Cold Fusion or Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions, U.S. Navy Researchers Reopen Case
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
It was also interesting the discover that the original experiment was dismissed because other experimenters failed to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons result ... despite not actually trying to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons experimental setup accurately. For example, not meeting the same level of hydrogen loading in the metal matrix.
It could all absolutely be BS, but I was surprised that it wasn’t actually proven to be BS; it was just not proven to not be BS, and was then made “embarrassing”.
A way to think about this is just to eliminate fusion from their claims. Ignore that, they didn’t have any evidence for it. The bottom line was, could they reliably generate useful heat. The answer to that was also no. So really, what are you left with?
Having said that room temperature fusion is a real thing. You can build a fusor in a garage with commonly available parts. It may well be possible to generate very low levels of fusion reactions in various ways, but generating useful energy that way may never be possible. Best of luck for these people for trying, you never know and maybe some useful insights will come from it.
If you don't understand it, it's not surprising that you can't make it useful. That doesn't say much about what you'll be capable of, after you do understand it.
While it's true that the onus was on F&P to prove their results, it's also true that if someone else is claiming to replicate the experiment, the onus is on them to do it correctly.
If you follow the known to be inaccurate description people will complain you’re not doing what the actually did. If you do what they actually did (or seem to have done as best we can tell), people will complain you didn’t follow their published description. Meanwhile F&P still couldn’t get reliable results themselves.
Sometimes. Often, what you’re left with is unusable experimental results because you don’t have a clue. The proper way to resolve that is what they did with faster-than-light neutrinos: ask for collaboration with other labs and try to replicate the result. This whole thing is not science, it’s cargo-culting the way science is described in pop culture.
[0]: https://fusor.net/
It looks like positive-return-on-energy fusion will almost certainly be achievable in 5-10 years, though it won't be commercializable for a lot longer than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor#Thermalization_of_the_io...
I do like how incredibly simple and easy fusors are compared to the other types of fusion reactor, but sadly they are still very very hot where it counts.
That's an interesting interpretation. My interpretation at the time was that they are chemists and ruled out chemical reactions as the heat source. They concluded it must be physics. Physicists then said "It can't be nuclear, it must be chemical" - forgetting who was doing the experiment. They seemed really arrogant to me.
And here we are 30 years later with it unsettled.
Compare this with high temperature superconductivity. If you get a time machine and go to 1985 and try to promote high temperature superconductivity, nobody will take you seriously.
But a team discover one material and published a clear recipe to built it. Other team tried some variations, and discovered an easier recipe to build them and published it. So soon everybody and their dog was making new variants, and new variants, and new variants...
A few years ago, they gave one in the physics' lab for undergraduate students, and we made a few measurements for a month carefully because they don't tolerate humidity. Until someone put it in a glass with water and ice to measure the properties at 0°C.
Also, now you can also see the recipe in a video in YouTube by "Applied Science": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU , the guy has some advanced lab, but nothing too advanced.
The problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment.
That certainly seems to be the case today, but it was not the case when physicists rejected the claim outright. In other words, the rejection came before the reproducibility problems.
fake quote> Nah.
The nice thing about physics is that it doesn't matter if the community reject the idea. If you have a nice experiment that is reproducible and has clear and easy instructions, sooner or later the community will accept it, and you may get a Nobel price. If the experiment is weird and you are unlucky, it can take a few decades.
Here is another weird experiment, with another weird result, but it's reproducible and has clear and easy to follow instructions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment
Had they published something along the lines of “we’ve seen this cool thing; we think it works that way; could anyone replicate this?”, there wouldn’t have been any controversy. But they did not offer any insight, their results were unreliable, and their interpretation was doubtful. It’s not because you don’t understand something that fairies must be involved somehow.
As far as I know, there is no theoretical reason to discard cold fusion. There are a few "cold fusion" method that work, like using muons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion but it's so expensive to create muons and they are short lived, so you expend more energy than the useful energy you can collect from the device.
So (in 1985) both phenomena were in the same class, it was not theoretically impossible, but no one had shown a good experiment were they happened.
> Had they published something along the lines of “we’ve seen this cool thing; we think it works that way; could anyone replicate this?”, there wouldn’t have been any controversy. But they did not offer any insight, their results were unreliable, and their interpretation was doubtful. It’s not because you don’t understand something that fairies must be involved somehow.
Perhaps we agree, the problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment. (And too many scammers publishing bad experiments and trying to get investors.)
The fuzziness about how you’d have fusion reactions by just putting protons in a metal is a bit dodgy. Everything else about it was a huge red flag. Yes, HTS are a bit different than older superconductors, and yes, we don’t know everything about them. But again, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine that there could be some mechanisms that could move the critical temperature by a factor of 5 to 10. Fundamentally, it’s still an exotic form of collective behaviour. Cold fusion amounts to getting ~0.1 MeV (the order of magnitude to tunnel through electrostatic interaction to reach a nucleus) out of ~0.05 eV (the energy of a proton at room temperature). That’s about as plausible as saying that you’d reach Earth’s escape velocity by running down a mountain. Of course, you’d be more credible with a rocket strapped on your back. Cold fusion is missing that rocket.
Physicists have to deal with this kind of crackpottery a LOT. They don't owe you their time unless you have some solid evidence and full transparency. Don't want full transparency? Be prepared to be called a fraud. That's how it goes.
The claim was of specific results which were inconsistent with the people performing the experiment having survived it. The experimenters being alive to give press appearances was sufficient reason to reject that claim out of hand.
That something else very interesting, but unknown, might have been happening wasn't rejected until after robust reproduction attempts failed to produce any evidence of that.
See it?
To put it another way, why are you calling this an unknown fusion reaction? What's the basis for the claim that it was fusion of any kind?
F&P thought that the evidence they had found demonstrated fusion. That it was known evidence of fusion. They were simply wrong. Saying 'well it might be some unknown form of fusion' is post-hoc rationalisation (for which you have no evidence or theory). That's not what they were saying at the time.
It's so infuriating that 30 years later we're still fighting these fundamental misconceptions about what was going on.
Discovery is not a science, but it is the part of science.
I did it again. Shame on me.
No, what lots of people (many of them far more prominent chemists than P&F said, not just physicists) is that, if honest, it had to be measurement error, not only based on abstract analysis of the described setup and results, but also based on robust attempts to replicate the claimed results.
They (Fleischmann & Pons) did not prove anything in the first place, so after that the “not the true experiment” thing is a fallacy. There will always be too much of something or not enough of anything. You can never replicate exactly an experiment, but this does not prevent all of science from progressing and reproducing results. Physics does not care about who operates the experiment. So if something works only when specific people try it, it does not give any confidence in the results. In other words, it does set the bullshit alarm ringing.
There is no theoretical foundation for cold fusion, and no known mechanism for it to work. So even if it does exist, their stance of “just trust us, and let us move the goalposts about replicability” is just voodoo and, yes, bullshit.
Why is this still considered BS if independent research teams have reproduced this ?
Yes there is interesting physics here and there's a lot we don't know about the behaviour of hydrogen and deuterium in dense metallic crystal lattices. Who knows, that behaviour might even have something to do with fusion.
That's separate from what F&P were claiming 30 years ago. They claimed to have produced 'tremendous heat' and to have detected evidence of fusion (gamma rays and fusion products). They couldn't replicate the heat measurements, there were experimental errors that mean we can't know if they had generated excess heat at all, and they were simply mistaken that the evidence they had gathered indicated fusion.
Two things can both be true at the same time. These new experiments might indicate heat generation and might indicate fusion, and the F&P experiments demonstrated none of those things. Those are not contradictory statements.
Heck, F&P might even have stimulated fusion in their experiments. It's impossible to prove a negative. The point is they didn't demonstrate that at all.
The experimenters researching this clearly don't have a great way to control for other factors in an experimental setting either.
As an example, there are multiple reports of transmutations being observed following a hydride doping experiment... however these are all done by gas spectrometer. It's unclear from the experiments whether there happened to be random impurities in the hydride prior to doping.
Similarly heat/neutron measurements are really difficult to get right and be convincing.
> As an example, calculating the exact screening effect of a metal lattice from theory has not been performed to anyones satisfaction, particularly if you account for hydrogen moving within the lattice, or the lattice undergoing some deformation.
Screening effect from what? There is nothing surprising in the way hydrogen behaves in a metal. We can simulate that with great accuracy, in fact we do it all the time as hydrogen embrittlement is an important issue in metallurgy.
This type of cold fusion would require two nuclei overcoming humongous energy barriers to get close enough to each other. No form of motion within a crystal lattice or no amount of deformation is going to provide that. The energies involved are about 6 orders of magnitude short.
Heat is trivial to measure, we’ve been doing that since the 19th century. Neutrons are not particularly difficult either, we’ve been doing that since the 1940s.
The energy you get from the reaction has nothing to do with the mass of the particles; not all mass is “converted” to energy. The mass energy of a proton is 931 MeV. The energy you get from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction is ~14 MeV.
Besides, this is irrelevant, as there is a ~1 MeV energy barrier preventing the reaction, which you still have to go through.
If you’re implying that the energy from one reaction could be used to make another reaction happen, then yes. But when your atoms emit 14 MeV each, you don’t have a crystal, you have a plasma. And this is not cold fusion, it is just regular fusion, same as in a star or in a tokamak.
This would be very easy to see if it were happening: the brutal expansion of the plasma would create huge stresses and its high temperature would melt the material locally. This is just not happening.
You are also moving the goalposts again: there is no such thing as protons getting accelerated by a MeV just by interacting with defects; the mass of a proton is irrelevant; and you don’t have spontaneous plasma in a crystal. Nothing you’ve written in this thread is supported by reality.
Local melting reported from the beginning for 20+ years.
Quotes:
Occasionally, energy density is sufficient to cause local melting.[87] Melting is possible because many impurities lower the melting point well below that of pure palladium (1554.9°C).[105, 106]
In the course of these experiments, the Japanese researchers verified the existence of other phenomena frequently reported from cold fusion experiments, such as occasional releases of energy in the form of sharp bursts.
Formation of small craters on the surface of Pd cathode during electrolysis in electrolytes based on heavy water is sometimes interpreted as a consequence of low-temperature nuclear reactions. In this note we discuss the validity of these statements.
And so on.
Reference 87 does not support melting in any way (you don't get faceted voids from local melting, and yes, local melting is a thing, just not spontaneous at room temperature with unaccelerated protons). References 105 and 106 have nothing to do with melting.
It is not difficult to find references (I mean, real ones, not dodgy conference proceedings) showing that defects can lower the melting point of a metal under certain conditions. But lowering the melting point does not make melting happen on its own at room temperature, either. And even if you can demonstrate that there is some melting, rather than an electrochemical reaction, it does not mean that any fusion reaction happened. It's about as credible as blaming aliens for a pattern you see in the noise.
> Formation of small craters on the surface of Pd cathode during electrolysis in electrolytes based on heavy water is sometimes interpreted as a consequence of low-temperature nuclear reactions
This is bunk. The Earth is sometimes referred to as a disk; it does not make the flat earth argument sound, particularly if the people doing the referring are the same people building a case out of it.
Again, none of this makes any sense, you're just wasting your time.
So complexity is actually the norm. The irreducible complexity of noise.
The giveaway that the EM drive is junk is that the effect has gotten smaller everytime the apparatus has removed a source of error.
Nothing is ever conclusive, but it points to something which should violate the known laws of physics really just being a pile of systematic error.
I’ve been seeing this claim in another field: about hydroxychloquinine. Every time a study comes out which doesn’t show a benefit, people rush in saying “that’s because they forgot X, didn’t dose the right amount of Y, etc”
I’m actually not sure what to make of this phenomenon in general. I will say though that when you’re trying to test a hypothesis, completely replicating another experiment isn’t necessary. You should test it under a variety of conditions. That makes it easier to avoid the same hidden mistakes that the original experiment might have included.
Ed; I should clarify: you start with whatever big nasty test scenario you need to make sure you can reproduce the effect at all, and only then can you start changing the conditions and be confident you're still measuring the same thing.
And for being relatively simple classical physics it was very controversial, with even some physics professors denying it was possible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(land_yacht)#:~:te....
https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/museum/ddwfttw.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_%28land_yacht%29
The search term to use is "DDWFTTW"
It's a bit confusing, but some important points are:
* It only works if you're on land, you can't have a flying device that does this.
* Boats can sail faster than the wind speed, but have do so at an angle to the wind. (Just to convince yourself that this isn't completely strange).
* The wheels rotation on the ground is what drives the propeller, not the other way around.
What I find interesting is some phenomena that was clearly present in some of these demonstrations - even if it wasn't LENR. The anomalous results are worth investigating because there may be unknown physics lurking there, but anything related to CF is scientifically taboo.
> Like a busy government which only passes expensive laws prohibiting some new and interesting thing when people have actually found a way of doing it, the universe relied a great deal on things not being tried at all. When something is tried, Ponder found, it often does turn out to be impossible very quickly, but it takes a little while for this to really be the case* – in effect, for the overworked laws of causality to hurry to the scene and pretend it has been impossible all along.
* In the case of cold fusion, this was longer than usual.
As to whether it works, who knows? It may have been conclusively disproven five years ago for all I know. Or maybe it works. But if they're generating neutrons through X-ray bremsstrahlung, that's horribly inefficient and unlikely to ever come close to net power.
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
So it's more accurate to say that megavoltage X-ray beams contain neutrons by default. I might need to know this on the ABR... :p
The first and best measurement to contemplate is the presence of helium. Of course, you have to worry about how much is in the atmosphere, and then how much might somehow be trapped in the bulk material of the apparatus itself. Still, a sudden surge of helium well beyond that of what might be found in the atmosphere would be telling.
We all remember calorimetry from high school and just how difficult it was to do proper measurements. And who knows what odd chemical reactions might release or subtract heat when you sit around cooking metal for a long period of time? No, calorimetry is error-prone and has too many miserable confounding factors.
Still, the only way to know you have fusion is to say "I have less of this lighter element and more of this heavier element." Everything is is just hoping that the assumptions from stellar fusion carry over. I'll believe it when I see it, but I also won't believe it until the accompanying papers talk about helium, and lots of it (or lithium ...).
The science behind fusion and what byproducts would come from it are also explained by the standard model.
The tragedy of this story is that the word fusion ever got attached to this phenomenon. To this day we have no evidence whatsoever that any form of fusion is associated with these experiments. What we do know is that F&P thought they had found evidence known to indicate fusion, but they were wrong and had misinterpreted it.
If you have some hydrogen atoms, and then you do something to them, and suddenly you have some helium atoms, that's fusion.
"If you have some hydrogen atoms, and then you do something to them, and suddenly you have some helium atoms, that's fusion."
And that's just wrong. There's a famous case from early on in the history of nuclear physics, where someone passed current through hydrogen gas and then found helium, and thought it was fusion. But what it was was helium diffusing out of the glass of the apparatus.
This should be the default assumption, because supposed cold fusion making 4He is a triple miracle: first that DD fusion occurs at all, then that it makes 4He, and then that it doesn't go through the normal channels (actually a quadruple miracle, since also that the 4He fusion doesn't dump its energy in very energetic gamma photons.)
Also, it's palladium. Getting hydrogen to fuse with palladium is a net loss of energy, which would be amusing in a sad way. "Guys, we got fusion to work, but it actually takes energy!"
I am only saying that we retire to the most basic definition of fusion: a bunch of atoms of lighter elements become, through some process, fewer atoms that have some heavier elements in the mix. I am in no way suggesting that binding energy doesn't exist, etc.
(I love Mahaffey's books so much.)
For some reason, their negative result makes some people believe other different kinds of "cold fusion" are more likely. This is not how conditional probability works.
As a demonstration of reproducibility, samples of palladium-nickel-zirconium oxide powder, taken from a single batch of production, were employed in independent parallel test runs at laboratories at Kobe University and Tohoku University. Both laboratories observed sustained excess heat over a period of more than 10 days. The data were qualitatively and quantitatively similar between the two laboratories.
What the whole sorry cold fusion experience shows is that if you have enough people trying to do something, some will get positive results, regardless of whether the phenomenon is actually real. A real tip off is how variable and mutually inconsistent the ephemeral positive results are. This is a sign they are experimental artifacts, not anything significant.
Including, after spending tons of money trying, by P&F themselves.
That’s clever and snarky and not at all helpful.
And if I’m to believe the comments about table top fusors below, it’s not even true.
Maybe the problem was their definition of “tremendous?” The cooling
water in which the fusion cell was suspended wasn’t boiling or even
misting up their glasses.'
That is a tremendous increase in temperature... when the expected amount is zero. But not exactly a "kill everybody in the room" amount of heat, right?
For most of the time, the power input to the cell was equal to the
calculated power leaving the cell within measurement accuracy, and the
cell temperature was stable at around 30 °C. But then, at some point
(in some of the experiments), the temperature rose suddenly to about
50 °C without changes in the input power.
Please don't misunderstand. I'm not arguing that they achieved cold fusion. Anybody with a shred of skepticism should assume they didn't, until proven otherwise via reproducible experiments.
As well call start calling a campfire "forest fusion" and offer to sell me the patent.
- Ultraviolet catastrophe
- Solar neutrino rate
- Precession of Mercury
etc
Not true!
Well, "true" according to the popular current day understanding of what fusion is... let me elaborate, elucidate, and explain...
Fusion is a fundamental process in nature, which is relative to scale.
As is fission.
Which is also relative to scale.
There are two great patterns expressed by the Universe at different scales, and these can basically be thought of in such simple terms as "cut" and "join".
You know, what we have scissors and duct tape for...
You go one way, you cut larger things into many smaller things; you go the other way, and you join many smaller things into larger things...
Cutting is Fission, joining is Fusion.
Now both of these patterns exist at all scales -- at all energy levels.
They exist in ALL chemical reactions.
In fact, I'll make a wager that future scientists will be able to prove that endothermic (absorbs heat) and exothermic (generates heat) chemical reactions -- are either Fission or Fusion.
If I were to make a bet, I'd say that Fusion is the exothermic one, simply because Fusion reactions as are known popularly today (again, not relative to scale) -- are the hotter reaction of the two.
So then the question is, how can an endothermic (absorbs heat) chemical reaction be fission -- if fission generates heat?
Well, I don't know the answer to that (yet!).
Perhaps all exothermic (heat generating) chemical reactions consist of fusion OR fission components, OR both...
Perhaps there are two other complimentary opposites to fusion and fission that remove energy...
But, here's a good time to talk about Implosion.
Most people who have watched Hollywood movies -- know what explosions are...
But, not too many people outside of the Physics community, or people who understand Brown's Gas or the works of Viktor Schauberger -- really understand implosions...
See, in Physics, there is always a two-way exchange of energy, that is, if something is expanding, then something else is contracting -- even though we might not see what that thing is -- even though we might need special equipment to detect it...
In an explosion, we see fire and hot gases expanding outward to fill space...
But, there must be something else -- equal-and-oppositely that's contracting inward, even though Physics has yet to observe what it is...
We can think about Implosions (although in a different context) -- as Black Holes. We can also think about them as vortices... Basically they remove something from something else, they act to "compress" matter, objects, information, etc.
So, getting back to fusion and fission, join and cut, implosion and explosion, these phenomena exist on all scales, at all temperature ranges.
A future scientist will show that all of these things are parts of the same dualistic pattern, which repeats in nature at all scales, at all temperatures...
(PDS: Addendum: I almost forgot to add the obligatory "And yes, I know, I'm a Crackpot!" ending to this message! <g>
So, on that note: "And yes, I know, I'm a Crackpot!" <g>)
Show me a unified equation
...that works equally well for electromagnetic force, fission and fusion and strong and weak nuclear forces... and all other forces...
If not, then permit me my own belief ("Freedom Of Belief"), that it is not well understood...
Oh, it's just that scientific physics stuff again. I can breathe easily now!
I first heard of the 1989 pons and fleischmann experiment in late '90 but didn't know what to think of it, I was in high-school, information was scarce. Then in 2008 or 2009' I found a memoir from a science historian about it. It spoke in great detail about the pressure to publish quickly before any rival the vested interest of the hugely influencal MIT in "hot fusion" (billions in funding). They they didn't even try to half-ass an experiment, then dragged pons and fleischmann in the mud so deeply they had to quit academic life and anyone who tried to follow their track would have their funding cut. Because most other physicist ( Pons & Fleischman were actualy electro-chemist) were not able to acheive the same results. Which was kind of to be expected: no peer review article was published they just "announced" their finding. Then everyone rush to blindly replicate months of hard work from a field they barely knew. Then it became a fraud, then fake science. Anyone trying the "forbidden" experiment would lose his reputation and any hope of a career. It doesn't get more anti science then cold fusion. Only then I realised wikipedia was full of censorship and could not be relied upon for anything remontly controversal.
Then came 2011, andrea rossi and the e-cat. Andrea rossi has a ph in... philosphy, convicted frauster in italy and inventor of a new cold fusion device. Even then it sparked ton of interest in cold fusion (LENR for low energy nuclear reaction, because it's not fusion that is happening: no hard radiation, no instant huge release of energy, etc.) and the next decade is a cycle of trying to debunk rossi, him promising a "working plant" next year, mistery client and feeding crumbs of evidence, proof and information over a decade. And it's not finished yet.
You can follow most of it on https://e-catworld.com/ . People there are not quite QAnon level of crazy but they will mention ufo various free energy stuff of regular basis. I remember reading news about navy SPAWAR research on cold fusion there.
But yeah in a nutshell huge claims, little results (but SOME result that is the annoying part).
The entire things is explainable by some combination of incompetence and fraud. There is nothing here that should lead one to believe there is any kind of actual new phenomenon.
The world emits about 37 billion tons of CO2 per year which is 33.5 billion Kg, so we need 90 million of those pilot plants to remove a year of CO2 in 365 days of operation, at a cost of $0.3T to $0.6T per year.
What does it mean to even "reverse" a non-linear dynamic system that is unpredictable in its thrashing as an exponential function of time? Reverse it to what? The 1960-1990 average and hold it there? Good luck.
Nuclear is promising for other reasons, namely that it's a virtually infinite source of energy with no downsides if we can master a technique for producing it without meltdown risk.
An astounding indictment across the whole scientific community that attempting to investigate an energy source that would advance human kind to essentially free energy would be... a career ender.
There is simply no reason for this.
Think how many resources has been put into anti-carbon messaging to transform the economies and the promotion of a global tax. Meanwhile a technology that can make the whole CO2 problem obsolete is taken to the back alley like this and figuratively murdered.
Why?
My understanding is that it’s a career ender because it has repeatedly been shown to not work. You also can’t investigate Perpetual Movement Machines because they can’t work either. It would be nice if it worked but it doesn’t make sense to change something that’s basically a pipe dream.
The only career ender should be scientific dishonesty.
An experiment that is rigorous and scientifically sound should always be valid.
The reputation of CF as a pseudo-science also points towards a career ender.
I can understand that it makes sense to teach the most useful stuff at the university, however I do wish that I could have had the choice to follow an optional "obscure, useless topics" lecture during my years in university.
When people's income depends on not being displaced by a new technology, you can bet that they will be dyed-in-the-wool Luddites.
When Cold Fusion was first announced way back in the 90s (IIRC) it was felt that the whole of the energy industries would be immediately affected by being replaced by small, clean, efficient fusion technology. Strange, that an immediate clamp down occurred on all Cold Fusion information, experimentation, etc.
Personally, I don't know whether Cold Fusion exists or not. But the absolute denigration of anything to do with it seems a bit suspicious to me.
Several researchers have reported energy production, but everybody else can't seem to replicate it, whether that's by accident or design.
Why hasn't Shenzhen rediscovered it? Everyone's rediscovered nuclear power and fusion bombs by now.