Cold Fusion Is Hot Again

(CBS)  Twenty years ago it appeared, for a moment, that all our energy problems could be solved. It was the announcement of cold fusion - nuclear energy like that which powers the sun - but at room temperature on a table top. It promised to be cheap, limitless and clean. Cold fusion would end our dependence on the Middle East and stop those greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. It would change everything.

But then, just as quickly as it was announced, it was discredited. So thoroughly, that cold fusion became a catch phrase for junk science. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion - for many scientists today, cold fusion is hot again.

"We can yield the power of nuclear physics on a tabletop. The potential is unlimited. That is the most powerful energy source known to man," researcher Michael McKubre told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.

McKubre says he has seen that energy more than 50 times in cold fusion experiments he's doing at SRI International, a respected California lab that does extensive work for the government.

McKubre is an electro-chemist who imagines, in 20 years, the creation of a clean nuclear battery. "For example, a laptop would come pre-charged with all of the energy that you would ever intend to use. You're now decoupled from your charger and the wall socket," he explained.

The same would go for cars. "The potential is for an energy source that would run your car for three, four years, for example. And you'd take it in for service every four years and they'd give you a new power supply," McKubre told Pelley.

"Power stations?" Pelley asked.

"You can imagine a one for one plug in replacement for nuclear fuel rods. And the difference only would be that at the end of the lifetime of that fuel rod, you didn't have radioactive waste that needed to be disposed of," McKubre replied.

He showed 60 Minutes just how simple the experiment looks; there are only three main ingredients. First, there is palladium, a metal in the platinum family. Second, one needs a kind of hydrogen called deuterium which is found in seawater.

"Deuterium is essentially unlimited. There is ten times as much energy in a gallon of sea water, from the deuterium contained within it, than there is in a gallon of gasoline," he explained.

The palladium is placed in water containing deuterium and the third ingredient is an electric current.

The experiment is wrapped in insulation and instruments. They're looking for what they call "excess heat." In other words, is more energy coming out than the electric current puts in?

No one knows exactly how excess heat would be generated, but McKubre showed 60 Minutes what he thinks is happening.

At the atomic level, palladium looks like a lattice and the electricity drives the deuterium to the palladium. "They sit on the surface and they pop inside the lattice," he explained, using an artist's rendition of the lattice.

McKubre believes there is a nuclear reaction - possibly a fusion process like what happens in the sun, but occurring inside the metal, at a slower rate, and without dangerous radiation.

Scientists today like to call it a nuclear effect rather than cold fusion. At least 20 labs working independently have published reports of excess heat - heat up to 25 times greater than the electricity going in.

"This little piece of palladium metal has about a third as much energy as the battery in your automobile. So very small volumes, very small masses can produce large amounts of energy," he explained, holding a small piece of palladium foil weighing just 0.3 grams.

McKubre has been working on this since that first discredited claim of cold fusion made headlines 20 years ago.

"To work on this issue is almost to put your scientific credibility at risk and I wonder why you've done it?" Pelley asked.

"My belief is that if there's a one percent chance that Fleischmann and Pons were correct, and I now believe that possibility is 99 percent. I have a duty to work on it," he replied.

Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons amazed the world in 1989 with their cold fusion news conference at the University of Utah. Fleischmann in particular was one of the world's leading electro-chemists, and the announcement of room temperature fusion set the world on fire.

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[jalewis]

Gentlemen/Ladies: Pls direct as much of your time and efforts to proving CF exists/does not exist as you spend in critising each other's positions. It's boring and you are getting nowhere in proving you viewpoint.

[ltz450af]

So billions of dollars and endless hours later., answer me this. What is the point of cold fusion? If there is no heat, what is going to turn the steam turbines that make electricity? That is all fissions does for us in reallity. Not like you will harness any power in cold form. It has to be turned into heat to be of any use to mankind. The only use cold fusion would have is to preform alchemy or try to play God in creating things we probably shouldn't. Let's make a bunch of gold so it's value and economy goes away to nothing. How about finding a way to get hot fusion and turn those turbines cleanly. Not that I'm to worried about it being figured out anyway. I think elecromagnetism would be the most likely way to make this happen in a cold state but would be an unrealistic amount of energy to accomplish this yeilding no real payoff. Let's spend our time and money a little more wisely eh. So let me hear some good arguments for.

[tblakeslee]

The early lab experiments were cold but Rossi and Focardi just demonstrated a commercial unit that generates 11 kilowatts continuously. They plan to deliver a megawatt power plant in Greece this October! No radiation in the nickel fuel or in the residue. More details here
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/03/low-energy-nuclear-reactions-2-5-million-watt-hours-from-a-nickel

[MrGeeky]

I don't know where msspec gets his prices for heavy water (deutrium Oxide). You can by 10 grams of 99.999% pure heavy water at "http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=16_17_69&products_id=135" for $10 US. Palladium is only about $400 per ounce and that little piece in the video was a only fraction of a gram. So this should be a pretty cheap experiment to reproduce excluding all of the measuring equipment.

[alfredschrader]

Getting the reaction to work is not the problem, nor the costs of materials. It's the fact that fusion gives off excess neutrons in the form of high speed radioactive flesh-tearing particles.
It is possible to grind atoms together inwhich they degrade & yield huge amounts of heat. I've already done this in my lab & it is not radioactive....Alfred Schrader 2,011

[AbdLomax]

Nobody knows what reaction is responsible for the excess heat and helium found in cold fusion reactions, but it probably is not direct deuterium fusion, because there is almost no radiation, only recently were extremely low level neutron emissions from CF cells shown by the U.S. Navy SPAWAR group. However, it's still fusion, because the energy ratio found (energy per helium nucleus) is on the money for what any process, that converts deuterium to helium, must produce.

Experiments of the type shown in the program are quite difficult to reproduce. Contrary to what the original announcement implied -- and the special seemed to imply as well, this is very difficult work. Many things can go wrong, such as exposing the heavy water to humidity, which will quickly poison the reaction. Most palladium samples will produce *nothing*, the nanostructure of the palladium is critical. Unless one is very lucky (sometimes there is high heat), it can take months of electrolysis to get enough deuterium to load into the palladium, and then very accurate calorimetry to detect the excess heat, above all the ordinary heating from the power input.

The effect is real, but that doesn't mean it's easy to see.

[MrGeeky]

It is very easy to determine if fusion has taken place. All they have to do is measure any helium atoms in the test tube. Very small numbers of helium atoms can be detected with inexpensive equipment. I'm sure they would have looked for this so either it is not fusion that makes the heat or another type of nuclear reaction or the helium could be trapped within the palladium. If the helium was trapped in the palladium then it could easily be release by melting the palladium since helium, being an inert gas, will not chemically bond to any element.

[AbdLomax]

Helium was sought and found almost twenty years ago. It's been extensively confirmed and the measurements tightened up. In "Review of cold fusion (2010)," published in the multidisciplinary journal Naturwissenschaften, last year, Storms reports the experimental value as 25 +/- 5 MeV per helium nucleus generated. That's consistent with the predicted value for deuterium fusing to helium (by any mechanism) of 23.8 MeV. This is conclusive. It's fusion. However, "fusion" almost certainly means another mechanism than deuterium-deuterium fusion, as the TV special showed in the artists' conception, and that reaction is very unlikely, because there is almost no radiation produced. No gamma rays, expected from d+d -> He-4. No neutrons, expected from the normal branches of the reaction. This is truly an "unknown nuclear reaction," though Storms says that there are now "plausible theories."

But this doesn't mean that cold fusion tea samovars are just around the corner. It's one cantankerous reaction, whatever it is. But it's a reproducible experiment, i.e., run a lot of cells with the state of the art, and look at the unexpected heat and the helium, and they match. Always, so far. There is no contrary evidence. It's time for the physicists to get to work on theories as to mechanism: after all, that's their field. Chemists discovered this, but explaining it is outside their expertise.

[samuelblack]

>One of the misconceptions that seems to be evident is that only the government would be involved in attempting to suppress cold fusion research; otherwise who would oppose it. The answer: Hot fusion scientists at MIT.

If you are so gullible to believe that a few hot fusion scientists at MIT have enough power to suppress a revolutionary energy source that would provide unprecedented benefit to the US and its government, then it is no surprise that you are also gullible enough to believe cold fusion is real.

>Lobbyists for the 'hot fusion' community took the following steps:
>1. A committee visited several laboratories where low-energy nuclear reactios were achieved and declared them all invalid.

Big deal. What gives them a monopoly on declarations of validity? If CF were valid, where were the committees sent by non-hot-fusion scientists to declare the experiments valid? Funding agencies like the DOE go to great lengths to avoid reviews from scientists with conflicts of interest. Since they would stand to benefit immensely from the success of CF, they would surely seek unbiased reviewers, and there are plenty of them around.

>2. An agent was obtained at the Office of Patents and Trademarks to ensure that no cold fusion patents were approved

How do you ?obtain an agent?? How does a lobby group or an agent simply ensure that no patents on a particular subject are approved? Why didn?t the CF researchers ?obtain an agent? and ensure that no hot fusion patents are approved? You know that the money provided by the DOE for hot fusion research has to be accounted for, and paying lobbyists and bribing patent officers is not an acceptable line in the budget. The DOE after all, and the government it represents would benefit immensely from the success of CF. Maybe the patent office just decided not to grant patents for technology that doesn't work.

>(? It is possible to get patents in France, Italy, Israel, South Korea and Japan, all of whom have government-backed cold fusion programs.)

And isn?t it funny that CF progress in those countries is no better than in the US, which is to say, there isn?t any.

>3. All major U.S. technical journals were warned against printing any cold fusion articles.

Warned by hot fusion scientists? What possible weight could they put behind such a warning? That they would then withhold papers? Are you suggesting a scenario in which CF is valid, but journals won?t publish it for fear of losing hot fusion articles? Do you think they would be afraid to publish the most revolutionary, environmentally beneficial articles on energy in 50 years, and become the most cited energy journal on the planet, because they want to keep publishing luke-warm incremental progress on a so-far unsuccessful technology? Is that what you think?

>4. A fund of about $30,000 was provided to Random House to fund a book to destroy the credibility of cold fusion. This book was BAD SCIENCE, THE SHORT LIFE AND WEIRD TIMES OF COLD FUSION, a hatchet job by Gary Taubes.

Have you informed the DOE about this? Because, if it?s true, I?m pretty sure it represents an illegal use of their funds, and as a major beneficiary of successful CF research, I?m pretty sure they wouldn?t like it.

Anyway, if all it takes is 30k, why don?t the CF proponents get a book written to rebuild the credibility of CF? Oh, that?s right. They?ve tried. With several books in fact. I wonder why it?s not working. They seem to spend more time writing about the saga than doing more experiments, probably because they?ve realized that more experiments with the same ambiguous, marginal, irreproducible, and impractical results aren?t going to be any more convincing than what they?ve already got. (Perhaps less.)

>5. An 'official' from Washington, D.C. called all major universities and warned them, 'If you have so much as a graduate student working on cold fusion, you will get NO CONTRACTS OUT OF WASHINGTON!'

What?s an 'official' from Washington? And how do lobbyists for hot fusion scientists persuade such an 'official' to threaten universities not to do research on a subject that purports to provide unprecedented benefit to the US? Do you think these hot fusion scientists can use government money to bribe government officials to act against the government's own interest by prescribing university research? And if that kind of circularity works, how would a well-funded area of research ever get shut down? Like say, the integral fast reactor?

>6. Robert Park, a self-appointed 'spokesman' for the American Physical Society has been vigorously lambasting cold fusion and its supporters for over ten years.

Park is not a hot-fusion scientist. Anyway, why doesn't a CF advocate self-appoint himself as a 'spokesman' for the APS, and vigorously advocate CF and its supporters? Maybe Park is more effective because he is right.

[tblakeslee]

How about a Nobel Prize winner? Here's Julian Schwinger's take:
http://www.brillouinenergy.com/JS_A_Progress_Report.pdf

[samuelblack]

>Senator John Kerry and Hazel O'Leary acitively shut down a competing technology to the hot fusion program at MIT (Just check Wikipedia under the integral fast reactor).

And yet, solar, wind, and geothermal research continue, and research into fission reactors is picking up again, if not quite as much into breeder reactors.

>Why? It allegedly led to "threats to non-proliferation". Big tobacco said that nicotine was non-addictive.

But the medical establishment disagreed, with virtual unanimity.

>Big coal told you that CO^2 didn't cause global warming.

But the climatology establishment disagrees, with virtual unanimity.

>Big physics (MIT) told you that the IFR was a threat to non-proliferation.

No. That would be the environmentalist movement, which doesn't like fission reactors of any kind, and particularly dislikes breeders. Jane Fonda had a little to do with that attitude. The physics establishment is largely supportive of fission reactors for energy, with or without breeding, but most I think would admit that the production of plutonium in breeders requires special precautions to avoid proliferation, or at least the perception of proliferation.

>The real reason is that if the IFR had been selected, the hot fusion program at MIT would have been superflous and MIT stood to lose billions of dollars in research grants. Apparently Senator Kerry shut down the program to protect his constituents at MIT...

This doesn't make sense. The funding for the IFR was also in the billions. Why wouldn't the constituents doing that research deserve equal protection? Or even more, if the program really was more viable, and therefore offered more benefit to the country. The truth is that the economics of both technologies are very much unknown, and until the technologies are more developed, no one knows which is more viable, so continuation of the IFR would not have been an immediate threat to hot fusion. In fact, to date, all breeder reactors have been very expensive, and some have been shut down (in France e.g.) because they are not competitive. As promising as breeder reactors may be, fusion, if it can be made to work economically, still has dramatic advantages in terms of fuel sources, and in the public perception of waste products and the dangers of catastrophic failures (meltdowns). And so it is very unlikely fusion research will stop for advances in fission research.

>Cold fusion and the IFR were both shut down by MIT who stood to lose billions of dollars in research grants if either program was successful

But surely MIT's reach is confined more or less to the US, and (this may come as a surprise to you) there is science beyond the borders of the US. And yet, in spite of considerable work on both fast breeders (esp. in France and Russia), and CF outside the US, work outside the US is also continuing unabated in plasma fusion research. In fact, the next big plasma fusion reactor (iter) is being built in France, the country that supported Pons & Fleischmann for a while, and that has the highest percentage of its energy produced by fission (78%), and that has done the most research into breeder reactors.

You would be much more successful arguing that big oil or big coal was shutting down CF and IFR research. Their reach is much more global, they have a lot more money, the money doesn't come from the government (a potential beneficiary of CF), and a lot more people would be affected. But it's too late now. If you change horses now, we'll all recognize you as a conspiracy theory in search of a conspirator.

>Does anyone believe that politics played no role in shutting down cold fusion research and the IFR in this country?

Certainly not in CF, for which funding has been grossly out of proportion to the results produced (although not from the DOE). Environmental politics has regrettably played a negative role in the shutting down of research into fast breeders. That is likely to change when (if) global warming becomes manifestly obvious from the rise in sea level. Hopefully it won't take that long.

[crackpotsloughter]

One of the misconceptions that seems to be evident is that only the government would be involved in attempting to suppress cold fusion research; otherwise who would oppose it. The answer: Hot fusion scientists at MIT. Consider the following website by Emerging Energy Marketing Firm, Inc. Prepared for Republican National Committee. Subject: The politics of New-Energy Technology.

"When low-energy nuclear fusion (dubbed 'cold fusion' by the media) was first announced, the 'hot fusion' community falsely assumed that this low-energy nuclear reaction was a threat to the continuation of $500 million (or more) per year from the DOE. Lobbyists for the 'hot fusion' community took the following steps:

1. A committee visited several laboratories where low-energy nuclear reactios were achieved and declared them all invalid.

2. An agent was obtained at the Office of Patents and Trademarks to ensure that no cold fusion patents were approved (I will note in passing that the worst that would have happened if hot fusion scientists had been right is that a few perpetual motion machines would have been patented. Since they are wrong, it may have cost American inventors billions of dollars in lost patent royalties. It is possible to get patents in France, Italy, Israel, South Korea and Japan, all of whom have government-backed cold fusion programs.)

3. All major U.S. technical journals were warned against printing any cold fusion articles. (All but FUSION TECHNOLOGY, the journal of the American Nuclear Society agreed not to publish).

4. A fund of about $30,000 was provided to Random House to fund a book to destroy the credibility of cold fusion. This book was BAD SCIENCE, THE SHORT LIFE AND WEIRD TIMES OF COLD FUSION, a hatchet job by Gary Taubes.

5. An 'official' from Washington, D.C. called all major universities and warned them, 'If you have so much as a graduate student working on cold fusion, you will get NO CONTRACTS OUT OF WASHINGTON!'

6. Robert Park, a self-appointed 'spokesman' for the American Physical Society has been vigorously lambasting cold fusion and its supporters for over ten years. PARK IS NOW BEING SUED." As far as the final comment, Park recently went on the record to proclaim that cold fusion is "science" just not important science.

Senator John Kerry and Hazel O'Leary acitively shut down a competing technology to the hot fusion program at MIT (Just check Wikipedia under the integral fast reactor). Why? It allegedly led to "threats to non-proliferation". Big tobacco said that nicotine was non-addictive. Big coal told you that CO^2 didn't cause global warming. Big physics (MIT) told you that the IFR was a threat to non-proliferation.

The real reason is that if the IFR had been selected, the hot fusion program at MIT would have been superflous and MIT stood to lose billions of dollars in research grants. Apparently Senator Kerry shut down the program to protect his constituents at MIT because no other Senators felt compelled to shut down the program, only Senator Kerry.

According to the experts Charles E. Till and George S. Stanford, the IFR promised clean, inexhaustible energy that was weapons incompatible and proliferation-resistant. It was safe, could burn up all special nuclear materials, including plutonium from decommissioned warheads, and the radioactive wastes from light-water reactors.

Cold fusion and the IFR were both shut down by MIT who stood to lose billions of dollars in research grants if either program was successtul (When Kerry and O'Leary shut down the IFR, it was three years from completion and completing the work would have cost no more than shutting it down (Stanford)).

Does anyone believe that politics played no role in shutting down cold fusion research and the IFR in this country?

[JedRothwell]

Samuelblack wrote:

"And this is especially so given that your claim about reproducibility is contradicted in the paper [by Miles] you cite to support it."

Please note that I cited McKubre, Mengoli, Arata or Iwamura for reproducibility. I said that "Miles et al. showed that repeatability is a function of the material." I did not say they claimed high reproducibility. They found the main source of irreproducibility: the materials. Reproducibility has increased a great deal since they wrote that paper.

As for the rest, I will let you have the last word again.

[samuelblack]

>>The only specific reference you supply to support your claim of repeatability is not refereed . . ."

>In my opinion, China Lake reports are better than most peer-reviewed papers.

As you are careful to point out below, your opinion means squat. And this is especially so given that your claim about reproducibility is contradicted in the paper you cite to support it.

>>"And in table 10, by 100% repeatability, you are presumably referring to several materials in which the effect was observed twice in 2 tries."

>Yes, 7 out of 8 tests for the NRL material, 2 out of 2 for the Johnson-Matthey Type A palladium supplied by Fleischmann and Pons.

But in spite of this, the authors of the paper conclude explicitly in several places that CF is not reproducible. You said "I know many experiments that fit this description [consistently repeatable]" and cited Miles (1996) to support it. The paper actually asks two questions in the Intro:

1. Is the apparent physical effect real? and
2. If so, can it be reproduced regularly?

In response to question 2, it answers

"... no. The lack of reproducibility has made this research exceedingly difficult and frustrating. The only consolation is that no other research group in the world has been able to solve the reproducibility problem. Given that the excess heat effect is real, this will never be a useful energy source until the reproducibility problem is solved."

Gee, that kind of sounds like what Gruber was saying. So the paper you cite actually supports Gruber's point, and contradicts yours.

> See also the statistical analysis of the helium results in this paper:

Now, you're just trying to divert attention from the question of reproducibility, which was the reason you cited the paper. No one disputes the fact that the CF researchers claim their results prove CF. The point of this discussion was that even the CF researchers admit that it's not reproducible.

>"This statistical treatment shows that the odds are approximately one in 750,000 that our complete set of heat and helium results could be this well correlated due to random experimental errors in our calorimetry and helium measurements.

This is based on unsupportable assumptions that errors would cause a 50/50 chance of excess heat and or excess He, and it is irrelevant if the artifacts that produce the errors are correlated (i.e. not random). The opposite of random errors is not fusion.

>>"I just flipped all the coins in my pocket twice, and the nickel came up heads both times."

>Let's see you get 9 out of 10,

If someone slipped 4 of 5 nickels into the mix with heads on both sides, that's what I'd see.

> or better yet, let's see you get 749,999 out of 750,000.

Now you're mixing up reproducibility with probability of a real effect. Even though the paper claims vanishing likelihood that the effect is not real, it admits that "Most experiments produced no evidence of any excess power. Overall, only 30% of our experiments yielded evidence for excess power."

>It takes several years to do this many experiments. You cannot expect better proof than 9 out of 10.

Why not? 10 out of 10 fission fuel rods produce heat. And they all produce the same heat to within small tolerances. And they did so less than a decade after fission was discovered.

Anyway, the authors don't claim 90%, they claim 30%. But even if you claim that for a particular material the reproducibility is 90% in this experiment, what happens when another lab follows the recipe? Will they get 90% too? And if so, then considering this was done in 1996, how is possible that a review of excess heat experiments in 2007 still only claims that 1/3 of the experiments are successful? And if a recipe for 90% reproducibility exists, how is it possible that it hasn't been made practical yet? So many questions. So few answers.

>>"You cannot be serious."

>This is not about me.

Yes it is. This is about you making false claims in this forum. This is about you and your claim that CF is reproducible. The paper you cited to support your claim contradicts it. Explicitly. Several times.

>Miles & Johnson are serious, and these results are definitive.

But they do not support reproducibility; nor do the authors claim it.

[JedRothwell]

I wrote:

"My reports were not erroneous. They were accurate, and authors did not retract."

I meant that my reports were accurate descriptions of the claims made by the authors, and those authors did not retract, as far as I know. One author is dead (CETI) and the other I have lost contact with (Hydrodynamics).

I did not perform the experiments or make the claims. I reported them. I did make measurements with my own instruments, as described in these reports, and as far as I could tell they confirmed the author's claims (except for the mistake I discovered at Hydrodynamics, which was corrected). My reports were carefully reviewed by the authors and by other outside observers, and I am sure they were accurate. But, as I said, several independent replications would be needed to establish these claims.

I should perhaps add that I have discovered and reported far more mistakes in cold fusion experiments than all of so-called "skeptics" put together. If anyone deserves to be called a skeptic in this field, I do. I have found no significant mistakes in any mainstream experiments, other than those that the authors themselves point out, such as Mengoli (1998), p. 167. The people criticizing the experiments here know nothing about the work, and nothing about the instruments and methods, and the few papers they have looked at they have grossly misunderstood. They are not "skeptics" in the traditional sense of the word.