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Cold
Fusion 1999 |
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COLD FUSION
in my kitchen
"Overall, I
consider myself to be a fairly neutral observer ..." |
Nuclear Transmutation:
The Reality of Cold Fusion |
October 21, 1999
What is the current scientific thinking on cold
fusion? Is there any possible validity to this phenomenon?
P e t e r N . S a e t a,
assistant professor of physics at Harvey Mudd College, responds:
Eight
years ago researchers Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, then both at the
University of Utah, made headlines around the world with their claim to have
achieved fusion in a simple tabletop apparatus working at room temperature.
Other experimenters failed to replicate their work, however, and most of the
scientific community no longer considers cold fusion a real phenomenon.
Nevertheless, research continues, and a small but very vocal minority still
believes in cold fusion.
Michael
J. Schaffer, a senior scientist at one of the major U.S. fusion research
laboratories (his employer has requested not to be identified), has provided
this historical overview, along with a rather moderate assessment current
status of cold fusion:
"Because cold fusion is still an unresolved and controversial subject that
generates strong opinions and passionate debate among scientists, I begin by
stating up front that I am a mainstream plasma physicist researching fusion
energy. I also read many of the papers published on cold fusion, however. I
attended the last three International Conferences on Cold Fusion, and I
myself ran two sets of cold fusion experiments, both with no clear evidence
of excess power release. Overall, I consider myself to be a fairly neutral
observer.
"To understand the controversy, it helps to know some basic facts about
fusion. Fusion is a nuclear reaction wherein two smaller nuclei join (fuse)
to form a new, larger nucleus. When that large nucleus is unstable, it
quickly breaks apart and releases energy. The big difficulty is that because
the initial nuclei are all positively charged, they are strongly repelled as
they approach one another. Therefore, only nuclei having a high kinetic
energy approach closely enough to fuse. High-speed nuclei can be made on the
earth either by particle accelerators or by extremely high temperatures--on
the order of 50 million degrees Celsius or more. In controlled 'magnetic'
fusion energy experiments, such as tokamaks and others, a magnetically
confined plasma is heated by electromagnetic waves or neutral particle
beams. In 'inertial' fusion energy experiments, tiny pellets are compressed
and heated by powerful pulsed laser or ion beams.
"Cold fusion claims to release measurable energy from fusion reactions at or
near room temperature when deuterium is dissolved in a solid, usually
palladium metal. The idea, which has its roots in research going back to the
1920s, is that hydrogen and its isotopes can dissolve to such high
concentrations in certain solids that the hydrogen nuclei approach closer to
one another than even in solid hydrogen. Furthermore, negative electrical
charges from the electrons of the solid host partly cancel the repulsion
between the nuclei. Early experiments did not detect any signs of fusion,
however. Furthermore, modern theoretical calculations show that the proposed
effects, while real, are much too small to produce detectable rates of
fusion.
"Electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons decided to revisit
room-temperature fusion. Their technique is to pass current through an
electrolytic cell consisting of a palladium (Pd) cathode, platinum (Pt)
anode and LiOD (a compound of lithium, oxygen and deuterium, or heavy
hydrogen) electrolyte in heavy water (water containing deuterium in place of
the ordinary hydrogen). The cathodic reaction liberates unbound atoms of
deuterium (D), which enter palladium much more rapidly than do deuterium
molecules. Under proper conditions, the concentration can build up to 0.9 or
more deuterium atoms per palladium atom, at which point the loss of
deuterium balances its rate of implantation. Pons and Fleischmann's cells
were part of a calorimeter (heat-measuring device), whose temperature rise
on a few occasions indicated on the order of 10 percent excess power, that
is, about 10 percent more power leaving the cell than electrical power used
to run it. Pons and Fleischmann announced their results at a now famous news
conference on March 23, 1989. They also thought they had detected gamma
radiation characteristic of neutrons passing through water, but these
results later had to be retracted.
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Source: Physorg.com |
|
"So, what is the current
scientific thinking on cold fusion? Frankly, most scientists have not
followed the field since the disenchantment of 1989 and 1990. They typically
still dismiss cold fusion as experimental error, but most of them are
unaware of the newly reported results. Even so, given the extraordinary
nature of the claimed cold fusion results, it will take extraordinarily high
quality, conclusive data to convince most scientists, unless a compelling
theoretical explanation is found first.
"Most cold fusion research today is done in Japan. The New Energy and
Industrial Technology Development Organization, a government organization,
sponsors the New Hydrogen Energy Laboratory in Sapporo. IMRA, a foundation
of the Toyota family, sponsors another well-equipped lab in Sapporo, as well
as Pons and Fleischmann's facility in France. Several Japanese universities
and industries also do cold fusion research."
Douglas R.O. Morrison, who was a physicist at CERN for 38 years, is a
longtime observer of cold fusion research; he has also attended the
International Cold Fusion Conferences. Here is his assessment:
" 'You mean it's not dead?' is the incredulous reaction when I say I have
been to a cold fusion conference. Almost all scientists and most of the
public no longer believe the 1989 claim of Fleischmann and Pons of having
solved the world's energy problems by using electrochemistry to fuse
deuterium nuclei together at low energy. But true believers soldier on.
"The Sixth International Cold Fusion Conference, ICCF-6, was held in October
1996 near Sapporo in northern Japan. It was sponsored by a branch of MITI,
which has given some $30 million over four years for cold fusion research;
this support was matched by funds and personnel from some 20 major Japanese
companies and in cooperation with a dozen Japanese universities. MITI
started the New Hydrogen Energy (NHE) laboratory near Sapporo, which
visitors have estimated contains some $10-million worth of equipment. "The
conference was remarkable for three reports of high-quality Japanese
experiments, which contrasted sharply with other reports. The NHE lab of
MITI described a large series of experiments devised to check the original
claims of Fleischmann and Pons. No excess heat was found.
"Toyota established a new organization, called IMRA, that has two
laboratories, one near Sapporo and the other near Nice in the south of
France; the latter has employed Pons. The second major experimental report
came from the IMRA-Japan lab, where researchers built an improved
calorimeter, which had no interaction with the surroundings. Twenty-six
experiments were tried employing the various systems and tricks that had
been suggested to cause excess heat, but no excess heat was observed.
Further, the upper limits were very low, +/- 0.23 watts, or 2.3 percent of
the input power--far from the cry of 'one watt in, four watts out' and the
hundreds of percent increases claimed back in 1989.
"Another set of results came from IMRA-Europe, which was presented by Pons.
He said that seven experiments were performed; they yielded excess heats of
250 percent, 150 percent, 'variable' and four that gave no excess heat at
all. This result might be considered rather meager [sic
- Ed.] after five years of work conducted before the 1989 announcement and
seven years after, when Pons and Fleischmann were well funded. A
high-temperature (near boiling) cell was used at IMRA-Europe, although such
a device had been shown to produce greater uncertainties.
"Extremely high temperatures are normally needed to obtain practical fusion
rates by overcoming the repulsion of the nuclei that are both positively
charged. At low energies--that is, at room temperatures--this potential
barrier makes fusion reactions have an incredibly low probability of
occurring. True believers claim that in the lattice of a metal such as
palladium, the rate of deuterium-deuterium fusion is much higher, so all
that is needed is to fill the lattice with deuterium.
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"The third careful Japanese
experiment by Jirohta Kasagi and his colleagues at Tohoku University was
designed to test this hypothesis. Deuterium ions of a variety of low
energies were fired into metals that had been saturated with deuterium; the
measured rates of fusion were then compared with expectations. The rates
decreased steeply at low energies because of the Coulomb barrier (electrical
repulsion), and no unexpected enhancement was observed of the kind that
would be needed to justify Fleischmann and Pons's claims.
"It might be thought that the three Japanese results would be decisive, but
the two summary speakers, Tullio Bressani of Turin and Mike McKubre of SRI
International, were optimistic and belittled or ignored them and instead
talked of other experiments that were not performed with the same careful
controls. Some remarkable new claims were mentioned. James Patterson of
Clean Energy Technologies (CETI) was scheduled to speak about his claims
that tiny balls coated with metal, generally nickel, could generate energy,
but he did not talk. Instead his collaborator, George Miley of the
University of Illinois and editor of the journal Fusion Technology, reported
that experiments using these balls produced transmutations of the nickel to
many other elements even as heavy as lead; he did not worry about the origin
of the extra neutrons needed to create lead.
"What was not said at ICCF-6 was also interesting. Many people who had
reported a sensational first result now no longer speak of it or try to
extend it. For instance, on the first day of the ICCF-3 conference in
Nagoya, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) had issued a press release
saying that one of their researchers had solved cold fusion and had
reproducible results. NTT promptly saw its shares rise in value by $8
billion--but within a few days, they fell back to their previous level. The
experiment was widely criticized but since has neither been mentioned again
nor formally withdrawn.
"There is one point on which all true believers in cold fusion agree: their
results are not reproducible. To most scientists, this implies that cold
fusion results are not believable, but true believers suggest that this
unpredictability makes them more interesting!
"From 1992 onward, many claims were made for cold fusion using normal water
instead of heavy water. It is well known that D-D (deuterium-deuterium)
fusion has a much higher rate, by many orders of magnitude, than H-H
(hydrogen-hydrogen) fusion. In fact, early claims of cold fusion stated that
the results must be attributed to fusion because they happened only with
deuterium and never with hydrogen, which indeed was used as a control. Also,
from 1992 onward, claims of transmutations have been made. One of these was
the old alchemists' claim of turning mercury to gold; others claimed small
changes in the isotopes. Miley's claim was doubly astonishing, as his
claimed transmutations used hydrogen instead of deuterium.
"If there are so many claims over so many years, some people inevitably
wonder if perhaps there just might be something in them. But the cold fusion
claims are mutually contradictory; if H-H fusion were to work, then D-D
fusion should cause the apparatus to explode. Also, there are more
experiments that find no effect than those claiming one, and these negative
experiments tend to be more carefully carried out. Some claims can be
rejected by other subsequent experiments: Steve Jones of Brigham Young
University
[of 9/11 conspiracy fame - Ed.]--originally
a rival of Fleischmann and Pons who made somewhat different claims for
neutron production--is now a strong opponent of cold fusion and indeed has
done experiments showing that in Fleischmann and Pons's open cells, the
hydrogen and oxygen gases can mingle and recombine giving out apparent
excess heat. If this potential for recombination is blocked, there is no
excess heat.
"With all this negative evidence, how can Fleischmann, Pons and others
continue? The short answer is that true believers can always find something
to encourage them, and they can ignore the rest. Cold fusion is much more
persistent than previous examples of pathological science, such as polywater,
which ended soon after the principal supporters gave up. Here there have
been well-organized public relations campaigns.
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"Initially, in 1989, Pons provided a series of escalating claims, including
showing what he claimed was a working cell 'giving off 15 to 20 times the
amount of energy that is put into the cell.' It was claimed that it 'could
provide boiling water for a cup of tea.' Now there are several people
publishing magazines, spreading claims and trying to influence media people
who sometimes present their hand-outs without checking. This technique keeps
the flame alive. Also some editors publish cold fusion claims in sympathetic
journals such as Fusion Technology. They claim that at the next American
Nuclear Society meeting in Orlando, to be held June 1 to 5, there will be a
cold fusion session featuring a panel discussion with Miley and Patterson.
"In another, nonscientific episode, Fleischmann, Pons and Italian
researchers Tullio Bressani, Guiliano Preparata and Emilio Del Giudice sued
the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, its editor and the science editor,
Giovanni Maria Pace, who had written in 1991 that cold fusion was
'scientific fraud.' The decision of the three judges was that this was
justified comment, and further they awarded costs to the newspaper. They
also expressed the opinion that some of the plaintiffs had lost touch with
reality.
"What is the future of cold fusion? True believers never give up, and the
funding keeps coming in. At first, American and some Russian work was
largely funded by the Electric Power Research Industry (EPRI), which spent
many millions of dollars, but that support has essentially stopped. Japanese
funding seems to be on the decline after ICCF-6. But private investors
remain hopeful--they tend to reason that it is worth the odd-million
investment if the return on investment is worth billions. They do not
appreciate, however, that the likely return is about
10-40--which means that even investing one
penny to earn possible billions would be a bad bet. The next cold fusion
conference, ICCF-7, with private sponsors, will be held in Vancouver in
April 1998. We all hope to be served a cup of cold fusion tea."
Robert F. Heeter of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is the author of
the "Conventional Fusion FAQ" (internet newsgroup sci.physics.fusion) and
webmaster of the Fusion Energy Educational Web Site. He responds:
"The 'cold fusion' phenomenon, in which the law of conservation of energy is
apparently violated when electricity and heat are applied to special systems
involving hydrogen isotopes (in water or gaseous form) and particular metals
(notably palladium and nickel), defies conventional scientific explanation.
All new theories explaining 'cold fusion' effects require large revisions in
existing physical theories (one might call them 'miracles'). Scientific
skepticism requires that unless the experimental evidence justifies belief
in these miracles, we must conclude that experimental errors are being
misinterpreted as positive results.
"One would normally expect that about half of all careful energy-balance
measurements would indicate excess energy, and about half would show an
energy deficit, because experimental error spreads the results around the
expected outcome. A preponderance of results showing excess energy might
indicate something new. But if one is deliberately searching for excess
energy, then one may be able to 'optimize' a complicated system to yield
large amounts of apparent excess energy by fooling the measurement apparatus
somehow. Whether a given excess-heat result represents a physical 'miracle'
or an experimental error is very difficult to determine if the amount of
excess heat is small or if the fraction of excess power to total input power
is low--as is the case in reports of cold fusion.
"If indeed miracles are occurring in 'cold fusion,' they are not fusion
reactions involving hydrogen isotopes. The inevitable signatures of fusion
reactions--in which atomic nuclei combine, thereby releasing a large amount
of energy--are combinations of energetic particles (neutrons, positrons and
ions) and gamma rays. The direct conversion of fusion energy into heat is
not possible because of energy and momentum conservation and the laws of
special relativity. Energetic particles and their secondary effects should
be easily detectable if the claimed levels of excess power were the result
of fusion reactions. But measurements of these fusion signatures have been
either nonexistent, inaccurate or orders of magnitude too low. Attempts to
explain 'cold fusion' as something other than nuclear fusion require similar
miracles supported by similarly weak evidence.
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Searching for the Truth
Behind the Cold Fusion Furor
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"The case for experimental
error is supported by the unreliability and lack of independent replication
of key results. Furthermore, the nature of the complex systems and
measurement equipment involved in 'cold fusion' research is beyond the range
of expertise of most researchers involved.
"'Cold fusion' resembles the alchemy of the middle ages. The search for
truth suffers now, in the quest to convert hydrogen into energy, just as it
did 1,000 years ago in the quest to convert lead into gold. The allure of
fame and wealth and the natural desire to believe in good news have been
corrupting influences on scientific skepticism. So researchers working
outside their main areas of professional expertise are even more likely to
misinterpret experimental errors as positive results. And it is hard not to
be skeptical about a revolutionary new discovery that would so conveniently
have such tremendous and immediate economic value.
"I entered graduate school wishing to help solve our impending energy
crisis, so I studied 'cold fusion' carefully and with an open mind in order
to make a wise career choice. I learned that the critical positive results
have not been reliably and independently reproduced, and many careful and
thorough studies have yielded negative conclusions, although often these
unexciting results went unpublished. It is probably impossible to prove that
'cold fusion' is nothing more than the result of misinterpreted experimental
errors, but the probability of it being otherwise is low.
"Efforts to disprove 'cold fusion' remind me of the O. J. Simpson case--the
evidence is clear enough that most people have firm beliefs, yet truly
conclusive proof is elusive. But science is not law: when one puts a
scientific theory on trial in an experiment, the existing theory is presumed
guilty of explaining your observations until it is proven innocent by
showing that only a new theory will fit the evidence properly. Large changes
in well-established theories require a stronger body of evidence. 'Cold
fusion,' if true, requires radical changes in our understanding of energy
and matter, but even after eight years of intense effort costing tens of
millions of dollars, the evidence remains weak--although apparently the cold
fusion conferences in Hawaii, Monte Carlo and elsewhere have been quite
lavish. I now doubt 'cold fusion' is really an easy alchemical solution to
the world's energy needs.
Source:
ScientificAmerican.com
|
Beaudette shows how
media attention escalated into
a confusing controversy...
should research be continued? |
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