Original subject was Re: [Vo]:Krivit Elsevier Encyclopedia Articles Publish
At 06:08 PM 12/24/2009, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Steven Krivit wrote:
On 23 March 1989, electrochemists M.
Fleischmann and S. Pons claimed in a press
conference at the University of Utah that they
had achieved nuclear fusion . . . Their
hypothesis that a novel form of thermonuclear
fusion was responsible for their experimental results is still unproved.
I don't get this. I don't think Fleischmann and
Pons ever claimed this is fusion caused by heat
(thermo-nuclear fusion). Or anything remotely
like plasma fusion. The only people who said that were the skeptics.
I misread Jed's comment at first. He's correct,
more or less. The key word is "thermonuclear."
Nuclear reactions caused by heat. Extreme heat.
However, see below, Fleischmann claimed an
effective pressure of 10^27 atmospheres. That's
equivalent to heat, at least in some ways. So it
may not be worth recalling the encyclopedia....
and, of course, the publication is good news, one
more nail in the coffin of mindless rejection. If
the skeptics are going to prevail, they will have
to get off their duffs and out of their
armchairs, escape the nursing home, and do some
actual research and get it published. They might
not find it easy to stuff this cold fusion zombie
back in its grave. It's got legs and teeth.
The suggestion that LENR research represented a
new form of thermonuclear fusion has caused significant confusion.
This suggestion was a strawman argument by the
skeptics intended to cause confusion. No cold
fusion researcher has made this suggestion as
far as I know. I hope the rest of the article makes this clear.
It is and was blatantly obvious that the reaction
isn't thermonuclear, not even on a very small
scale, as with possible fractofusion or
sonofusion, because of the lack of heavy neutron
radiation. (Very low level neutron radiation can
be explained by secondary reactions or rare pathways.)
It would seem that the use of "thermonuclear"
there was an error. Some of what Fleischmann and
Pons said was supportive of a quasi-thermonuclear
explanation (i.e., very high pressure) and some
wasn't. Whatever this discovery was, it wasn't
simple thermonuclear reactions, and that was
blatantly obvious. It was something new (or at
least, not previously recognized).
From the press conference
(http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/reports/UUtahPressConferenceTranscript.shtml):
Pons: "weve established a sustained nuclear
fusion reaction by means
by means which are
considerably simpler than conventional techniques."
"Deuterium, which is a component of heavy water
is driven into a metal rod similar ... exactly
like the one that I have in my hand here under
to such an extent that fusion between these
components, these deuterons in heavy water, are
fused to from a single new atom. And with this
process there is a considerable release of energy
and we have demonstrated this could be sustained
on its own. In other words, much more energy is
coming out than were putting in."
Fleischmann: "It is very simple, you drive the
deuterons into the lattice, you compress the
deuterons in the lattice and under those
circumstances we have found the conditions where
fusion takes place and can be sustained
indefinitely. Now, indefinitely is an emotive
word, we have run experiments for hundreds of
hours and on our timescale that is a pretty long time. "
Pons: "OK, as far as ... direct measurements
well first of all, the heat that we then measure
can only be accounted for by ... nuclear
reactions. The
the heat is so intense that it
cannot be explained by any chemical process that
... is known. The other evidence is of course
that we
have direct measurements of neutrons by
measuring the ... gamma radiation which builds up
in a tank where one of these cells is under
operation. We can measure
have a gamma ray
spectrum of the ... neutrons as they interact
with the water to form a gamma ray and
and
another deuterium atom in the water ... in
addition -- there is a build up of tritium ... in
the ... in the cell which we measure with a scintillation counter. "
But I can easily forgive the "thermonuclear"
impression. Fleischmann ascribed the reaction to "very high compression."
Fleischmann: "If you apply
if you drive the
deuterons into the lattice with an electric field
at the interface, then you achieve a very high
compression. If you tried to achieve the same
compression by ... compressing deuterium gas, D2,
the isotopic equivalent of Hydrogen gas, H2, then
you would need between 1026 and 1027 atmospheres
of pressure to achieve the same compression of
the deuterons in the lattice as we can achieve in
our sophisticated test tube (audience laughter)
and it is that, we believe, which is the crucial
factor in achieving fusion at room temperature."
He's unlikely to have been right, certainly in
terms of bulk pressure. But density is certainly
a factor in terms of increasing the likelihood of
whatever phenomenon causes the reaction. He and
Pons, and just about everyone else, for a long
time, assumed that the reaction would be
deuterium fusion, which brings with it a host of
problems. That was a limiting assumption, and
it's related to the "thermonuclear" assumption,
but it's an oxymoron to call a low-temperature
nuclear reaction "thermonuclear." Pons mentioned
muon-catalyzed fusion, which is certainly not
thermonuclear, and the implied hypothesis was
that some kind of catalysis might be involved.
However, if I'm correct, MCF has the same
branching ratios, so some other kind of catalyzed
fusion would be likely to do the same.
I'd expect that if somehow double deuteron
confinement had any significant fusion
cross-section, perhaps due to electron screening
or hydrinos or the like, it would likewise
generate those neutrons half the time.
Taubes claims that the figure of 10^27
atmospheres is an error, by the way. The actual
figure, according to him, is 15,000 atmospheres.
10^27 is certainly extreme! But perhaps he meant something different.
However, Fleischmann makes it clear that the
reaction is different: "the generation
rate of
generation of tritium and the rate of generation
of helium-3 is only one-billionth of what you
would expect if the fusion reactions were those
experienced in high energy physics. So we have
... a relatively low rate of production of
neutrons. Now how do we know ... that the
neutrons come from the cell? Well, by counting
them with a neutron counter in the vicinity of
the cell. If you move the neutron counter
somewhere else, you get a few neutrons from the
cosmic rays. Theres a reason why were in the
basement because we want all that concrete above
us
to help cut them out
the cosmic ray
neutrons out, as far as possible and we also see
the gamma rays generated in the vicinity of the
electrochemical cell so they can only originate
because of the neutrons coming through the glass
wall into the water, reacting with the water to
generate gamma rays
they are observed,
vertically above. So, basically, thats the story. "
Neutrons were not directly observed, but
inferred, apparently improperly, from a gamma ray
spectrum. This error made if far easier for
physicists to reject the work out of hand. It was
a mess. I still don't understand what actually
happened with the radiation. They detected
gammas, he ascribes that to neutrons. But the
gammas, he reports, went away when they moved the
detector. The inference of neutrons was almost
certainly a mistake. But the gammas? What were
they coming from that would account for what he
reports? Was he making inaccurate or exaggerated
statements? I'll revisit this below.
But Fleischmann was *not* trying to divert funds from hot fusion research:
Fleischmann:"if I could go to that question about
the implications we dont know what the
implications are. The subject has to be fully
researched, the science base has to be
established. I would emphasize that it is
absolutely essential to establish a science base,
as widely as possible, as correctly as possible,
to challenge our findings, to extend our
findings. Having established that, you have to,
of course, consider all the engineering
implications. But it does seem that there is here
a possibility of realizing sustained fusion in a
relatively inexpensive ... with a relatively
inexpensive device, which could be ... brought to
some sort of successful conclusion fairly early on."
Audience member:"Last year the department of
energy spent about half a billion dollars in
research of fusion (inaudible) ... basically [the
Utah work] has been described as a kitchen type
experiment. How do you feel, knowing that you
could do in a kitchen what other researchers can
do with half a billion dollars of large scientific
"
Fleischmann:"Its a pretty big kitchen (audience
laughter.) I should explain to you that this ...
and Brophy wont like me using this emotive
language but ... Stan and I thought this
experiment was so stupid that we financed it
ourselves (audience laughter) and I think it
would be
fair to say that weve burned up about
a hundred thousand dollars in the process so
its not that cheap and this is just a kitchen
experiment so if you scale it up we could burn up
a few million dollars fairly quickly too (audience laughter)
so
"
Fleischmann:"my view is that you have to really
pursue all the research in this area. You dont
know what
which particular research strategy
and which particular technology will come to
fruition or in what
which area. I mean this
might be a small scale application
the big
fusion
the big tokamaks might be the
the
answer for the large scale generation. We dont
know so I think it would be unwise to say just
because there is something new around the corner
that
spending a few hundred million somewhere else is a mistake."
Instead of saying it negatively, I'll put it
positively. Fleischmann knew that there might be
problems scaling up the effect and making it
reliable for commercial application. He was, of
course, right. Nobody has actually succeeded in this, with confirmation.
According to Storms, the evidence of gammas at
the specific energy, 2.22 MeV, associated with
neutron interaction with normal hydrogen, was due
to a calibration error. However, above, I note
that Fleischmann claimed some kind of control,
that the radiation they found disappeared when
the detector was moved away from the cell.
Fleischmann reported a gamma energy at 2.8 MeV
when heat was being generated. "Rather than this
observation being used to discredit Fleischmann
and Pons, as was done at the time, the corrected
value provides useful information about the
process. Other gamma energies have been reported."
Imagine a bank guard that claims that he saw
space aliens stealing cash from the vault at
night. Naturally, he's suspected of being a thief
himself. However, they put a hidden camera in
place. The camera shows space aliens entering the
vault, but a mask slips and they are clearly
humans. The result? The guard is arrested,
because he made a false report. There were no space aliens.
WTF are gammas doing there? (There are other
possible sources, but any care with controls
would rule them out, presumably.) The clear error
that the scientific community made was to reject
experimental evidence without ever finding an
explanation for it. In this, the cold fusion
affair seriously departed from the "pathological
science" of N-rays and polywater. The
replications with N-rays and polywater were
explained, successfully. In one of the more
mind-boggling aspects of this history, massive
denial that there were any replications still
exists, still is quoted sometimes in media. It is
now a rough consensus that there is excess heat,
and the position that there isn't has become,
among those with knowledge of the field, fringe.
There is an anomaly. What is it? Other than the
nuclear reaction hypothesis, which is only
general and not specific, there is no
widely-accepted theory. The association of excess
heat and helium, however, is why I'm totally
convinced that some nuclear reaction is involved,
it is definitive and would require an
extraordinary level of coincidence or,
alternatively, fraud perpetrated across many
research groups. And this would be easy to shoot
down if it was wrong. The association was known
by the mid-1990s. The neglect of this is
practically inexcusable. As has been pointed out,
the rejection of cold fusion became practically a
religious belief, and with such beliefs, why
waste time on experiments, we *know* it's wrong,
even if we don't know exactly why. We can always
make up some reason. I've seen the reasons below
asserted recently, as if the evidence discrediting them were not known.
They didn't stir the cells (wrong, stirred by
bubble action). The helium detected is below
ambient, must have been leakage. (That would not
explain excess heat/helium association, with no
helium when there is no excess heat, almost
always helium when there is apparent excess heat,
and a Q factor, that, amazing coincidence, is
right for d + d -> He-4 fusion (but which might
actually be another pathway, and it would not
explain the helium/time records. The helium found
does not level off as the concentration
approaches ambient, as it would with a leak, but
continues past ambient in some experiments.) When
SPAWAR finally reported neutrons, using
integrating SSNTDs, I saw all the objections come
up again. 'must be bogus because no theory
explains it." "Why didn't they do controls?" (Why
didn't they read the paper? There were plenty of
controls.) "Chemical damage." (Okay, maybe some
chemical damage on the front, but this does not
explain the patterns they found, particularly
triple-tracks, apparently from C-12 breakup, and
back-side tracks on the CR-39, with 1/16 inch of
polycarbonate protecting the back from the
environment near the cathode, and spatially
associated with the cathode, indicating proton knock-on.) And on and on.
There is actually extraordinary evidence, so it's
time to start examining some extraordinary
conclusions. Actually, that's been happening, the
wall against cold fusion is rapidly collapsing.
