I was surprised to find that there is a lot of theoretical justification for possible mechanisms of cold fusion, and a lot of experimental evidence that must either be suggestive of something interesting, or indicative of bold-faced and widespread fraud.
It was also interesting the discover that the original experiment was dismissed because other experimenters failed to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons result ... despite not actually trying to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons experimental setup accurately. For example, not meeting the same level of hydrogen loading in the metal matrix.
It could all absolutely be BS, but I was surprised that it wasn’t actually proven to be BS; it was just not proven to not be BS, and was then made “embarrassing”.
You can’t prove a negative though, the onus was on F&S to prove their result and they couldn’t do that. They had misinterpreted some of their results (they had not detected gamma rays or fusion byproducts) and had made errors in their experimental design. Basically they were chemists, and their claims of fusion were based on misunderstandings of the physics.
A way to think about this is just to eliminate fusion from their claims. Ignore that, they didn’t have any evidence for it. The bottom line was, could they reliably generate useful heat. The answer to that was also no. So really, what are you left with?
Having said that room temperature fusion is a real thing. You can build a fusor in a garage with commonly available parts. It may well be possible to generate very low levels of fusion reactions in various ways, but generating useful energy that way may never be possible. Best of luck for these people for trying, you never know and maybe some useful insights will come from it.
What you're left with is something you don't understand. That's often been a precursor to real breakthroughs.
If you don't understand it, it's not surprising that you can't make it useful. That doesn't say much about what you'll be capable of, after you do understand it.
While it's true that the onus was on F&P to prove their results, it's also true that if someone else is claiming to replicate the experiment, the onus is on them to do it correctly.
F&P were unable to replicate their results. People have been trying for decades, with their help and the best they get is some occasional anomalies. The contention that the experiment has never been ‘properly’ replicated comes from the fact that they made some errors in their experimental design and description. How can you ‘properly’ recreate an experiment if the given design is known to be inaccurate?
If you follow the known to be inaccurate description people will complain you’re not doing what the actually did. If you do what they actually did (or seem to have done as best we can tell), people will complain you didn’t follow their published description. Meanwhile F&P still couldn’t get reliable results themselves.
> What you're left with is something you don't understand. That's often been a precursor to real breakthroughs.
Sometimes. Often, what you’re left with is unusable experimental results because you don’t have a clue. The proper way to resolve that is what they did with faster-than-light neutrinos: ask for collaboration with other labs and try to replicate the result. This whole thing is not science, it’s cargo-culting the way science is described in pop culture.
Which is when (if you do Science much) your heart sinks because you become absolutely certain that you have made (another) mistake and will now spend days/weeks/months trying to pin it down.
Just wanted to follow up on fusors, since the technology seems to be less known that it deserves to be. As parent says, it is a completely solid, in-your-garage demonstration of fusion. Lot's of information at fusor.net [0].
It looks like positive-return-on-energy fusion will almost certainly be achievable in 5-10 years, though it won't be commercializable for a lot longer than that.
I do like how incredibly simple and easy fusors are compared to the other types of fusion reactor, but sadly they are still very very hot where it counts.
>> Basically they were chemists, and their claims of fusion were based on misunderstandings of the physics.
That's an interesting interpretation. My interpretation at the time was that they are chemists and ruled out chemical reactions as the heat source. They concluded it must be physics. Physicists then said "It can't be nuclear, it must be chemical" - forgetting who was doing the experiment. They seemed really arrogant to me.
The problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment.
Compare this with high temperature superconductivity. If you get a time machine and go to 1985 and try to promote high temperature superconductivity, nobody will take you seriously.
But a team discover one material and published a clear recipe to built it. Other team tried some variations, and discovered an easier recipe to build them and published it. So soon everybody and their dog was making new variants, and new variants, and new variants...
A few years ago, they gave one in the physics' lab for undergraduate students, and we made a few measurements for a month carefully because they don't tolerate humidity. Until someone put it in a glass with water and ice to measure the properties at 0°C.
Also, now you can also see the recipe in a video in YouTube by "Applied Science": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU , the guy has some advanced lab, but nothing too advanced.
The problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment.
>> The problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment.
That certainly seems to be the case today, but it was not the case when physicists rejected the claim outright. In other words, the rejection came before the reproducibility problems.
I can tell you exactly what the editor said after reading the first paper about high temperature superconductivity:
fake quote> Nah.
The nice thing about physics is that it doesn't matter if the community reject the idea. If you have a nice experiment that is reproducible and has clear and easy instructions, sooner or later the community will accept it, and you may get a Nobel price. If the experiment is weird and you are unlucky, it can take a few decades.
Here is another weird experiment, with another weird result, but it's reproducible and has clear and easy to follow instructions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_experiment
This is entirely unlike high-temperature superconductivity, though. We knew superconductivity was a thing in some materials under a give material-dependent critical temperature. Looking for compounds with higher critical temperature is not a major shift, or surprising in any way. Why would any editor say no when someone writes “look, we’ve found a crystal with a high critical temperature”?
Had they published something along the lines of “we’ve seen this cool thing; we think it works that way; could anyone replicate this?”, there wouldn’t have been any controversy. But they did not offer any insight, their results were unreliable, and their interpretation was doubtful. It’s not because you don’t understand something that fairies must be involved somehow.
We had an explanation of superconductivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_pair but it didn't apply to high temperature superconductivity. It took many years to get a good enough explanation of high temperature superconductivity, and IIRC there are a few details that are not understood. So it was surprising that someone made a high temperature superconductor.
As far as I know, there is no theoretical reason to discard cold fusion. There are a few "cold fusion" method that work, like using muons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion but it's so expensive to create muons and they are short lived, so you expend more energy than the useful energy you can collect from the device.
So (in 1985) both phenomena were in the same class, it was not theoretically impossible, but no one had shown a good experiment were they happened.
> Had they published something along the lines of “we’ve seen this cool thing; we think it works that way; could anyone replicate this?”, there wouldn’t have been any controversy. But they did not offer any insight, their results were unreliable, and their interpretation was doubtful. It’s not because you don’t understand something that fairies must be involved somehow.
Perhaps we agree, the problem of Cold Fusion is the lack of a reliable experiment. (And too many scammers publishing bad experiments and trying to get investors.)
The concept of low-temperature fusion in itself is not absurd necessarily, but there is a whole lot of orders of magnitude to overcome. And it cannot be easy or common, or we’d have seen it already: one particle releasing ~1 MeV in a crystal leaves traces, which we can interpret very well. So the proofs need to be solid, not just hand-waving “it must be fusion, because we haven’t got the faintest idea”.
The fuzziness about how you’d have fusion reactions by just putting protons in a metal is a bit dodgy. Everything else about it was a huge red flag. Yes, HTS are a bit different than older superconductors, and yes, we don’t know everything about them. But again, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine that there could be some mechanisms that could move the critical temperature by a factor of 5 to 10. Fundamentally, it’s still an exotic form of collective behaviour. Cold fusion amounts to getting ~0.1 MeV (the order of magnitude to tunnel through electrostatic interaction to reach a nucleus) out of ~0.05 eV (the energy of a proton at room temperature). That’s about as plausible as saying that you’d reach Earth’s escape velocity by running down a mountain. Of course, you’d be more credible with a rocket strapped on your back. Cold fusion is missing that rocket.
Not every outlandish claim should garner the attention and respect from scientists. If you hide your "discovery," refuse to publish in scientific journals and be subject to peer review, if you claim "secrecy" is why no one can replicate your result, well, you'll be tossed on to the tall pile of folks claiming this or that physics breakthrough.
Physicists have to deal with this kind of crackpottery a LOT. They don't owe you their time unless you have some solid evidence and full transparency. Don't want full transparency? Be prepared to be called a fraud. That's how it goes.
> That certainly seems to be the case today, but it was not the case when physicists rejected the claim outright.
The claim was of specific results which were inconsistent with the people performing the experiment having survived it. The experimenters being alive to give press appearances was sufficient reason to reject that claim out of hand.
That something else very interesting, but unknown, might have been happening wasn't rejected until after robust reproduction attempts failed to produce any evidence of that.
The nuclear physicists were simply pointing out that the evidence F&P offered of detecting a fusion reaction, was not actually evidence of fusion. I dont really see what’s arrogant about that.
> The nuclear physicists were simply pointing out that the evidence F&P offered of detecting an [unknown] fusion reaction, was not actually evidence of [known] fusion reaction.
No I don't, even if there is something unknown going on that has none of the known characteristics of fusion, why even say it's fusion? Why attach that label to it, especially when you have no actual theory of what is happening and why?
To put it another way, why are you calling this an unknown fusion reaction? What's the basis for the claim that it was fusion of any kind?
F&P thought that the evidence they had found demonstrated fusion. That it was known evidence of fusion. They were simply wrong. Saying 'well it might be some unknown form of fusion' is post-hoc rationalisation (for which you have no evidence or theory). That's not what they were saying at the time.
It's so infuriating that 30 years later we're still fighting these fundamental misconceptions about what was going on.
Excellent thanks. That's very helpful as those analogies are very apt. The West Indies has nothing to do with India. Atoms are no unbreakable. Cold Fusion has nothing to do with fusion. I'm glad we got that straight.
> Physicists then said "It can't be nuclear, it must be chemical" - forgetting who was doing the experiment.
No, what lots of people (many of them far more prominent chemists than P&F said, not just physicists) is that, if honest, it had to be measurement error, not only based on abstract analysis of the described setup and results, but also based on robust attempts to replicate the claimed results.
> despite not actually trying to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons experimental setup accurately
They (Fleischmann & Pons) did not prove anything in the first place, so after that the “not the true experiment” thing is a fallacy. There will always be too much of something or not enough of anything. You can never replicate exactly an experiment, but this does not prevent all of science from progressing and reproducing results. Physics does not care about who operates the experiment. So if something works only when specific people try it, it does not give any confidence in the results. In other words, it does set the bullshit alarm ringing.
There is no theoretical foundation for cold fusion, and no known mechanism for it to work. So even if it does exist, their stance of “just trust us, and let us move the goalposts about replicability” is just voodoo and, yes, bullshit.
It's important to distinguish between current actual results from labs working very carefully and methodically and turning up interesting anomalous results, and the original claims made by F&P.
Yes there is interesting physics here and there's a lot we don't know about the behaviour of hydrogen and deuterium in dense metallic crystal lattices. Who knows, that behaviour might even have something to do with fusion.
That's separate from what F&P were claiming 30 years ago. They claimed to have produced 'tremendous heat' and to have detected evidence of fusion (gamma rays and fusion products). They couldn't replicate the heat measurements, there were experimental errors that mean we can't know if they had generated excess heat at all, and they were simply mistaken that the evidence they had gathered indicated fusion.
Two things can both be true at the same time. These new experiments might indicate heat generation and might indicate fusion, and the F&P experiments demonstrated none of those things. Those are not contradictory statements.
Heck, F&P might even have stimulated fusion in their experiments. It's impossible to prove a negative. The point is they didn't demonstrate that at all.
Digging into the research here, there are a lot of results which indicate some form of LENR should be feasible in suitably complex environments. As an example, calculating the exact screening effect of a metal lattice from theory has not been performed to anyones satisfaction, particularly if you account for hydrogen moving within the lattice, or the lattice undergoing some deformation.
The experimenters researching this clearly don't have a great way to control for other factors in an experimental setting either.
As an example, there are multiple reports of transmutations being observed following a hydride doping experiment... however these are all done by gas spectrometer. It's unclear from the experiments whether there happened to be random impurities in the hydride prior to doping.
Similarly heat/neutron measurements are really difficult to get right and be convincing.
As a materials physicist, I have no idea what you mean by this:
> As an example, calculating the exact screening effect of a metal lattice from theory has not been performed to anyones satisfaction, particularly if you account for hydrogen moving within the lattice, or the lattice undergoing some deformation.
Screening effect from what? There is nothing surprising in the way hydrogen behaves in a metal. We can simulate that with great accuracy, in fact we do it all the time as hydrogen embrittlement is an important issue in metallurgy.
This type of cold fusion would require two nuclei overcoming humongous energy barriers to get close enough to each other. No form of motion within a crystal lattice or no amount of deformation is going to provide that. The energies involved are about 6 orders of magnitude short.
Heat is trivial to measure, we’ve been doing that since the 19th century. Neutrons are not particularly difficult either, we’ve been doing that since the 1940s.
Yes, but that’s not how it works.
There still is an energy barrier to “land into” a nucleus, and tunnelling through that is just not plausible with the energy of a proton in a crystal lattice, again by more than 6 orders of magnitude. Structure defects do not magically create energy to give it to nearby ions.
I can see one way the mass is relevant in this case: it changes the particle’s wavevector. It does change the probability of tunnelling through the energy barrier (lighter particles tunnel mor easily), but that effect is completely negligible compared to the height of the barrier.
The energy you get from the reaction has nothing to do with the mass of the particles; not all mass is “converted” to energy. The mass energy of a proton is 931 MeV. The energy you get from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction is ~14 MeV.
Besides, this is irrelevant, as there is a ~1 MeV energy barrier preventing the reaction, which you still have to go through.
If you’re implying that the energy from one reaction could be used to make another reaction happen, then yes. But when your atoms emit 14 MeV each, you don’t have a crystal, you have a plasma. And this is not cold fusion, it is just regular fusion, same as in a star or in a tokamak.
Electric field can easily create plasma at tips. Effect known as St. Elmo's fire. If material have impurity in the form of a tip in a cavity, then an electric field can create plasma in this cavity.
No, it cannot. There is not a single instance reported of spontaneous plasma formation in a defect in a crystal, charged or otherwise. The electric field within a conductor is effectively zero: you cannot have the kind electric field required.
This would be very easy to see if it were happening: the brutal expansion of the plasma would create huge stresses and its high temperature would melt the material locally. This is just not happening.
You are also moving the goalposts again: there is no such thing as protons getting accelerated by a MeV just by interacting with defects; the mass of a proton is irrelevant; and you don’t have spontaneous plasma in a crystal. Nothing you’ve written in this thread is supported by reality.
> This would be very easy to see if it were happening: the brutal expansion of the plasma would create huge stresses and its high temperature would melt the material locally. This is just not happening.
Local melting reported from the beginning for 20+ years.
Quotes:
Occasionally, energy density is sufficient to cause local melting.[87] Melting is possible because many impurities lower the melting point well below that of pure palladium (1554.9°C).[105, 106]
In the course of these experiments, the Japanese researchers verified the existence of other phenomena frequently reported from cold fusion experiments, such as occasional releases of energy in the form of sharp bursts.
Formation of small craters on the surface of Pd cathode during electrolysis in electrolytes based on heavy water is sometimes interpreted as a consequence of low-temperature nuclear reactions. In this note we discuss the validity of these statements.
I see, A Student’s Guide to Cold Fusion. That is cute. And now the goalposts have moved from spontaneous melting to local melting under an electric field.
Reference 87 does not support melting in any way (you don't get faceted voids from local melting, and yes, local melting is a thing, just not spontaneous at room temperature with unaccelerated protons). References 105 and 106 have nothing to do with melting.
It is not difficult to find references (I mean, real ones, not dodgy conference proceedings) showing that defects can lower the melting point of a metal under certain conditions. But lowering the melting point does not make melting happen on its own at room temperature, either. And even if you can demonstrate that there is some melting, rather than an electrochemical reaction, it does not mean that any fusion reaction happened. It's about as credible as blaming aliens for a pattern you see in the noise.
> Formation of small craters on the surface of Pd cathode during electrolysis in electrolytes based on heavy water is sometimes interpreted as a consequence of low-temperature nuclear reactions
This is bunk. The Earth is sometimes referred to as a disk; it does not make the flat earth argument sound, particularly if the people doing the referring are the same people building a case out of it.
Again, none of this makes any sense, you're just wasting your time.
This is interesting development. Back then when Pons and Fleischmann first came out with this in 89, they were heavily ridiculed ( or smeared) by main stream academics like MIT. It also turns out MIT has received a lot of money to do hot fusion research. Wouldn't be the first time that interests of funding interfered with science.
Yeah, I always heard it was complete BS, but when you look into it there have been some weird phenomena reported. Unfortunately no one seems to be able to reliably produce them.
One thing that is an indispensable lesson of graduate research: actually trying to make a cutting edge measurement and pick signal from noise is INCREDIBLY hard. It's easy to underestimate just how noisy frakking everything is. Every thing looks complex and uncertain and it's only through extremely hard work and careful measurement that you can know ANYTHING.
So complexity is actually the norm. The irreducible complexity of noise.
> despite not actually trying to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons experimental setup accurately
I’ve been seeing this claim in another field: about hydroxychloquinine. Every time a study comes out which doesn’t show a benefit, people rush in saying “that’s because they forgot X, didn’t dose the right amount of Y, etc”
I’m actually not sure what to make of this phenomenon in general. I will say though that when you’re trying to test a hypothesis, completely replicating another experiment isn’t necessary. You should test it under a variety of conditions. That makes it easier to avoid the same hidden mistakes that the original experiment might have included.
You should definitely also try the exact original conditions. Think about reducing a tricky bug: you start with the exact input and code that first caused the problem, then try removing constraints to see what preserves the bug.
Ed; I should clarify: you start with whatever big nasty test scenario you need to make sure you can reproduce the effect at all, and only then can you start changing the conditions and be confident you're still measuring the same thing.
Yes but science and computer programming are fundamentally different activities. The programmer tries to reproduce the bug because his main fear is that he can’t see its effect. But the scientist’s main fear is that the experimental setup does not robustly test the underlying hypothesis. If you reproduce exactly the conditions (and remember you will always be criticized for missing X), the best you can learn is whether the previous result was not completely fabricated (or statistical noise). It’s much more productive to subject a result to a wide battery of tests.
If you're dealing with an unknown, confusing phenomenon, you don't know what the underlying hypothesis is. You don't know yet what constitutes rigorous testing and what is just wandering off into the weeds. So you need to start with seeing if the thing happens at all. You do in fact need to know whether the previous result was garbage before it can be productive to do a wide battery of tests. And "wide" depends on how sensitive to conditions your effect is, which you also don't know yet. Your closest thing to an anchor is the initial claimed setup, so start there.
If cold fusion exists that produces more energy than it consumes, it would take some extreme conditions. If cold fusion could appear under normal-ish conditions, we would have already observed it and tapped into it
From Wikipedia: "After proposing the vehicle's design, and presenting the analysis to demonstrate its viability, the Blackbird team learned that others had previously conceived and built similar designs—most notably aerodynamics engineer Andrew B. Bauer, later with the Douglas Aircraft Company, built and demonstrated such a vehicle in 1969, based on an analysis presented in a student's paper from some 20 years earlier."
I don't think LENR is possible, but I'd love to be wrong and I do think that some money and energy should be spent investigating it.
What I find interesting is some phenomena that was clearly present in some of these demonstrations - even if it wasn't LENR. The anomalous results are worth investigating because there may be unknown physics lurking there, but anything related to CF is scientifically taboo.
Fleischmann and Pons had a lab sponsored by IMRA (the research division of Toyota) where they were supposed to repeat their experiment. They spent 12 million dollars without getting any believable results. The idea that their research was somehow suppressed is laughably wrong.
>
Like a busy government which only passes expensive laws prohibiting some new and interesting thing when people have actually found a way of doing it, the universe relied a great deal on things not being tried at all.
When something is tried, Ponder found, it often does turn out to be impossible very quickly, but it takes a little while for this to really be the case* – in effect, for the overworked laws of causality to hurry to the scene and pretend it has been impossible all along.
* In the case of cold fusion, this was longer than usual.
That's almost the exact premise of Fine Structure (or is it?): https://qntm.org/structure Scroll down a bit to read online. Funnily enough, I first learned of this story on HN years ago.
Confused to see so much talk of Fleischmann and Pons. The technique described in the linked article appears to be essentially neutron-catalyzed fusion. This is not too different conceptually from muon-catalyzed fusion, except instead of muons lowering the reaction energy barrier, neutrons provide the activation energy. The cold fusion claims from the '80s used an electrical process, which is not believable for quantum reasons (electron density can't get high enough to pull protons together due to Pauli exclusion).
As to whether it works, who knows? It may have been conclusively disproven five years ago for all I know. Or maybe it works. But if they're generating neutrons through X-ray bremsstrahlung, that's horribly inefficient and unlikely to ever come close to net power.
How the hell would you generate neutrons from X-rays? The energy is nowhere close to neutron-antineutron pair production. Higher energy gamma rays can do that, but you need a really big accellerator to produce them. Splitting nuclei by gamma rays is a little easier, but not much. Still far away from the usual bremsstrahlung energy range, except if you have one of the few accellerators that can produce those high-energy electrons for you. Oh, and if you are really going for bremsstrahlung, prepare for lots and lots of noise from secondary reactions and lower-energy bremsstrahlung to filter out. If you want synchrotronstrahlung, good luck building a 1000km one.
Well, I had internalized that you get neutron contamination when you treat with accelerating voltages of 10 MV or higher, and I didn't bother to look it up. It's generated in the X-ray target by the reaction of the 10 MeV electron with a tungsten nucleus:
Aneutronic fusion exists. Neutrons were expected by some because normal fusion produces them ... but if it is cold fusion, there's no reason to believe that would happen. Indeed, you should throw out as many expectations as you possibly can if you're dealing with a new process.
The first and best measurement to contemplate is the presence of helium. Of course, you have to worry about how much is in the atmosphere, and then how much might somehow be trapped in the bulk material of the apparatus itself. Still, a sudden surge of helium well beyond that of what might be found in the atmosphere would be telling.
We all remember calorimetry from high school and just how difficult it was to do proper measurements. And who knows what odd chemical reactions might release or subtract heat when you sit around cooking metal for a long period of time? No, calorimetry is error-prone and has too many miserable confounding factors.
Still, the only way to know you have fusion is to say "I have less of this lighter element and more of this heavier element." Everything is is just hoping that the assumptions from stellar fusion carry over. I'll believe it when I see it, but I also won't believe it until the accompanying papers talk about helium, and lots of it (or lithium ...).
You don't have to use assumptions just from stellar fusion. You can use the evidence from all the nuclear testing, from fusors or from cosmic ray analysis.
The science behind fusion and what byproducts would come from it are also explained by the standard model.
If it's a new process and doesn't exhibit any of the known characteristics of fusion, how do you know it's got anything to do with fusion at all?
The tragedy of this story is that the word fusion ever got attached to this phenomenon. To this day we have no evidence whatsoever that any form of fusion is associated with these experiments. What we do know is that F&P thought they had found evidence known to indicate fusion, but they were wrong and had misinterpreted it.
I think I adequately covered contamination when I mentioned the atmosphere and the possibility of the helium being captured in the bulk of the apparatus already. As to the last two, those are an objection you could point at, well, every experiment in the history of science and are therefore not really worthy of mention.
"If you have some hydrogen atoms, and then you do something to them, and suddenly you have some helium atoms, that's fusion."
And that's just wrong. There's a famous case from early on in the history of nuclear physics, where someone passed current through hydrogen gas and then found helium, and thought it was fusion. But what it was was helium diffusing out of the glass of the apparatus.
This should be the default assumption, because supposed cold fusion making 4He is a triple miracle: first that DD fusion occurs at all, then that it makes 4He, and then that it doesn't go through the normal channels (actually a quadruple miracle, since also that the 4He fusion doesn't dump its energy in very energetic gamma photons.)
I always thought the idea was the hydrogens are fusing with the metal lattice, or impurities in the metal (more likely to be exothermic, I guess), in which case you won't get helium after all.
No, the overall concept in the metal lattice was that the lattice itself brought the hydrogens closer in some way, or lowered the potential barrier between them.
Also, it's palladium. Getting hydrogen to fuse with palladium is a net loss of energy, which would be amusing in a sad way. "Guys, we got fusion to work, but it actually takes energy!"
Just a note, if you are going to throw away the rule book (standard model) because its 'cold' fusion, you can't then say that hydrogen palladium fusion is a net loss of energy. If being cold changes everything so much, who knows under cold conditions if it's a net gain?
Oh, I'm not suggesting throwing away the Standard Model (although it has its known quirks and I am assuming you are referring to the Standard Model), but you don't need to do that to say that hydrogen palladium fusion is a net loss of energy. That just takes your basic addition and subtraction and keeping hold of a little thing called conservation of mass-energy. That ... I am not throwing out the window.
I am only saying that we retire to the most basic definition of fusion: a bunch of atoms of lighter elements become, through some process, fewer atoms that have some heavier elements in the mix. I am in no way suggesting that binding energy doesn't exist, etc.
In Atomic Adventures, James Mahaffey (who I unreservedly recommend) outlines the history, claims and problems with Cold Fusion. He was a member of one of the first teams to try to replicate the results, and points out that (from the point of view of working atomic scientists at the time) it was very clear that whatever this was, it was not fusion, as it lacked features that would have to be present if it were. Notably, the scientists pictured standing next to it weren't dead. It was also first announced in a press release, not a journal and the actual details of the experiment were initially kept secret (and not knowing the details was used as a reason that replication was failing) for commercial reasons. Whatever Pons and Fleischmann were doing, it pretty clearly wasn't science. It had none of the features of scientific enquiry, but nearly all of the features of a grift, and that hasn't changed in the intervening years.
Don't leave out the part where Mahaffey first confirmed the P&F results before having to retract that due to improper equipment usage. That likely was a big contributing factor to the many conspiracy theories that P&F had in-fact cracked cold fusion and The Government/Big Old/The Illuminati were trying to keep it a secret.
All of that clearly raises red flags, which are perhaps overwhelming, but it doesn't necessarily mean they were entirely wrong. Case in point, a certain pharma company with no track record whatsoever was recently working on mRNA vaccines: they did science by press release, didn't release details of their experiments purportedly for commercial reasons, had sketchy executives saying sketchy things, and it all turned out to be 100% right. It's hard to take the red flags and draw a conclusion based on that alone. The failure to replicate is far more important than the behavior of the actors involved.
P&F were not replicated, so we can safely say they were entirely wrong.
For some reason, their negative result makes some people believe other different kinds of "cold fusion" are more likely. This is not how conditional probability works.
As a demonstration of reproducibility, samples of palladium-nickel-zirconium oxide powder, taken from a single batch of production, were employed in independent parallel test runs at laboratories at Kobe University and Tohoku University. Both laboratories observed sustained excess heat over a period of more than 10 days. The data were qualitatively and quantitatively similar between the two laboratories.
Reproducibility means a recipe that anyone can reproduce. Anecdotal reports of that sort don't count. They can be explained by incompetence or even fraud.
What the whole sorry cold fusion experience shows is that if you have enough people trying to do something, some will get positive results, regardless of whether the phenomenon is actually real. A real tip off is how variable and mutually inconsistent the ephemeral positive results are. This is a sign they are experimental artifacts, not anything significant.
Exactly. The fact that reported positive results always seem to be at the limits of detectability, whatever the equipment used, is a huge red flag that the results are probably artifacts.
The crucial difference is that the mRNA virus, when finally scrutinized, was shown to be effective with effects that could be consistently replicated and there was a theoretical explanation consistent with other things we've observed about mammalian immune systems. People were absolutely correct to dismiss the claims about the mRNA virus until those demonstrations were available, and would be wrong to dismiss them afterward. Cold 'fusion' is still in the first phase and has been for decades. Science isn't about what might be right. It's about what can be demonstrated.
James Mahaffey, Atomic Adventures (Pegasus:2018 Reprint): 'A couple of things about the announced phenomenon bothered me greatly. Both Pons and Fleischmann had claimed over and over that their apparatus was producing “tremendous” heat and “measurable” neutrons. On the news, they were shown hovering over their operating fusion reactor, closely examining the apparatus as the oxygen and deuterium bubbled. That didn’t make any sense. It
should have been the other way around—tremendous neutrons making measureable heat. If they were, in fact, making tremendous heat, then they would have been killed by the heavy neutron flux and secondary radiations broadcasting out of the unshielded deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction. Maybe the problem was their definition of “tremendous?” The cooling water in which the fusion cell was suspended wasn’t boiling or even misting up their glasses.'
Maybe the problem was their definition of “tremendous?” The cooling
water in which the fusion cell was suspended wasn’t boiling or even
misting up their glasses.'
Well, yes? According to Wikipedia, what F&P reported was an unexplained 20 °C rise in temperature.
That is a tremendous increase in temperature... when the expected amount is zero. But not exactly a "kill everybody in the room" amount of heat, right?
For most of the time, the power input to the cell was equal to the
calculated power leaving the cell within measurement accuracy, and the
cell temperature was stable at around 30 °C. But then, at some point
(in some of the experiments), the temperature rose suddenly to about
50 °C without changes in the input power.
It seems to me that there are large numbers of problems with their claims! But the temperature thing doesn't seem to be one of them?
Please don't misunderstand. I'm not arguing that they achieved cold fusion. Anybody with a shred of skepticism should assume they didn't, until proven otherwise via reproducible experiments.
People are not getting killed by the heat, but by the radiation needed to do that. My math on radiation is a bit shaky, but to heat water by 20 degrees, it needs to absorb 80000 Grey, isn't it. Now we can also assume that most radiation was not confined to the water. The dose to get a person sick is 2 Grey and 10 Grey (full body) is almost always fatal. Making a few leaps in logic here and it depends on how much water was heated, assuming it was in the litre range, then beeing close to such a device seems likely to be unhealthy.
I get what you’re saying, but I was reporting Mahafee said about the response of scientists to the first press conference. They were not claiming that their new type of deuterium fusion didn’t have the same relationship between generated heat and neutron flux. They were claiming it was ‘fusion’ generating ‘tremendous heat’ which was completely inconsistent with them standing next to it unharmed. The (still dubious) claim that this is a different type of ‘fusion’ that has different features came much later. I’ll very happily withdraw criticism if someone (1) publishes a properly reviewed study that is replicable and (2) make a convincing case for a theory that explains the phenomenon that is consistent with other observations of fusion. After several decades, we’re still not seeing any real progress on either of those, so I remain pretty confident of my skepticism.
Table top fusors do not produce the same amount of neutron flux as the cold fusion result (with huge amounts of heat production) would imply. Just a few neutrons here or there with fusors.
I don't find this argument convincing:
"This is fusion."
"It can't be fusion. We've got a pretty good understanding of how fusion works, and this is missing some key features. Notably, neutron flux consistent with the claimed heat."
"This is a special kind of fusion that doesn't have any of the features your theory describes."
"Ok. What's the theory that describes this result then?"
<Waves vaguely at beaker of warm water> "I don't need a theory, it's been experimentally proven!"
As well call start calling a campfire "forest fusion" and offer to sell me the patent.
Cold fusion is one of my favorite hypothetical technologies. The rationale makes so much sense, and it would be such a game-changer. (I'm guessing it doesn't actually exist, but still... lovely idea...)
"The rationale makes no sense" cannot be used to disprove something with lots of unknowns. Of course having a theory that match current understanding would be helpful.
Good thing I wasn't trying to do that. What I was doing was arguing the statement "The rationale makes so much sense" is bullshit. No, the rationale made no sense. It directly contradicted what was known. Now, sometimes things that make no sense turn out to be true, but that's very rare (especially when the newly claimed thing requires not one but multiple miracles to be real), and not what I was addressing.
if cold fusion works, maybe we can get nuclear aircraft. The possibilities are so exciting it's sad that our discovery that huge energy can be created by splitting the atom hasn't helped humanity more. The fact that it helps prevent ww3 is a negative benefit.
>"Fusion is typically a high temperature, high pressure phenomenon. It requires a star, or, if you’re hellbent on making it happen on Earth, massive magnets and a lot of power."
Not true!
Well, "true" according to the popular current day understanding of what fusion is... let me elaborate, elucidate, and explain...
Fusion is a fundamental process in nature, which is relative to scale.
As is fission.
Which is also relative to scale.
There are two great patterns expressed by the Universe at different scales, and these can basically be thought of in such simple terms as "cut" and "join".
You know, what we have scissors and duct tape for...
You go one way, you cut larger things into many smaller things; you go the other way, and you join many smaller things into larger things...
Cutting is Fission, joining is Fusion.
Now both of these patterns exist at all scales -- at all energy levels.
They exist in ALL chemical reactions.
In fact, I'll make a wager that future scientists will be able to prove that endothermic (absorbs heat) and exothermic (generates heat) chemical reactions -- are either Fission or Fusion.
If I were to make a bet, I'd say that Fusion is the exothermic one, simply because Fusion reactions as are known popularly today (again, not relative to scale) -- are the hotter reaction of the two.
So then the question is, how can an endothermic (absorbs heat) chemical reaction be fission -- if fission generates heat?
Well, I don't know the answer to that (yet!).
Perhaps all exothermic (heat generating) chemical reactions consist of fusion OR fission components, OR both...
Perhaps there are two other complimentary opposites to fusion and fission that remove energy...
But, here's a good time to talk about Implosion.
Most people who have watched Hollywood movies -- know what explosions are...
But, not too many people outside of the Physics community, or people who understand Brown's Gas or the works of Viktor Schauberger -- really understand implosions...
See, in Physics, there is always a two-way exchange of energy, that is, if something is expanding, then something else is contracting -- even though we might not see what that thing is -- even though we might need special equipment to detect it...
In an explosion, we see fire and hot gases expanding outward to fill space...
But, there must be something else -- equal-and-oppositely that's contracting inward, even though Physics has yet to observe what it is...
We can think about Implosions (although in a different context) -- as Black Holes. We can also think about them as vortices... Basically they remove something from something else, they act to "compress" matter, objects, information, etc.
So, getting back to fusion and fission, join and cut, implosion and explosion, these phenomena exist on all scales, at all temperature ranges.
A future scientist will show that all of these things are parts of the same dualistic pattern, which repeats in nature at all scales, at all temperatures...
(PDS: Addendum: I almost forgot to add the obligatory "And yes, I know, I'm a Crackpot!" ending to this message! <g>
So, on that note: "And yes, I know, I'm a Crackpot!" <g>)
You are somewhat right that the basic principle applies in general, as you combine pieces together or break a composite system apart you are always dealing with some form of binding energy, whether it is gravitational, electromagnetic or nuclear. But what makes all the difference are the forces involved - chemical reactions mainly involve the electromagnetic force, fission and fusion mainly involves the strong nuclear force. This is all well understood and the properties of the involved force dictate the length and energy scales of the phenomena.
It is almost certain that some unknown phenomenon is happening with palladium/nickel and hydrogen/deuterium.
I first heard of the 1989 pons and fleischmann experiment in late '90 but didn't know what to think of it, I was in high-school, information was scarce. Then in 2008 or 2009' I found a memoir from a science historian about it.
It spoke in great detail about the pressure to publish quickly before any rival the vested interest of the hugely influencal MIT in "hot fusion" (billions in funding). They they didn't even try to half-ass an experiment, then dragged pons and fleischmann in the mud so deeply they had to quit academic life and anyone who tried to follow their track would have their funding cut. Because most other physicist ( Pons & Fleischman were actualy electro-chemist) were not able to acheive the same results. Which was kind of to be expected: no peer review article was published they just "announced" their finding. Then everyone rush to blindly replicate months of hard work from a field they barely knew. Then it became a fraud, then fake science. Anyone trying the "forbidden" experiment would lose his reputation and any hope of a career. It doesn't get more anti science then cold fusion. Only then I realised wikipedia was full of censorship and could not be relied upon for anything remontly controversal.
Then came 2011, andrea rossi and the e-cat. Andrea rossi has a ph in... philosphy, convicted frauster in italy and inventor of a new
cold fusion device. Even then it sparked ton of interest in cold fusion (LENR for low energy nuclear reaction, because it's not fusion that is happening: no hard radiation, no instant huge release of energy, etc.) and the next decade is a cycle of trying to debunk rossi, him promising a "working plant" next year, mistery client and feeding crumbs of evidence, proof and information over a decade. And it's not finished yet.
You can follow most of it on https://e-catworld.com/ . People there are not quite QAnon level of crazy but they will mention ufo various free energy stuff of regular basis. I remember reading news about navy SPAWAR research on cold fusion there.
But yeah in a nutshell huge claims, little results (but SOME result that is the annoying part).
> It is almost certain that some unknown phenomenon is happening with palladium/nickel and hydrogen/deuterium.
The entire things is explainable by some combination of incompetence and fraud. There is nothing here that should lead one to believe there is any kind of actual new phenomenon.
The whole point of "cold" fusion is that it does not require immense pressures or temperatures; hot fusion hasn't consumed all of the hydrogen in the universe because those pressures and temperatures don't exist in most places.
But if we're using this clean energy and the levels of green house gases is lowered then the excess heat will simply leave the planet. Total non-issue.
It depends on price. If it proves to be more expensive then fusion, no. However if it's much cheaper than wind, we could use it to pull CO2 directly out of the air on a massive scale. One might imagine a sort of lo-fi global thermostat, an interesting and somewhat scary thought.
We do that on a small scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal#Direct_... - "a pilot plant in British Columbia, Canada that has been in use since 2015[51] and is able to extract about a tonne of CO2 a day.". CO2 is in the atmosphere at 400 parts per million, i.e. to get 400Kg of CO2 out you need to suck 1,000,000Kg of air through (at minimum, assuming you can get every single CO2 molecule out), which sounds like a lot of matter to move and a power-hungry approach.
The world emits about 37 billion tons of CO2 per year which is 33.5 billion Kg, so we need 90 million of those pilot plants to remove a year of CO2 in 365 days of operation, at a cost of $0.3T to $0.6T per year.
No, because climate change is made up of dynamic, layered, cyclical activity and influenced by volcanism (and stratospheric SO2 injections in particular), solar activity, cosmic rays, aerosol emission from humans, forests, and volcanoes, geothermal influence on sea temps (ENSO, AMO, PDO, etc), geomagnetic activity, orbital cycles, axial precession, albedo, and cloud cover.
What does it mean to even "reverse" a non-linear dynamic system that is unpredictable in its thrashing as an exponential function of time? Reverse it to what? The 1960-1990 average and hold it there? Good luck.
... yes, it could, because the excess energy could be used to capture carbon. All combustion is an exchange of electrons; providing electromotive force can reverse the reaction.
You can just plant trees to capture carbon. But of course, the ~400ppm carbon in the atmosphere is still far below natural levels that have occurred in history (as high as 7000 ppm). I'm not even convinced that removing carbon using heavy machinery is a good idea, as it would presumably reverse the fertilization effect of CO2: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
Nuclear is promising for other reasons, namely that it's a virtually infinite source of energy with no downsides if we can master a technique for producing it without meltdown risk.
> “Quite frankly, [to] other folks who have tried this over the years, it was considered a career ender,”
An astounding indictment across the whole scientific community that attempting to investigate an energy source that would advance human kind to essentially free energy would be... a career ender.
There is simply no reason for this.
Think how many resources has been put into anti-carbon messaging to transform the economies and the promotion of a global tax. Meanwhile a technology that can make the whole CO2 problem obsolete is taken to the back alley like this and figuratively murdered.
“An astounding indictment across the whole scientific community that attempting to investigate an energy source that would advance human kind to essentially free energy would be... a career ender.ll
My understanding is that it’s a career ender because it has repeatedly been shown to not work. You also can’t investigate Perpetual Movement Machines because they can’t work either. It would be nice if it worked but it doesn’t make sense to change something that’s basically a pipe dream.
In theory, this is the purpose of tenure. Advancing to tenure status should make your subsequent research into LENR unassailable. In practice, I guess you still have to toe the line, and apply for grants...
Same thing with plan to plant trees to reduce C02. Unfortunately groups sometimes use outcomes (climate change, mass shootings, spotted owl habitat protection, salmon spawning) to propose solutions that are beneficial to an ideology or an agenda rather than a solution that is without bias. Problems are tools.
Universities pay professors who have research topics attractive to funding agencies and students. If you saw a physics professor specializing in Bohmian mechanics and pilot-wave theory, you'd steer clear.
The reputation of CF as a pseudo-science also points towards a career ender.
However, Bohmian mechanics are not pseudo-science. It is a beautiful useless interpretation of quantum mechanics that has many problems, but at least it is still science. Cold fusion I agree tends towards pseudo-science.
I can understand that it makes sense to teach the most useful stuff at the university, however I do wish that I could have had the choice to follow an optional "obscure, useless topics" lecture during my years in university.
When people's income depends on not being displaced by a new technology, you can bet that they will be dyed-in-the-wool Luddites.
When Cold Fusion was first announced way back in the 90s (IIRC) it was felt that the whole of the energy industries would be immediately affected by being replaced by small, clean, efficient fusion technology. Strange, that an immediate clamp down occurred on all Cold Fusion information, experimentation, etc.
Personally, I don't know whether Cold Fusion exists or not. But the absolute denigration of anything to do with it seems a bit suspicious to me.
Several researchers have reported energy production, but everybody else can't seem to replicate it, whether that's by accident or design.
It was also interesting the discover that the original experiment was dismissed because other experimenters failed to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons result ... despite not actually trying to replicate the Fleischmann and Pons experimental setup accurately. For example, not meeting the same level of hydrogen loading in the metal matrix.
It could all absolutely be BS, but I was surprised that it wasn’t actually proven to be BS; it was just not proven to not be BS, and was then made “embarrassing”.