Cold fusion ‘breakthrough’ heralds clean nuclear power

NUCLEAR scientists will this week announce they may have achieved a controlled form of cold fusion, a technology that potentially offers humanity a limitless source of clean energy.

The researchers are to publish evidence suggesting they have successfully fused the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, so recreating the processes that take place within the sun.

Until now the only way to achieve fusion has been through nuclear weapons or in vast experimental machines that cost billions of pounds. Both depend on generating extremely high temperatures.

However, the latest research, by scientists at the American government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Michigan, was done on a laboratory bench using relatively simple and cheap equipment at room temperature.

The study echoes the work of Professor Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons who, in 1989, announced they had achieved cold fusion at Southampton University but were ridiculed when no one could repeat their work.

Fleischmann and Pons made what many now see as a fatal mistake when they released their results at a press conference rather than having them scrutinised by other scientists before publication in an academic journal.

It is understood that Rusi Taleyarkhan from Oak Ridge, Fred Becchetti from the University of Michigan and their collaborator, Robert Nigmatulin, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, have repeated their work and subjected it to extensive peer review.

If confirmed, the discovery could rank among the most important since the dawn of the nuclear age. The scientists are, however, extremely cautious at this stage, saying only that they have detected all the signs of fusion rather than categorically confirming it.

Their technique uses pressure waves to generate tiny bubbles in a solution of acetone that has been infused with deuterium, a “heavy” form of hydrogen extracted from sea water.

At the heart of most hydrogen atoms is a nucleus comprising a single proton. Deuterium atoms, however, have an additional particle, a neutron. This makes them roughly twice as heavy and slightly unstable.

Physicists have long known that smashing two deuterium atoms together can fuse them into tritium, a third form of hydrogen with a proton and two neutrons. This fusion releases vast amounts of energy. This was the principle used to create the hydrogen bomb in 1945, but ever since then scientists have been struggling to find a way to control the process.

In the latest technique, the sound waves create bubbles that expand with explosive force. As the wave passes, the bubbles implode, generating extremely high temperatures. This process is known as sono-luminescence after the flashes of light emitted.

Until recently scientists could generate only temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees, far short of the sun’s 10m Celsius. This appears to have been solved by “hitting” the bubbles with another sound wave that compresses them so rapidly that temperatures soar and the deuterium fuses.

An insider said the researchers had detected “promising signs of fusion” including the creation of tritium and, crucially, the emission of neutrons. The researchers believe the neutrons have energy levels consistent with those that would be emitted by deuterium fusion.

This would enable them to escape the fate of Fleischmann and Pons, whose readings of neutrons enabled them to claim they had achieved fusion. It later emerged that these neutrons could have been the results of contamination.

Neil Turok, professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge University, said the results, if confirmed, were extremely exciting: “Cold fusion has a bad history but these laboratories are among the best in the world and they will have taken every precaution to get it right.”

The research has major implications for other fusion projects. Britain already hosts the Jet project at Culham in Oxford, where a machine has been built to research sustainable nuclear fusion reactions.

This weekend it emerged that Culham had scrapped its own research into sono-luminescence and other low-tech forms of fusion after a report from Thornton Greenland, a former senior scientist, suggesting it was unlikely ever to work.

Greenland said: “I thought there was too little evidence to show it would work, but this suggests I was wrong.”

Recently, Lord Sainsbury, the science minister, committed Britain to joining an international project to build a £2 billion fusion machine called Iter, Latin for “the Way”.

Even this, however, will be able to sustain fusion reactions for only 16 minutes. A proper fusion reactor capable of producing power is thought to be 30-50 years away.

Fleischmann, who now lives near Salisbury, still believes his results were correct although he regrets allowing colleagues to press him into publicising them before he was ready.

He said: “I hope they have achieved it. If they have, I hope people are ready for it this time.”


REACTION	Energy Release (MeV)	Reaction/sec per 1 W Output

D + D --> 3He + n	3.27	1.90x10l2

D + D --> T + p	4.03	1.54xl012

D + D --> 4He + gamma	23.85	2.61xl011

D + T --> 4He + n	17.59	3.53x1011

p + D --> 3He + gamma	5.49	1.13xl012

p + T --> 4He + gamma	19.81	3.14x1011

Anybody know how it's going with the Z machine in New Mexico?

What in hell is going on out there in the desert?

A machine called Z

Under a ring of water in a sealed chamber in the middle of the New Mexico desert lies the heart of a machine that could change the world

Michael Paterniti
Sunday December 31, 2000
The Observer

It is never night inside the Machine. Even after the sun has set on the mesa and Jimmy Potter and the frogmen and the men in white jumpsuits and the men in blue jumpsuits have showered, packed up, and gone home; even as yawning, befuddled scientists - with names like Jim Bailey and Mark Derzon and Melissa Douglas - sit in offices in a nearby building, trapped by their own reflections and in the blackened windows; and even as this oesophageal dark falls over coyote and jackrabbit and moves everything towards sleep and dreams, towards the deepest centre of the night, the Machine is awake.

Its 36 Marx generators are set in a ring like a metallic Stonehenge. The 20 Rexolite disks of the vacuum chamber look like flying saucers. Its vast, concentric pool of five-weight oil and deionized water seems bottomless - real oil and real water, in half-million-gallon tanks that sit one inside the other like a wheel within a wheel. Even now, there are depths in the Machine, invisible worlds revealing themselves, the secret body of the universe floating up. Deuterium, tritium, helium.

It begins with the flip of a cyber switch in the control room at the north end of the hanger. Before a bank of computer screens, a man clicks a mouse, and then electricity, quietly sucked off the municipal power grid in Albuquerque, floods into the outer ring of Marx generators. Which is when the Machine takes control. A siren sounds, red lights flash, doors automatically lock. The frogmen and the white and blue jumpsuits clamber over the high bay, down metal steps, and retreat to a copper-coated room behind a foot of cement.

Another switch is flipped, another mouse clicked. To the piercing sound of an alarm, a countdown in the Marx generators ensues, or rather a count up, in kilovolts, comes in a monotone, almost hollow voice beneath the frantic alarm. The man in the control room on a tinny loudspeaker, the Machine speaking through the human.

'Twenty kV...'

'Thirty kV...'

'Forty kV...'

At 90, the floodgates open: a pulse of electricity surges out of the Marx generators toward an inside ring of giant capacitors and then through a series of gas switches. The current is compressed by the Machine into a wild whitewater of electricity that charges toward the vacuum chamber at a speed of 60 million feet per second. On its way, it passes through painted sharks' mouths, drawn there by the men in white and blue jumpsuits in the way that fighter pilots sometimes draw on their warplanes to show their prowess - or hide their misgivings. The electricity pours past the sharks' mouths, is redirected downward, along the Z axis, into the vacuum chamber, blitzing and bombarding from all sides a three-dimensional target in a gold-plated can, a delicately strung array of tungsten wires the size of a spool of thread, hanging in black space like a tiny chandelier.

Driven so furiously in the Machine, and then storming the array, the pulse of electricity - enough juice now to light up America like a birthday cake - instantly vapourises the tungsten wire into plasma, a superheated ion gas. The ions hover and dance along the invisible circumference once described by the array, while a relentless magnetic field keeps pressing on them, shoving them from behind. Thrusting and squeezing and ramming until the ions can no longer resist, the centre cannot hold, and in that hot nanosecond - Boom ! Everything becomes one.

This is not a gentle conjunction but a Pandora's box suddenly ripped open by nuclear passion, an orgy of ions. Boom ! Lightning fills the Machine, veins out over the surface of the water. Temperatures flare to those inside the sun. The earth rocks once again. And in few billionths of a second, 290 terawatts - 80 times the power generated on earth at any given time - roar to life inside the Machine.

Watching it through a Plexiglas window, you might as well be watching the beginning of the universe. Or the end of it. Contained in that single flash of white light, when the Machine holds the heat and the power of the sun, when the room fills with lightning, there is everything we know - and everything we may become. The 21st century. A world covered by rooms of little suns, generating intense energy and, with it, the possibilities of time travel and galaxy hopping. Peace among nations. Or the end of time as we know it, a hole ripped in the universe by the Machine, something many doomsayers predict, and the earth sucked into oblivion. Our downfall or salvation. A fusion machine they call Z.

The magic bean; the Holy Grail: fusion.

A Machine Called Z

Random thoughts and observations concerning the possibility of "cold fusion":

Le Chatelier's principle states:

Any change in one of the variables that determines the state of a system in equilibrium causes a shift in the position of equilibrium in a direction that tends to counteract the change in the variable under consideration."

High temperature fusion may be as well attributed to the high pressures generated by high temperatures as by the high temperatures. Fusion, after all, results in a smaller volume, which is consistent with le Chatelier's principle quoted above.

How does natural radiation background or the well documented half-life of many elements occur without the intervention of all the manmade steps taken creat fision reactions? Radioactive decay has been explained by "tunneling" which is well documented in chemistry and electronics, e.g. the Esaki diode.

If I recall correctly, one gram of palladium can absorb an amount of hydrogen equivalent one gram of liquid hydrogen. The pressures generated within the palladium crystal lattice by the absorbtion of such amounts of hydrogen are very high. The difference between deuterium dissolved acetone or palladium may only be a matter of degree. How would a sample of palladium saturated with deuterium react to high frequency vibrations be they sonic or electronic?

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TABLE 1.1

KNOWN FUSION REACTIONS OF HYDROGEN ISOTOPES