Fusion

russ_watters

Art, that article is seven years old.

Morbius

Russ,

Yes - basically the "reasoning" of P&F was - "something's happening, and we
chemists can't explain it - so it must be a nuclear process - even though
neither of us is a nuclear physicist."

Their whole contention was that it had to be a nuclear process because
they didn't understand what was happening chemically. I will bet, that when
and if the final chapter is ever written on the "cold fusion" debacle - that
it will turn out to be some chemical process that P&F didn't think of and
falsely attributed to a nuclear process.

As for the calculations, if P&F had done the calculations and calculated
how much radiation would be coming from the device if it really was
fusion taking place in the hydrolysis cell - then they should have have
keeled over from an overdose of radiation.

That whole affair was one of the most disgusting debacles. The science
was not peer-reviewed before publication. All the normal "checks and
balances" that the scientific community has to review information
before it's put "out there" - to be sure that the public is receiving high
quality information was bypassed. Scientists were going to a gullible
media quickly - so that they could be the first to grab the media
attention. It was really disgusting seeing scientists becoming "media
hounds".

If you want to grab the headlines - go into politics or entertainment -
not science.

Dr. Gregory Greenman
Physicist

russ_watters

Ironic - they may have missed out on a Nobel Prize opportunity.

Art

Russ, 7 years isn't so long seeing as how many of the references provided on this forum are hundreds of years old Seriously though I thought it was a very good broad spectrum analysis of what happened after P & F as it seems a lot of people thought that was the end of cold fusion research. There are of course many more recent articles detailing specific research such as the current interest in utilising crystals to produce cold fusion. For eg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...8/ixworld.html
but I haven't seen a more recent all encompassing 'state of the nation' report such as the one I referenced.

russ_watters

There are none in reputable science journals with the exception of the recent review by the DOE, which was inconclusive at best. No, there really isn't anything happening in cold fusion research. From the article: That doesn't sound like cold fusion to me.

Morbius

Art,

When one does "good science" - then one's work should stand the
test of time - and it is appropriate to quote the original research
hundreds of years later.

However, that is not the case with the scientific fraud that is / was the
"cold fusion" debacle. That was NOT good science - the scientific
tradition of peer-review and publication in respected scientific journals
was bypassed in favor a "media event" by a couple scientists seeking
media attention.

As far as professional scientists - that was the end of "cold fusion".

The "crackpots" still continued unabated.

If one achieves fusion by accelerating deuterium ions electrically -
which is how fusion was first obtained in cyclotrons - that is NOT
"cold fusion". The high speed of the accelerated ions is, of course; what
one expects to find in a plasma at high temperatures. So electrically
accelerated ion producing fusion is another example of "hot" fusion,
not "cold" fusion.

The problem with accelerating the ions electrically, is that you don't
get macroscopic amounts of energy that way. Even if you have ion
currents of millions of amperes - it's not a useful amount of energy.

That's why physicists went to confining a hot plasma - because there
the number of high speed ions is orders of magnitude greater than what
one can achieve electrically.

So the "scientists" in the article you quoted are stuck back in the 1950s -
they are at the point that physicists were a half-century ago. However,
good physicists have progressed since the days of cyclotron induced
fusion.

This "crystal fusion" is a bunch of nonsense. There's no way that the
geometric arrangement of atoms that is a crystal affects the physics
on a length scale that is orders of magnitude shorter.

It's akin to claiming better mileage due to better combustion in your
car due to some alignment of the planets of the solar system. The atoms
in your cars combusion chambers don't care how the planets are aligned.

That's essentially what "crystal fusion" is claiming. It's time to
recognize this for what is is - a scientific FRAUD!!

Dr. Gregory Greenman
Physicist

Art

Morbius,
Seems a little harsh to write off highly qualified career scientists as crackpots because they are investigating areas of physics in conflict with current beliefs. If this attitude was all pervailing we would not have a lot of the hard science we have today. It is only by people sticking their necks out and questioning long held beliefs that science has advanced. Here's extracts from an article I dug up which includes some references to ongoing research. One never knows you might even change your mind.

"Cold fusion is technically the name for any nuclear fusion reaction that may occur well below the temperature required for thermonuclear reactions (millions of degrees Celsius). There are a number of established processes by which this can occur although currently none of these can produce breakeven energy.

Established cold fusion methods do not yield more energy than is put into them. If cold fusion in electrolytic cells were to be established, it might turn out to be a cheap and simple means of power generation. The phenomenon is still far from established, and as of 2004 such a desirable end result remains a remote possibility rather than an expectation.

The term "cold fusion" was coined by Dr Paul Palmer of Brigham Young University in 1986 in an investigation of "geo-fusion", or the possible existence of fusion in a planetary core. The term was then applied to the Fleischmann-Pons experiment in 1989.

Continuing efforts
There are still a number of people researching the possibilities of generating power with cold fusion. Scientists in several countries continue the research, and meet at the International Conference on Cold Fusion (see Proceedings at www.lenr-canr.org (http://www.lenr-canr.org/index.html)).

The generation of excess heat has been reported by

Michael McKubre, director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International,
Richard A. Oriani (University of Minnesota, in December 1990),
Robert A. Huggins (at Stanford University in March 1990),
Y. Arata (Osaka University, Japan),
S. Szpak, Mosier-Boss (SPAWAR Naval Research Laboratory in 2004),
among others. In the best experimental set-up, excess heat was reported in 50% of the experiment reproductions. Various fusion ashes and transmutations were reported by some scientists.

Dr. Michael McKubre thinks a working cold fusion reactor is possible. Dr. Edmund Storms, a former scientist with The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, maintains an international database of research into cold fusion."

Here's a useful link to an E book on cold fusion http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf