Cold fusion: it's the helium, stupid | Hacker News Reader

Cold fusion: it's the helium, stupid

rondam.blogspot.com

10 pointslisper11 comments

Sorry folks, the blogger doesn't know what he is talking about. Helium production to fill balloons come from reactions large enough to lay waste to laboratories maybe even cities. If there is fusion the by product is low energy neutrons, damned hard to detect, certainly not by Geiger counters.

That's assuming that what's going on is fusion at all -- which isn't a given. "Cold fusion" was a marketing term, not a scientific one.

I'm way out of my knowledge here, but google tells me:

- a Deuterium-Tritium fusion event releases 4.03 MeV

- 1eV = 1.602 x 10^-19 joules.

- That means each helium produced comes with 6.5 x 10^-13 joules of energy.

- One liter of gas where humans live has 2.6 x 10^22 molecules.

- A small balloon contains about a liter of gas. (ok, I made this one up.)

- I think gaseous helium is just single atoms.

- One liter of helium produced by fusion came with 6.5x10^-13 * 2.6x10^22 joules of energy, call it 1.6 gigajoules.

- 1 joule = .24 calories ... 384 megacalories.

- Figure the thermal mass of the experiment was about like 1kg of water (desktop scale)... the experimental apparatus would be 384000 degrees celsius (not recommended for desktop scale).

I'm guessing I can detect the temperature first.

(Bonus calculation, 1 liter of helium production also matches the energy released by 382 kg of TNT.)

>> 6.5x10^-13 * 2.6x10^22 joules of energy, call it 1.6 gigajoules.

= 16 x 10^9 = 16 gigajoules, not 1.6 gigajoules. Suddenly, I feel like taking off my sweater.

Nuts, now I need a thermometer that goes up to 4 million degrees and another 3500kg of TNT to complete the experiment.

If there's 0 helium going in, and >0 coming out, there's fusion, no matter how little. There's no other way to get helium from hydrogen.

Also, hydrogen gas would float a balloon even better than helium, so that wouldn't be much of a test.

Let's not call it cold fusion. Let's call it an "an experiment which produces excess heat".

It removes the helium argument, no? My understanding is cold fusion is the (improper) name given to this phenomena, which nobody can replicate reliably nor explain with certainty. If it is indeed fusion, here's to hoping our world is round.

Cannot be replicated + signal tiny compared to the noise floor = no evidence for existence.

Or it could be a different kind of fusion. Maybe protons fuse in a different way in a metal lattice.

They very clearly said they are calling this a nuclear effect, not cold fusion.

Oh THAT cold fusion.

I couldn't understand how helium would relate to the Adobe web programming language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com