Posted on 05/27/2008 1:35:26 PM PDT by Red Badger
On May 22, researchers at Osaka University presented the first demonstration of cold fusion since an unsuccessful attempt in 1989 that has clouded the field to this day.
To many people, cold fusion sounds too good to be true. The idea is that, by creating nuclear fusion at room temperature, researchers can generate a nearly unlimited source of power that uses water as fuel and produces almost zero waste. Essentially, cold fusion would make oil obsolete.
However, many experts debate whether money should be spent on cold fusion research or applied to more realistic alternative energy solutions. For decades, researchers around the world have been simply trying to show that cold fusion is indeed possible, but they´ve yet to take that important first step.
Now, esteemed Physics Professor Yoshiaki Arata of Osaka University in Japan claims to have made the first successful demonstration of cold fusion. Last Thursday, May 22, Arata and his colleague Yue-Chang Zhang of Shianghai Jiotong University presented the cold fusion demonstration to 60 onlookers, including other physicists, as well as reporters from six major newspapers and two TV studios. If Arata and Zhang´s demonstration is real, it could lead to a future of new, clean, and cheap energy generation.
In their experiment, the physicists forced deuterium gas into a cell containing a mixture of palladium and zirconium oxide, which absorbed the deuterium to produce a dense "pynco" deuterium. In this dense state, the deuterium nuclei from different atoms were so close together that they fused to produce helium nuclei.
Evidence for the occurrence of this fusion came from measuring the temperature inside the cell. When Arata first injected the deuterium gas, the temperature rose to about 70° C (158° F), which Arata explained was due to nuclear and chemical reactions. When he turned the gas off, the temperature inside the cell remained warmer than the cell wall for 50 hours, which Arata said was an effect of nuclear fusion.
While Arata´s demonstration looked promising to his audience, the real test is still to come: duplication. Many scientists and others are now recalling the infamous 1989 demonstration by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, who claimed to produce controlled nuclear fusion in a glass jar at room temperature. However, no one - including Fleischmann and Pons - could duplicate the experiment, leading many people to consider cold fusion a pseudoscience to this day.
But one witness at the recent demonstration, physicist Akito Takahashi of Osaka University, thought that the experiment should be able to be repeated.
"Arata and Zhang demonstrated very successfully the generation of continuous excess energy [heat] from ZrO2-nano-Pd sample powders under D2 gas charging and generation of helium-4," Takahashi told New Energy Times. "The demonstrated live data looked just like data they reported in their published papers [J. High Temp. Soc. Jpn, Feb. and March issues, 2008]. This demonstration showed that the method is highly reproducible."
In addition, researchers will have to repeat the experiment with larger amounts of the palladium and zirconium oxide mixture in order to generate larger quantities of energy.
via: Physics World and New Energy Times
It's for real this time
Arata is 84 year old retired professor emeritus. Look at his photo. He is not a liar plus he is not going to ruin his name and honor at age 84. He is old school Japanese where this is very important
Check out Mr. Arata. If he is good then this cold fusion is good
http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo-Photos-AT.htm
http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-De
Check out---->>> Photos from Akito Takahashi (Added May 23)
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Arata-Zhang LENR Demonstration |
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Photos from Akito Takahashi (Added May 23)
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Arata-Zhang LENR Demonstration OSAKA, JAPAN -- Against a monumental backdrop of bad publicity for cold fusion since 1989, researchers in Japan on May 22 demonstrated the production of excess heat and helium-4, the results of an historic low-energy nuclear reaction experiment.
"Arata and Zhang demonstrated very successfully the generation of continuous excess energy (heat) from ZrO2-nano-Pd sample powders under D2 gas charging and generation of helium-4," Takahashi wrote. "The demonstrated live data looked just like data they reported in their published papers (J. High Temp. Soc. Jpn, Feb. and March issues, 2008). This demonstration showed that the method is highly reproducible." Takahashi wrote that 60 people from universities and companies in Japan and a few people from other countries attended, as well as representatives from six major newspapers (Asahi, Nikkei, Mainichi, NHK, et al.) and two television stations. In an earlier conversation with New Energy Times, Arata offered his perspective on "cold fusion" research, which he calls solid nuclear fusion. "Some people say we have reached the end of science, that there are no more great discoveries that remain. In my view, nature always has more secrets to reveal," Arata wrote. "I always stay on guard not to be too possessed by my own current knowledge. History has shown us repeatedly, for example, the foolishness of denying 'heliocentricism,' which resulted from individuals adhering too strongly to their own knowledge or to what was common sense in the past." New Energy Times will have a more complete report in the next issue on July 10. Arata-Zhang Demo Announcement
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Cheers!
You might have added, that for chemical processes, if you drop the temperature, the conventional reaction rate drops too; and under certain conditions, tunneling makes up a goodly proportion of the overall reaction rate.
Whether this applies to nuclear processes (higher activation barrier) is beyond the scope of this post.
Cheers!
Not at all. Munder Deathpig---I kind of like it. Sounds kind of Viking-ish.
They used a helium detector, IIRC....
Tunneling? Or maybe a combination of this and a thing from fluid dynamics called the venturi effect. If two cars enter a tunnel at the same time, it's okay as long as the width of the tunnel is sufficient to accommodate both cars. But if the tunnel gets narrower and narrower they will smash into each other. Using the venturi effect, the cars get faster and faster as they go through the narrowing opening. When they smash together, instead of being destroyed, they merge into one car, or in this case, one atom of helium, and the "leftovers" become energy released as heat. Now that they are "one" car, or "one" atom, they take up less space than two cars or two atoms, so there is now room for the cars/2H atoms behind them to do the same thing in sequence, until you run out of cars/2H atoms.............But that's just my guess............
“If this were in fact fusion we would have to keep fission reactors going just to produce heavy water”
FROM WIKI:
Natural abundance
Deuterium occurs in trace amounts naturally as deuterium gas, written ²H2 or D2, but most natural occurrence in the universe is bonded with a typical ¹H atom, a gas called hydrogen deuteride (HD or ¹H²H).[4]
The existence of deuterium on Earth, elsewhere in the solar system (as confirmed by planetary probes), and in the spectra of stars, is an important datum in cosmology. Stellar fusion destroys deuterium, and there are no known natural processes (for example, see the rare cluster decay), other than the Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which might have produced deuterium at anything close to the observed natural abundance of deuterium. This abundance seems to be a very similar fraction of hydrogen, wherever hydrogen is found. Thus, the existence of deuterium is one of the arguments in favor of the Big Bang theory over the steady state theory of the universe. It is estimated that the abundances of deuterium have not evolved significantly since their production more than 14 billion years ago.[5]
The world’s leading “producer” of deuterium (technically, merely enricher or concentrator of deuterium) was Canada, until 1997 when the last plant was shut down (see more in the heavy water article). Canada uses heavy water as a neutron moderator for the operation of the CANDU reactor design. India is now probably the world’s largest concentrator of heavy water, also used in nuclear power reactors.
BTTT
Well, the Venturi effect exists due to the disturbance of a fluid medium between the cars (the air). At nuclei scales, there is no medium for the Venturi effect to occur in.
I would think that in the case of Deuterium, it IS the medium, since it is introduced as a gas...........
“It doesn’t make much sense to have a power plant solely to produce the fuel for a power plant.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
No, fusion occurs due to interactions between Deuterium atoms over distance scales that require that the atoms are in extremely close contact. Therefore, there is no room for any intervening atoms, therefore no medium is present.
That was my question. Nuclear power plants work by putting heat to work to generate steam to turn a turbine to turn a generator that provides electricity. Generating Helium is good for party balloons but not generating useful power.
A previous responder said cold fusion meant relatively cold as compared with other fusion reactors using heat similar to that of the sun, a heat level difficult to contain and use.
But a room temperature reaction provides no energy that we could easily convert into traditional power. Unless there was an associated flow of electrons that can be contained and directed, I don't understand how a truly cold (room temperature) reaction has any benefit beyond greater understanding of physics that might lead to another more useful discovery.
I am an engineer. I think in terms of application. If it generates hundreds of degrees of temperature rise instead of tens of thousands, that is useful. If it generates ten degrees of temperature rise, that is not, at least not for power generation.
Maybe this is where quantum theory meets physical world. The atoms are "forced" together, serially, like in a vise, under such pressure that they combine into a helium atom and release energy as heat, only under a controllable process that can be harvested. Maybe the palladium and zirconium dioxide act as the atomic "jaws" of the vise to produce this "fusion" slowly, instead of instantaneously in one "Big Bang"!............
It doesn’t make much sense to have a power plant solely to produce the fuel for a power plant.
That’s like saying it doesn’t pay to cut wood.
Just chuck the gasoline from the chain saw right into the fireplace.
Energy has many forms, and there are advantages/disadvantages to each.
Probably has something to do with the quantum properties of the crystalline forms of palladium
When you start to get up into the heavier metals and actinide series, there’s alot of weird chit going on!
Possibly. That’s the intuition most physicists seem to have, assuming that cold fusion exists, but we really don’t know.
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