LENR, My guilty pleasure... guilty no more! :-)
xanatos
Posts: 1,120
Interested if there's anyone else on here who is actively working on building a LENR ("Cold Fusion") cell? The research is VERY positive now, with an astounding number of peer-reviewed, accepted replications, and they even have some perfectly in-keeping-with-the-standard-model theories that explain how the Coulomb Barrier can be overcome (My personal favorite is Surface Plasmon Polariton Coherent Resonance - especially the laser-induced version). LANL, the US Navy, Lawrence Livermore, dozens of universities are all chiming in with confirmation, including industrial heavyweights like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Toyota, etc.
Here are three links with an absolute treasure-trove of up-to-date research findings by as unquestionable a source as you can get (but I suppose people can still question CERN, LANL, NASA, the Navy, etc...):
2009 University of Missouri
CERN 2012 March 22 Colloquium
LENR-CANR.org
In any case, I am now actively building a cell, just ordered the Palladium. For under $500.00 this is now a hobby-level project (just don't drink the Deuterium!). I know there's been discussion of this issue on these boards before, but a lot of new info has come to light in the past 2 or 3 years. Just wondered who else was actually interested in trying this stuff vs speculating.
Dave
Here are three links with an absolute treasure-trove of up-to-date research findings by as unquestionable a source as you can get (but I suppose people can still question CERN, LANL, NASA, the Navy, etc...):
2009 University of Missouri
CERN 2012 March 22 Colloquium
LENR-CANR.org
In any case, I am now actively building a cell, just ordered the Palladium. For under $500.00 this is now a hobby-level project (just don't drink the Deuterium!). I know there's been discussion of this issue on these boards before, but a lot of new info has come to light in the past 2 or 3 years. Just wondered who else was actually interested in trying this stuff vs speculating.
Dave
Comments
You might want to alert the U.S. Navy's SPAWAR labs in San Diego about that. It would certainly be news to them.
So the question I ask, Leon, and anyone reading this who already "knows" that cold fusion is a waste of time, is this: what would it mean to the world if it weren't? And what if there was a whole bunch of data- verified, undeniable facts from the most reputable sources on the planet, stating unequivocally that cold fusion was a reality, and has been experimentally observed at literally hundreds of labs in dozens of countries around the world. And that, as it turns out, it all works on known, standard- model physics, no leaps of faith required. And that the three links above contain enough of this hard, high-sourced information to reverse your beliefs about cold fusion. Do you have the courage to challenge your current beliefs? Are you willing to re-examine the current facts? To see that in fact we now know why the early Fleishmann & Pons experiments couldn't be replicated (but have been many times over since). This isn't a theoretical anymore, cold fusion is a fully-recognized experimental OBSERVATION. And you will be affected by this discovery within 10 years, possibly less, whether you believe it or not.
It's really, really, worth reexamining beliefs around cold fusion, if those beliefs were formed before 2004- we've discovered a LOT since then that we didn't know before then.
Dave
Some interesting photos here http://lenr-canr.org/?page_id=187
See the second photo - I didn't know you could order a gas cylinder of deuterium.
Further down are some bits of exploded equipment. I guess if this does work and you get a lot of energy output then things are going to explode. The explosion doesn't necessarily prove that it was cold fusion (I've blown a few things up with hydrogen in my youth) but it is intriguing.
And watch the radiation. When I was a kid I had a book about Madame Curie and some of the early experiments with radioactivity. (place some radioactive material in front of your closed eyes and you can see flashing lights...). If you succeed there could be a bit of radiation produced.
So xanatos - please be careful!
Absolutely fair question. I'll start you off with one (I'm traveling and on my iPod Touch, not the most convenient to go back & forth with between sites, but here's a start. I'll provide more extensive reading when I am on a regular computer):
Here's the PDF:
U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report on cold fusion:*Technology Forecast: Worldwide Research on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Increasing and Gaining Acceptance*DIA-08-0911-003, 13 November 2009
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BarnhartBtechnology.pdf
And that was from 2009. Just a start. Interested in your feedback.
Dave
Do you have any of those papers?
None of the reported experiments have been independently replicated, AFAIK.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/022501181p3h764l/?MUD=MP
While the possibility of a sudden spike in energy release is quite real, I will get far more radiation driving tomorrow than my LENR cell will produce. This is another great thing about LENR: while hot fusion relies on thermal conditions to create the momentum required to overcome the coulomb barrier, surface plasmon resonances induced on loaded metal hydrides or deuterides are fully capable of generating enormous electrostatic and magnetic forces, which are highly localized at the surface. It's one of the most elegant discoveries I've ever read about.
Dave
Thanks for posting that. Springer's great. They published the best intro to Surface Plasmons in their book "Surface Plasmons on Smooth and Rough Surfaces and on Gratings" back in 1988! After the discoveries in 2004/5, every available copy was bought up. They now go for $185++ on eBay/Amazon... on the rare occasions one shows up. I'm very happy to have a copy!!! Math is dense, but descriptive, especially of the nature of the localized fields.
Have you read the paper?
No excess energy seems to have been produced. Has the experiment been independently replicated?
Has anything been published in Nature or Science, or a similar journal?
Yes, this effect has been independently replicated. But then skeptics started arguing about the inadequacies of CR-39. Never mind CR-39 has been used in nuclear experiments for decades, suddenly, as soon as it shows something supporting LENR, it's a trailer trash technique. You can track a little bit about it here:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/KowalskiLcommentson.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MosierBossreplytocom.pdf
But let's face it. Most of the physics community is nothing but a bunch of grey-haired old farts (like me). They're human beings, too. And human beings get set in their ways. Old farts become know-it-alls (just like me). And so nobody is going to convince them that there's anything out there they haven't thought of already.... until it sneaks up behind them and burns holes in all their Depends Undergarments.
To Xanatos: just be aware that Palladium is very reactive stuff. Its compounds can be nasty. And anytime you're doing electrochemistry, you can often get all kinds of weird nasty complexes - chemical compounds in solution that aren't good for your body or your environment, etc. So take lots of precautions against getting any of the stuff on you or in your environment. Don't pour the waste products down your drain, for example. Always wear safety goggles and gloves when you're working. Far more than radiation, it's probably the chemicals that can kill you or make you really sick.
Dave
PS to all... Apologies for the typos, especially i and o swaps... iPod Touch keyboard-itis!
Be careful about relying too much on "reputable" journals. There are certainly journals that have no review and will publish anything submitted, but there are many journals that are considered reputable by people in the field, but are not mainstream journals like Nature. The politics and finances behind mainstream journals also needs some consideration. There is a movement, now championed by some major universities both in the US and UK, to break the lock hold on the publication portion of "publish or perish" where articles are then not available to read unless a significant fee is paid and this is wrecking university library's shrinking budgets. This (politics and finances) is a major problem for medical journals as well. A number of specialty societies will only accept findings (for being of the 'highest' evidence-based) unless they're published in one of a few mainstream journals. Unfortunately, these mainstream journals will often only deal with papers that don't challenge too much the mainstream "way of doing things" and, in any event, are limited in how many papers can be published in a world where we're drowning in papers, many of them quite good.
Yep, you can read about that kind of movement in the following:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/researchers-boycott-elsevier-journal-publisher.html?_r=1
It's happening with the biologists, too. Frankly, in light of the internet, many people are simply getting fed up with the academic politics and sometimes insane delays that peer-review can cause. For better or worse, some people are just publishing their results as-is and sorta take a free-market approach to information. The pace of research has accelerated in such a way and yet the old stodgy system of peer review remains so mind-numbingly the same, researchers are beginning to balk at the process.
Apparently, the US Patent Office isn't accepting any patent applications for LENR. They obviously put it in the same category as perpetual motion machines.
Nothing has been published in the mainstream scientific journals.
Some of the claims, like those for the E-Cat and Defkalion systems:
http://www.e-catworld.com/
http://www.defkalion-energy.com/
http://www.defkalion-energy.com/files/HyperionSpecsSheetNovember2011.pdf
are quite unbelievable. I don't see any point in anyone trying to develop their own LENR system, just buy one of their energy sources.
I suppose that depends on your definition of "scientific community."
And that little fact might best be filed under "self-fulfilling prophecies."
Nothing about it has been published in Golf Magazine nor in Lawn and Gardens so you can be sure it's a phenomenon worthy of completely ignoring.
Almost all scientific research is a waste of time.
But only in retrospect.
"the results are disputed" -- there are plenty of examples from the history of science of results that have been disputed for years and eventually proven beyond a doubt to be true. There are other disputed results that have been proven to be false, but it took years and a lot of work to sort out both. Pauling's claims about Vitamin C are somewhere in between for example. Some people are Vitamin C deficient. Some people easily become Vitamin C deficient under stress. Many others are not / do not. It's hard (expensive) to tell which is which, so you can't tell ahead of time who will benefit from Vitamin C supplementation, by how much, or how much is needed to make a difference. Fortunately, it's pretty benign stuff.
"at least two commercial ... fools from their money" -- that's the nature of leading edge research ... there are a lot of false trails. That's the nature of venture capitalism ... you don't hear much about the failures, only the great successes. Good venture capitalists expect a certain amount of losses and opt for the best management and oversight possible to cut losses early, but they understand that you have to gamble to win big.
The described nuclear reactions simply aren't possible. As for producing vast amounts of heat, that is just as daft.
Some physicists seem to be remarkably gullible. When I was reading psychology at Birkbeck, London, Prof. Hasted of the physics department invited Uri Geller to demonstrate his alleged powers, and subsequently wrote up what transpired. The psychology department asked if they could provide a couple of observers, but Geller refused to attend if any psychologists were present. Around the same time, Prof. John Taylor at Kings College, down the road, got lots of kids to demonstrate their metal bending skills.
The fact that only two or three people here seem to feel strongly enough about LENR to sustain an argument about it seems to indicate that it isn't considered a particularly important topic. Perhaps more supporters and sceptics will come out of the woodwork.
The original cold fusion claims were at least nominally plausible, except that the most damning bit of evidence was that the researchers were still alive. They weren't claiming any kind of weird nuclear reactions; they were claiming a new way to achieve confinement for the purpose of driving known fusion reactions.
Nuclear reactions are understood fairly well, and there isn't much left to learn about the interactions of light elements for fusion. All fusion reactions which operate at low enough energies to achieve outside of a star emit neutrons. All fusion reactions create ionizing radiation, period. It is the fast-moving particles, including neutrons, and gamma rays which represent the energy output you want.
The Sun doesn't blast us with gamma rays and 10 MeV protons only because the heart of the star, where fusion is going on, is shielded from outer space by the Sun's outer layers which absorb these energies and re-radiate them in a cascade which results in the spectrum we see at the Sun's surface.
could conceivably occur at low temperatures and produce no excess neutrons.
IMO, the way the cold fusion controversy was handled by the scientific establishment is a blight on its supposed mantra of objectivity. It wasn't so much that Pons and Fleishman's results eluded reproduction -- which they did, due possibly to how the palladium rods were prepared -- but that they were chemists. This drove the physics establishment to apoplexy. "The very idea that these ... these chemists [said with a sneer] should invade our domain and get federal grant money! Who the he!! do they think they are?" The pillorying that Pons and Fleishman suffered as a result was all about turf and very little about science.
-Phil
I read that, then saw Phil posting, and almost expected an "AHHA! here ya go guys. a few pics and a YouTube video later, Leon would be eating his shorts.
-Phil