The Resurrection Of Cold Fusion: A Much-Needed Transfusion Or Continued Delusion?

I don't care if it works or not, until we can mine hydrogin from some place other than earths water, fusion will be a waste of a very needed resorce, get us off this planet, and then maybe it will be worth something but now it is just as bad as burning fossil fuels, and something this world does not need.

This is like a tube expert telling transistor people that this quantum tunnelling thing is voodoo and transistors will never take off. The real question is how can we make this useful. How it works is simple. With traditional fusion, You tunnel through the electrostatic barrier of 1 positive charge vs another positive charge by heating some multiple of 10 to the 23rd atoms to a few million degrees under millions of PSI pressure and one in a billion billion nuclii actually collide. Under these collisions, sometimes Neutrons fly off at high energy and then decay in a few seconds. Good we can detect these high speed, high energy crashes. All magic until half a century ago, but some claim to understand it fully, when that is only partially true. Now in low temperature collisions, which act similar to transistors in that we rely on tunneling effects, we are talking about lowering that barrier by surrounding the positive charges of the deuterium nuclii by hundreds of negative charges from a metal atom which happily loans us the electrons, and providing pressure by trying to sneak many deuterium into the lattice spacing where they have a much denser packing than we could normally get without huge pressures. These quantum effects are also well understood, but not easily modeled, but can lower the distances and velocities required to tunnel by several orders of magnitude. When the still one in a few billion collisions result in a d-d merging, we get helium, but now without the crashes that use to produce neutrons every few collisions. So all is good except, if it isn't a bit more controlled, how do we make devices safer and more useful than lab experiments.

Dr Lister was made out to be a fool for sterilizing. And look how long it took to believe the Dr with the cure for ulcers. We think we are so smart but years from now we will be looked at like we look at people 100 years in the past. I know someone that did something the books say cannot be done. Good thing he did not read the book/ the book. This also brings to mind the Levitron toy top it was said it could not be done.

Most people have heard of conservation of matter and energy, or conservation of momentum. These and other principles like conservation of charge and spin underlie the highly successful predictions of the standard model. Subtle modifications to the model may be expected, but D-D fusion without detectable neutrons is so far from what already works that it should be treated right along claims of perpetual motion. And calling it a nuclear event instead of fusion is as pathetic as calling Guantanamo detainees "enemy combatants" so they can be denied basic human rights. Shame on 60 Minutes for creating false hope instead of debunking this huge distraction.

I tend to believe as many comments above that this effect is misunderstood rechargable battery. This is why it works unpredictably - you have to charge it to get it working. Maybe some of these experiments lead to a battery that can be charged with hot fusion then later used to extract energy at controlled rate. I would non mind having ZPM at my disposal :-)

JustAnotherCrackpot said: "I would be interested in detecting the presence of helium" Tom in Silicon Valley said:"No helium, no fusion, right?" Go look at lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MilesMcorrelatioa.pdf and or the DOE review was cashed here www.profusionenergy.com/A_Collection_of_information_on_Cold_Fusion/www_science_doe_gov/sub/News_Releases/DOE-SC/2004/low_energy/Appendix_1.pdf You should look at page 20

The word "believe" was used by 60 minutes many times. "Belief" has not a place in this discussion. Either the data is credible in that it motivates further work, or it is not-credible. This requires application of measurements, hypotheses, and experiments, not belief. Science seeks to understand. Engineering seeks to use. Two feet on the same body, usually one is in front of the other. It is important to name things correctly. The observation is "excess heat". One hypotheses is "fusion". Another is "bad experimental technique". I have no visibility into the other hypotheses, but were I an investigator studying the observation, I''d surely be constructing some (to me) plausible hypotheses and testing them. Keeping score, I read it as: Classical Fusion (even cold) -- probably not. Bad experimental technique -- probably not. Unknown source of heat -- yes, but why? Here begins the hard work -- the thousands of minor experimental changes to explore the range of variables -- countless insights, many wrong, suggesting fresh hypotheses -- gradual understanding -- engineering success, repeatably demonstrating excess energy -- theoretical framework, correcting critical engineering misunderstandings -- proliferation of the theory through the practitioners -- perhaps leading to a practical exploitation of the effect. In a magical-thinking way, I hope the excess energy turns out to be useful. In a practical-thinking way, I won''t stop using CF bulbs.

At one time, 90% of the days "great minds" believed the earth was flat or the earth was the center of the universe, or this and that so numbers of opinions do not mean much. What would be relevant would be the ratio of the people who have actually performed the tests? The scientist interviewed is correct about the simplicity of the parameter reading process. One would have to intentionally screw up the data collection process to get a false 25 to 1 ratio. This would have been very apparent to the outside expert brought in to review the experiment. For him to go on record as verifying their testing methods is essentially validation. Further confidence would have been attained if 60 minutes had brought in 3 separate and unassociated experts to do the same job. 3 validations would have been near proof. Then the only remaining question is how to induce consistency. What triggers the catalyst?

I haven''t seen the video, but it would be great if they could make a very long lasting battery out of the cold fusion reaction even if it put out only a fraction of a volt. Imagine the uses this could generate. With a series of these say "cold-fusion batteries" we could power computers and military cool/hot suits of even our cell phones. Hot Fusion may work if they could pressurize the particles where the lasers were aimed at since stars and suns were created not only from heat, but from intense pressure as well.

It's very interesting to me that persons who are presmued to have electrochemical expertise appear not to have investigated or reported on palladium (Pd) interactions with hydrogen (and its isotopes) more fully. For example, one very good reference from 1937 is "Gases and Metals", by Colin J. Smithells. It is known that hydrogen has very large (hundreds of cc's per 100 grams of metal) solubility in Pd, which alters Pd's specific resistance and as well as its electrochemical properties. Deuterium has solubility which is similar in magnitude to hydrogen. Calorimetric issues caused by the gas dissociation and solubility may be confounding some measurements. Just a bit of "food for thought". Best, Bob.

Until they detect gamma rays and/or neutrons, I remain skeptical.

Don''t bet the farm on it. Burgy (www.burgy.50megs.com)

P.T. Barnum was right !

I was interested when Dr. Fleischmann described being rushed by others to release preliminary findings. I believe he would have had it otherwise. It is difficult when the push for recognition gets in the way of thorough science, and yet, if we waited for all the T's to get crossed and I's to get dotted, the researcher would probably be dead. What I would be looking for in analyzing experimental results and attributing the cause would be other products besides just heat. Other commenters have said the same - looking for neutrons for instance. I would be interested in detecting the presence of helium. Even then the inference to root cause would be only that, an inference. More generally, it takes more than just an energy imbalance to attribute a result. I'm sure most researchers want to be thorough, but we must give them the leeway (also funding) to continue their work despite the excitement of preliminary results.

Do these experiments violate the laws of thermodynamics? For example, a heat pump would at first appear to violate the First Law, because you get more energy than you put in (in the form of electricity or shaft power). By doing work on the heat pump, we are able to transfer energy from a low temperature reservoir at some dead state temperature to a higher, more useful temperature (to heat a building, for example). How do we know the researchers aren''t observing a thermoelectric effect, since a thermoelectric refrigerator, functioning as a heat pump, also produces more heat output than the electrical energy input? I would like to see a Second Law analysis of these experiments.

The fundamentals of hot fusion are well understood: we can see and measure solar phenomena, we have made hydrogen fusion bombs, we can observe nuclear fusion processes in particle accelerators. The NRL Plasma Formulary from the US Naval Research Laboratory gives you all the fusion science you will ever need. The hot fusion community has two approaches: scaling down the bomb (laser fusion) and scaling down the sun magnetic fusion). They have made a lot of progress, but still have a way to go. The Cold Fusion/Nuclear Effects crowd are still trying to understand their fundamentals. D+D fusion (which you need if you claim 1 gallon of water is as good as 10 gallons of gasoline) generates most of its heat in the form of neutrons. They never seem to see them. Putting different types of metals into solutions can make electrochemical batteries. Certainly you can get out more energy than you put in. But you aren''t getting fusion energy gains. You are getting a very expensive, poorly performing battery.

I'm a engineer and physicist. If one studies solid state physics you will find that there are many phenomenon within soilids (and liquids) that are not understood by modern physics. Just open up any recent issue of Nature for a variety of condensed matter phenomenon being investigated by science. I see this as one more phenomenon worthy of investigation across a whole host of phenomenon. They all need continued funding and support, because if you haven't looked around much, technology of the future will be based on our better understanding the small.