University checks "bubble fusion" fraud claim (cold fusion fraud)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Purdue University is investigating complaints about a scientist who claimed to have achieved "cold fusion" using sound waves to make bubbles in a test tube, the university said on Wednesday.

Nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan's work has been controversial since he published a study in 2002 claiming to have achieved the Holy Grail of energy production -- nuclear fusion at room temperature.

If scientists can duplicate the results and harness the technology, tabletop fusion has the potential to provide an almost limitless source of cheap energy.

Many labs are working frantically to try to do so, but their efforts are difficult to substantiate and especially susceptible to being labeled as fraud.

Taleyarkhan, whose study was published while he was at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, now works at Purdue University in Indiana and has also been trying to replicate his earlier findings.

Purdue Provost Sally Mason said her office was checking complaints from some of Taleyarkhan's co-workers.

"Purdue last week initiated a review of this research and these allegations," Mason said in a statement.

"The research claims involved are very significant and the concerns expressed are extremely serious. Purdue will explore all aspects of the situation thoroughly and announce the results at the appropriate time," she added.

"To ensure objectivity, the review is being conducted by Purdue's Office of the Vice President for Research, which is separate from the College of Engineering."

The journal Nature reported on Wednesday that it had interviewed several of Taleyarkhan's colleagues who suspect something is amiss.

"Faculty members Lefteri Tsoukalas and Tatjana Jevremovic, along with several others who do not wish to be named, say that since Taleyarkhan began working at Purdue, he has removed the equipment with which they were trying to replicate his work, claimed as 'positive' experimental runs for which they never saw the raw data, and opposed the publication of their own negative results," Nature said in a statement.

"In addition, Brian Naranjo at the University of California, Los Angeles, is submitting to Physical Review Letters an analysis of Taleyarkhan's recently published data that strongly suggests he has detected not fusion, but a standard lab source of radioactivity."

Naranjo's lab reported in April 2005 that it had achieved cold fusion by heating a lithium crystal soaked in deuterium gas.

Engineers and physicists have been cautious about Taleyarkhan's technique but say in theory it could work.

In his original report, published in the journal Science in 2002, Talayarkhan and colleagues said they created nuclear fusion in a beaker of chemically altered acetone by bombarding it with neutrons and then sound waves to make bubbles.

Experts have been especially skeptical about cold fusion claims since Britons Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of Southampton University held a news conference in 1989 to claim they had achieved it.

Announcing a major scientific advance in a news conference rather than submitting experiments to expert peer review and scrutiny is considered poor form by scientists -- and Fleischmann and Pons were further ridiculed when no one could duplicate their efforts.

As anyone who has paid attention to the cold fusion committee in the past 15 years, you would know that if literally God himself handed a working prototype that produced cold fusion, the cold fusion committee would call it a fraud. It's never enough with them.

Ah hah, I agree with you, maybe.

There has always been this satanically inspired, secularist, humanist, marxist conspiracy to fluoridate the water supply and to suppress the devices that give us 200 miles per gallon. Ah, satan has so many guises.

I am not sure of your point. You like pixies but dislike physics? Or is it the other way round?

There are many researchers who have gotten positive results from sonofusion, Taleyharkin is but one of them(and not the first). This is just one of many, many breakthroughs in the LENR(Low Energy Nuclear Reaction)field. Another is Stan Gleason's process(discovered in a corner of a welding shop in cinncinati) : Zirconium pipe with end caps, stainless steel rod and central disc : fill with thorium nitrate : in 3 hours and about 3 KWHs later 90% of the thorium has been transmutated into copper and titanium(copper flakes are visible). To wit, nuclear waste remediation with a simple device. Now, how come Yucca Mountain instead of intense development of this fantastic breakthrough? Vested interests! Over $7 BILLION DOLLARS has been spent on Yucca Mountain STUDIES and not one pound of nuc-rad-waste has been stored there, ie, it's all about MONEY honey. Truckers getting paid BUCO BUCKS transporting nuc-waste from the 74 sites around the country, glassification companies that have poured millions into the technology of encapsulating rad-waste into glass blocks...all GONE when you show you can treat nuc-rad-waste cheaply and on-site with LENR....My friend has waited for YEARS to get this technology funded(plus Ken Shoulders EV process)from european billionaires(there is NO HOPE for US funding as we well know)...And this is only the tip of the iceberg, if you only knew the REAL story that has long been surpressed.

There is a whole new world awaiting you in the field loosely referred to as "cold fusion". Today we call it LENR for Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. The Pons and Fleischmann discovery of 1988-89 was just "alice jumping through the looking glass", a beginning. Today there are all kinds of spin offs, whole new doors being opened. I could tell you some of it, like what "time" truly is, but as a starter look up Infinite_Energy.com, Eugene Mallove's magazine. He was killed may 14, 2004 by thugs; we think of him as SAINT Mallove because of his courageous stand against the lies of the science establishment. Anyway, if you can afford it, get back issues of IE magazine, your eyes will be OPENED. There are about 3000 of us in the new energy field world wide and several have died under mysterious circumstances, this is a dangerous occupation...

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