Cold Fusion

Yes - check out New Energy Times

http://newenergytimes.com/Conversations/Cravens.htm

yes that's him thank you

Observe only. Do not give him money. He has perfected a method of making money vanish

O Gawd!!!!

Haven't we all???

Mark

Mine even talks. It says, "Goodbye!"

-e

I don't know about Dr. Cravens, but anyone interested in *legitimate* scientific research into cold fusion should check out the results reported by Szpak, Mosier-Boss, and Gordon at the U.S. Navy San Diego SPAWAR Systems Center (see links below). "Cold fusion" (now more accurately referred to as "low-energy nuclear reactions" -- LENR) got off to a bad start due to Pon's and Fleischman's hasty decision to ignore the usual peer-review process. This, and the premature claims by amateurs, and the unfair association with "free energy" crowd, caused the stigma that the field continues to suffer. But note that the LENR claims do not require violation of any accepted laws of physics -- they instead proposes here-to-fore unknown reactions that release nuclear potential energy (whether fission or fusion remains unclear). This field deserves serious scientific study. Even if it has only a slim chance of succeeding, LENR might cleanly solve our energy needs once and for all.

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SzpakSexperiment.pdf

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/SzpakSfurtherevi.pdf

http://www.lenr-canr.org

looks like a lot of wiggling to try to grab the long odds gamblers.

No hopr for any of these forays.

There is only one low power method that works and it has been around for decades.

" "Cold fusion" (now more accurately referred to as "low-energy nuclear reactions" -- LENR)"

A neat scientific experimental confirmation of the actuality of Cold Fusion being a fact.
Hardly a Fusion Reactor of practical application(s).

It looks like bad experimental procedure to me, no fusion at all.

Hardly a Fusion Reactor of practical application(s)

Initial proof-of-principle experiments almost never immediately provide practical devices. R&D takes time. Consider how many years passed between the invention of the transistor (in 1947) and its practical applications that we now take for granted. Likewise for the internal combustion engine.

But with fusion they lack that initial proof of concept. So they play and feed and cloth themselves with other people money under the charade of research

But with fusion they lack that initial proof of concept. So they play and feed and cloth themselves with other people money under the charade of research

The debate rages on. Did you read the papers from the Naval Research Lab? And if so, do you have sufficient scientific background to judge their work objectively? (I am a physical chemist). Which aspect of their method do you question? Of course we need to see replication of the results by other groups, as per the demands of the scientific method. The LENR claims may turn out to be mistaken (always a possibility with preliminary results), but at least their investigation looks far more rigorous than that of any of the earlier groups. Most of their predecessors seemed to be just groping in the dark.

The group at Naval Research consists of serious scientists under intense peer review -- very unlikely that they would intentionally mislead (won't be around long if they did). Scientific certainty is a matter of degree, and the field of LENR has a long way to go in building its case, but at least try to keep an open mind.

Nice, well-balanced post, Sven-san.

Yes, I read and understood(what there was of it). Now are these events amplified noise, current density events or a true event that involves fusion? Having seen a lot of scams and having been looked to for funding for assorted scams I tend to give these things the gimlet eye.

Aurizon,

Glad to hear that you read and understood the papers. I hope I didn't sound arrogant when I asked if you did, but I have often felt frustrated by skeptics that said they "didn't need to read the papers". Note that although Szpak et al reported anomalies presently far too weak to serve as an energy source, they are at least very reproducible (unlike previous cold fusion/LENR claims). I can understand your doubts about the signal-to-noise ratios, but hopefully this will improve as results accumulate (especially results by other groups).

Szpak et al seem to have advanced the LENR field in three major ways. Firstly, their use of CR-39 polymer blocks to record the tracks produced by the analogous ionizing radiation was absolutely brilliant (mainstream nuclear research uses this method routinely, so why did no one else think of this before?!). Skeptics justifiably question the signal-to-noise ratios for complex instrumental techniques such as infrared, x-ray, and piezoelectric techniques. And also for tritium detection. But the elegant simplicity of the CR-39 technique makes it hard to argue that the evidence consists of pure noise (of course they ran control blanks using CR-39 blocks from the same lot).

Szpak et al contributed a second major breakthrough by successfully demonstrating a method to simultaneously deposit their palladium metal electrode and load it with deuterium (D2). This allowed the production of anomalous events to start within minutes, instead of the embarrassingly long delay time of weeks that had historically plagued experiments using palladium loading.

Thirdly, the use of electrostatic and magnetic fields to enhance the rate of anomalies seems very promising. Although this does complicate the picture, raising the possible objection that the fields might trigger ordinary but poorly understood processes at the electrode surfaces. We'll have to wait to find out the details, but at least this techniques should greatly shorten the time needed to gather lots of data.

Anyway, I agree that healthy skepticism will help prevent us from being mislead -- true scientists welcome critical feedback. Unlike the blind faith demanded by religious/political dogma, the scientific method requires us to question everything, and settle for nothing less than mounds of reproducible empirical evidence. All the poorly performed cold fusion studies over the years have really damaged the reputation of the field. I feel very happy to finally see reports that (so far) can actually stand up to tough questioning. Note Szpak's publications in reputable journals like the J. of Electrochemistry, Physical Reviews, and Naturwissenschaften, as opposed to the usual cold fusion reports in dubious non-peer-reviewed magazines such as "New Energy Times" and "Infinite Energy".

On a somewhat related topic, how effective is palladium metal at storing garden-variety hydrogen? The plain ol' 'protium' kind? Does palladium store more hydrogen per gram than, say, some of the hydrides now being considered?

-e

Palladium can absorb large amounts of hydrogen -- at room temperature, up to 900 times its own volume. Since the absorption process is purely chemical, it works equally well for all hydrogen isotopes. So yes, palladium absorbs ordinary H2 just as efficiently as D2 (or T2, tritium gas).

Researchers have proposed a wide variety methods for hydrogen storage. Examples include compressed H2 gas, as liquified H2, absorbed into graphite or buckytubes, inside glass microspheres, as metal hidrides, and in compound forms such as NH3BH3. Compressed and liquified H2 are well known methods, but these have the problems of relatively low energy density (i.e., low H2 weight capacity compared to the weight of the container), and safety issues, respecively. The other methods do better in this regard, but are still mostly in the research stage and may suffer from other drawbacks. Based on how often it apears in technology reports, the metal hydride method appears to have the best overall characteristics at present. Maybe an alert reader can point us to a web site giving a good overview?

svengali writes: "Palladium can absorb large amounts of hydrogen -- at room temperature, up to 900 times its own volume. Since the absorption process is purely chemical, it works equally well for all hydrogen isotopes. So yes, palladium absorbs ordinary H2 just as efficiently as D2 (or T2, tritium gas)."

-----

Yes. The thrust of my question is centered more around hydrogen storage per se. I singled-out protium storage specifically to convey the sense that here I was discussing hydrogen storage, not cold-fusion and its association with deuterium. Of course, there will always be a few isotopes present in a given sample.

How does palladium for hydrogen storage stack up against the best hydrides? I've googled for this info, but oftentimes the links lead to "subscription required" articles to trade rags or offers to sell me the article. I assume your organization has such subscriptions allowing you to keep up with the latest research.

-e

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hydride+%2Benthalpy+%2Bpalladium+%2Bstorage&btnG=Search

Hey, thanks!

The problem with H2 or D2 in palladium is the fact that they are not stored side by side, but are interspersed with Pd. This makes fusion harder to achieve.

I had speculated whether or not an implosion of D2 saturated Pd, much like a fission bomb, would achieve the requisite density.

Not wishing to blow up all that pd, I suppose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium_hydride

Szpak et al. have done a great job, but they are hardly the first to use CR39. Russian, Italian and U.S. researchers have done this for many years. Szpak has achieved good reproducibility producing neutrons, but others have achieved 80 to 100% reproducibility for with excess heat, tritium and especially transmutations. Mitsubishi, the Japanese National Synchrotron Lab and others have performed many transmutation experiments over the last 12 years, and every experiment has produced a positive result. In some cases they convert nearly the whole thin film layer from Cs into Pr, which comes out with the isotopic distribution as the starting Cs. See Iwamura et al. for details.

Szpak and others at the Navy have undergone rigorous peer-review, but the same can be said of the other authors who published in established, mainstream journals. Most of them say the review hurdle was much higher than normal, because of the harsh opposition to this research. Despite this opposition, professional scientists in over 100 world-class laboratories have published roughly 1000 peer-reviewed papers in these journals.

For more information see LENR-CANR.org. This site includes an index of 3,400 papers on cold fusion, including ~1000 peer-reviewed ones, and the full text from over 500 papers.

- Jed Rothwell

Librarian,LENR-CANR.org

Mr. Rothwell,

please , the link to LENR-CANR.org .

Thanks ,Nic

nicolaievlad

''the link to LENR-CANR.org ."

And the LINK IS: < LENR-CANR.org >

What more could you ask for?????

Thanks for this very interesting and informative link on the subject.

Mark

I've been looking for a place to get Dueterium, to do experiments with, does anyone know any?

I've also started an info thread about Cold Fusion in this forum

http://www.overunity.com/index.php/topic,2149.0.html

Also about H2 storage do you think it can be stored, in H forum, and in water that it's created in, if the unit is under pressure? Does H bind into H2 at the electrode, or as it ripes off the O atom? I think the H atoms proton, travels throught the water to pick up an electron at the negatively charged electrode, that would explain why O condences on one electrode, and H on the other.

This video supports that possiblity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRXlm5AO9mY