

Neutron tracks revive hopes for cold fusion  - noodle
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16820-roomtemperature-fusion-in-from-the-cold.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

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DarkShikari
There's some pretty hard proof of Pons-esque cold fusion in recent years; for
example, some tests a while back showed that deuterium in palladium could
produce a large number of isotopes of heavy metals, each multiples of 4
greater in atomic mass than palladium, suggesting fusion into helium to
produce alpha particles, which then were absorbed by the palladium nuclei. I
think it's a pretty sure bet here that fusion is going on somewhere in some
fashion.

Now, what is not obvious is whether one could actually get any sort of useful
energy out of this. We already have tabletop neutron generators that classify
as a form of "cold fusion"--they just take a lot more energy in than they put
out and there's no practical way to make them more efficient, as opposed to
magnetic confinement fusion which does show promise for scaling up.

Of course, it all needs more research, which is why the way the topic has been
poisoned by Pons/Fleischmann is really a problem.

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stratomorph
Unfortunately there's no mention of what it would take to produce anything
more than a tabletop curiosity. It says, "After two to three weeks, the team
found a small number of 'triple tracks' in the plastic..." How many is a small
number? How much energy does that represent compared to the amount pumped in
as electricity?

From reading the abstract on SpringerLink, I guess 9.6 MeV is released per
neutron. At that neutron energy, about 650 billion neutrons per second would
have to be released to produce a single watt, assuming perfect conversion. Is
that reasonable? That seems high to me, but I'm not a physicist.

Without more information, it's a stretch to say this "revives hopes for cold
fusion". Without being able to read the paper, it seems that the authors have
avoided such claims. I guess "Evidence of Energetic Neutrons" wasn't the
headline new Scientist needed. [Edit:typo]

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FlorinAndrei
650 billion is a small number. A microgram contains much more particles than
that.

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stratomorph
True, but if they were getting anything like that level of activity, their
plastic detector would have been swamped. If one in a hundred million neutrons
produced by this process headed through the plastic, they could have reported
thousands of "triple tracks", rather than a "small number". I realize that the
experiment is a small step and not intended to generate energy by itself, but
it strikes me as an awfully high magnitude to be counting individually with a
microscope.

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biohacker42
NS seems like a tabloid to me. Actual article:
<http://www.springerlink.com/content/022501181p3h764l/>

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FlorinAndrei
Balls of steel. This topic is so poisoned after Fleischmann and Pons, nobody
touches it willingly. Well, looks like almost nobody.

But seriously, it's like the bugbear of research nowadays. No matter whether
it would be possible to do fusion in those conditions, or not, people avoid
getting near this subject for fear of tainting their reputations and
destroying their careers.

Personally, I'm not sure what to think about cold fusion. On one hand, making
two D particles stick together is hard. On the other, the D soup within a Pd
lattice is definitely a complex system and, probably, still has some surprises
in store. Time will tell.

