Pamela Mosier-Boss in the U. The experiments are well-documented and their results have been published in multiple peer-reviewed scientific literature, so our first approach is to try to reproduce their results. According to modern physics, no such reactions should take place, so a new theory should be developed to explain these reactions. There is also the possibility of developing novel heat sources, as these reactions are claimed to be producing excess heat from electricity.
Information that the HERMES research gathers about the fundamental properties of palladium-hydrogen systems could also help with developing a better process for producing hydrogen for fuel cells to power automobiles , according to Peljo.
The term LENR — low-energy nuclear reaction — now is used by some scientists "to avoid the stigma associated with cold fusion," according to Munday. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots.
Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Environmental Science. Energy Production. To some, it might seem as if investigating and re-investigating cold fusion is a waste of time and resources, but some scientists don't see it that way. Now That's Interesting. 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? Almost all scientists and most of the public no longer believe the 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. No excess heat was found. 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. He said that seven experiments were performed; they yielded excess heats of percent, percent, 'variable' and four that gave no excess heat at all.
This result might be considered rather meager after five years of work conducted before the 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. The experiment was widely criticized but since has neither been mentioned again nor formally withdrawn. To most scientists, this implies that cold fusion results are not believable, but true believers suggest that this unpredictability makes them more interesting!
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 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. 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--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. 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. 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. They also expressed the opinion that some of the plaintiffs had lost touch with reality.
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 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 --which means that even investing one penny to earn possible billions would be a bad bet.
We all hope to be served a cup of cold fusion tea. 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. They continue to rack up experiments showing excess heat gain, defined as the ratio of energy put out by a system to the energy required to operate it.
But in the end, most of these researchers are just looking for an explanation and would be happy if even a modest amount of heat generated turns out to be useful in some way. Nagel , an electrical and computer engineering professor at George Washington University and a former research manager at the Naval Research Laboratory.
The original branch of the field focuses on infusing deuterium into a palladium electrode by turning on the power, Nagel explains. Researchers have reported such electrochemical systems that can output more than 25 times as much energy as they draw. The other main branch of the field uses a nickel-hydrogen setup, which can produce greater than times as much energy as it uses.
Nagel likes to compare these LENR technologies to that of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor , a multination high-temperature fusion experiment based on well-understood physics—merging deuterium and tritium—being carried out in southern France. Nagel says the LENR field continues to grow internationally, and the biggest hurdles remain inconsistent results and lack of funding. For example, some researchers report that a certain threshold must be reached for a reaction to start.
The reaction may require a minimum amount of deuterium or hydrogen to get going, or the electrode materials may need to be prepared with a specific crystallographic orientation and surface morphology to trigger the process. The latter is a common issue with heterogeneous catalysts used in petroleum refining and petrochemical production. In , Rossi and his colleagues announced at a press conference in Bologna, Italy, that they had built a tabletop reactor, called the Energy Catalyzer, or E-Cat, that produces excess energy via a nickel-catalyzed process.
To substantiate his discovery, Rossi has held E-Cat demonstrations for potential investors and members of the media and commissioned independent validation tests.
Rossi posits that his E-Cat features a self-sustaining process in which electrical power input initiates fusion of hydrogen and lithium from a powdery mixture of nickel, lithium, and lithium aluminum hydride to form a beryllium isotope. Rossi says no waste is created in the process, and no radiation is detected outside the apparatus. One reason many people are having trouble believing Rossi is his checkered past.
In Italy, he was convicted of white-collar criminal charges related to his earlier business ventures. Rossi says those convictions are behind him and he no longer wants to talk about them. He also once had a contract to make heat-generating devices for the U.
But the delivered devices did not work according to specifications. In , Rossi announced completion of a 1-MW system that could be used to heat or power large buildings. But neither the factory nor the household units have materialized. In , Rossi licensed his technology to a company called Industrial Heat, which was formed by private equity firm Cherokee , a company that focuses on buying real estate and has a goal of cleaning up old industrial sites for redevelopment.
In the meantime, Industrial Heat and Leonardo have had a falling out, and both are now suing each other in court over violations of their agreement. Rossi continues his research and has announced development of other prototypes. But he gives away few details about what he is doing.
The household devices are still waiting for safety certification, he notes. Even if a device clears the hurdles of reproducibility and usefulness, he adds, its developers face an uphill battle of regulatory approval and customer acceptance. But Nagel remains optimistic. For that reason, Nagel has just outfitted a lab at George Washington to start a new line of nickel-hydrogen experiments. Many of the researchers who continue to work on LENR are accomplished scientists and are now retired.
Nuclear physicist Ludwik Kowalski, an emeritus professor at Montclair State University, agrees cold fusion got off to the wrong start. Kowalski thinks the social stigma against the research created as part of the initial fallout developed into a bigger problem, one that is unbecoming to the scientific method.
Whether or not the claims of LENR researchers are valid, Kowalski believes a clear yes or no answer is still worth seeking. Even if Kowalski gets a yes to his question and LENR researcher claims are validated, the path to commercialization is fraught with challenges. Not all start-up companies, even ones with sound technology, are successful for reasons that are not scientific in nature: capitalization, cash flow, cost, manufacturing, insurance, and competitive energy pricing, to name a few.
For example, consider Sun Catalytix. The company spun off from MIT is one example of a start-up built on strong science that fell victim to commercial pressures before it hit its stride. The company was created to commercialize an artificial photosynthesis process developed by chemist Daniel G.
Nocera , now at Harvard, to economically and efficiently convert water into hydrogen fuel with sunlight and inexpensive catalysts. Nocera envisioned that hydrogen generated in this way could power a simple fuel cell to provide energy to homes and villages in poor regions of the world without access to a power grid, making modern conveniences available and improving quality of life.
But the process needed significantly more capital and more time to develop than the company initially thought. After four years, Sun Catalytix abandoned its commercialization effort, turned to making flow batteries, and then was bought in by Lockheed Martin. Sun Catalytix no longer exists. He simply wants to know, does the hydrino exist?
If the process generates liters of hydrino gas as he has calculated, it should be obvious. Langmuir coined the term more than 50 years ago to describe a psychological process in which scientists unconsciously veer away from the scientific method and become so engrossed in what they are doing they develop an inability to be objective and see what is real and not real.
But he has never been a true believer. All the discussions about cold fusion and LENR end that way: They always come back to the fact that no one has a commercial device on the market yet, and none of the prototypes seem workable on a commercial scale in the near future.
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Thank you! Nuclear Power Cold fusion died 25 years ago, but the research lives on Scientists continue to study unusual heat-generating effects, some hoping for vindication, others for an eventual payday by Stephen K. Ritter November 7, A version of this story appeared in Volume 94, Issue Some 7, people attended a hastily organized cold fusion session at the ACS national meeting in Dallas in , hopeful that word of the newly announced phenomenon was true.
In brief In , the scientific world was turned upside down when two researchers announced they had tamed the power of nuclear fusion in a simple electrolysis cell. Credit: SRI International. Wilk, synthetic organic chemist. Credit: BLP. Miles, electrochemist. We were willing to invest time and resources to see if this might be an area of useful research in our quest to eliminate pollution. Darden, CEO, Cherokee.
Credit: Ecat. Rossi kneeling works on one of the modular units of a 1-MW Energy Catalyzer designed to power large buildings. Credit: Courtesy of Melvin Miles. In July, Miles used his kitchen as lab space to run an experiment similar to the original Fleischmann-Pons experiment. In the setup shown, which includes a palladium wire cathode in deuterated water and potassium nitrate solution nested inside a homemade copper calorimeter, all sitting in a constant-temperature water bath Walmart-purchased aquarium at left , Miles observed excess heat generated that is associated with deuterium fusion.
A clear yes or no answer is still worth seeking. Subscribe ». You might also like Physical Chemistry. Cold fusion. Unlikely Cold Fusion. Reviving Cold Fusion. Share X. To send an e-mail to multiple recipients, separate e-mail addresses with a comma, semicolon, or both. Title: Cold fusion died 25 years ago, but the research lives on. Submit Sending Tom Parsons November 7, AM. Nice article! Unfortunately you associate Mills and the hydrino to cold fusion but the energy is chemical in nature and not nuclear.
If you had done a little research you would have known this. Gregory Smith November 7, AM. Good Grief. Surprised and disappointed you are even covering this. The one thing Mills is unarguably good at is finding optimistic investors. For anyone still tempted to invest in this It's not mentioned in the article, but Mills recently demonstrated a working prototype that not only produces 2MW over x input power fueled by ordinary hydrogen, but, astonishingly, even self-sustains a plasma in the absence of an ignition current.
Plasmas in the absence of a source of charged particles has never been shown terrestrially. Maybe those investors know something you don't? Kahuna November 8, PM.
A slight correction. Mills has not demonstrated the 2MW of power from the yet, that is only the expectation for the SunCell design and theoretically will happen within the next few months. The plasma part of your statement appears correct however, and it would seem to be the most difficult part of the job IMO.
When the SunCell can "close the loop" with no external power source and produce prodigious energy for extended periods, I suspect many more folks will pay attention to Mills and BrLP. Mary Yugo November 9, PM. Not "when" And based on Mills' history, it seems exceedingly unlikely. Well-meaning people can disagree on whether the 2MW was "proven". Four independent experts representing top research universities have separately concluded via differential water bath calorimetry that up to 2MW of power was being generated at over x gain.
I personally communicated with many of them. Mills described the glove box continually alarming due to the inability to vent the excess heat being generated. We also have evidence of thick tungsten electrodes and solid molybdenum liners being wrecked in seconds.
I spoke to a lab tech who experienced these effects. So yes - I think we do have evidence of unprecedented power being created. Becktemba November 7, PM. Russ Nelson December 26, PM. Many businesses based on working technology will fail. A failure to make money is not a failure of the technology. Also, time is often a function of money. Many single satellites, individual drugs, navy ships, bridges and tunnels, and single buildings utilize far, far more resources than this.
Many of them more than an order of magnitude more, and some nearly two orders of magnitude greater. These mundane examples return many orders of magnitude less economic return than the possibility if LENR were developed to become a useful energy contributor.
A quick though experiment to put things into perspective Let's estimate the value of future LENR energy in today's terms. Also, let's be very conservative an apply a total value of future LENR energy for our purposes to be calculated over a short 10 year period. This short value period can offset and mitigate any disagreement over other probabilities we are about to assume below.
We shall also ignore the economic value of positive environmental impacts on this exercise that may be incalculable. Let's now assign some placeholder probabilities for our thought experiment.
This is arbitrary, but none-the-less an effort has been made to be conservative to balance the beliefs of those within and outside of the field. Many think the evidence is incontrovertible, while others that it is pathological science. For the purposes of our thought experiment, then let's ask under the aforementioned conditions, what amount of investment is warranted from an economic standpoint, or from a alternate perspective, how much would a prudent gambler bet on LENR research?
It is a simple calculation that shall be left to the reader. Stunningly so. Our future activity and investment of resources in this realm must be proceeded by the idea that we are willing to be wrong. Once we get past this hurdle, the numbers can be our compass absent any other agreement or collective intellectual commitment. End though experiment. Bernhard Piwczyk December 27, PM. I applaud the carefully thought out thought experiment By Steve Katinsky! We must listen to S. Hawkins recent plea to cooperate and not get lost in silly argument over minutia.
Kirk Shanahan November 7, AM. Non-nuclear explanations exist for all but a few of the observations made by cold fusion CF researchers. Marwan, M. McKubre, F. Tanzella, P. Hagelstein, M. Miles, M. Swartz, Edmund Storms, Y. Iwamura, P. Mosier-Boss and L. Christopher Calder November 7, AM. Both Mitsubishi and Toyota have reported experimental success in transmuting one element into another. Excess heat may be difficult to measure. Transmutation of elements requires fusion by definition, and is pretty solid evidence something has happened.
That said, we all need a working product that makes useful amounts of energy to feel confident that LENR can work for us in a productive way. The world does not need small amounts of energy from small lab experiments.
The world needs vast amounts of energy that can be delivered on demand. I think the mathematical odds suggest that there is something very real going on, but we do not know yet if it will ever be anything of value. Accurately measured lab experiments trump old theory.
If you feel that only experimental results that can be explained by old theories are correct, then how can new and better theories ever be born? It's called "progress". Kirk Shanahan November 8, AM. Heavy metal transmutation claims are not well supported.
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