Mark Gibbs <mgi...@gibbs.com> wrote:
> The cold fusion phenomena, while scientifically intriguing, amounts to to > nothing of practical interest if you can't do something useful with it ... > rather like muon catalyzed fusion ... Interesting but not practically > useful. Oy veh. Where to begin?!? This is such a grievous technical confusion, I hardly know what to say. Okay: Cold fusion caused a major explosion before 1989, at U. Utah, and it boiled away water in Mizuno's lab in the early 1980s. This was even before anyone managed to confirm the effect exists. After 1989, DOZENS of experiments produced power density and temperatures roughly equal to the core of conventional fission reactor. Some of the produced 50 to 100 MJ of energy from samples weighing a few grams. In other words, a device the size of a small coin produce as much energy as kilogram of gasoline, sometimes at boiling temperatures. Or in some cases at temperature high enough to melt ceramic cold fusion cathodes. OBVIOUSLY that is enough power and energy for a practical application. So, there has never been the *slightest doubt* that cold fusion is capable of producing useful levels of energy if it can be controlled. There is not one reason to think that! The question has always been: Can the reaction be controlled? Since every other physical reaction ever discovered in the laboratory has been controlled, eventually, and since several control parameters of cold fusion have been discovered, it is reasonable to suppose that it can be controlled. Muon catalyzed fusion, on the other hand, is known to be limited to extremely low power levels, and an useless input to output ratio. This known by theory and confirmed by experiment. Using this for practical purposes would be like trying to power our electrical machinery with Benjamin Franklin's electrostatic generators. Those generators could charge up Leyden jar capacitors enough to kill a turkey, and enough to nearly kill Franklin himself. But obviously you could not power a factory with one, even if you scaled it up. It is equally obvious that if you scale up a 1989 cold fusion device, you *could* power a factory, a city, or the whole planet with it. Furthermore, nearly every useful scientific discovery in the last 400 years began as a small reaction in the laboratory, and was later scaled up. I mean things like electricity and radiation. We went from the Curies finding samples of radium are slightly warm, to full scale fission reactors 50 years later. The fact that a reaction is small at the beginning is never a reason to suppose it cannot be scaled up to industrial-scale applications. History has shown over and over that this is wrong. I could say much more to address this miasma of confusion, but I shall refrain. Let me say only that Fleischmann, I, and many others believed all along that the only reason cold fusion has not been controlled and scaled up in the last 23 years is because it has not been funded properly. - Jed
