Merged Cold Fusion Claims

[Wowbagger]

Look, we know Cold Fusion exists. I don't really use it much, but I still happen to have it installed on one of my old computers, anyway. The only thing that seems fishy to me is that their formulas are not written in CFML.

 

[PixyMisa]

The "t 1/2 = 700 yoctoseconds" is the amount of time the neutron sticks to the 4He before falling off.

I'll have to use that the next time someone in R&P claims that psi events are too "ephemeral and transitory" for science to detect.

 

[JoelKatz]

Look, we know Cold Fusion exists. I don't really use it much, but I still happen to have it installed on one of my old computers, anyway. The only thing that seems fishy to me is that their formulas are not written in CFML.

Actually, cold fusion does in fact exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

The problem is that you need a lot of muons to make it happen (due to alpha sticking) and nobody knows how to prevent alpha sticking or easily make lots of muons. (Insert cow joke here.) Alpha sticking is not well understood (the practical results still don't match the theoretical results for an unknown reason) so that may be a source of hope. There are still a lot of respected scientists who think that cold fusion could be a plausible path to practical fusion energy sources, but hot fusion is way ahead right now.

 

[pteridine]

So far, this is in the realm of magic. The reaction would only take place at temperatures in the billions of degrees...celsius. Electro magnetic repulsion is that difficult to overcome. Most of the energy would be released as gamma rays. Unless this was well shielded, it would have killed people. There is no evidence of any nuclear reaction. In addition, the probability of the reaction occuring is really small.

Right now, this is just an argument from ignorance and that is never proof of anything. If this truly worked, it would be commercially available already.

glenn

Why would you say that if this worked it would be commercially available already? You may be unaware that, historically, any invention has some development time before it it commercial, whether the science is understood or not.
It is true that this now appears to be in the realm of magic and the possibility that it actually works is certainly the nightmare of the hot fusion community. Magic is sometimes how advanced technology appears at first. There is a trite quote somewhere about that.
Consider that all the physics happening at high temperatures and pressures may not be tranposable to the conditions used in this reaction, much like chemical reactions that change relative rates, mechanisms, and products at different temperatures and pressures, albeit over a much narrower range. It would be wise to observe and base judgements on data which has yet to be provided rather than try to invoke physics that may not apply to try to explain away a phenomenon that challenges authority.
Only a few scientists and organizations have shown the scientific curiousity that all should aspire to when it comes to LENR. Unfortunately, our large, "talented" academic research organizations have not, although heretical individuals within them have. One organization and laboratory of note and in my opinion one of the best laboratories in the world has provided necessary leadership in the area of LENR. The US Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Laboratory had been quietly exploring this phenomenon until the politics of "big fusion" and "big energy" finally caught up with them and, shortsightedly, closed down much of the work. This will likely change in the near future should Rossi continue to show results. The science of this will be done under the umbrella of a successful application as this is the only way that this would now be permitted to be studied by those with vested interests in its failure or long developmental delay. It will be as interesting to watch this play out as our scientific forebears watched the battle between Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics.

 

[Andy_Ross]

'Vested Interests' keeping it down?

A move to the Conspiracy forum I think.

 

[ellindsey]

I have recently seen an interesting theory posted to explain some of the issues which would make cold fusion impossible, in particular the coulomb barrier and lack of gamma or neutron emission. The theory is that in nickel hydride, with the right conditions of temperature and energy pumped into the system via electromagnetic fields, that electrons will occasionally somehow merge with the proton in the hydrogen or deuterium by an inverse beta decay event. This will yield a low energy neutron (or two low energy neutrons if deuterium is being used) which can then merge with one of the nearby nickel nuclei. Nickel has a lot of isotopes, so most of these neutron capture events merely yield a heavier but still stable nickel sample, though there may be some copper generated by beta decay.

This is still probably impossible, but it would move the magic impossible part from overcoming the coulomb barrier to somehow getting hydrogen to undergo spontaneous inverse beta decay.

New Energy Times has been running articles and posting interviews dealing with the entire issue. My feeling is that this is probably bunk, but interesting enough to be worth following.

 

[tsig]

Here's an update from the site I linked to a while back:

Rossi Discovery – What to Say?
Posted on January 15, 2011 by Steven B. Krivit
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/15/rossi-discovery-what-to-say/

From the link:

4- What I have presented is not a theory or a laboratory prototype waiting for the approval of anybody but the market: we are starting an industrial production of out reactors. If somebody has a technology able to compete, the competition will not be on the blogs, but on the market. In this field the time of mental masturbations is over. Now is time for facts, and facts are operating reactors of satisfied Customers.
5- I know you and I know you are serious persons: therefore I hope a correct information will start between us from now.

Warm Regards,
Andrea Rossi


He's going to skip any tests and appeal directly to the public.

I think I've seen this approach before.

 

[BenBurch]

If he can sell them and they work, he has something. If he wants money up front and never delivers, he's a crook.

 

[ben m]

I have recently seen an interesting theory posted to explain some of the issues which would make cold fusion impossible, in particular the coulomb barrier and lack of gamma or neutron emission. The theory is that in nickel hydride, with the right conditions of temperature and energy pumped into the system via electromagnetic fields, that electrons will occasionally somehow merge with the proton in the hydrogen or deuterium by an inverse beta decay event.

That's the same as the Widom and Larsen "theory". It's complete nonsense. Inverse beta decay requires an energy input of 700,000 eV. The mean thermal energy in a block of hot metal is somewhere around 0.1 eV. It's not just unlikely to find fluctuations that high---it's an explicit violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. (Extracting a neutron's worth of energy from a heat bath, as this would, would decrease its entropy. You could collect neutrons leaking out of a heat, move them to an even hotter bath to decay, and run a heat engine on the difference.)

Second, manufacturing neutrons in a block of nickel does not lead to "heat". It leads to thermal neutrons. Nickel is not a particularly good neutron absorber; a good fraction of neutrons must escape. A 10kW generator would be making 10^16 neutrons per second (a million curies). That's not "we were able to detect some radiation above background". That's "everyone in the room died and was buried in a lead coffin". The radiation accident that killed Louis Slotin gave him a 21 Sv dose; it's equivalent to absorbing 10^15 neutrons total.

The strongest neutron source I've ever used was one curie. It was not in a small pipe wrapped in tinfoil in front of a room full of journalists. It was wrapped was in a lead "pig" with foot-thick walls; everyone in the room was wearing radiation badges; only the radiation-safety officer was allowed to handle the pig itself.

Third, how big an idiot does one have to be to announce that "neutrons" are a quiet, nonradioactive way of "turning nickel into copper"? Putting neutrons into nickel turns it into radioactive nickel, primarily 59Ni, a bit of stable 61 and 62, and a bit of 63Ni. 59Ni turns into cobalt over 100,000y, and 63 turns into copper of 100y.

 

[Richard S]

'Vested Interests' keeping it down?

A move to the Conspiracy forum I think.

The problem is that, if there is even a miniscule chance of there being something valid here, a new phenomenon of nature, it might be possible to weaponize it. In my last post I added a link to the David Goodstein article on CF, how he got into things like the Mossbauer Effect, the idea that there may be small, unique exceptional cases where the normal separation between chemical and nuclear processes breaks down.

It's sort of like the movie "Sneakers" when they got into what would happen if one brilliant mathematician was able to find a way to solve the "P vs. NP" problem, how all our encryption could unravel overnight. It's unlikely, but just possible enough that we have to worry about it.

I mean, I *hope* there is some shadowy govt. organization that worries about this. It's pretty common knowledge that the NSA hires a big share of the top-level graduates from mathematics programs for this reason.

 

[Tubbythin]

It is true that this now appears to be in the realm of magic and the possibility that it actually works is certainly the nightmare of the hot fusion community.

Urm, why?

The US Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Laboratory had been quietly exploring this phenomenon until the politics of "big fusion" and "big energy" finally caught up with them and, shortsightedly, closed down much of the work.

What are you talking about? What are big fusion/energy?

It will be as interesting to watch this play out as our scientific forebears watched the battle between Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics.

Or not.

 

[Mr.D]

A 10kW generator would be making 10^16 neutrons per second (a million curies).

And this in a nutshell is what I was alluding to before as the problem with P&F's cold fusion, and it's the same story here. The radiation they say they detect, but shield against has to be compatible with their heat measurements.

But let's say for argument's sake there really is some sort of exotic nuclear reaction happening in there. Shouldn't the radiation they detect scale with the heat produced? Produce THAT data and I'll bet they catch more scientific attention. (Though I don't know what implications it would have for practical power generation since the shielding would also have to scale.)

 

[Hindmost]

Why would you say that if this worked it would be commercially available already? You may be unaware that, historically, any invention has some development time before it it commercial, whether the science is understood or not.
It is true that this now appears to be in the realm of magic and the possibility that it actually works is certainly the nightmare of the hot fusion community. Magic is sometimes how advanced technology appears at first. There is a trite quote somewhere about that.
Consider that all the physics happening at high temperatures and pressures may not be tranposable to the conditions used in this reaction, much like chemical reactions that change relative rates, mechanisms, and products at different temperatures and pressures, albeit over a much narrower range. It would be wise to observe and base judgements on data which has yet to be provided rather than try to invoke physics that may not apply to try to explain away a phenomenon that challenges authority.
Only a few scientists and organizations have shown the scientific curiousity that all should aspire to when it comes to LENR. Unfortunately, our large, "talented" academic research organizations have not, although heretical individuals within them have. One organization and laboratory of note and in my opinion one of the best laboratories in the world has provided necessary leadership in the area of LENR. The US Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Laboratory had been quietly exploring this phenomenon until the politics of "big fusion" and "big energy" finally caught up with them and, shortsightedly, closed down much of the work. This will likely change in the near future should Rossi continue to show results. The science of this will be done under the umbrella of a successful application as this is the only way that this would now be permitted to be studied by those with vested interests in its failure or long developmental delay. It will be as interesting to watch this play out as our scientific forebears watched the battle between Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics.

All over the world, accelerators have been bombarding charged particle against targets for over 50 years. We have had a lot of development time. I know of no invention in the past 50 years or so that appears like magic. Prior to t

There is nothing in physics that would make this "reaction" viable. As I stated previously, if it were a net positive energy reaction, the large stars would have a bunch of copper in their cores. The energy production stops at iron and nickel due to the binding energy. The graph below shows this concept. Fuse a couple things on the left side of the graph and you get products that are slightly less massive and bound together more "tightly." Fission a heavy element on the right side of the graph and you get two products that are slightly less massive and again, more "tightly" bound. Any reaction involving stuff in the middle such as iron, nickel etc would be net negative enery. There is more to this as nuclear reactions involve probabilities as well. Depending on the reaction, the probability of the reaction is essentially empirically determined. For U238, the probabilty for fission is low while the probability for fission of U235 is fairly high--as an example.



U235 fissions with a neutron, so it was easy to achieve. To fuse atoms together, overcoming the coulomb repulsion take millions of degrees...and the reaction they are claiming would be in the billions.

The people involved with this claim were turned down by peer reviewed journals and turned down for a patent. They choose the route of histrionics in the media...so it is normal for academia to abandon them. A really big red flag is always the lack of any plausible theory coupled with a total lack of reasonable data. Even measuring the gamma energy with a simple scintillation detector would show something...but that is not what is happening.

I am a bit too lazy to pruff read this, so it likely contains typos...

glenn

as far as the navy is concerned, they have a lot of officers and they tend to throw money at just about anything...but they still had the sense to abandon this.

 

[ben m]

As I stated previously, if it were a net positive energy reaction, the large stars would have a bunch of copper in their cores. The energy production stops at iron and nickel due to the binding energy.
The graph below shows ....

Again, hindmost, this is incorrect. p + 62Ni -> 63Cu (for example) IS an exothermic, energy-releasing reaction. And a good thing too---if it weren't, 63Cu would be unstable to proton emission.

The strict meaning of "62Ni is at the top of the binding energy curve" is that there is no possible reaction 62Ni + 62Ni --> (any other combination of 56 p and 68 n) which is exothermic.

Stellar fusion stops at iron for a variety of reasons; "p + Ni is not a net positive energy reaction" is not one of them. The main reason is that there's not much p left in hot stars; the only common light nucleus available for reactions is 4He. So you end up looking at alpha-capture reactions on already-proton-rich nuclei, and it turns out that these reactions indeed stop being energy-producing after 56Ni.

Again, the reason cold fusion doesn't work is the kinetics (the reaction rate is basically zero at anything below supernova temperatures), not this aspect of the energy budget.

 

[Cuddles]

All over the world, accelerators have been bombarding charged particle against targets for over 50 years.

Small correction - more like 100 years.

The many experiments pointing toward the reality of LENR are slowly converging and I expect that over the next few years, key aspects of the process will be understood and this will become an impoprtant energy source.

There's a problem here. Let's assume that all of this is absolutely true. The problem is that this is all also absolutely true for hot fusion - we know it's real, we know how to do it in the lab, we know we can get more energy out than we put in, and so on. Yet 60 years on we still don't actually have commercial fusion power. So why would cold fusion magically make it to the market within a few years? Remember, the only real difference is the temperature. You're still dealing with highly radioactive processes and products, you still have the problems of scaling it up, actually turning the heat into power, and so on.

The point here is that it's not just the science that's implausible, it's the business plans as well. Here we have someone who has only just announced the first observations of cold fusion, still with no idea how it actually works, yet he's already announcing commercial production and looking for investors. This is just not a logical progression. It is, however, exactly the progression that would be expected from a free energy scammer, since it's exactly how many previous ones have looked.

 

[Dancing David]

Only a few scientists and organizations have shown the scientific curiousity that all should aspire to when it comes to LENR. Unfortunately, our large, "talented" academic research organizations have not, although heretical individuals within them have. One organization and laboratory of note and in my opinion one of the best laboratories in the world has provided necessary leadership in the area of LENR. The US Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Laboratory had been quietly exploring this phenomenon until the politics of "big fusion" and "big energy" finally caught up with them and, shortsightedly, closed down much of the work.

Uh huh, sure , or it was that it produced nada, zip, zilch, niente and nothing in terms of results. maybe they investigated and found it is bogus in terms of fusion.

Lets see some data that is not of a CT nature.

 

[pteridine]

All over the world, accelerators have been bombarding charged particle against targets for over 50 years. We have had a lot of development time. I know of no invention in the past 50 years or so that appears like magic. Prior to t

There is nothing in physics that would make this "reaction" viable. As I stated previously, if it were a net positive energy reaction, the large stars would have a bunch of copper in their cores. The energy production stops at iron and nickel due to the binding energy. The graph below shows this concept. Fuse a couple things on the left side of the graph and you get products that are slightly less massive and bound together more "tightly." Fission a heavy element on the right side of the graph and you get two products that are slightly less massive and again, more "tightly" bound. Any reaction involving stuff in the middle such as iron, nickel etc would be net negative enery. There is more to this as nuclear reactions involve probabilities as well. Depending on the reaction, the probability of the reaction is essentially empirically determined. For U238, the probabilty for fission is low while the probability for fission of U235 is fairly high--as an example.

U235 fissions with a neutron, so it was easy to achieve. To fuse atoms together, overcoming the coulomb repulsion take millions of degrees...and the reaction they are claiming would be in the billions.

The people involved with this claim were turned down by peer reviewed journals and turned down for a patent. They choose the route of histrionics in the media...so it is normal for academia to abandon them. A really big red flag is always the lack of any plausible theory coupled with a total lack of reasonable data. Even measuring the gamma energy with a simple scintillation detector would show something...but that is not what is happening.

I am a bit too lazy to pruff read this, so it likely contains typos...

glenn

as far as the navy is concerned, they have a lot of officers and they tend to throw money at just about anything...but they still had the sense to abandon this.

The fact that you know of no invention that "appears like magic " hardly affects this situation. If we start with the Fleischmann-Pons experiments, this has been "appearing" for 20 years whether you believe it or not.
There is nothing in the physics that you understand that would make this reaction viable. Nothing in Newtonian physics would explain the photoelectric effect, either.
Peer reviewed journals would expect the details of the device to be exposed and the inventor obviously does not want to do that. What "peers" would review it? Those that say it can't happen because they have never seen it before? Rossi is an engineer and his pathway is to build working units. For him, that is by far the best way to show that he has something and he doesn't need anyone peering into his invention. The mechanisms of the reaction will be determined after there is an effect to study. If this is real, lithium deuteride pellets and Shiva lasers will not be needed. Prayers to Shiva for a "break even" can remain unanswered and Shiva can be disarmed.

As to your example, you discuss stars. In your research, have you ever noticed that the conditions in stars are different than in the Rossi device? Is it possible, in your opinion, that in stars, there are grain boundaries in the nickel you believe must be present? Certainly, your star nickel will be a neutral atom in a metallic lattice, won't it? I find it interesting that many would extrapolate and expect the same mechanisms and products under such different conditions.
Your last line merely displays your complete ignorance about the Naval Research Lab. You might want to read a bit before you make such statements.

As to others who are quick to condemn, wait for the data. Be skeptical but not dismissive as, at present, you have bases for the former but no bases for the latter. This will work itself out over the next year or so and all will learn something about science and human nature. Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.

 

[kookbreaker]

Ah, I see Cold Fusion is making its once-every-5-years 'Rise From Your Grave' appearance.

 

[edd]

It's perfectly reasonable to be dismissive now, and still change your mind later if (and it's a big if) sufficiently strong data shows up later. We certainly have a basis to be dismissive when there is insufficiently strong evidence provided at the moment and good reason to find the proposed mechanism of energy production implausible.

Analogies to the photoelectric effect are broken - the photoelectric effect was repeatedly observable for a considerable length of time before its explanation. This claim is not repeatedly observable, not yet at any rate (and I would put money on it not being so in the future). In addition, the physics that might plausibly be involved is fairly reasonably understood - this is not as far as I know how the case was with the photoelectric effect.

 

[Dancing David]

The fact that you know of no invention that "appears like magic " hardly affects this situation. If we start with the Fleischmann-Pons experiments, this has been "appearing" for 20 years whether you believe it or not.
There is nothing in the physics that you understand that would make this reaction viable. Nothing in Newtonian physics would explain the photoelectric effect, either.
Peer reviewed journals would expect the details of the device to be exposed and the inventor obviously does not want to do that. What "peers" would review it? Those that say it can't happen because they have never seen it before? Rossi is an engineer and his pathway is to build working units. For him, that is by far the best way to show that he has something and he doesn't need anyone peering into his invention. The mechanisms of the reaction will be determined after there is an effect to study. If this is real, lithium deuteride pellets and Shiva lasers will not be needed. Prayers to Shiva for a "break even" can remain unanswered and Shiva can be disarmed.

As to your example, you discuss stars. In your research, have you ever noticed that the conditions in stars are different than in the Rossi device? Is it possible, in your opinion, that in stars, there are grain boundaries in the nickel you believe must be present? Certainly, your star nickel will be a neutral atom in a metallic lattice, won't it? I find it interesting that many would extrapolate and expect the same mechanisms and products under such different conditions.
Your last line merely displays your complete ignorance about the Naval Research Lab. You might want to read a bit before you make such statements.

As to others who are quick to condemn, wait for the data. Be skeptical but not dismissive as, at present, you have bases for the former but no bases for the latter. This will work itself out over the next year or so and all will learn something about science and human nature. Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.

So all you have is rhetoric, no data, no evidence?