Cold Fusion

I returned home Saturday night to find a copy of condensed matter nuclear science: proceedings of the 10th international conference on cold fusion, edited by Peter L. Hagelstein (MIT) and Scott R. Chubb (Naval Research Laboratory). Weighing in at 4.25 pounds, this is no small book addressing a big big topic. I had attended the 10th ICCF, which was held in Cambridge, and hence a copy of the proceedings showed up on my doorstep.

What can be said about cold fusion? First, I'm not a physicist and cannot fully evaluate the science presented in this collection of papers, or elsewhere for that matter. That said, let me report what others say based on many informal interviews during ICCF10 and subsequently.

You may remember that in the 1980s, chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann created a sensation when they announced they had produced excess energy -- more out than went in -- in a table-top experiment. The source of this excess energy was cold fusion, sometimes referred to as Low Energy Nuclear Reactions ("LENR"). If verified both experimentally and theoretically, cold fusion would be a world changing scientific breakthrough.

Many then tried to duplicate the Pons and Fleischmann results. Some at MIT failed to reproduce the results. In fact, there has been a long running battle over falsified data, misrepresentation, the intrusion of funding politics, and the defense of scientific reputations related to the negative MIT results. Based on these and other negative results, the Department of Energy has for a long time not taken serious any of the positive cold fusion results. And for the most part, the US Patent Office has refused for a long time to grant patents explicitly relating to cold fusion, although a few patents did issue following publication of the original Pons and Fleischmann results.

Turns out that it's not easy to do the proper experiments and for a couple of reasons. First, calorimetry - roughly the science of heat measurement - is a difficult, and some would say, dying art. More important, most CF experiments did not use controls. In the experimental sciences, results are always evaluated in comparison to something.

Many papers, books, and publications have been written about all this. Some of the best include Fire From Ice by Dr. Eugene Mallove (who was murdered, under questionable circumstances according to some), and Excess Heat by Charles G. Beaudette. Cold Fusion Times, edited by Dr. Mitchell Swartz, has information and links. Google searches will reveal other sources.

[One example of a generally negative view is the Wiki article here that repeats much of the standard anti-cold fusion reasoning. It would be good to update that article taking into account Hagelstein's theoretical work and the work of Swartz and other experimentalists.]

So what about Cold Fusion ("CF")?

Here's what I believe to be the consensus views of those working in the field:

• Cold Fusion is real and has been reproduced many times in several labs around the world.
• The hurricanes that blow against the reality of CF are driven in large part by those whose economic interests are threatened if CF is in fact real, namely, carbon-based energy industries and the hot fusion research community.
• Regardless of experimental results, one needs a convincing theory of CF. Many believe that the work of MIT's Peter Hagelstein--a tenured professor of electrical engineering--is exemplary and if verified experimentally, stands in line for a Nobel prize.
• Regardless of theory, one needs strong experimental confirmation and demonstrations that the effects scale into commercializable products. Many point to the work of Dr. Mitchell Swartz as exemplary for two reasons. First, Swartz reliably reproduces excess heat and, more importantly, does so with appropriate experimental controls, the sine qua non of experimental science.
• Research continues to accumulate on both the experimental and theoretical fronts. The open question seems to be when the CF community will reach the tipping point.

Comments

[Peter Nielsen]

Unreproducability of experimental results has been one of Cold Fusion's biggest problems. An explanation of the general problem:

The usual explanation given by Hot Fusion mainstream physicists for why they don't take Cold Fusion more seriously is the problem of unreproducability of Cold Fusion experimental results.

I have never been happy about this explanation because many real phenomena are elusive. Indeed, such phenomena have often been at the cutting edge of much important research, not least in particle physics, my first specialty.

It occurred to me a few days ago that there may be an explanation of Cold Fusion's problem in the extreme, multiscale variability of meson densities in the background meson soup of the bottom of Earth's atmosphere.

There is much evidence, starting with Luis Alvarez et al's 1957 work, that mesons catalyse Cold Fusion reactions by greatly reducing Coulomb (electrical repulsion) barriers between Deuterium atoms via replacement of orbital electrons.

Such catalysis would be strongly dependent on significant densities of meson particles of optimal energies, which may on some occasions be generated by cosmic ray interactions with the Earth's atmosphere, which may not have been taken into account by researchers.

The energies of cosmic ray interactions with the Earth's atmosphere cover an enormous energy range. Interactions near the bottom of this range are extremely frequent. Interactions near the top of this range are extremely infrequent.

The optimal energy of interactions producing mesons most strongly affecting Cold Fusion reactions would be between these two extremes. The frequency of occurrence of these optimal energy interactions, and sub-optimal intervening periods, would be somewhere between the extreme frequencies of these extremes.

This intermediate frequency may well be of a similar order to the frequencies of Cold Fusion experiments. Hence contradictory results. Hence unreproducability of Cold Fusion experimental results:

While successful Cold Fusion experiments may generally have been done within optimal background meson soups, unsuccessful Cold Fusion experiments may generally have been done within sub-optimal background meson soups.

[bill colley]

I believe that hot and cold fusion are the same thing and that God did not invent two ways for fusion to occur.

If not retired, I might be considered a student. However, during my limited and unimpressive school days, I did research on hydrogen attack and corrosion.

I believe that cold fusion is similar to hydrogen attack of steel in that it occurs in microdefects in palladium or other metal cathodes as does hydrogen attack in steel.

During electrolysis of heavy water,deturium ions are drawn with a large force to the surface of the palladium cathode resulting in a large pressure at the palladium surface.

At equilibrium with surface conditions,an astromonical pressure develops in the defects in the cathode. Since the pressure is uniform in the palladium cathode, the defects cannot expand.

High temperatures are produced with a high flow rate of deuterium into the defects, but the pressure itself is sufficient to cause fusion. Compare pressure with rate of fusion in literature.
As fusion occurs, heat is produced but equilibrium is maintained.

Hovever, a pressure gradent can be produced in the palladium cathode if the applied voltafe is allowed to vary. This may offer an advantage if the defects in the palladium expand as a result of the gradient, but at the same time, the effectiveness of the palladium can be destroyed with expansion of the defects to the surface with leakage of high pressure deuterium. The literature seems to indicate that the activation energy of self diffusion in this process is 15 kcal/mole in agreement with that for cold fusion.

A computer program might be used to very carefully control the voltage into the cold fusion device from start to finish of experiment.A very small change in the applied voltage can produce a sufficently large pressure gradent to result in failure.Maintainence of a very constant voltage might solve the reproducibility problem.