Posted on 11/18/2014 6:37:55 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Bangalore: Some top nuclear scientists are urging India's new government to revive research on "cold fusion", saying it has the potential to provide answers to the country's energy problem.
In the 1990s, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai had done some work on cold fusion -- now called Low Energy Nuclear Reactions or LENR -- but abandoned the research 18 years ago.
"We are making a frantic effort to revive cold fusion/LENR research in India," Mahadevan Srinivasan, who along with the late P.K.Iyengar led cold fusion research at BARC, told IANS. "Former Atomic Energy Commission chairman Srikumar Banerjee is solidly backing me (in this effort)."
The journal "Current Science" published by Bangalore-based Indian Academy of Sciences has proposed to bring out a special section on cold fusion in one of the upcoming issues with contributions from scientists working in this field.
"I am trying to get Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi (to) appoint a task force to investigate cold fusion and advise him on a course of action," Srinivasan said, adding he had had a one-on-one meeting with Energy Minister Piyush Goel last week on this topic.
Thermonuclear fusion process -- like the one that powers the Sun -- takes place under extreme temperature in which hydrogen (or its heavier cousins deuterium and tritium) nuclei fuse to release energy.
On March 23, 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the University of Utah in the US startled the world with their claim of having observed fusion between deuterium nuclei in a palladium lattice at room temperature.
But mainstream Scientists worldwide rejected these claims of room temperature fusion and dismissed the experimental findings as "erroneous".
The BARC team which replicated the work in early 1990s showed that the reaction studied by the Utah physicists indeed produced tritium as well as helium indicating that cold fusion was real.
But further work on cold fusion in BARC was shut down "under global peer pressure", Srinivasan said.
According to Srinivasan, research on cold fusion needs to be revived now since "very interesting things are happening in this field" and people like Bill Gates -- who Nov 12 visited the Italian laboratory to observe LENR experiments being carried out there -- were "seriously considering funding cold fusion/LENR".
Srinivasan said that recent technological breakthroughs had resulted in the development of suitcase-sized LENR reactors that can be mass produced.
The fuel for these novel "reactors" -- dubbed Energy Catalyzer or "Ecat" by its Italian inventor Andrea Rossi -- is inexpensive nickel in the form of specially prepared "nano" powder exposed to ordinary hydrogen gas.
Rossi gave a demonstration of a 10-KW unit at the University of Bologna in January 2011 in the presence of about 50 invitees. He followed it up with a demonstration of a 1-MW water boiler, Srinivasan said.
"Since Rossi has not published his work in the form of scientific papers in journals, the mainstream scientific community is not aware of this development."
Srinivasan said a research centre and possible manufacturing base for these reactors have been set up in Baoding in eastern China and that at least two companies have announced likely market release of multi-KW LENR reactors during 2015.
"One such LENR generator located in each village and powering a local village-level micro-grid can work wonders," says Srinivasan, adding one can even envision tractors being powered by LENR source in future.
"It is hoped that the new government will take cognition of this breakthrough development and take necessary steps to foster this new technology in India," he said.
It’s a shame that posting news about LENR/Cold Fusion here at FR is a complete waste of time.
potential to provide answers to the country’s energy problem.
Sure, so does perpetual motion. Might as well go with Bird Blenders (wind mills), at least that provides a fraction of the power used to manufacture them over the life of the units.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true — I just think it will take some time for people to recognize the potential in the LENR field.
It might not have been that way, but for the fact that the guy who used to post most of the LENR threads, took all of the naysaying personally. He sort of soured the discussions about this technology here.
He eventually became so wound up, that he began lashing out at nearly anyone who posted on his threads. He's no longer here, so I won't mention his name.
Mark my words. When this technology is proven to be valid beyond a shadow of doubt, every one of those detractors is going to quietly slink away with nary an apology to those they gave so much grief to, for so long.
At the very best there is great difficulty trying to reproduce the results reliably. It smacks of amateur hour. Maybe some scientist in some lab will be able to puzzle out the secret, and then cold fusion really will be ready for prime time. But this just does not look like 99.9999 of modern technical success stories, which were pursued in labs.
That is the way of the world.
If it doesn’t support either the oil industry, or the Med Mafia, there’s little interest to be found here.
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Seems to me the biggest problem with cold fusion is replicating the experiments. What say you.
With all the interest in alternative energies cold fusion can never get the big investors the way crap projects like Solyndra do. I think word is out on Wall Street that cold fusion is cute but flaky when it comes to repeating the process
Back shortly after Pons and Fleishman published their experiment, a physicist in Palo Alto California decided to pack their recipe in an air tight metal cylinder.
The result exploded violently, killing the physicist, and completely destroying his laboratory. There was no follow-up ever reported on it.
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Sounds like a meth lab
How about Brightsource?
Their multi-billion dollar experiment in the desert is quite effective at cooking birds as they fly by, but is using almost as much energy as it produces just to keep it running.
A total failure, but the media still call it “green energy.”
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The timbers of the building flew much like a meth explosion, but it was a true physics lab, funded by HP, and Stanford.
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I would be leery of playing around with powdered nickel.
I would be leery of playing with anything that had even a hint of a nuke reaction involved.
I think they are not getting nuclear energy, but something related to the powdered metal, a physico-chemical phenomenon. Nobody complained about scattered radiation in that accident.
That's a broken record that's been playing since 1989. I'm not so sure the results can't be replicated today.
Note in the article that other researchers replicated Pons and Fleishman's results in 1990. Nothing ever came of it, and the work ended, because it was drowned out by an avalanche of skepticism in the 'scientific' community.
That is just so typical of history on this planet.
There was no reported follow-up at all after the initial fire department comments the day of the explosion.
There had to be a nuclear component with the vessel being initially a vacuum, then producing sufficient expansion to knock down that wing of the building. It was quite substantial.
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