Pelley's Reporter's Notebook
April 16, 2009 1:33 PM
Presented in 1989, cold fusion was quickly dismissed as junk science. But today, the experiments could lead to a monumental breakthrough in energy production. Scott Pelley reports.
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A Primer for Non-Physicists
Atoms comprise of negatively charged electrons whirling around a relatively small nucleus of neutrons and positively charged protons. Protons have a mass 1836 times the mass of electrons. A neutron is a combination of an electron and a proton with zero net electrostatic charge. An atom?s number of protons and its equal number of electrons determine its type of element. Only when a positive ion (such as a proton or nucleus of a helium atom) penetrates an atom?s nucleus does the atomic nucleus become another element (or another isotope of the same element) or becomes unstable and splits (fissions) into two or more elements.
For decades, physicists have assumed that changing (transmuting) elements always requires high energies. Elaborately expensive machinery was required to accelerate a positively charged particle of less than atomic size to a high enough energy to overcome the electrostatic repulsion of an atom?s nucleus and penetrate its interior.
Cold fusion is only one of several types of physical phenomena which indicate the existence of a mechanism by which elements could be changed to other elements without seemingly requiring very high energies. However, the secret of cold fusion?s excess heat had remained a mystery until September 13, 1996 when Kenneth Shoulders explained how the fracturing of palladium loaded with hydrogen (deuterons) could produce high-density charge clusters and cause nuclear reactions. Based on this evidence and on the pioneering work of Rod Neal and Stan Gleeson, a trio of physicists, Hal Fox, Robert W. Bass, and Shang-Xian Jin, finally deduced a more complete theory of the nature of the mechanism which extends beyond the discovery of cold fusion. The magnitude of their fundamental scientific discovery can best be appreciated by considering that Hal Fox?s Fusion Information Center, Inc., has collected over 3,000 papers on cold fusion since its discovery in 1989 without anyone being able to offer a complete understanding of just how cold fusion works.
What follows is a simplified explanation of their remarkable concept using an analogy of electrons as ping pong balls and protons as bowling balls. Visualize a room with one wall as the positive plate connected to the positive terminal of a battery, and the opposite wall as the negative plate connected to the battery?s negative terminal. Each ping pong ball is negatively charged and when released at the negative wall, electrostatic repulsion/attraction will cause the ping pong ball to fly across the room to the positive wall. Each bowling ball is positively charged and when released at the positive wall, it will roll slowly in the opposite direction across the room to the negative wall.
Both the ping pong ball and the bowling ball have an equal but opposite electrostatic charge. So therefore they both draw the same amount of electrical energy from the battery as they fly or roll from one wall to the opposite wall. But because the ping pong ball is so much lighter than the bowling ball, the ping pong ball will strike the opposite wall at a much greater speed than the bowling ball.
Now assume that 1,000,000 ping pong balls are released as a cluster at the negative wall. (At a high enough density, electrons will forget their mutual electrostatic repulsion and cluster in the same manner as ball lightning. Mother Nature sometimes pulls weird tricks.) Embedded in the ping pong ball cluster are 10 bowling balls. Because there are so many more negatively charged ping pong balls, the positively charged bowling balls are going to stick with the ping pong balls and ignore the attraction of the negative wall and the repulsion of the positive wall. So therefore the bowling balls hitch a free ride along with the ping pong balls. When the bowling balls hit the positive wall along with the ping pong balls at the same speed as the ping pong balls, the bowling balls will hit the positive wall with enormously greater energies than if they had hit the negative wall, rolling slowly alone, in the opposite direction.
In the same manner, protons (and other types of positive ions) in ?low-energy? nuclear reactions are hurled into the nuclei of atoms by their ?piggy-back? ride on high-density electron charge clusters with sufficient energy to split or transmute atoms. This mechanism apparently is the secret of cold fusion?s excess heat, eliminating radioactivity, transmutation of common elements into scarce elements, and powerful new atom smashers small enough for college physics laboratories. If the new theory holds up to scrutiny by other physicists, it might win a Nobel prize in physics!
Gary Vesperman
www.energysuppression.com