Is Cold Fusion Real?
A colleague asks for my viewpoint on low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR, aka cold fusion). I wrote:
It’s funny you ask, as my belief has changed over the last few years. If you will read the short chapter on the subject in my first book (Renewable Energy – Facts and Fantasies) starting on page 171, you’ll see that my mentor on the subject, Wally Rippel (pictured), an extremely senior physicist, is (or at least was) a believer on the subject. Subsequently, however, he’s become far more skeptical. The problem I have with it is that there is no theory that explains how LENR could possibly work; the issue isn’t that there is insufficient energy potential, but that sustained reactions can happen at speeds much slower than 10^-22 seconds at temperatures much lower than hundreds of millions of degrees. As another high-ranking physicist told me, “It’s a subject better suited to séances than sciences.”
It is very strange that someone who analysed the experiment (don’t care of theory, it is changing every century) is not convinced that LENR is real.
did you read any experimental paper ?
did you read any critical paper on the experimental point (easy, there is only 4, all refuted, read Beaudette for the explanation p 35 http://iccf9.global.tsinghua.edu.cn/lenr%20home%20page/acrobat/BeaudetteCexcessheat.pdf#page=35 )
to read papers, you can start by the review in current science (peer reviewed by non LENR physicist)
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/php/feat.php?feature=Special%20Section:%20Low%20Energy%20Nuclear%20Reactions&featid=10094
check the citations
you can also start from this review in natirwissenschaften
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00114-010-0711-x
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEstatusofcoa.pdf
there is also a list of peer reviewed paper (old, but much enough)
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf#page=6
JJAp have some good PR papers from iwamura, takahashi
http://dx.doi.org/10.7567/JJAP.52.107301
as i said for the critical paper (I remove theory which is not a question, and failure papers who only show what does not work or how to experiment wrongly) there is only 4:
Lewis (he accuse bad stirring, refuted because F&P cell was well stirred)
Hansen (he accuse recombination, refuted because current density was high enough in F&P and recombination measured and limited)
Morrison (hard to understand… as Jed rothwell explain http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusion.pdf#page=4 this is more a psychiatric problem)
Wilson, the only competent, which is in fact a positive analysis as he refute the previous critics, and propose a tiny correction that does not explain the biggest anomalous events. This paper, despite competent, show the bias of science on LENR. Even positive papers are interpreted negatively…
the synthesis of current situation is well explaine din tha short vide
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjvL4zNLOGw&feature=youtu.be
this paper
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEcoldfusiond.pdf
the source of the myth is explained there
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0495.pdf
now the question is if it is possibly an energetic revolution.
the fact that Industrial heat bough the technology of rossi, then send the reacto to be tested by independent physicist, is enough to be sure they expected it would work.
The ferrara test was well made (some conspiracy theory, that Lugano test cancel out), and Lugano test show solid isotopic evidence (enough surprising not to be a fraud), and what seems to be dubious calorimetry. Lugano and ferrara test shows it works, that it cannot be a fraud, so the only question is how big is the revolution.
Brillouin already have result of COP=2 published at ICCF17, and will probably tell more soon…
Airbus support to LENRG ecosystem, after Elforsk, Cherokee fund, tell more about the credibility of current evidence than any academic article.
Note also that academics are strangely silent, as is the press (why nobody ridicule Airbus, or the VIP people ar Oxford)… I know universities, beside Skinr, Texas TU, Tohoku, who prepare to join LENR efforts (with LENRG).
http://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Thread/1337-LENRG-G-Day-Milano-Airbus-and-LENR/
http://www.tohoku.ac.jp/en/news/research/news20150406_1.html
I know why : this is simply that informed journalist, informed academic, know all is real, and that they know that they will be fired if they say it… and if the critic LENR they will be ridiculed later… best is to be silent. This is maybe the best evidence, the lack of any critic of the behavior of the few corps and universities who support LENR. Did you ever see a journalist or an academic who did not enjoy some easy critic and insults, and occasion to ridicule colleague or corps?
Craig,
All that really needs to be understood about cold fusion is that it has never been replicated. Pons and Fleishmen (sp? I’m having to reach back a long way to remember this) ran straight to the media with their results rather than first going to peer reviewed journals. So the media started broadcasting it as a success before anything had been verified.
As soon as the media reports started coming out, the imagination of congress and hollywood got ahold of it and ran with it before other labs could even start setting up their experiements… but eventually the scientific community attempted to replicate the results -thousands of experiments, no positive results. Pons and Fleishman could never replicate their results either… It was not true. It was probably some experimental error that they witnessed once and then went shouting down the halls about it, and someone in the department (probably a grad student) was unprofessional enough to contact the media… and in the moment they chose to be con artists rather than scientists…
But since that time the world has flooded untold billions into fraud after fraud…. and i all remains fraud.
Without any theory to explain why the most stable isotopes in the universe would suddenly undergo rapid fusion, and no experimental results to show that this has occurred despite billions of dollars spent on con men… I think we can call this case closed.
🙂
Here’s an excerpt from my conversation with Cal Tech physicist Wally Rappel, who is mentioned above and numerous places elsewhere here, which was part of my first book: Renewable Energy — Facts and Fantasies — http://2greenenergy.com/renewable-energy-facts-fantasies-ebook/:
CS: But I heard that the people who looked into this couldn’t find nuclear products.
WR: That’s simply not true. The researchers from Cal Tech and MIT did find nuclear products; they fudged the numbers to get the DoE off the case. The US Navy and Lawrence Livermore have also found clear evidence of nuclear results. And even when they admit they find nuclear products, they would say things like, “Oh the engineering on this will be really hard.” I’m not saying it will be easy, but that’s like saying, “There is a trillion dollars in that safe over there, but there is no use trying to get at it because the combination lock might be hard to open.” All these ridiculous ideas are a result of the enormous pressure to agree with the idea that cold fusion is a hoax.
Craig,
I’m not sure what “nuclear products” someone is expecting to find. What I want to see is a well documented and witnessed assembly of a reactor design that produces an excess amount of heat generated over many months from a reactor that contained nothing other than hydrogen and nickel.
A single gram of hydrogen and nickel would convert to many MWh of energy if fusion took place and converted the two into copper. This would not be subtle, and it would be very easy to identify the excess heat, rather than looking for traces of copper within the nickel mass (the nickel mass could easily have been contaminated with copper pre-“experiment”.
The fact that the cold fusion people have been unable to get unambiguous data on this subject is as much evidence as you need. They’ve had tens of billions of dollars of funding and they’ve worked on it for 3 decades, and cannot show an unambiguous result that passes the smell test (most of the demonstrated “reactors” are assembled in secret, with any number of means of secretly conducting energy into the reactor core, and the resulting energy produced is absurdly low level and seems incapable of warming to a greater level than boiling water)..
It just feels like fraud to me. And sense there’s absolutely no theory to accompany these miracle non-replicable “experiments” that are presented in a way very similar to magic tricks… I choose to believe they are fraud. Ockham’s razor and all…
*shrug*
🙂
there is definitive results, able to convince any honest informed scientist.
Of course it is not sufficient to convince someone of 5 years old, as most requires to be convince of something they don’t like.
What was missing for decades was practical applications, and requiring industrial application to accept a reality is pathetic unscientific. That is what most people call “undeniable”…
this mean that a kid of 5 cannot ignore. I agree that this level is not yet reached.
Robert duncan (the physicist boss of Uni missouri physics department who created Skinr, and now CEES at TTU) is one of them. As everybody he started by not trusting anything, but he investigated and found it worked…
before that Heinz Gerischer, a skeptic electrochemist until he admitted it was convincing in 1901. His quality was that he was competent, unlike most physicists who simply expect things they know well : neutron… like knights who look for the horse manure behind WW2 tanks.
the problem is that no evidence can convince people who don’t want to accept they were fooled.
like on 9/11 conspiracy theory they reject any every single evidence, every single scientist, Nobelized, electrochemist, radiochemist, national lab, private lab or corporate lab or academic lab, US, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese…. all corrupted and incompetent…
they swallow like a 9/11 conspiracy fan any unproven claim.
for example the cherry picked evidence, that where not only fraud but impossible allowed Gary Taubes to convince many people, ignoring other evidence in National lab, in BARC, by focusing only one one fake fraud.
this is not new, just read how Semmelweis was treated and what was his evidences ?
most modern medicine papers are less solid than his statistical study.
just compare calorimetry by F&P and by MIT/Caltech amateurs
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ICCF17/papers/Miles-Examples-Isoperibolic-Calorimetry-ICCF17-ps.pdf
read that peer reviewed papers, peer reviewed bu rejected afterward
http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/368TGP_oriani.pdf
In previous posts, I cited review papers with mass of citation that you will study. some are published behind paywall.
among papers published in Currentscience,
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/php/feat.php?feature=Special%20Section:%20Low%20Energy%20Nuclear%20Reactions&featid=10094
This paper review the mass of experimental results, especially heat
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0535.pdf
the data available is far from the myth
beside heat the best review, is the one on Helium
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0574.pdf
but transmutations is interesting
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0624.pdf
and tritium too
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0619.pdf
about money the billion you talk about is for hot fusion.
during last 25 years research effort is much below the billion, despite thousands of experimental results, hundreds of published peer reviewed papers, and dozens of teams.
the problem is that because of the terror organized against cold fusion scientists, the efforts were not enough shared and coordinated.
This is one of the key point in McKubre intervention at ICCF19, to promote sharing and collaboration.
I’m sure you know that this reference is from a conversation I had with you:
As another high-ranking physicist told me, “It’s a subject better suited to séances than sciences.”
🙂
Craig,
I thought that was probably me.
🙂
I thought it was clever–and worth committing to memory.