Physicist Claims First Real Demonstration of Cold Fusion

www.physorg.com ^ | 05/27/2008 | Staff

[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

[djf]

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.

[El Gato]

I wonder what the general reaction would have been in 1908 if someone made the claim that a small bomb could not only destroy an entire city, but also leave it uninhabitable for decades or centuries?

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. :)

[CougarGA7]

My senior year in high school we were required to put together a science project and the top 3 projects would go to the state science fair.

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.

[starlifter]

Bunch o’ maroons, if you ask me.

[sig226]

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.

[Netheron]

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’.

[devere]

“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.

[Justa]

Bflr

[isthisnickcool]

Cold fusion?

That's what happened during sex with my first wife....

[DBrow]

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’.

[sig226]

If you can fuse exactly two atoms into one, call me. No, don’t call me, call the Nobel Committee. You’ll deserve it.

[William Tell]

dpwiener said: "... if it can be shown that the excess heat must be generated by nuclear rather than chemical reactions, then victory is at hand. An enormous number of scientists and engineers will turn their attention back to cold fusion, and its secret will be teased out in short order."

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.

[devere]

It has already been done: "Later work by Miles and Bush using sealed metal vessels, and by McKubre70 and Gozzi71, confirmed that 4He is presented to the gas phase above the electrolyte of a cathode demonstrating the Fleischmann and Pons effect. Gozzi presented some very striking results,71 in which bursts of excess energy were time-correlated with bursts of 4He observed in the gas stream.i When compared one at a time, the number of helium atoms detected per burst was on the order of what might be expected from 23.8 MeV per D+D reaction, but with a variation between 0.25 and 1.0 of the this amount. If the energy production in these experiments is in fact due to a reaction mechanism consistent with D+D → 4He + 23.8 MeV, then it seems that some of the helium may enter the gas stream and some remain within the metal. Several important conclusions can be drawn from the studies cited above: • The rate of helium production (atoms/s) varies linearly with excess power for the three studies taken separately and together (see Figure 6). • The amount of helium observed in the gas stream is generally within a factor of about 2 less than would be expected for a reaction mechanism consistent with D+D → 4He. • Helium is partially retained, and dissolved helium is released only slowly to the gas phase for analysis. Recent work at ENEA Frascati also supports these conclusions.72,73 Excess heat and helium observations consistent with a D+D → 4He + 23.8 MeV (heat) reaction mechanism, in a metal deuteride near room temperature, stands in stark contrast to the d(d,γ)4He reaction known from nuclear physics." http://www.science.doe.gov/Sub/Newsroom/News_Releases/DOE-SC/2004/low_energy/Appendix_1.pdf NEW PHYSICAL EFFECTS IN METAL DEUTERIDES Peter L. Hagelstein,1 Michael C. H. McKubre,2 David J. Nagel,3 Talbot A. Chubb,4 and Randall J. Hekman5 1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 2SRI International, Menlo Park, CA 3The George Washington University, Washington DC 4Research Systems Inc., Arlington, VA 5Hekman Industries, LLC, Grand Rapids, MI The experimental evidence for anomalies in metal deuterides, including excess heat and nuclear emissions, suggests the existence of new physical effects.

[devere]

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

[neverdem]

thanks, bfl

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

If this were in fact fusion we would have to keep fission reactors going just to produce heavy water.

I do not think that the heavy water making facility in Telemark, Norway during early WWII used a fission reactor.

[valkyry1]

This topic and the posts in this thread have so many places to talk about that it is practically impossible to decide ;)

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks neverdem. Probably of some interest.

[Straight Vermonter]

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.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

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.