Successful Cold Fusion Experiment?

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."

Elium-4?

Must have been a very successful experiment. All the "H" are indeed gone!

Re:Elium-4?

italian words for Hydrogen and Helium are Idrogeno and Elio. These translitteration comes from latin, where they didn't have an H phonema. The symbols H and He start with H because the name of the atoms are derived from greek where they did have H starting words.

It might come to a surprise to you, but not all words come from english; eventually it's the other way round.

Re:Elium-4?

Well, actually the Greek doesn't have an H letter (AFAIK there was an H sound, but it didn't have its own character, but an appropriately accented vowel indicated that is was to be spoken with an H before it; I think those accents don't exist any more in modern Greek). OTOH, Latin definitively does have an H letter, although the Romans probably didn't speak it.

Re:Elium-4?

Latin "h", originally pronounced like English "h", eventually ceased to be pronounced at all; in the modern languages descended from Latin it is has been lost and is found, if at all, only in words borrowed from other languages.

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

Re:Elium-4?

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.

Two more reports...

I found this article on the demonstration:

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...

Peer-Reviewed Articles

If found older (English) peer-reviewed papers by this Author here [jst.go.jp] and here [jst.go.jp]. He doesn't seem to have published much on this since then [google.co.uk], except for a very vague patent application to be found here [wipo.int].

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

``you don't get the Nobel prize for an article in "Il sore 24 ore"''

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.

How about neutrons?

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?

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:

1. 2H + 2H --> 3H + p
2. 2H + 2H --> 3He + n

Just an idea...

Could we please restrict all further "cold fusion" articles to at least the level of "cold fusion experiment of X successfully reproduced by Y"?. That would help keeping the noise level down.

There is more than only this experiment

If you would follow this field more closely you would find that there is a small but steadily growing number of scientists from around the world working in this field.

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]

Re:It's not Rocket Science!

That's why Slashdot has editors to clean up the submissions, and discard the dupes.

Oh, wait...

Re:A world changing experiment...

They spell differently in Italia, dufus. So apparently if intelligent beings from another planet land here, most people will be too busy making fun of them to understand their message?

Re:A world changing experiment...

or at best, it's a "word changing experiment". ;)

Re:A world changing experiment...

Well, when you have these kinds of blatant typos it means the poster might not have any idea what he was talking about. In that case, it cast doubts on whether it's really a "world changing experiment"...

Exactly. Let's see, a report full of errors about a Italian economics journal reporting on a Japanese experiment. Doesn't give me confidence.

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.

Re:Neutrons anyone?

It's cold fusion, from H (1P+1N) to He4 (2P+2N).
Thus no Neutrons. Much safer.

Re:Neutrons anyone?

The 2 Deuterium to 1 Helium-4 reaction is only one of the results which would happen in that situation - the production of Tritium (Possibly leading to Tritium+Deuterium reactions producing He4 and a neutron) or Helium-3 and a spare neutron is also possible, and indeed are significantly more energetically favourable under normal circumstances, and would lead to a neutron flux.

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.

Re:wow, elium-4

No, they used Italianium and Machinetranslatium.

english.it

In my personal experience, machine translation has long since surpassed your average Italian English speaker.

Why not?

Cold fusion isn't ruled out by any known laws of physics, so I'll keep an open mind about it until it's proven one way or another. Pons and Fleischman may not have succeeded, but that's no reason to quit. As long as the people trying to make it work are doing so with their own funds, more power to them. If someone succeeds, then a lot of the scarcity in the world can be solved.

-jcr

Re:Why not?

That's a very good point. This is not like a perpetual motion machine, which is completely forbidden by the laws of physics as we know it. Cold fusion is only notorious because the people who originally publicized it were total publicity hounds and sacrificed science to get in the news, resulting in it all blowing up in their faces when it turned out that they didn't have anything. Aside from it being a notorious hoax or mistake, there's nothing that makes cold fusion inherently ridiculous or bad.

Re:So-called geeks!

Firstly, let's remember that so far, cold fusion has been a con. A rip-off. A fraud.

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

Re:Sounds like this old, ridiculed experiment

There appears to be something happening - but as long as we don't know the mechanism there is nothing to be said about kinetics.
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.

FRAUD ALERT -- Slashdot sucked in again!

FRAUD? It has been known for more than 40 years, maybe much more, that putting Hydrogen or Deuterium into Platinum or Palladium causes some interesting effects. The metals absorb a huge amount of Hydrogen.

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.