustible energy. In addition, it is important because it reveals the existence of a new way nuclei of atoms can interact that conventional scientific theory predicts is impossible.
What then is this phenomenon that offers such promise?
Energy can be obtained from the atomic nucleus in two different ways. On the one hand, a large nucleus can be broken into smaller pieces, such as is experienced by uranium in a conventional nuclear reactor and by the material in an atom bomb. This is called fission. On the other hand, two very small nuclei can be joined together, such as occurs during fusion of two light elements known as deuterium and tritium in a Hot Fusion reactor as well as in a hydrogen thermonuclear bomb. This process, called fusion, also takes place in our Sun and stars to produce much of the light we see.
The fission reaction is caused to happen by adding neutrons (one of the components of an atomic nucleus) to the nucleus of uranium or plutonium to make it unstable. The unstable nucleus splits into two nearly equal pieces, thereby releasing more neutrons, which continue the process. As every one now knows, this process produces considerable dangerous waste that is highly radioactive. The uranium used as fuel also occurs in limited amounts in the earth's crust. As a result, this source of energy is not ideal, although widely used in electricity nuclear generating plants at the present time.
Fusion reactions bring together two atomic nuclei and force them together to combine into one. This takes a large amount of energy to overcome the natural electromagnetic repulsion between the nuclei, but when they combine, the resulting single nucleus has a mass slightly less than the two original ones. This difference in mass (m, say) converts into energy (E, say), as predicted by Einstein and described by his famous equation, E=mc2, c being the speed of light. Lighter nuclei are easier to fuse than heavier ones, so hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is the best fusion fuel. The normal hot fusion reaction requires the nuclei of two deuterium or tritium atoms to be smashed together with great force or energy. This is accomplished by raising their temperature. However, this temperature is so high that the interacting materials cannot be held in a solid container which would obviously melt at such high temperatures, but must be contained in space by a magnetic field. This process has proven to be very difficult to accomplish for a time sufficient to generate useable energy. In spite of this difficulty, attempts have been under way for the last 40 years and with the expenditure of many billions of dollars. Success continues to be elusive while the effort continues.
For many reasons, fusion power is seen by many as the "natural" long-term universal power source. Some suggested advantages of commercial fusion reactors as power producers are: · An effectively inexhaustible supply of fuel (i.e., hydrogen obtained from water) · A fuel supply that is available from the oceans to all coastal countries and therefore cannot be interrupted by other nations · No possibility of "nuclear runaway" (excursions or criticality accidents) · No chemical combustion products as effluents · No use of weapons grade nuclear materials, thus no possibility of diversion for purposes of blackmail or sabotage · Low amount of radioactive by-products produced with a significantly shorter half-life relative to fission reactors.
Some argue that fusion is the best option for a truly sustainable or long term energy source because the fuel is virtually inexhaustible
Cold fusion, on the other hand, attempts to achieve the same result, but by using solid materials as the container held at normal temperatures. The container consists of various metals, including palladium, with which the deuterium is reacted to form a chemical compound. While in this environment, the electrical barrier between the deuterium nuclei is reduced so that two nuclei can fuse without having to be forced together. Because the process causing this to happen is not well understood, the possibility is rejected by many conventional scientists. Difficulty in producing the process on command has intensified the rejection. While this difficulty is real, it has not, as many sceptics have claimed, prevented the process from being reproduced hundreds of times in laboratories all over the world for the past 13 years. Indeed, the process continues to be reproduced with increasing ease using a variety of methods and materials.
The current status of cold fusion AS the story goes, on March 23, 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann both of the Chemistry Department of the University of Utah announced their discovery of "cold fusion." It was the most heavily hyped science story of the decade, but the awed excitement quickly evaporated amid accusations of fraud and incompetence when their claims could not be substantiated by their peers. When it was over, Pons and Fleischmann were humiliated by the scientific establishment; their reputations ruined, they fled from their laboratory and dropped out of sight. "Cold fusion" and "hoax" became synonymous in most people's minds, and today, everyone knows that the idea has been discredited.
Or has it? In fact, despite the scandal, laboratories in at least eight countries are still spending millions on cold fusion research. During the past nine years this work has yielded a huge body of evidence, while remaining virtually unknown - because most academic journals adamantly refuse to publish papers on it. At most, the story of cold fusion represents a colossal conspiracy of denial. At least, it is one of the strangest untold stories in 20th-century science. Since cold fusion is essentially a chemical process similar to what happens in an ordinary electric battery, the real question nagging nuclear physicists is whether a very powerful nuclear process can be triggered by an ordinary chemical process? The answer, based on what is known about nuclear phenomena, is apparently negative. But on the other hand, too many experiments in many laboratories all over the world now seem to indicate the opposite. Indeed, a variety of nuclear reactions, including fusion, have been demonstrated to occur spontaneously in special chemical environments at very low levels. Some of these reactions produce detectable heat. Occasionally, these reactions can be made to occur at potentially useful rates, but the scientific reasons are not yet understood. Until the necessary environment is identified and can be produced in large quantity, the cold fusion field continues to have only scientific interest to a relatively few people. However, once the novel environment has been identified, normal engineering methods can be applied to make the material in quantity for use in a suitable power plant.
So far, scientists have discovered thirteen different ways to initiate the reactions and have demonstrated different aspects of the effect hundreds of times in many laboratories world-wide. These demonstrations include production of anomalous energy, helium, tritium, and a variety of elements not previously present in the experimental container. Clearly, the phenomenon is not limited to fusion. Because the novel chemical environment is largely produced by chance, many efforts to replicate the effect fail. Such failure frustrates an understanding of the phenomenon and emboldens sceptics.
Explanations for the effect are being provided by dozens of theoreticians, with growing success. The major problem has been that present understanding rests on observing such nuclear reactions only after applying high energy - a brute force method. Naturally, this approach and resulting theory do not apply to the conditions being explored in this work. Subtle forces and processes are overwhelmed by this large energy and made invisible. Indeed, many people noticed that when the applied energy is reduced, more fusion is observed than "theory" would predict. This behaviour has been frequently ignored because the intent of conventional work is to make fusion happen at the highest possible rate. The chemically assisted nuclear reaction (CANR) effect has shown that if the environment is optimised, the required energy can be minimized. Consequently, the phenomenon is just a natural extrapolation of conventional studies, but with the environment no longer being ignored.
The phenomenon demonstrates that within the correct chemical environment, a wide variety of nuclear reactions can be initiated without producing harmful radiation and with few radioactive products. This phenomenon provides a potential way to generate clean, inexhaustible energy as well as to reduce radioactive waste obtained from fission reactors. Although the effect is now being studied and the results patented in at least six countries, work in the U. S. is minimal and for now cannot be patented, and can rarely be published in conventional US scientific journals. An official bias against the phenomenon exists in the U.S. government that inhibits both public and private financing.
Future Prognosis for cold fusion Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.
With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems would simply melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy (DoE) is now interested. In December 2004, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments. That is quite a turn around. The DoE's first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.
The basic claim of Pons and Fleischmann is that dipping palladium electrodes into heavy water - in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium - can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move into palladium's molecular structure, enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every accepted scientific theory. That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion. "The experimental case is bullet-proof," he says. "You can't make it go away." In the circumstance everyone should expect to hear a lot more about cold fusion in the next five to ten years.
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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