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
The third PDF you posted pretty much absolutely, positively, undeniably proves that there is production of helium.
That seals the deal, as far as I understand it.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are quite inhabitted and have been for decades.
My 1973 Mazda RX-3, which I bought new in the early fall of '73 just before the Arab oil embargo, was built in Hiroshima. Heck it didn't even glow in the dark. Bummer. :)
I was more interested in chasing girls than doing a science project as was my partner. So we got together the night before it was due to do our project.
We decided to do power from a potato. Seemed easy enough. Just shove two wires into opposite sides of the potato and hook it up to a light bulb from my parters train set.
Except...
It didn't work. We knew we were doing something wrong, but we had no idea what. There was no Internet to help us out, the libraries were closed, and we had to turn this in in the morning.
So, with an exacto knife I very carefully cut the potato open and planted a AA battery inside the spud. The light lit up after we put the potato back together. In fact, the darn thing would blind you.
We showed off our project and much to our surprise (not) we were not selected to go to state. However, we did get an A minus on the project. Feeling very proud of ourselves we went back to our responsibilities of girl chasing.
At my graduation the teacher pulled me aside and reminded me of the project. He wanted to know how we got the battery in the potato. The reason we got the A minus was because he couldn't find where we had cut the potato open and he admired our ingenuity.
Cold fusion reminds me of this story.
Bunch o’ maroons, if you ask me.
You are releasing enough energy to make funny things happen. E=MCC describes the conversion of mass to energy, so if you convert the mass to energy, some of the mass must disappear. There will not be an even number of particles when the fusion reaction is done, and there might also be heavier elements if there was enough heat to make them fuse.
Well, if you look at it in a classical perspective, yes it looks weird. If you look at it as a quantum system, where the observation amplitudes are described by eigenstates of the Hamiltonian given the canonical commutators between position and momentum, then it’s fairly straightforward.
I’m sorry that I can’t point to something in the large-scale world as an analogue, but once you’ve worked with the math long enough, it starts to become second nature. The point that I was making, though, is that it explains modern technology and businesses put big $$ down on its predictions, so we understand it ‘well-enough’.
“There will not be an even number of particles when the fusion reaction is done”.
Actually two Deuterium atoms have a rest mass of 4.027, while one He4, which the same number of protons, neutron’s, and electron’s has a rest mass of 4.003. The extra stability of He4 lowers it’s rest mass quite a bit. You can easily see through e=mcc that the 0.024 energy release by fusion is huge. You don’t need much fusion going on to produce a great deal of energy. If this thing works, we like the mythical Krell of “Forbidden Planet”, will only need to worry about misusing our powers.
Bflr
That's what happened during sex with my first wife....
Thanks, Wonder! I don’t have all of these reports, I skimmed Mosier and learned things I had not seen before.
To lurkers, in brief, yes there are x-rays, yes there is tritium.
Um, WW, do you get upset if people call you Munder Morthog? Just askin’.
If you can fuse exactly two atoms into one, call me. No, don’t call me, call the Nobel Committee. You’ll deserve it.
I vote yours as understatement of the century. As many of us experienced, the engineering community was greatly distracted from their work at the time of Pons and Fleishmann's announcement.
Repeatable results showing fusion would re-ignite that excitement and an entire industry would begin to take shape before our eyes and practically over night. The patent office would need to hire more people.
It got sort of mushed. Here’s the link again:
http://www.science.doe.gov/Sub/Newsroom/News_Releases/DOE-SC/2004/low_energy/Appendix_1.pdf
thanks, bfl
I do not think that the heavy water making facility in Telemark, Norway during early WWII used a fission reactor.
No but it needed its own power plant. It doesn’t make much sense to have a power plant solely to produce the fuel for a power plant.
That depends on the amount of energy consumed in the first plant compared to the amount produced by the second plant. The first plant used mechanical, electrical, or chemical means (I don't know which). If the second plant produces much more energy from nuclear fusion, then it would power the first plaant and produce a surplus.
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