[opendtv] New Cold Fusion Evidence Reignites Hot Debate
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:16:59 -0400
Don't know if any of you caught this in the news yesterday. This may
also apply to that special 5th gen ATSC receiver ...
Another article said the main problem was that the measuring equipment
wasn't sensitive enough in many experiments to detect the effect. The
excess heat is apparently not generated continuously and not always by
the same amount.
Bert
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http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/8407
New Cold Fusion Evidence Reignites Hot Debate
By Mark Anderson
25 March 2009-On Monday, scientists at the American Chemical Society
(ACS) meeting in Salt Lake City announced a series of experimental
results that they argue confirms controversial "cold fusion" claims.
Chief among the findings was new evidence presented by U.S. Navy
researchers of high-energy neutrons in a now-standard cold fusion
experimental setup-electrodes connected to a power source, immersed in a
solution containing both palladium and "heavy water." If confirmed, the
result would add support to the idea that reactions like the nuclear
fire that lights up the sun might somehow be tamed for the tabletop. But
even cold fusion's proponents admit that they have no clear explanation
why their nuclear infernos are so weak as to be scarcely noticeable in a
beaker.
The newest experiment, conducted by researchers at the U.S. Space and
Naval Warfare Systems Center, in San Diego, required running current
through the apparatus for two to three weeks. Beneath the palladium- and
deuterium-coated cathode was a piece of plastic-CR-39, the stuff that
eyeglasses are typically made from. Physicists use CR-39 as a simple
nuclear particle detector.
After the experiment, the group analyzed the CR-39 and found microscopic
blossoms of "triple tracks." Such tracks happen when a high-energy
neutron has struck a carbon atom in the plastic, causing the atom to
decay into three helium nuclei (alpha particles). The alpha particles
don't travel more than a few microns, though, before they plow into
other atoms in the CR-39. The result is a distinctive three-leaf clover
that, to physicists, points to the by-product of a nuclear reaction.
"Taking all the data together, we have compelling evidence that nuclear
reactions [are happening in the experiment]," says physicist Pamela
Mosier-Boss of the Navy group.
Reached by e-mail, Frank Close, a particle physicist at Oxford
University, says he's still skeptical. "There are many sources of
neutrons in the natural environment, including...cosmic-ray sources," he
says. He adds that some of the earliest cold fusion experiments in 1989
confused cosmic-ray signals for cold fusion evidence.
In fact, 20 years to the day before Monday's press briefing, Stanley
Pons and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Utah announced the very
first cold fusion experiment. Their apparatus, they said, was somehow
producing 1.75 watts more heat than the electric power they sent in.
Their results, however, were not reliably reproducible. Experimental
errors couldn't be ruled out. And, like present-day proponents, Pons and
Fleischmann couldn't explain how or why nuclear physics fit anywhere
into what they were observing. So for most of the scientific community,
cold fusion was largely discredited and discarded before the 1990s had
even begun.
Yet as the ACS panelists stressed on Monday, scores of scientists
followed up on Pons and Fleischmann's experiments despite the "crackpot"
label that soon dogged cold fusion research. Along the way, cold fusion
was rebranded as "low-energy nuclear reactions," or LENR. And, the
panelists said, although rarely reported in the mass media, hundreds of
LENR experiments over the past two decades have been published in
peer-reviewed science journals.
According to Edmund Storms, retired nuclear scientist from Los Alamos
National Laboratory and author of The Science of Low Energy Nuclear
Reaction (World Scientific, 2007), experiments confirming Pons and
Fleischmann's finding of excess heat have now been published in 150
different papers in journals and conference proceedings around the
world. The reported excess heat, he says, ranges from milliwatts up to
180 watts.
Steve Krivit, editor of the online LENR newsletter New Energy Times,
says experiments have dominated the field to date. In contrast, LENR
theory is lacking. The primary problem, the same one that has
marginalized LENR for two decades, is that before two positively charged
hydrogen nuclei can move close enough to each other to fuse into helium,
they first must overcome their nearly overwhelming electric repulsion.
The only known and widely accepted way to do that is based on what stars
and multibillion-dollar "hot fusion" reactors do: squeeze the nuclei
into as small a space as possible and kick the temperature up to tens of
millions of degrees.
"Some people have accused the [LENR] field of wishful thinking, and it's
unfortunate, because the experimental evidence is, in my opinion after
eight years, unambiguous," says Krivit, who is also coeditor of the
Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Ludwik Kowalski, formerly a physics professor at New Jersey's Montclair
State University, now retired, says that throughout the 1990s and into
the 2000s, he was as skeptical as anyone about cold fusion. But in 2007,
he conducted his own CR-39 experiment, as described in an earlier paper
by the U.S. Navy group.
"I got the same result they got, exactly," Kowalski says, noting that
the CR-39 tracks he saw traced the outline of the cathode wire and were
highly suggestive of nuclear activity. "Now I think there are serious
indications that there is something behind this."
About the Author
Mark Anderson is an author and science writer based in Northampton,
Mass. In February 2009, he toured Plastic Logic's Dresden, Germany, fab
for a peek at how that company's e-reader will come together.
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