04/27/2004: 
Technologica
D.O.E. Ready to Take a Fresh Look at Cold Fusion
By Jeff Hecht, MIT Technology Review
Fifteen years after the first controversial claims hit the headlines, cold fusion refuses to die. A small cadre of die-hard advocates argues that experiments now produce consistent results. The physics establishment continues to scoff, but some scientists who have been watching the field carefully are convinced something real is happening. And now the U.S. Department of Energy has decided that recent results justify a fresh look at cold fusion.
Physicists were stunned when two University of Utah electrochemists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, claimed in 1989 that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature. Their experiment packed deuterium-the stable heavy isotope of hydrogen-into palladium electrodes. After many hours of operation, they reported that more heat was generated than a purely chemical reaction could have produced. At first it looked like Pons and Fleischman might have come up with a revolutionarily easy way to tap fusion energy, and laboratories around the world rushed to try the experiment for themselves. The simple-looking experiment proved virtually impossible to reproduce, however, and within weeks, most physicists wrote off cold fusion as a mistake-an experimental result that contradicted the known laws of physics.
Yet the potential of limitless energy lured a band of would-be revolutionaries who kept on working the problem. Often they found nothing. Sometimes, however, their experiments appeared to produce more energy than they expected from chemical reactions; at other times they detected traces of potential fusion reaction products, suggesting that some previously unknown physical effects may be at work.
The evidence for "new physics" has been building for years, says Peter Hagelstein, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, who chaired the tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion in Cambridge last August. Experiments performed under properly controlled conditions reliably produce more heat than standard theory predicts. Nuclear products show up in about the right amounts to account for this excess heat. Patterns have emerged that explain previous anomalies. When Hagelstein saw how pieces of the puzzle were fitting together at the August meeting, he urged the Department of Energy to reconsider a field that had been cast out of orthodox science soon after its birth.
As with the "cancer cure" from yesterday, this is something that could be of great worth to the well being and knowledge of civilization. Yet the scientific establishment has pushed it aside, calling it pseudoscience. Why would you not explore an area with so much potential to benefit humanity? At least now, with the Government throwing money at it, the truth of the matter may come to light.
An interesting read, check out the full article at the MIT Technology Review
7 Annotations Submitted
Tuesday the 27th of April, prof_booty noted:
from what i understand, it has been explored, and no other lab has been able to duplicate results. just cause the establishment doent like it doent mean it is a cover up.
Tuesday the 27th of April, awiggins noted:
Did you read the article Mr. Booty?
Tuesday the 27th of April, the article noted:
Over the past 15 years, enthusiasts have generated some 3,000 manuscripts on cold fusion, but very few were ever published in scientific journals. Many results evaporated under outside examination, and promoters pushed "free energy" schemes that sounded more like perpetual motion than physics. Most of those manuscripts "are not helpful," says Hagelstein, a theorist with wide-ranging interests in optics, energy, and nuclear physics. But some 50 do show interesting, reproducible effects. "The heat effect has been replicated many times," Hagelstein. It works only when deuterium is loaded into palladium cells, and never when normal hydrogen is used instead of the heavy isotope. Exacting measurements with heat-measurement instruments have answered criticisms of the original experiments. Excess heat has been measured beyond what Hagelstein considers any reasonable doubt.
Experiments that produce excess heat also have yielded helium-4, one potential product of the fusion of two deuterium nuclei, in amounts that correlate with the excess heat. Theory predicts that the fusion reaction should generate 24 million electron volts (MeV) of energy per helium-4 nucleus. An analysis by Michael McKubre of SRI International detected energy of 31 MeV- a match within the experimental uncertainty of plus or minus 13 MeV. Skeptics had doubted the reaction was possible, but Hagelstein says McKubre's analysis of the experiments, reported at last year's cold fusion meeting, shows that fusion of two deuterium to yield helium-4 "is not as nutty as it initially seemed."
McKubre has also found that the seeming inconsistency in experimental heat production arose from differences in the amount of deuterium packed into the palladium electrode. Whenever the number of deuterium atoms loaded into the metal matched or exceeded the number of palladium atoms, excess heat was generated. Palladium loaded with slightly less deuterium produced inconsistent results, and if the deuterium level was reduced by a great amount, then no excess heat at all was produced. Deuterium loading was hard to control and limited by the strength of the metal. Unfortunately, palladium strength is difficult to predict or control, and is not improved by purification; indeed, the purest palladium ruptured at lower loadings, and the highest strength was seen only in one impure batch.
Tuesday the 27th of April, awiggins noted:
By the way, it is Santo who is always looking for the cover up. I am the one who believes that everyone is corrupt. Shades of grey I suppose.
Tuesday the 27th of April, pr0f noted:
Over the past 15 years, enthusiasts have generated some 3,000 manuscripts on cold fusion, but very few were ever published in scientific journals.
damn that peer review.
Michael McKubre of SRI International [http://www.sri.com/ reputable i'm sure]
extrodinary claims require extrordinary proof
Wednesday the 28th of April, awiggins noted:
I could not agree with you more. Extraordinary claims do indeed warrant extraordinary proof. This is why I am glad to see a subject that has been passed over by the "orthodox" science community come into the spotlight for a closer review. History is full of accounts of science discoveries that would never have been exposed because the mainstream science community had no interest in perusing the matter.
Wednesday the 28th of April, santo26 noted:
I was reading an article about the gentleman who discovered REM sleep in the late 1940s- early 50s. Everyone thought it was BS. Same with old Copernicus.
When a scientist pursues a line of thinking off the highway and comes up with anomalous results, his scientific peers, using the scientific method, try to recreate the experiment and attempt to poke holes in the argument through peer review.
So what if some scientist comes up with something that currently requires a lot of money to do in a lab? Or creates a reaction under strange circumstances that could not be duplicated easily until other technologies make it easier to conduct? Is cold fusion a good idea that came too early? There are a lot of things that were proven to exist but were not able to be properly harnessed until later, like Ben Franklin's electricity experiments.
