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Successful Cold Fusion Experiment?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sat May 24, 2008 04:26 AM
from the so-cold-it's-hot dept.
from the so-cold-it's-hot dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The italian economic journal 'Il sole 24 ore' published an article about a successful cold fusion experiment performed by Yoshiaki Arata in Japan. They seems to have pumped high pressure deutherium gas in a nanometric matrix of palladium and zyrcon oxide. The experiments generates a considerable amount of energy and they found the presence of Helium-4 in the matrix (as sign of the fusion). I was not able to find other articles about this but the journal is very authoritative in Italy. Google translations are also available."
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Eric Lerner's Focus Fusion Device Gets Funded 367 comments
pln2bz writes "Eric Lerner, author of The Big Bang Never Happened, has received $600k in funding, and a promise of phased payments of $10 million if scientific feasibility can be demonstrated to productize Lerner's focus fusion energy production device. Unlike the Tokamak, focus fusion does not require the plasma to be stable, does not produce significant amounts of dangerous radiation, directly injects electrons into the power grid without the need for turbines and would only cost around $300k to manufacture a generator. Lerner's inspiration for the technology is based upon an interpretation for astrophysical Herbig-Haro jets that agrees with the Electric Universe explanation."
Submission: Successful cold fusion experiment by Anonymous Coward
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Elium-4? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Elium-4? (Score:5, Informative)
It might come to a surprise to you, but not all words come from english; eventually it's the other way round.
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Re:Elium-4? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Elium-4? (Score:5, Interesting)
So Latin "homo" "person" but Italian "uomo", Rumanian "om" and so on.
(The "h" in French "homme" has never been pronounced and is only there in the spelling by analogy with the Latin word).
In the time of the later Roman Republic and early Empire (when most of the famous Latin literature comes from) whether "h" was pronounced was a class thing; dropping "h"s was supposed to be a mark of ignorance or low status.
People insecure about their status would put in "h"s where they didn't belong (the poet Catullus has a whole poem mocking somebody who does this).
Even those who prided themselves on their education were already getting it wrong by then, though, and some of their mistakes got perpetuated:
"humerus" "upper arm" should be "umerus"
"anser" "goose" should be "hanser"
We can deduce a remarkable amount about how Classical Latin was pronounced; there's a good book about it:
"Vox Latina" by W Sidney Allen
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Re:Elium-4? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, that was certainly the most interesting etymological post I've seen on slashdot lately! Certainly more interesting than an article on physics posted in an Italian business magazine, which seems to have been the original topic.
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Well to heck with English spelling in English then (Score:4, Insightful)
It might come to a surprise to you, but not all words come from english; eventually it's the other way round.
That's all great and interesting and all, and the other posts on etymology are interesting too, but you see, the thing is, the Slashdot article summary is written in English, for a primarily English speaking audience. In English, the word begins with an "H".
I'm all for respecting the languages of others, but the English word is spelled "Helium". Or, do we now get to use the spelling and pronunciation rules of whatever language we choose?
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Re:Elium-4? (Score:5, Funny)
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H conservation! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:H conservation! (Score:5, Funny)
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wow, elium-4 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:wow, elium-4 (Score:5, Funny)
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english.it (Score:5, Funny)
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english.it.us (Score:4, Funny)
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Two more reports... (Score:5, Informative)
http://physicsworld.com/blog/2008/05/coldfusion_demonstration_a_suc_1.html
A little more here:
http://newenergytimes.com/news/2008/29img/Arata-Demo.htm
Not a first hand account, but still.
Wouldn't that be nice? After years of delays for a new experimental fusion reactor (ITER) because they could not agree on where it should be built, a Japanese professor finds a way to get cold fusion to get work and the reactor is obsolete before built! Science can move ahead in strange and unpredictable ways as well...
Re:Two more reports... (Score:4, Insightful)
A big MAYBE: first the cold fusion experiment must be investigated, reproduced, etc, AND it obsoletes ITER only if it can be harnessed to produce energy, which is far from certain..
Look about high temperature supraconductors: at a time they were all the rage, but currently in many (most?) setup, it's old fashioned 'cold' supraconductors which are used because of issues with the 'high temperatures' one (britleness, ability to withstand high current, etc.)
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A world changing experiment... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A world changing experiment... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:A world changing experiment... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:A world changing experiment... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:A world changing experiment... (Score:5, Informative)
Reading the second article [ilsole24ore.com] does not give me confidence. It is the same old "we did this and that and got out some heat and some Helium." This also does not give confidence.
The article talks about Deuterium (Hydrogen-2) and Helium-4. Deuterium - Deuterium fusion should give rise to Tritium (Hydrogen-3 - which is radioactive) or Helium-3 plus a neutron (which is a form of radioactivity). Now, either of these products (Tritium or Helium-3) can themselves fuse (with each other or with Deuterium) to produce Helium-4, but these should also produce neutrons. Deuterium - Deuterium fusion to directly to Helium-4 is much harder to do (it has a very small cross-section), and its energy should come out as gamma rays.
So, they claimed no radioactivity (when there should have been neutrons or gamma rays produced) with an unlikely nuclear reaction (H2 + H2 -> He4) and it produced a moderate amount of heat (1 kilo Joule) without actually stating how much energy it took to run the apparatus.
It may be real, but the indications in this Italian economics journal are not encouraging.
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Peer-Reviewed Articles (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems unlikely to me that the first move an earnest discoverer of a new energy source in Japan would be to call an Italian newspaper. All the more since he seems to be working in academia and would thus have a strong incentive to publish in a peer-reviewed journal first (you don't get the Nobel prize for an article in "Il sore 24 ore"). But, here are the papers. Form your own opinion...
Re:Peer-Reviewed Articles (Score:5, Insightful)
But you do get to the front page of Slashdot!
More seriously, the established journals are often hideously slow in publishing stuff, and often dare to charge you for it, too. In the age of the Internet, all that can be dispensed with. You can get your discoveries and inventions published, peer reviewed, and communicated to the masses, all for free and without having to wait on some organization's release cycle.
You can also, of course, use the Internet to spread lies and misinformation, create fake peer reviews, and communicate all that to the masses, all for free and without having to wait on some organization's release cycle.
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How about neutrons? (Score:5, Informative)
The article seemed to be sparse on the details of what was actually going on, but if indeed the only evidence that they had a fusion reaction happening is the presence of helium-4, then they may have just detected naturally occurring helium [wikipedia.org] that is present in the atmosphere (0.000524%).
A better test to see whether fusion reactions are taking place is to try to detect the a stream of neutrons which are being produced. The neutrons flux and the energy should be able to be used to differentiate the fusion neutrons from the background neutron sources, such as those caused by spontaneous fission [wikipedia.org] events of heavy elements like uranium. Also, nuclear fusion reactions tend to produce high-energy, or fast neutrons [wikipedia.org] (upwards of 14 MeV with deuterium-deuterium fusion) which isn't too common unless you have some type of nuclear reaction taking place. (Here's a list of important nuclear fusion reactions important fusion reactions [wikipedia.org] for those who are curious.)
Detecting helium on the other hand, seems not so out of the ordinary since there is helium in the atmosphere.
Re:How about neutrons? (Score:4, Informative)
2H + 2H ----> 4He
- no neutrons "lost" at all.
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Re:How about neutrons? (Score:5, Informative)
The simple answer is that 2H + 2H --> 4He doesn't happen.
As shown in the link I posted to Wikipedia in my original post, you'll see that 2H + 2H --> 4He does not happen with any significance. In other words, that reaction doesn't happen enough to make it a significant source of the reaction. Nuclear physics doesn't exactly work like arithmetic.
The primary d-d reactions are listed as follows in the important reactions [wikipedia.org] section of the nuclear fusion article at Wikipedia:
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More info (Score:4, Informative)
Think for a moment! (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesnt that seem a bit fishy?
See me again when they actually published something somewhere...
Just an idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is more than only this experiment (Score:5, Informative)
Since cold fusion has such a bad reputation, they are calling it Low -Energy Nuclear Reactions. It's not only a better name, but it describes more accurately what those scientists are seeing: Transmutations and excess energy in low energy conditions.
The offical LENR webcine New Energy Times has all the info:
http://www.newenergytimes.com/ [newenergytimes.com]
the ACTUAL peer reviewed article (Score:4, Informative)
Read The Numbers... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you don't get Nobels for publishing Japanese cold fusion work in Italian economics journals. You don't get them from publishing any cold fusion work in any peer reviewed physics journal because they don't get published as such, for much the same reasons that make people claim absence of evidence is evidence of absence even though the evidence was only absent in some of the replications. You do, however, publish articles about Japanese cold fusion work in an Italian economics journal when a Japanese company is building cold fusion equipment in an Italian factory purchased from Fiat, said company having hired Pons and Fleischmann as design consultants.
Neutron flux is a sign of some fusion reactions, but not all. 2 * (1p + 1n) --> (2p + 2n): two deuterium go to one helium. The energy released is from the conversion of mass of two deuterium (2 * 2.014 = 4.028) into one helium (4.002). The difference (.026) is is given off as energy measured in ergs, calculated from the amount of mass "lost" in grams times the speed of light in a vacuum in centimeters per second times itself. The source of the energy is the release of binding energy in the nuclei; the binding energy required grows at a lesser rate than the number of nucleons. This is the mass difference stated in another way. The energy is this particular reaction comes.
And if cold fusion were as much a hoax as those educated by hearsay rather than science would have you believe, then you wouldn't have symposia on the subject at scientific conferences hosted by the selfsame journals that refuse the publish such articles unless they're written so speculatively as to seem almost fiction, and the phenonemon examined is called something else.
Regardless of the barriers caused by pathological disbelief masquerading as skepticism, or worse, education at the hands of the pathological disbelievers, over 3,000 articles peer reviewed articles on cold fusion have been published. Enough evidence has been accumulated to convince both the US Many and the US Dept. of Energy that the phenonenon is real, though inadequately understood, and deserved more investigation and funding.
Those who are so certain that cold fusion is bogus would probably be glad to know that once the bogus cold fusion reactors built at the bogus Fiat plant are primed they crank out 270 kiloboguswatts over 90 bogusdays with no additional input of energy.
Answer for yourself: if you had something important, but the mention of it made those who were the supposed experts in the field run screaming, just how would you go about bringing the knowledge out into the open without getting quashed? Through many different kinds of channels, a tiny bit at a time, which would by necessity mean some of the announcements would be of results and discoveries from some considerable time prior. The SETI people assert this is how alien contact and/or news of such would proceed and nobody blinks at that. Claim that this same process of being used on news of replicable tabletop physics and their eyes get stuck wide shut.
Unofficial translation (Score:5, Informative)
Italian reader
Moreover, the article is very focused on
telling the amazing story and embellishing
it with Japanese stereotype. The "Sole 24 ore"
is a well reputed economical journal, but
it is nothing about technical.
Indeed, they miss any reference to the original
news.
The revenge of the Samurai.
Yoshiaki Arata, 85 years old is a Japanese Professor Emeritus,
a leading pioneer of the advanced nuclear program in Japan and one of the fathers of research about hot fusion.
He is a strong NATIONALIST (he speaks only Japanese in public),
awarded by the Emperor and has now won his 20 years long battle as a Samurai.
He never gave up about the topic [cold fusion] since 1989, when Fleishmann and Pons announced a possible "constrained" fusion of deuterium inside a palladium cathode.
[They use] lightweight molecules, made traveling by a moderate anode-to-cathode electron flux in the fluid towards
palladium exhagonal structures.
There, they collide, pushing over themselves and trapping them causing the spontaneous pressure to reach million of atmospheres,
and then breaking nucleus, producing heat and finally converting into Helium-4.
A genuine nuclear fusion, obtained without the need of the big, high energy toroids as Iter, just like it happens
in stars.
Instead, they needed just a bottle with a little "heavy water" (easy to find in nature), a rare metal and the
same electric power you need at home.
Without radiations and with the final production of a inert gas, helium, useful to fill balloons.
Too beautiful to be true. Fleishmann and Pons shocked the whole community but they never managed to reproduce an experiment that would have changed
the life of humanity , if not in a few, sporadic cases.
They were defined cheaters, pretenders, not scientific, together with their entourage, up to being marginalized by the scientific community.
But samurai Arata went straight along the line. Also because
since the fifties he was amazed by the deuterium supercompression technique,
due to anomalies that happened using certain metals. So he decided
to take another line of research while working on low-energy fusion, the
one of electro-chemic. By simply pushing the deuterium inside palladium
nanoparticles with more and more atmospheres, up to creating the
same "crowded" situation and pressure increase of that experiment.
Today [5/22/2008] he made a public demonstration of his reactor in
Osaka, moving a Stirling engine with a few grams of palladium.
The reactor has been partially realized using ideas of Francesco
Celani and his group at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics
(INFN) in Frascati: the second-ranked laboratory actively working on Arata's line.
In the next few days Arata will try to increase the amount from 7 to 60
grams of palladium, expecting hundreds of Watts in thermal power, that is,
enough for your house lights for months.
But the very outstanding news, given in front of a multitude of scientific
reporters, someone coming even from the USA, is to have proved the production,
inside palladium hexagons, of a non-neglegible quantity of Helium-4,
the sign of deuterium transmutation and nuclear fusion.
This resulted in the reporters' crowd started talking about the "Arata
Phenomenon", a term he kindly accepted taking a bow, just like an old Samurai.
Re:It's not Rocket Science! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:It's not Rocket Science! (Score:5, Funny)
That's why Slashdot has editors to clean up the submissions, and discard the dupes.
Oh, wait...
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But whenever translating into English... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Neutrons anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Thus no Neutrons. Much safer.
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Re:Neutrons anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, if it is a purely 2D->He4 reaction, there should be a significant gamma flux with a characteristic (IIRC) energy as the product nucleus relaxed, which should be fairly easy to verify, at least in a ballpark measurement.
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Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
-jcr
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Re:Why not? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Why not? (Score:5, Informative)
No, cold fusion is ruled out by basic Quantum Mechanics.
The electrons are irrelevant since their density is so low, and nuclei must be within 10^-15 m to fuse. This only occurs at temperatures of hundreds of millions Celsius. If these experiments were generating temperatures this high, one could easily tell because they would also emit X- and gamma-rays.
Explanation of "cold fusion" phenomena (if these experiments are real and reproducible) would require a significant modification of Quantum Mechanics. This is exactly why physicists are so quick to dismiss the experiments. Few papers have been published "ruling it out" because it's so simple. However here is one: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v63/p191 [aps.org]. The theoretical literature claiming to come up with exotic ways to allow the phenomena to happen are quite extreme, in my opinion.
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Re:Why not? (Score:4, Informative)
Muon catalyzed fusion is documented and reproduceable. It can also occur at room temperature or lower.
It's probably not viable as a power source though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion [wikipedia.org]
Tim.
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Re:So-called geeks! (Score:5, Insightful)
None of the above, actually. It's been a failure to date, but who's been defrauded? Can you show that anyone who funded it was lied to about the difficulty of bringing it to market?
Investments in basic research are a long shot, and long shots can pay off very well if they come through.
-jcr
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Re:So-called geeks! (Score:4, Funny)
Refusing to use fusion because it might one day affect the oceans is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Our current energy usage is destroying the planet now. It would be utterly insane to refuse to use a clean, non-destructive alternative just because over-use will start having some small impact some kilo- or mega-years in the future. Nothing is perfect. If this works (and I am, as I said, quite skeptical) then it would be vastly better than any known alternative.
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Re:Sounds like this old, ridiculed experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article (and some other links in the comments), and assuming fusion really takes place, I would guess that this is some surface-related mechanism. Some unknown mechanism where the D-atoms are first adsorbed on the Pd, and then fusion takes place. If so it can very well be a relative slow process. I have not read the articles in much detail, I'm a chemist, not physicist. The articles also mention that imperfections in the Pd crystals appear to play a major role - again limiting the available area where such a reaction could take place.
And on top of it all, this reaction takes place at much lower temperature than most fusion reactions, thus the movement of the atoms is slower.
All in all, don't let the very slow kinetics put you off the idea that atomic fusion may take place, the most interesting fact reported is that the experiment produces energy over a long period of time and that I think is worth further investigation. First of all of course reproduction of the very experiment by some other scientists, and then improving the efficiency and figuring out what REALLY is going on.
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FRAUD ALERT -- Slashdot sucked in again! (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently the only purpose for this that has ever been found, however, is confusing Slashdot editors.
There are a large number of people claiming to be "working" on cold fusion. No one has ever been able to demonstrate anything interesting.
However, there are also a lot of schemes to steal investor money. In my opinion, this is probably fraud, as others have been.
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Cold Illusion: Old story from February 2008 (Score:5, Informative)
It's an old story, from February 2008. Quote: ' "The demonstrated live data looked just like data they reported in their published papers (J. High Temp. Soc. Jpn, Feb. and March issues, 2008)..." '
Quote: ' "Some people say we have reached the end of science, that there are no more great discoveries that remain. In my view, nature always has more secrets to reveal," Arata wrote.' My translation: "Please believe in this particular fantasy."
Apparently Slashdot editors don't do any research.
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Re:Cold Illusion: Old story from February 2008 (Score:5, Interesting)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5214938694909002743&q=the+war+on+cold+fusion&ei=Exo4SOt6iJzhAsyLxN8D&hl=en [google.com]
Also watch the US Navy SPAWAR experiments:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2843914499166355574&q=spawar+%22cold+fusion%22&ei=4hk4SNzaMIvS4QLYy53pAw&hl=en [google.com]
It may not be "cold fusion" but they have proof of excess
heat and other signs of nuclear process.
Some of the scientists involved are well respected too.
Consider all evidence before passing final judgement.
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Known for more than 40 years. (Score:4, Informative)
"Excess heat" is not a sign of nuclear fusion. It is a sign of something that has been known for more than 40 years, that Platinum and Palladium absorb Hydrogen, and sometimes heat is generated when experimenting with that.
Wikipedia: Palladium [wikipedia.org]. Quote: "Incredibly, when palladium is at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, it can absorb up to 900 times its own volume of hydrogen,
The people who "demonstrate" "cold fusion" never seem to be physicists. This Slashdot story is about someone who works for the Welding Research Institute at Osaka University.
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FRAUD ALERT -- Slashdot sucked in again! -- UPDATE (Score:5, Informative)
Yoshiaki Arata works for the Welding Research Institute of Osaka University. He is not a physicist, apparently.
Old story: He's been reporting this kind of thing since before October 13, 2006: A New Energy caused by "Spillover-Deuterium" [jst.go.jp]. Quote: "Intermittent operation over a period of two years using this structure proved the complete reproducibility of these results."
I hope no Slashdot reader invests in this. Would it be too much to ask Slashdot editor Scuttle Monkey [slashdot.org] to do a little research before he posts stories?
This is not the first complaint about Scuttle Monkey: Who is Scuttle Monkey? [slashdot.org]
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Re:FRAUD ALERT -- Slashdot sucked in again! (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, I also don't have any problem believing that platinum or palladium could have absorbed helium like a sponge from somewhere, and the hydrogen is merely driving it out and replacing it.
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