Free Republic

LOGAN — A widespread belief among physicists nowadays is that modern science requires squadrons of scientists and wildly expensive equipment.     Craig Wallace and Philo T. Farnsworth are putting the lie to all that.     Wallace, a baby-faced tennis player fresh out of Spanish Fork High School, had almost the entire physics faculty of Utah State University hovering (and arguing) over an apparatus he had cobbled together from parts salvaged from junk yards and charity drops.     The apparatus is nothing less than the sine qua non of modern science: a nuclear fusion reactor, based on the plans of Utah's...

ROCHESTER HILLS, Mich., Nov. 19 (UPI) -- An ambitious teenager in Rochester Hills, Mich., is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion -- combining atoms to create energy. The Detroit Free Press reported that 17-year-old Thiago Olson set up a machine in his parents' garage and has been working exhaustively for more than two years. His machine creates nuclear fusion on a small scale.

The energy contained in even a small quantity of fusionable material is so vast that only a tiny amount would provide the power needs of an entire city. He often cited some calculations performed by Fritz Furth with engineers at Con-Edison, the New York City power company, indicating that all the power necessary to run a city the size of New York for an entire month could be produced by Fusor fuel at the cost of about a nickel; accounting for inflation, that amount is probably up to about a dollar by now... At home, Phil expected that individual dwellings...

DETROIT — On the surface, Thiago Olson is like any typical teenager. He's on the cross country and track teams at Stoney Creek High School in Rochester Hills, Mich. He's a good-looking, clean-cut 17-year-old with a 3.75 grade point average, and he has his eyes fixed on the next big step: college. But to his friends, Thiago is known as "the mad scientist." In the basement of his parents' Oakland Township, Mich., home, tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two...

No future for fusion power, says top scientist 19:00 09 March 2006 NewScientist.com news service David L Chandler Nuclear fusion will never be a practical source of electrical power, argues a prominent scientist in the journal Science. Even nuclear fusion’s staunchest advocates admit a power-producing fusion plant is still decades away at best, despite forty years of hard work and well over $20 billion spent on the research. But the new paper, personally backed by the journal’s editor, issues a strong challenge to the entire fusion programme, arguing that the whole massive endeavour is never likely to lead to anything...

On May 8, 2006, science journalist Eugenie Samuel Reich published a series of four articles in Nature which came as close as possible to accusing Purdue physicist Rusi Taleyarkhan of committing fraud without actually saying so. Taleyarkhan's research -- nuclear reactions in a novel mechanism that could have immense technological potential -- apparently seemed too good and too profound to Reich and Nature. Reich's series of four stories in Nature was replete with innuendo and groundless speculation, building a house of cards on which to base the thesis that her journalistic investigation would lead to "the end of bubble fusion."...

When you consider that his committee's sole function was to advise whether or not research funds should be spent to investigate an entirely new area of physics and electrochemistry, and that this statement is one of his principal reasons for deciding not to invest such research funds, his statement takes on an almost Kafkaesque quality. It is unwise to invest research funds in any new area, unless we already have a thorough foundation in the basics of that new area? How could anyone ever get any money for research out of professor Huizenga's committee? By proving that they already know...

Close window Published online: 10 May 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060508-8 Bubble-fusion group suffer setback Team admits a mix-up with one of their neutron detectors.Eugenie Samuel Reich Rusi Taleyarkhan with his table-top fusion equipment in a lab at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he conducted research before coming to Purdue.Credit: U.S. Department of Energy file photo/Lynn Freeny A group of researchers making high-profile claims about fusion energy has admitted to accidentally using equipment different from that reported in their most recent paper. An erratum providing details of the mistake by Rusi Taleyarkhan of Purdue University and colleagues has been published in Physical...

To efficiently operate a fuel cell, carbon monoxide has always been a major technical barrier. But now, chemical and biological engineers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have not only cleared that barrier—they also found a method to capture carbon monoxide's energy. To be useful in a power-generating fuel cell, hydrocarbons such as gasoline, natural gas, or ethanol must reform into a hydrogen-rich gas. A large, costly, and critical step to this process requires generating steam and forcing a reaction with carbon monoxide (CO). This process, called water-gas shift, produces hydrogen and carbon dioxide (CO2). Additional steps then must reduce the...

The nation's energy industry is struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina. Gas prices are soaring as a result of the catastrophic storm. America's reliance on overseas oil increases every year. And from his office in the North Bay city of Sebastopol, Mark Goldes envisions a day -- perhaps not so far off -- when none of this will be a problem. Goldes, 73, is chief executive of a small company called Magnetic Power Inc., which has spent years researching ways to, yes, generate power using magnets. Within a few months, he says, he might just have a breakthrough to report...

He was ballyhooed and then discredited and then largely forgotten. But cold fusion pioneer Dr. Martin Fleischmann still holds the secret to a cheap energy source for the world, says a California company that plans to produce prototypes of a cold fusion-powered home heater, with Fleischmann as "senior scientific adviser." The announcement came on the 17th anniversary of the day that Fleischmann, then a chemistry professor at the University of Utah, and his colleague B. Stanley Pons stunned the scientific world with news that they had discovered a room-temperature way to create nuclear fusion. The announcement immediately led to predictions...

Psychologists call it cognitive dissonance: the mental torment that comes from being confronted by two fundamentally opposed propositions. Deciding between them often provokes powerful emotions – just ask Dr Randell Mills, whose claims have a habit of triggering severe bouts of cognitive dissonance among otherwise perfectly rational people. And no wonder: this medical student turned physicist claims to have debunked the textbook account of how atoms are put together – and in the process discovered a new source of clean, cheap energy. By itself, that would provoke little more than eye-rolling boredom from scientists all too familiar with the grand...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Purdue University is investigating complaints about a scientist who claimed to have achieved "cold fusion" using sound waves to make bubbles in a test tube, the university said on Wednesday. Nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan's work has been controversial since he published a study in 2002 claiming to have achieved the Holy Grail of energy production -- nuclear fusion at room temperature. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the sun. If scientists can duplicate the results and harness the technology, tabletop fusion has the potential to provide an almost limitless source of cheap energy. Many labs are...

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design. The device, which uses two opposing crystals to generate a powerful electric field, could potentially lead to a portable, battery-operated neutron generator for a variety of applications, from non-destructive testing to detecting explosives and scanning luggage at airports. The new results are described in the Feb. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters. "Our study shows that 'crystal fusion' is a...

Can the popping of tiny bubbles trigger nuclear fusion, a potential source of almost unlimited energy? This controversial idea is back on the table, because its main proponent has new results that, he claims, will silence critics. But others say that the latest experiment simply comes with its own set of problems. The idea is simple enough. Blast a liquid with waves of ultrasound and tiny bubbles of gas are created, which release a burst of heat and light when they implode. The core of the bubble reaches 15,000° C, hot enough to wrench molecules apart. Physicists have even suggested...

Zhiyu Hu believes it is possible to match nature's highly efficient method to convert chemicals into thermal energy at room temperature, and he has data and a published paper to support his theory. In a paper scheduled to appear in the May 18 print issue of the American Chemical Society's Energy & Fuels, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Hu describes a novel method to achieve spontaneous ignition and sustained combustion at room temperature. He achieves this "nano-catalytic reaction" with nothing but nanometer-sized particles of platinum stuck to fibers of glass wool in a small jar with methanol and air – with...

Thursday, 25 July, 2002, 11:15 GMT 12:15 UK Fusion experiment disappoints The idea that we could build nuclear fusion reactors that relied on the extraordinary pressures and temperatures experienced inside tiny, collapsing bubbles in a liquid has suffered a grievous blow. New calculations all but rule out the controversial suggestion, made earlier this year by US and Russian researchers. We've shown that chemistry occurs within a collapsing bubble, and that it limits the energy available during cavitation Kenneth Suslick They fired sound waves through acetone, causing minute bubbles in the liquid to form and then collapse at temperatures of millions...

When acetone – better known as nail polish remover – is ultrasonically resonated and irradiated by neutrons, nuclear fusion will occur. That is the claim of the two young physicists Dr. Yiban Xu and Adam Butt from the American Purdue University. "Cavitation is the phenomenon in which liquid is fractured and a void is formed to form cavities composed of gas and/or vapour", explains Xu. If the acetone is put into resonance using a piezo-crystal, gas bubbles are formed which subsequently store potential energy in the acoustic field. To ensure that the bubbles get larger than a critical value, the...

Researchers at Purdue University have new evidence supporting earlier findings by other scientists who designed an inexpensive "tabletop" device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions. The technology, in theory, could lead to a new source of clean energy and a host of portable detectors and other applications. The new findings were detailed in a peer-reviewed paper appearing in the May issue of the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design. The paper was written by Yiban Xu, a post-doctoral research associate in the School of Nuclear Engineering, and Adam Butt, a graduate research assistant in both nuclear engineering and...

PASADENA, CALIF. - For the last few years, mentioning cold fusion around scientists (myself included) has been a little like mentioning Bigfoot or UFO sightings. After the 1989 announcement of fusion in a bottle, so to speak, and the subsequent retraction, the whole idea of cold fusion seemed a bit beyond the pale. But that's all about to change. A very reputable, very careful group of scientists at the University of Los Angeles (Brian Naranjo, Jim Gimzewski, Seth Putterman) has initiated a fusion reaction using a laboratory device that's not much bigger than a breadbox, and works at roughly room...