Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is “significant” evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.
The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.
“Our finding is very significant,” said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.
“To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a LENR device,” added the study’s co-author in a statement.
[…]
Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss’s published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.
[…]
But Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, said the study was “big” and could open a new scientific field.The neutrons produced in the experiments “may not be caused by fusion but perhaps some new, unknown nuclear process,” added Krivit, who has monitored cold fusion studies for the past 20 years.
Most ideas without a working theory as to how they actually work are not high value areas of inquiry. Of course people should, and will, investigate whims and fantasies, nothing wrong with that.
Yes, cold shoulder until a firmer hypothesis is formed, or repeatable positive results are documented.
DISCLAIMER
There is no relationship between myself and the Dance Troupe in the above poster.
My wife assures me that I am not cold. She is a medical professional, she knows these things.
I’m hoping that there is something to this, but still a bit skeptical.
I was going through my major in Physics when the Fleischmann-Pons announcement was made. Within a couple of weeks we knew they screwed up and didn’t have anything.
The problem with Chemist doing Physics is taking into consideration all the factors which could alter the measured results. Physicist know to take everything into account, even the room you work in.
It turns out that Fleischmann and Pons, being chemist, didn’t realize that the basement they were in was itself slightly radioactive.
They didn’t do a proper baseline and instead just measured the decay of the potassium in the basement walls, not any fusion in the liquid.
Let’s hope the guys at the US naval labs learned from all this. I would expect so given the past history and by and large these guys are very sharp.
“Most ideas without a working theory as to how they actually work are not high value areas of inquiry. ”
Right, like most natural phenomena which are first observed and only later explained by theory? I’m still skeptical, but more hopeful.
I was a research scientist at this lab, and any public release is carefully reviewed, verified, and backed by supportable evidence, prior to being sanitized and released by the public affairs office. It will be interesting to hear the full story. I hope this turns out to be a significant break through.
Mistakes can and do happen, even under the best conditions. If this is the case, a full explaination will be forthcoming. Politics aside, people at these facilities are not allowed to grand stand (in public) as a matter of the type of research conducted – national policy & security. If that policy has changed I would be very disappointed.
#4–Winston==whats natural in this manufactured observation?
Now, bobbo, we don’t know enough about their “manufactured observation” to make any inferences.
How about this for a manufactured observation?
—————-
Take your pencil and drop it.
Observe that it falls toward the earth.
Note that there must be a force involved. Call it gravity.
State how gravity actually works.
————-
If you can do the forth step, state how gravity actually works, you will be right up there in history along Newton and Einstein.
Fact is, everyone can observe, measure, and describe gravity, but no one has been able to explain just how gravity works.
A manufactured observation without a working theory.
#7–Ah Yea==you make my point. We can all drop a pencil and observe. No one can observe net energy from cold fusion.
Hence “manufactured” and not natural.
I personally have witnessed cold fusion. While making a Bloody Mary, I had really cold ice cubes. While drinking this concoction all of the ice cubes fused together. It was fucking awesome! I repeated this experiment repeatedly until I passed out, worked every time. i’ll be submitting a paper once I get rid of this headache.
The fault for the early demise of Cold Fusion lies with the Pons & Fleishmann’s university. They both expressed reservations about going public with the data but were pushed into it by overzealous administrators.
The evidence that *some* nuclear process is occurring on H-saturated palladium is incontravertible, The question of any excess heat generated or the exact process involved are points of active inquiry. Calorimetry is a delicate procedure, open to all kinds of error.
Regarding #9 – My experiment did make those girls pictured above look better.
#8 “No one can observe net energy from cold fusion.”
What?? Where did you get THAT from? What is it you think they are measuring to determine if fusion occurred? Net energy output!
After deducting background radiation, any additional radiation of any sort whether it be electromagnetic or particle, in physics parlance is net energy output.
The net output may be positive (the system entropy increases) or negative (system entropy decreases – unlikely), but as long as it doesn’t remain exactly the same, you have a net output.
Now for the researchers to state that they saw cold fusion, I must assume they measured a product of fusion, probably a sustained neutron or gamma production. Ergo, a net output.
There simply isn’t any way to determine fusion except by net output.
#12–Ah Yea==I got it from a few years ago-the last time I actually read a full article on it. The early errors were one of reading the input energy or not fully accounting for it, in essence making a perpetual motion machine/energy production cycle that only needed to be scaled up.
Don’t blame me, (or go ahead?) if I haven’t updated my understanding of cold fusion to include whatever the hell you are talking about. It “cold whatever isn’t producing a net positive something over the input whatever” then cold fusion is the wrong label. Course, that happens a lot here.
No problem bobbo. In fact, as you read my comment above, that is exactly what we discovered at UCLA. They didn’t take the background radiation of their basement workshop into consideration and were reading potassium decay.
This is where I would be absolutely amazed if the current research made the same mistakes.
#14–Ah Yea==I love the stories about: “Is it science, or measuring error?”
2 examples:
1. The ozone layer was measured and observed for years before final recognized for what it was. In the early years, it was considered to be instrument static and zero’ed out to calibrate the detection device===or something like that.
2. Background radiation that was thought to be pigeon shit but was actually evidence of the big bang.
Many more, but those come to mind first leading to one of my favorite tags: How do you know what you know, and how do you change your mind?
Why should you stop giving it the cold shoulder?
Even if it works, the extreme environmentalists will be against it, as cheap energy is not part of their agenda.
#16–Mikey==stale and unimaginative.
Please do better or STFU!
#12, Ah Yea,
After deducting background radiation, any additional radiation of any sort whether it be electromagnetic or particle, in physics parlance is net energy output.
Nope. Any stray particle absorption would also count towards net energy output. Example, solar collectors.
There simply isn’t any way to determine fusion except by net output.
You might be jumping the gun here. What if cold fusion required energy instead of releasing it? I don’t have the answer, just suggesting we don’t start making pronouncements we don’t know the answer to.
Ah Yea,
I should add that I am not a physicist either. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
8)
How can you say you’re going to blade off hundreds of thousands of acres of earth to preserve the Earth?’
Terry Frewin, a local Sierra Club representative, said he had tough questions for state regulators. ‘‘Deserts don’t need to be sacrificed so that people in L.A. can keep heating their swimming pools,’’
The agenda isn’t cheap energy. It’s controlling people’s lives.
More information here (thanks to Cage Match).
“Neutron tracks revive hopes for cold fusion”
Please note that cold fusion has been replicated thousands of times by over 200 labs such as Los Alamos of BARC. You can read all about this at any university library. I have a collection of 1,200 peer-reviewed journal papers about cold fusion which I copied from the libraries at Los Alamos and Georgia Tech.
You will find a list of 3,000 papers on this subject, and 500 full text papers here:
http://lenr-canr.org/
Excess heat, tritium, neutrons and helium from cold fusion have been observed by thousands of researchers worldwide, often at high signal to noise ratios (thousands of times above background). There is not the slightest chance all of the observations are experimental error.
Whether the effect can be made into a practical source of energy remains to be seen.
This still seems just a bit too iffy. Indirect evidence of energetic neutrons, and little of that, it seems. Anyway, what good are energetic neutrons to most people? They’re toxic and they compromise the integrity of the structures they encounter. What we want is a measurable, preferably relatively large, thermal output.
When two other labs have replicated the experiment with better neutron detection equipment, maybe then I’ll pay attention.
Either that, or when the price of electricity drops by 25% or more…
This is NOT the first time neutrons have been detected. Pons and Fleischman reported neutrons and then had to retract the claim. So have many of their followers. The trouble is that neutrons are electrically neutral and so are not all that easy to detect. You don’t just go down to the storeroom and check out a neutron detector like you would a Geiger counter. All of the claims of neutron detection turn out to have been like this one — by chemists and others who are not nuclear physicists and are not familiar with the problems and spurious signals that arise from attempts to detect neutrons.