Considering the mechanism by which muon catalysis works (and it's well understood, having first been predicted in 1950 and subject to many confirmed experiments since) it is extremely unlikely that the Palladium is capable of doing anything remotely similar to what the muon does. And it's even more unlikely that the Palladium is somehow pulling muons out of its pocket.
There just aren't a lot of holes in our current understanding of the physics of light element nuclear reactions where anything like neutron-free LENR could fit. I'm afraid it's like the faster than light neutrinos; it's much more likely to be experimental error than a violation of known physics.
Part of the reason Pons and Fleishman were treated like quacks is that this is pretty fundamental stuff in nuclear physics, and there would be a lot fewer holes in Pacific atolls if we didn't understand this corner of nuclear physics pretty well. Claiming that electrochemical processes can have much at all to do with nuclear reactions is already pretty extraordinary; when you pile that on top of requiring obscure nuclear reactions that have never been observed or have only been observed in the presence of exotic particle accelerator products is really pushing it. Not being aware that radiation is likely to be a fundamental hazard of any form of fusion and taking appropriate safety measures really makes you look like an amateur. And even if by some miracle this is all real and somehow due to safe Dt-Dt reaction, there's no way Pons and Fleishman would have been able to be sure of getting it. Not shielding their experiment was extremely stupid by any estimate. So it's not so much that they were chemists, as they were very obviously ignorant of some rather important physics.
On edit: An example of the danger of not knowing your nuclear reactions is the Castle Bravo runaway which occurred because it was not known that Lithium-7 would fission under fast neutron flux adding more tritium and neutrons to the reaction; this caused the bomb to yield 2.5 times what was expected and nearly killed a bunch of observers. That was a very rare example of a nuclear reaction that was observed before it was predicted post-Manhattan Project.
There is also the claimed effect of using something like laser energy or a magnetic field to trigger the reaction. There is no theoretical basis whatsoever for such stimuli to initiate a nuclear process, AFAIK. With those experiments that claim to produce excess energy, there is the strange time delay of several hours before "full" output is obtained.
There is also the claimed effect of using something like laser energy or a magnetic field to trigger the reaction. There is no theoretical basis whatsoever for such stimuli to initiate a nuclear process, AFAIK. With those experiments that claim to produce excess energy, there is the strange time delay of several hours before "full" output is obtained.
Hi,
Just got home, so will hopefully be soon able to answer these various points.
1. Leon: With regards to the laser stimulation, and your statement that there is "no theoretical basis for such stimuli to initiate a nuclear process", - well, actually there is, and it fits well within the Standard Model. How familiar are you with Surface Plasmons, and Surface Plasmon Evanescent Resonance Modes? Look it up if you're not. Photons can couple to surface plasmons creating surface plasmon polaritons. These surface waves have ENORMOUS, highly concentrated electrostatic and magnetic fields which are highly localized, meaning confined to the surface at VERY small dimensions. The energies in these fields are far in excess of what is required to overcome the Coulomb barrier. The resonances are triggered not by a single laser, but by two lasers tuned to frequencies a few terrahertz apart, such that a "beat frequency" is formed that is the resonant frequency of the plasmons on the metal hydride (or deuteride) that you have loaded. There are very specific methods of coupling these photons - you are right that just shining a laser on the surface does not yield any type of interesting reaction. I mean this with great respect, because often your advice in other fields is impeccable - but if you are going to argue that there is no theory to explain the observations, then you need to be more familiar with current theory.
This brings up another point - these theories are being proposed and tested to explain OBSERVATIONS, not theorizing "what should happen, if"...
Lastly, the strange "delay" of which you speak deals with the time required for palladium to uptake a full "load" of hydrogen atoms (or deuterons in the case of heavy water). This effect is so well known it dates back to 1890 (not a typo, that's eighteen ninety). Palladium absorbs 935 times its volume of hydrogen. The atomic density of Hydrogen when fully absorbed by Palladium is GREATER than the atomic density of Hydrogen atoms in LIQUID HYDROGEN. Even without any electrostatic pressure applied, Palladium will self-load to 70% capacity. But this doesn't happen immediately - there is a known time constant for loading, which is based on surface area, etc. So this particular piece is not even available for discussion anymore - the principle is so sound that it is used every day by thousands of industries to create pure hydrogen. We know this one, no argument there can be even remotely taken seriously.
Now we also know of ways to SIGNIFICANTLY shorten the loading time of the Hydrogen (or Deuterons) into the Palladium lattice - and this process is called co-deposition. Again, another electrochemical cell, but using PdCl (Palladium Chloride) as the electrolyte. The Pd is deposited on the cathode ALONG WITH the Hydrogen/Deuterium - so it's loaded as you build your cathode. It has reduced the loading time from weeks to hours.
So... now that I'm back at my home office, I'm going to eat - and then dig around for some of those peer-reviewed journal articles. I will echo Mike Greene's comments - Peer-Reviewed Journals are NOT the source of all truth. They have served a great purpose in the past and initially represented the highest calibre of science in action, but politics, and fear for one's job, have crept into these processes, and as such, much that is worthy of study is rejected because of its not meeting certain "other" criteria, which have nothing at all to do with its scientific merit, validity, or quality of investigation. A new method of review needs to be instituted.
Lastly, I would ask you this: Why, seriously, what is the motivation, for organizations like LANL, DARPA, The US Navy, The US Defense Intelligence Agency, Lawrence Livermore, and hundreds of reputable universities like MIT, U of Missouri, UCLA, BU, NEU (just to name a few I know of here in the USA), plus places like CERN - why on EARTH would they all join in on a "scam"? Or do you seriously entertain the notion that ALL of these scientists and researchers are incompetent? Because in order to maintain true skepticism of this material, you have to believe that ALL of these people and organizations are either incompetent, or are knowingly perpetrating a hoax. I simply don't understand that thinking, and if you can offer me one shred of validating evidence that supports either of those scernarios that I can accept, I'll be impressed.
More stuff to look at - the attached PDF is from the CERN colloquium on March 22, 2012. It details the research process that has occured to determine if, in fact, the whole Cold Fusion phenomenon is real, or the result of experimental error, or an outright hoax. There is a video that goes along with it, but the PDF is a great start since it illustrates the history of the research and gives MANY references to follow up on - for those who haven't already decided based on old information that this is all BS - and gives sources for more learning. Again - this is CERN. Much more to follow, I'm doing this while I make dinner... :-)
Palladium/Hydrogen Interaction Basics: High School Lab Experiement:
Attached is a high-school lab experiment detailing the behavior of palladium with hydrogen. Excellent read to give you an idea of how very bizarre Pd acts in the presence of H - without doing ANYTHING to it except letting them dance on their own.
ANd just for reference: A link to the massive downloadable archive of papers published - probably not to Leon's standards :-) - that detail various findings in the field of LENR...
Almost done cooking... :-) Just wanted to mention, for what it's worth, that, Leon, we may be in agreement on one topic: E-Cat and Defkalion. These guys claim a "special catalyzed process", and that they are producing 60kw+ - and they are forever promising a demonstration "in the near future". Well - these guys I'm not so sure about. I'd love to believe their claims, but until they demo and allow some reputable folks to examine their work, I have to put them in the suspect class. Right now, most verified and tested cells are running in the 1:10 range - for every watt in, 10 watts out, based on calorimetric measurements. I do believe that as we get a handle on the technology, we will vastly improve on that ratio, but for now.... I tend to discount the extreme energy claims as well.... although I keep half of one corner of one eye watching them. Same goes for Blacklight Power and their "Hydrino"... time will tell.
Really, and this kind of nuclear physics research is now sought after (FOR REALS), as they wanted to just forego the nuclear fission process that occurs in all nuclear power plant. Why foregoing Fission power generation? Simple: Plutonium and Uranium are surprisingly nasty stuff, and it doesn't take that much to cause it to go critical as much as resulting in thermal runaway. (The reason why the nuclear reactors require lot of cooling to remove heat in range of millions to few billions Watts. That's a lot of heat.) Just a bit of my observation.
The reason why fusion nuclear power is being sought after are; No radioactive toxic wastes after the fuel is used up (actually some: there are two byproducts; Helium and Lithium isotopes. Lithium-7 is to watch out for.) Simple fuel maintenance (just pump in Hydrogen isotopes desired for nuclear power, like Deuterium or Tritium). And, lastly, Deuterium is like 1,000 times cheaper than even an Uranium pellet.
But the problems come in many ways; Nuclear fusion reaction requires extremely high temperature, in range of 120 to 800 million degrees. It's hard to get the break-even for 10 : 100 factor of the works being applied to the fuel, and extracting the energy released from it for electricity generation. The goal was to apply 10 million Watts to get 100 million Watts out of the fusing Hydrogen. That's quite hard, compared to Uranium reaction (Uranium doesn't require electricity, all it want is Neutrons and lot of it). The reason why it was hard is radiative thermal dissipation, meaning Hydrogen = Helium fusion cools themselves off by just simply discarding the energy, in form of X-rays and Gamma rays, and they cools down instantly once you remove the primary source of energy (great for instant scramming).
Magnetic field? That depends on wattage of the Ohmic transformer being used to apply all of the energy into the fuel (resistive current - like Neon sign on steroids, with electromagnet wrapped around it). It is one of the tricky method which had little success. Laser seems to be better approach, as it have enough energy to force the Hydrogen atoms toward the center (like star), depending entirely on optic tweezer effects, and heat the fuel so much that it hits 500 million degrees instantly - the X-rays from the Hydrogen is also monitored to make sure it is hit hard enough. This one is easy, but not cheap. LLNL have been doing this for many years. However, I know that X-ray laser is actually more efficient than even Infrared laser, because you want much more energy in the photons hitting the Hydrogen atoms, and ripping off the electrons, hammering them together. (Nuclear reaction is electrical by nature, at sub-atomic level anyways).
This is an interesting discussion that has provided quite a bit of information to consider. Thank you for starting it xanatos. One comment in particular caught my eye "Nuclear reactions are understood fairly well, and there isn't much left to learn".Somewhat similar to the opinion of the established scientific community just before the Curies discovered radioactivity. Something along the lines of " we know pretty much everything important now, just a few little details to mop up ".
This is an interesting discussion that has provided quite a bit of information to consider. Thank you for starting it xanatos. One comment in particular caught my eye "Nuclear reactions are understood fairly well, and there isn't much left to learn".Somewhat similar to the opinion of the established scientific community just before the Curies discovered radioactivity. Something along the lines of " we know pretty much everything important now, just a few little details to mop up ".
Indeed, and not unlike the field of optics, which was once declared a "closed field" because they truly, honestly believed they understood everything there was to understand about lenses and light. And then came things like quantum optics and adaptive optics and oh, lasers.... and today we realize that there is SOOOOOO much we don't know about the field that it dwarfs our total of what we do know. Some fields of science do seem to swing between those two extremes...
Kwinn, you badly misstated what I said. What I said was there aren't a lot of holes in what we know where something like neutron-free LENR could fit. This is quite specific, and very justifiable. General Relativity didn't invalidate Newtonian mechanics, and QM didn't invalidate the observations that had previously been thought to indicate that the universe was linear. Those new discoveries had to fit in holes where the existing observations did not contradict the new phenomena. And you can still use the old assumptions to good effect if you know their limitations; you don't need relativity to design a roller coaster, or QM to design a radio set.
The reactions that could possibly be used for fusion power generation are very well understood. There aren't a lot of holes there. Two whole generations of physicists, including my own father, got their Ph.D.'s by filling in those holes in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Countless hours were spent with accelerators and nuclear sources and radiation detectors cataloguing what these particles do, and now you really need an accelerator the size of a large city to demonstrate anything surprising.
Pons and Fleishman were categorically, unforgivably wrong. Had they been even half-right they would have killed themselves. The idea that on top of being right about electrochemical catalysis of nuclear reactions they managed to get lucky enough to find one of the few reactions that wouldn't kill them is just daft. (It should be noted that Dt-Dt -> He4 is considered low grade sloppy seconds as potential reactions go even among people who seriously think muon catalyzed fusion can be made practical.) Barring some kind of miracle fusion is going to make neutrons. Lots and lots and lots of neutrons.
And one of the fun properties neutron radiation has is that it turns ordinary matter into nuclear waste. Aluminum alone has several nasty isotopes that form under neutron bombardment. Neutrons make metals brittle by knocking atoms out of position in the crystal lattice. Fusion isn't really all that clean at all when you consider what the neutron flux does to the reactor vessel.
The LENR literature has the feel of stuff being thrown at a wall to see what will stick. And much of the early research that led to fission had that feel; the story of Fermi figuring out the role of moderation from the difference in activity between marble and wood lab tables is almost comical, and it is heartbreaking to contemplate the trepidation which Lise Meitner exhibited convincing herself that the uranium radiation spikes whose energies so closely matched the packing fraction differences really represented fission. But after 1945 that was all over. There's nothing like using your equations to kill a few hundred thousand people to make it clear your equations kick butt.
LENR has to fit in the few and far between holes in this substantial wall of knowledge that has been built in the last 60 years. That's not at all saying there is nothing left to learn; one can look at the difference between the world described by Newtonian mechanics and that described by general Relativity and marvel. But Relativity had to explain why Newton worked so well, and any new tech has to work in a way which explains why everything done since 1945 has been so thoroughly consistent. It's not at all like 1935 when nobody even knew what radioactivity was and sticking different things in the beam just to see what happens was a reasonable thing to do.
It is true that Palladium compresses hydrogen to densities greater than that of liquid hydrogen, which is a cool feature of its crystalline structure. But that still doesn't have much to do with the energies necessary to force nuclei into fusion-enhancing proximity. Reducing nucleic separation from 1,000 times too distant to 500 times too distant really doesn't buy you much. And the other schemes proposed all still have that stuff tossed at the wall feel. Really, you think lasers can do it? Well are you shielding your experiment? Because it doesn't seem like anybody has a theory rigorous enough, even if wrong, to suggest that what will be triggered is the one safe Dt-Dt-He4 reaction of all those possible.
Are you familiar with the literature on surface plasmons? Familiar enough to comment with authority on the energies present in the surface of metal hydrides and deuterides with respect to the energies required to overcome the Coulomb Barrier?
I can't state with authority that the surface plasmon thing isn't capable of overcoming the Coulomb barrier. I can say with authority that if it is, you can't control the reaction you will get. In fact, since this is not muon catalyzed you are almost guaranteed to get one of the reactions that needs to produce two products for conservation purposes. Are you shielding your experiment?
I can say with even better authority that unless you have access to some pretty fancy lasers you won't be exploiting plasmon effects anyway. My guess is that you will successfully get your Palladium to absorb a bunch of hydrogen, which is kind of cool, and then you will throw stuff at it hoping something will stick. It's very unlikely that anything will. That kind of went out of favor around 1940.
However, yes, laser can do that: It's just a matter of laser power. LLNL's laser is just catastrophically powerful (100 terawatts in 10 nanosecond pulsewidth, enough to flash the Tungsten or anything hard). All you need for nuclear fusion reaction are: heat and pressure, just like how the Diamonds are formed. Only on extreme scale, something that diamonds will simply become nuclear fuel (Edited - Carbon-burning process as mentioned - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-burning_process). Edit: I take it. You posted before I got to post it.
Second note: Nuclear fusion detonation lasers are impossibly hard to design. You will have to take in the account of few things: 1. Cooling, lot of it. 2. Damage threshold of optics coating. 3. Material used for Master laser and accompanying amplifiers - like Nd:YAG (or Nd:glass for huge laser) for example. 4. Management of optical delays between beamlets.
localroger, I am guilty as charged and apologize for the out of context quote. What I meant was that that particular sentence acted as the catalyst that clarified and consolidated my impression of all the negative comments concerning the possibility of cold fusion.
This is not to say that I think they are wrong. They may very well be right. I am not so sure.
I will be the first to admit that I know nothing of LENR, but I would like to point out that many respected people also thought that flight was impossible.
I mean if you look at some of the first attemps they are laughable.
Maybe LENR is impossible, but I think it is something worth attempting.
I slept for a night pondering about the nuclear physics, I gotta admit that cold fusion borders on impossibility because fusion reaction actually require heat and/or pressure. Sun is one example of that.
prof_braino, that's correct, sir. Neutron streams are usually impossibly hard to control, let alone absorbing those pesky neutrons - One function of Boron based alloy scram rods are to absorb all of the neutrons, while Carbon-based moderator rods are to slow the Neutrons down so they can split heavy atoms in the fuel rods. When the fusion and/or fission reaction starts, the neutrons starts with small ripples, then end in avalanche, which can be extremely fatal. (One of the reasons I wouldn't want to stand too close to the pure Plutonium ingot. Hydrogen atoms in our bodies are just enough to reflect neutrons back into the ingot, causing it to go critical for a short time, which can either be harmful or fatal, depending on how much it weighs.)
Got distracted last evening - back at it again for a few minutes here.
Dr. Mario: The lasers I am talking about here need only be in the low-power range - just a few milliwatts to a few watts. It's not the laser power that counts so much as the tuning of the laser frequencies and polarizations such that the beat-frequency between them corresponds to the resonant frequency of the surface plasmons of the hydride/deuteride that you are stimulating. You're thinking about the fusion projects where they are, literally, dumping more power into a tiny focal point than exists in the entire US Power Grid - which, if we want to talk about laughable requirements, I would certainly count that one. Fascinating, amazing technology, but ultimately very impractical - at least at the moment.
Localroger: You are making an accurate distinction between my *personal* experiment, and the technology itself. I am going to do as much as I can, given my limited resources. I can get Pd foil, sponge or sheet (starting with a 10mm x 20mm little rectangular piece), Pt wire, LiSO4/MgSO4/PdCl ... whatever salt I want to try depending on which version of the experiment I want to try (salts for the electrolyte are cheap at least - well, except for PdCl), and Deuterium. I'm going to set up temperature recording equipment (BS2 based to record multiple sensor probes and log the data to a USB Stick... since I've already made that circuit & program for someone else a few years ago) - and then, you're absolutely right - I'm just going to try stuff to see what happens. I have plenty of lasers, some of which are tunable, with power ranges from a few mW up to just shy of 5W. I have gamma and neutron detection equipment available to me. I even have some clients who have some laser jewelry-welding equipment so I can weld my Pt wire to my Pd cathode so there's no significant liklihood of contamination with reactive metals that could create parasitic half-reactions or something.
None of this however has any bearing on the technology itself, which, as I've stated previously, is really not a theoretical anymore, but is acknowledged and accepted as experimental observations. And not just by electronic engineers turned hobbyist - by people who have actually designed working fission reactors that are actually running. People that have been involved in the design of nuclear weapons, x-ray lasers, all sorts of stuff. In other words, people who have an education in this field that vastly exceeds mine, and I might even hazard a guess that their experience in the field may possibly even exceed yours, although for all I know you may in fact be a multi-doctorate particle physicist, so the point's up for grabs I guess. :-)
What I'm getting at here is this: In order to be able to truly dismiss cold fusion as impossible, or possible, but only if it acts like the hot fusion we know, you have to believe all those people to whom I refered above to either be completely incompetent, despite their previous accomplishments, OR you have to believe that they are all engaged in some massive global agreement to perpetuate a hoax on a supremely grand scale.
So far, the only arguments that people (at least the ones who can argue with ANY level of actual knowledge whatsoever - there are plenty who can argue but they haven't got a clue what they're talking about) can give against CF is that 1) It can't happen unless it's millions of degrees, in other words, "all fusion must be or act like hot fusion". And people will cite the lack of hot-fusion behavior as evidence against cold fusion. When they are exposed to credible research by credible organizations that says in fact that there ARE gammas and neutrons, but that they are observed to have a very short path (literally staying within the metallic lattice before being reabsorbed), that is always dismissed as "experimental error" or misinterpretation of the data. But 30+ labs have confirmed this observation. Collusion in a hoax, or - are they all delusional and incompetent?
And of course there are those who made their minds up about the whole phenomenon back in 1989/1990, when the initial problems with experimental replications cropped up, and - as I stated earlier, once people make up their mind about something with certainty, the mind simply sees no point in wasting further effort on examining more information about something that is already "known" to be false. Hence, they miss ALL the new data that has come out that has resulted in vast, vast improvements in experimental replications (one VERY small example is that the Pd cathode must be COMPLETELY submerged at all times - because H or D diffuses through the metal like water through a screen, and if any of the Pd is exposed, the loading H or D simply flows through and diffuses into the air above the the exposed cathode, and so the cell can never load. Over 50% of the failed replications had exposed Pd cathodes, or employed a welded Pd wire which ran to the cathode, effectively creating a hydrogen-hose right out of the experiement. There are literally dozens of examples like this that caused the bulk of experimental replication failures...)
So - to make a long story short - yes, I'm playing here. But I have enough of the data to feel confident that I actually have a shot at getting some excess energy. A lot of the electrolytic-type CF cells that have gotten positive results weren't much better than what I'm going to make. And I have no "publish or die" requirements hanging over my head (although I am going to document the whole process in rigorous detail - just in case I do get something interesting!) But me playing with a technology doesn't mean the technology is a toy. I've been playing with electronics since, literally, I was 4 years old. And to echo Bean's comments, it is true that there were some very respectable experts at the time flight was being experimented with - by bicycle mechanics if I recall correctly - who stated with great certainly and with the weight of great scientific evidence to back them up - that flight could never be realized.
All great truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
-Schopenhauer
Impossible or not, one of those neutrons is going to shoot your eye out!
On the door of my laser lab I have a yellow caution sign that shows someone getting zapped by a laser. The text: "CAUTION: BIG SCARY LASER - Do not look into beam with remaining eye"
Don't laugh - 10mm x 20mm is fine for this scale, and surface irregularities and defects seem to have some positive influence in initiating and sustaining the reaction (lending further credence to the SPP theories, such as Widom/Larson.
Now just awaiting the Pt wire, then off to my jeweler friend! :-)
Um, good answer, xanatos. That can be thought as the power mean-square, determined by the wavelengths of the laser emission itself - like 532 nanometer lime green extracted by double-harmonic generation, Nd:YAG / Nd:VYO4 = KTP crystal assembly - for the wattage required for one Joule (as an example) to do the work required - such; 2.45 Watts 808 nanometer laser source (laser diodes are much efficient) through the laser crystal assemblies for One watt green laser for one joule required to do the works. Just a basic example as the fusion detonation lasers are pretty much constructed similar like this.
However, it varies by a long stretch as spectra absorption in any matters are quite important. It's possible to get away with 100 milliwatts laser to initiate the fusion nuclear reaction. It's also the time domain that really matter much (one example of that is the laser diode-based range finder which extract few megawatts from 10mW laser diode within few nanosecond time fired) - you really still want to dump as much energy as possible because you still want the optic tweezer effect to do the dirty deeds for you - squeezing Hydrogen atoms together. You may want to try shorten the laser pulse enough to attempt to extract as much energy from the laser as possible without drawing too much electricity (there are couple tricks to do that - Q-switching is one of that).
Also, there is one fun thing to do if you got the access to Xenon strobe-fired Nd:YAG laser assembly (often sold as surplus, pulled from military tank rangefinder assembly), you can put the fast-focal convex lense in the front of your laser - you would see the dot of light at the focal point as the laser emission ionizes the air. It do take about 10 - 70 millijoules to do that, though. It just becomes easier when you use more powerful output (some rangefinder lasers do the job fine).
Still, I appreciate your answer as it's actually valid. And, the warning sign is entertaining (also a surefire way to keep the curious visitors out).
Edit: 10 x 20mm Padillium's quite expensive. And, it's pretty much more than enough for most purposes.
Oh, and I want to ask you, xanatos, do you actually have digital-storage geiger counter? That would be handy in weeding out false readings as you already know WHEN the reaction occur, so you can focus on real reading. Just asking. An example of what I was talking about: http://www.magnii.com/products/usb-rad121.html
BTW, I researched the nuclear physics in my free time, and I have quite good understandings (some of knowledge is actually useful for understanding how much electron shells required to initiate X-ray lasing - the spectra of X-ray laser emission are dependent on number of electrons and number of shells which is a tad complicated but when studied in detail, it became clear to me). I originally wanted to construct Helium-II or III ion laser which emits at 13.6 nanometer Oxygen-III lines or a tad longer wavelength. Not easy stuff to perform (electronics required to be able to do that are quite complicated - have read through couple scientific journals and some patents on gas-discharge X-ray lasers already). One such link to the X-ray spectrum listing in the periodic table is that one; http://www.physics.org/explorelink.asp?id=3151&q=tool¤tpage=1&age=0&knowledge=0&item=9
When they are exposed to credible research by credible organizations that says in fact that there ARE gammas and neutrons, but that they are observed to have a very short path (literally staying within the metallic lattice before being reabsorbed), that is always dismissed as "experimental error" or misinterpretation of the data.
Here's the thing: I've never said fusion has to behave like hot fusion. Muon catalyzed fusion certainly exists. But it has to act like fusion. And in any fusion reaction, the energy comes from the difference in packing density between the source and product particles. There are a very limited number of possible fusion reactions even if you assume the magic ability to push the nuclei together by hand. All of them have characteristic outputs because the difference in packing energy shows up as kinetic energy of the product particles, and maybe a gamma photon. There's literally nowhere else for the energy to go. And this energy isn't an unpleasant side effect; it's the reason you're running the reactor. It's your desired output. It's so fundamental that when Fermi built the first fission reactor, he didn't even waste his time looking for heat; he proved its operation by measuring particle flux.
Now all of these reactions that produce neutrons or protons produce them with energies in the MeV range, which will travel a considerable distance through solid matter. None of them produce or ever could produce slower particles with less range, because no matter what mechanism you use to combine the nuclei -- heat (which means inertia), muons, introducing them at a singles bar -- the amount of energy which is released is fixed. If you are not getting these outputs, it means that whatever you are observing isn't fusion.
I am fairly open-minded about new things. I spent some time hanging around with what was then called the New Age community in the early 1990's. (Hey, I was selling semiprecious gemstones, and they were a customer base.) I met a lot of earnest, intelligent people who were convinced that various forms of woo were scientific fact. I can attest from personal experience that if you do some of the experiments that Robert Anton Wilson suggested in his writings, or build the machines described by G. Harry Stine in On the Frontiers of Science, you may have some very strange experiences. (And no drugs required. The brain is quite capable of high weirdness all on its own.) There is a large subclass of these people who are convinced that some barely observable phenomenon is the leading edge of The Next Big Scientific Thing. ESP of course. Dowsing. Crystal power. Orgone energy. Pyramids. Psychotronic wishing machines. Radionics. What all these things have in common is that they seem to work well enough for enough people, many of whom are serious and credible, that there are groups pushing them collecting data and making the case that they reveal some As Yet Undiscovered Law of Science. What they also all have in common is that they don't work for everybody, and when they do work the documentation is just credible enough to allow for some doubt.
Every single one of those people thought they were Orville or Wilbur. Every single one of them thought they had a darn good case for their pet cause, that they were using the pith balls that would become the electric dynamos of the next technological breakthrough.
As I said, I'm pretty open minded. I've given a lot of stuff a try that most science-minded people would just laugh at. I did some of Wilson's experiments and built some of Stine's machines. And I even got some very weird results. But I did learn to take one thing to heart: Real technology does not resist scaling. Yes there were experts who said flight was impossible (though there were others who thought it might come from the bicycle industry). Orville and Wilbur ended the argument by successfully building an airplane. And it only took them a few years to do that, because the stuff they tried at small scale reliably worked for other people and when they scaled it up. When they scaled up Fermi's reactor to make plutonium and electricity at Hanford, it worked pretty much as expected. There was a setback involving fission product poisoning, but Fermi quickly figured it out and corrected for it.
When Pons and Fleishman were in the news I was skeptical of cold fusion because I knew heat was the last thing you'd worry about in an experimental reactor, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt until the numbers came in from others, both for failing to replicate and for asking how they were still alive if they had generated that much energy without shielding. Today I'm skeptical of it because it follows an all too familiar pattern. Considering the amount of interest shown in it, if it was real someone would have made it scale by now, or at least have a larger scale experimental failure to investigate.
You certainly brought up a good point as why are they still alive - 1,000 to 10,000 rads is enough to kill anyone instantly while 10 - 100 rads causes some delayed symptoms. That got me wondering why that would be a good reason to doubt cold fusion - in a way. I would definitely shield anything that involves ANY kind of nuclear reaction in my experiment...
Man, like, you're such a downer! When was the last time you had your aura, like ... you know ... cleansed?
Seriously, you bring some solid science to the discussion, and it's nice to have it available as an anvil against which to hammer other points of view.
Thanks for your considered responses. I appreciate all of your viewpoints, and being that I just really enjoy this research, and now the beginnings of an actual experiment, complete with all sorts of fun calculations, designing, building and hopefully soon some fizzing Palladium... I will continue to follow my gut that says that there may be something here we just haven't encountered before. Perhaps the Pd (and other materials) do catalyze the reaction somehow, as well as moderating it... I don't know. But my gut tells me I'm correct. ANd one thing I've learned over the decades I've been involved in various forms of tech - my gut has ALWAYS been right when it comes to technology. Could it be that this could be the first time it'll be wrong? Sure. But my track record in feeling out technological and scientific matters has been impeccable. And that, multiplied by the numbers of highly reputable, qualified people (and I don't mean Rossi, Defkalion, etc - I mean LANL, MIT, CERN, NASA, etc.) - allows me to have a very high degree of confidence going forward.
I know that these reactions need to be energetically balanced, and many of the researchers show math and talk about gammas and ultra-cold neutrons, and claim that this shows the reaction IS balanced, and show more math that I really can't follow - but my math education pretty much stopped after diff & integral calc, and even that's gotten somewhat rusty.
Ultimately, time will prove things out, one way or another, and one of us will get "I Told You So" rights :-) In the interim, I'll keep posting items of high-value by (what I consider to be anyway) reputable sources - MIT, DARPA, LANL, CERN stuff, so that those who are so inclined can keep up with interesting data and developments.
And of course, I'll be posting my progress, with photos, data, and video, so you can all laugh along with me, or at me as you choose :-) Either way, I'll be having fun, and I'll gain first-hand experience in the process, rather than only reading and viewing others' work.
But my cathode is here now, and it needs my attention! :-)
More soon,
Dave
PS., Dr. Mario: In the early days of CF there was a question going around: "If the reaction is nuclear, where are the dead grad students?" :-)
I am not saying that cold fusion is a farce... Just there are little tiny details are missing like, was the reactor vessel shielded with Lead or something like that to avoid frying the person performing the nuclear experiment?
Nevertheless, I would prefer my nuclear reactor shielded with Lead, concrete or immensed in the deep pool of water, for our own safety, if I was to perform the cold fusion experiment.
Dangit Phil, turns out my quartz Herkimer diamond was having an argument with my Amazonite sphere, and the whole mineral shelf was taking sides.
True story: If you shine a laser at the milky base of a quartz crystal, the milky part will diffuse the light and the crystal will look like it's lit up from inside. If you dont see the red dot where the laser beam enters it's not clear at all where the light is coming from. So I've got an old ca. 1988 He-Ne laser tube mounted in an acrylic box, which is a pretty neon lamp in its own regard even without the beam, and at one of the last gem/mineral/woo shows we sold at I set the laser up on a platform at one end of our booth, and a fist-sized crystal at the other. Since the air was clear it wasn't obvious at all that there was a beam passing across the table and that that was where the crystal's illumination was coming from.
So these two teenage girls come up with a rather impressive collection of spiritually meaningful jewelry, and the crystal catches their eye. One girl reaches out to pick up the crystal and, of course, as soon as her hand blocks the beam it stops glowing. She of course froze, and I just went "Awwwwwww, damn. You know I had to meditate over that thing for three weeks to get it to glow like that?"
I'm not totally evil though. Then I showed them the laser.
There won't be any, no one has got anywhere with cold fusion.
- and yet it still refuses to lie down and die ?
Sure the jury is out, because there is not yet an accepted atomic-level model, but there are enough replicated experiments that a LOT of man-hours are going into this.
I'm less interested in the 'is it real' - as units are being sold, as in the 'what does it cost to operate' - which is a more important question
(and also nicely includes the first question).
Comments
There just aren't a lot of holes in our current understanding of the physics of light element nuclear reactions where anything like neutron-free LENR could fit. I'm afraid it's like the faster than light neutrinos; it's much more likely to be experimental error than a violation of known physics.
Part of the reason Pons and Fleishman were treated like quacks is that this is pretty fundamental stuff in nuclear physics, and there would be a lot fewer holes in Pacific atolls if we didn't understand this corner of nuclear physics pretty well. Claiming that electrochemical processes can have much at all to do with nuclear reactions is already pretty extraordinary; when you pile that on top of requiring obscure nuclear reactions that have never been observed or have only been observed in the presence of exotic particle accelerator products is really pushing it. Not being aware that radiation is likely to be a fundamental hazard of any form of fusion and taking appropriate safety measures really makes you look like an amateur. And even if by some miracle this is all real and somehow due to safe Dt-Dt reaction, there's no way Pons and Fleishman would have been able to be sure of getting it. Not shielding their experiment was extremely stupid by any estimate. So it's not so much that they were chemists, as they were very obviously ignorant of some rather important physics.
On edit: An example of the danger of not knowing your nuclear reactions is the Castle Bravo runaway which occurred because it was not known that Lithium-7 would fission under fast neutron flux adding more tritium and neutrons to the reaction; this caused the bomb to yield 2.5 times what was expected and nearly killed a bunch of observers. That was a very rare example of a nuclear reaction that was observed before it was predicted post-Manhattan Project.
Hi,
Just got home, so will hopefully be soon able to answer these various points.
1. Leon: With regards to the laser stimulation, and your statement that there is "no theoretical basis for such stimuli to initiate a nuclear process", - well, actually there is, and it fits well within the Standard Model. How familiar are you with Surface Plasmons, and Surface Plasmon Evanescent Resonance Modes? Look it up if you're not. Photons can couple to surface plasmons creating surface plasmon polaritons. These surface waves have ENORMOUS, highly concentrated electrostatic and magnetic fields which are highly localized, meaning confined to the surface at VERY small dimensions. The energies in these fields are far in excess of what is required to overcome the Coulomb barrier. The resonances are triggered not by a single laser, but by two lasers tuned to frequencies a few terrahertz apart, such that a "beat frequency" is formed that is the resonant frequency of the plasmons on the metal hydride (or deuteride) that you have loaded. There are very specific methods of coupling these photons - you are right that just shining a laser on the surface does not yield any type of interesting reaction. I mean this with great respect, because often your advice in other fields is impeccable - but if you are going to argue that there is no theory to explain the observations, then you need to be more familiar with current theory.
This brings up another point - these theories are being proposed and tested to explain OBSERVATIONS, not theorizing "what should happen, if"...
Lastly, the strange "delay" of which you speak deals with the time required for palladium to uptake a full "load" of hydrogen atoms (or deuterons in the case of heavy water). This effect is so well known it dates back to 1890 (not a typo, that's eighteen ninety). Palladium absorbs 935 times its volume of hydrogen. The atomic density of Hydrogen when fully absorbed by Palladium is GREATER than the atomic density of Hydrogen atoms in LIQUID HYDROGEN. Even without any electrostatic pressure applied, Palladium will self-load to 70% capacity. But this doesn't happen immediately - there is a known time constant for loading, which is based on surface area, etc. So this particular piece is not even available for discussion anymore - the principle is so sound that it is used every day by thousands of industries to create pure hydrogen. We know this one, no argument there can be even remotely taken seriously.
Now we also know of ways to SIGNIFICANTLY shorten the loading time of the Hydrogen (or Deuterons) into the Palladium lattice - and this process is called co-deposition. Again, another electrochemical cell, but using PdCl (Palladium Chloride) as the electrolyte. The Pd is deposited on the cathode ALONG WITH the Hydrogen/Deuterium - so it's loaded as you build your cathode. It has reduced the loading time from weeks to hours.
So... now that I'm back at my home office, I'm going to eat - and then dig around for some of those peer-reviewed journal articles. I will echo Mike Greene's comments - Peer-Reviewed Journals are NOT the source of all truth. They have served a great purpose in the past and initially represented the highest calibre of science in action, but politics, and fear for one's job, have crept into these processes, and as such, much that is worthy of study is rejected because of its not meeting certain "other" criteria, which have nothing at all to do with its scientific merit, validity, or quality of investigation. A new method of review needs to be instituted.
Lastly, I would ask you this: Why, seriously, what is the motivation, for organizations like LANL, DARPA, The US Navy, The US Defense Intelligence Agency, Lawrence Livermore, and hundreds of reputable universities like MIT, U of Missouri, UCLA, BU, NEU (just to name a few I know of here in the USA), plus places like CERN - why on EARTH would they all join in on a "scam"? Or do you seriously entertain the notion that ALL of these scientists and researchers are incompetent? Because in order to maintain true skepticism of this material, you have to believe that ALL of these people and organizations are either incompetent, or are knowingly perpetrating a hoax. I simply don't understand that thinking, and if you can offer me one shred of validating evidence that supports either of those scernarios that I can accept, I'll be impressed.
Dave
Attached is a high-school lab experiment detailing the behavior of palladium with hydrogen. Excellent read to give you an idea of how very bizarre Pd acts in the presence of H - without doing ANYTHING to it except letting them dance on their own.
http://lenr-canr.org/index/DownloadOnly/DownloadOnly.php
Dave, still cooking... :-)
Really, and this kind of nuclear physics research is now sought after (FOR REALS), as they wanted to just forego the nuclear fission process that occurs in all nuclear power plant. Why foregoing Fission power generation? Simple: Plutonium and Uranium are surprisingly nasty stuff, and it doesn't take that much to cause it to go critical as much as resulting in thermal runaway. (The reason why the nuclear reactors require lot of cooling to remove heat in range of millions to few billions Watts. That's a lot of heat.) Just a bit of my observation.
The reason why fusion nuclear power is being sought after are; No radioactive toxic wastes after the fuel is used up (actually some: there are two byproducts; Helium and Lithium isotopes. Lithium-7 is to watch out for.) Simple fuel maintenance (just pump in Hydrogen isotopes desired for nuclear power, like Deuterium or Tritium). And, lastly, Deuterium is like 1,000 times cheaper than even an Uranium pellet.
But the problems come in many ways; Nuclear fusion reaction requires extremely high temperature, in range of 120 to 800 million degrees. It's hard to get the break-even for 10 : 100 factor of the works being applied to the fuel, and extracting the energy released from it for electricity generation. The goal was to apply 10 million Watts to get 100 million Watts out of the fusing Hydrogen. That's quite hard, compared to Uranium reaction (Uranium doesn't require electricity, all it want is Neutrons and lot of it). The reason why it was hard is radiative thermal dissipation, meaning Hydrogen = Helium fusion cools themselves off by just simply discarding the energy, in form of X-rays and Gamma rays, and they cools down instantly once you remove the primary source of energy (great for instant scramming).
Magnetic field? That depends on wattage of the Ohmic transformer being used to apply all of the energy into the fuel (resistive current - like Neon sign on steroids, with electromagnet wrapped around it). It is one of the tricky method which had little success. Laser seems to be better approach, as it have enough energy to force the Hydrogen atoms toward the center (like star), depending entirely on optic tweezer effects, and heat the fuel so much that it hits 500 million degrees instantly - the X-rays from the Hydrogen is also monitored to make sure it is hit hard enough. This one is easy, but not cheap. LLNL have been doing this for many years. However, I know that X-ray laser is actually more efficient than even Infrared laser, because you want much more energy in the photons hitting the Hydrogen atoms, and ripping off the electrons, hammering them together. (Nuclear reaction is electrical by nature, at sub-atomic level anyways).
Just my opinion.
Indeed, and not unlike the field of optics, which was once declared a "closed field" because they truly, honestly believed they understood everything there was to understand about lenses and light. And then came things like quantum optics and adaptive optics and oh, lasers.... and today we realize that there is SOOOOOO much we don't know about the field that it dwarfs our total of what we do know. Some fields of science do seem to swing between those two extremes...
The reactions that could possibly be used for fusion power generation are very well understood. There aren't a lot of holes there. Two whole generations of physicists, including my own father, got their Ph.D.'s by filling in those holes in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Countless hours were spent with accelerators and nuclear sources and radiation detectors cataloguing what these particles do, and now you really need an accelerator the size of a large city to demonstrate anything surprising.
Pons and Fleishman were categorically, unforgivably wrong. Had they been even half-right they would have killed themselves. The idea that on top of being right about electrochemical catalysis of nuclear reactions they managed to get lucky enough to find one of the few reactions that wouldn't kill them is just daft. (It should be noted that Dt-Dt -> He4 is considered low grade sloppy seconds as potential reactions go even among people who seriously think muon catalyzed fusion can be made practical.) Barring some kind of miracle fusion is going to make neutrons. Lots and lots and lots of neutrons.
And one of the fun properties neutron radiation has is that it turns ordinary matter into nuclear waste. Aluminum alone has several nasty isotopes that form under neutron bombardment. Neutrons make metals brittle by knocking atoms out of position in the crystal lattice. Fusion isn't really all that clean at all when you consider what the neutron flux does to the reactor vessel.
The LENR literature has the feel of stuff being thrown at a wall to see what will stick. And much of the early research that led to fission had that feel; the story of Fermi figuring out the role of moderation from the difference in activity between marble and wood lab tables is almost comical, and it is heartbreaking to contemplate the trepidation which Lise Meitner exhibited convincing herself that the uranium radiation spikes whose energies so closely matched the packing fraction differences really represented fission. But after 1945 that was all over. There's nothing like using your equations to kill a few hundred thousand people to make it clear your equations kick butt.
LENR has to fit in the few and far between holes in this substantial wall of knowledge that has been built in the last 60 years. That's not at all saying there is nothing left to learn; one can look at the difference between the world described by Newtonian mechanics and that described by general Relativity and marvel. But Relativity had to explain why Newton worked so well, and any new tech has to work in a way which explains why everything done since 1945 has been so thoroughly consistent. It's not at all like 1935 when nobody even knew what radioactivity was and sticking different things in the beam just to see what happens was a reasonable thing to do.
It is true that Palladium compresses hydrogen to densities greater than that of liquid hydrogen, which is a cool feature of its crystalline structure. But that still doesn't have much to do with the energies necessary to force nuclei into fusion-enhancing proximity. Reducing nucleic separation from 1,000 times too distant to 500 times too distant really doesn't buy you much. And the other schemes proposed all still have that stuff tossed at the wall feel. Really, you think lasers can do it? Well are you shielding your experiment? Because it doesn't seem like anybody has a theory rigorous enough, even if wrong, to suggest that what will be triggered is the one safe Dt-Dt-He4 reaction of all those possible.
Are you familiar with the literature on surface plasmons? Familiar enough to comment with authority on the energies present in the surface of metal hydrides and deuterides with respect to the energies required to overcome the Coulomb Barrier?
Dave
I can't state with authority that the surface plasmon thing isn't capable of overcoming the Coulomb barrier. I can say with authority that if it is, you can't control the reaction you will get. In fact, since this is not muon catalyzed you are almost guaranteed to get one of the reactions that needs to produce two products for conservation purposes. Are you shielding your experiment?
I can say with even better authority that unless you have access to some pretty fancy lasers you won't be exploiting plasmon effects anyway. My guess is that you will successfully get your Palladium to absorb a bunch of hydrogen, which is kind of cool, and then you will throw stuff at it hoping something will stick. It's very unlikely that anything will. That kind of went out of favor around 1940.
However, yes, laser can do that: It's just a matter of laser power. LLNL's laser is just catastrophically powerful (100 terawatts in 10 nanosecond pulsewidth, enough to flash the Tungsten or anything hard). All you need for nuclear fusion reaction are: heat and pressure, just like how the Diamonds are formed. Only on extreme scale, something that diamonds will simply become nuclear fuel (Edited - Carbon-burning process as mentioned - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-burning_process). Edit: I take it. You posted before I got to post it.
Second note: Nuclear fusion detonation lasers are impossibly hard to design. You will have to take in the account of few things: 1. Cooling, lot of it. 2. Damage threshold of optics coating. 3. Material used for Master laser and accompanying amplifiers - like Nd:YAG (or Nd:glass for huge laser) for example. 4. Management of optical delays between beamlets.
Edit: 100TW isn't right: https://www.llnl.gov/str/Petawatt.html O___O Now that's a serious stuff!
This is not to say that I think they are wrong. They may very well be right. I am not so sure.
I mean if you look at some of the first attemps they are laughable.
Maybe LENR is impossible, but I think it is something worth attempting.
Bean
prof_braino, that's correct, sir. Neutron streams are usually impossibly hard to control, let alone absorbing those pesky neutrons - One function of Boron based alloy scram rods are to absorb all of the neutrons, while Carbon-based moderator rods are to slow the Neutrons down so they can split heavy atoms in the fuel rods. When the fusion and/or fission reaction starts, the neutrons starts with small ripples, then end in avalanche, which can be extremely fatal. (One of the reasons I wouldn't want to stand too close to the pure Plutonium ingot. Hydrogen atoms in our bodies are just enough to reflect neutrons back into the ingot, causing it to go critical for a short time, which can either be harmful or fatal, depending on how much it weighs.)
Got distracted last evening - back at it again for a few minutes here.
Dr. Mario: The lasers I am talking about here need only be in the low-power range - just a few milliwatts to a few watts. It's not the laser power that counts so much as the tuning of the laser frequencies and polarizations such that the beat-frequency between them corresponds to the resonant frequency of the surface plasmons of the hydride/deuteride that you are stimulating. You're thinking about the fusion projects where they are, literally, dumping more power into a tiny focal point than exists in the entire US Power Grid - which, if we want to talk about laughable requirements, I would certainly count that one. Fascinating, amazing technology, but ultimately very impractical - at least at the moment.
Localroger: You are making an accurate distinction between my *personal* experiment, and the technology itself. I am going to do as much as I can, given my limited resources. I can get Pd foil, sponge or sheet (starting with a 10mm x 20mm little rectangular piece), Pt wire, LiSO4/MgSO4/PdCl ... whatever salt I want to try depending on which version of the experiment I want to try (salts for the electrolyte are cheap at least - well, except for PdCl), and Deuterium. I'm going to set up temperature recording equipment (BS2 based to record multiple sensor probes and log the data to a USB Stick... since I've already made that circuit & program for someone else a few years ago) - and then, you're absolutely right - I'm just going to try stuff to see what happens. I have plenty of lasers, some of which are tunable, with power ranges from a few mW up to just shy of 5W. I have gamma and neutron detection equipment available to me. I even have some clients who have some laser jewelry-welding equipment so I can weld my Pt wire to my Pd cathode so there's no significant liklihood of contamination with reactive metals that could create parasitic half-reactions or something.
None of this however has any bearing on the technology itself, which, as I've stated previously, is really not a theoretical anymore, but is acknowledged and accepted as experimental observations. And not just by electronic engineers turned hobbyist - by people who have actually designed working fission reactors that are actually running. People that have been involved in the design of nuclear weapons, x-ray lasers, all sorts of stuff. In other words, people who have an education in this field that vastly exceeds mine, and I might even hazard a guess that their experience in the field may possibly even exceed yours, although for all I know you may in fact be a multi-doctorate particle physicist, so the point's up for grabs I guess. :-)
What I'm getting at here is this: In order to be able to truly dismiss cold fusion as impossible, or possible, but only if it acts like the hot fusion we know, you have to believe all those people to whom I refered above to either be completely incompetent, despite their previous accomplishments, OR you have to believe that they are all engaged in some massive global agreement to perpetuate a hoax on a supremely grand scale.
So far, the only arguments that people (at least the ones who can argue with ANY level of actual knowledge whatsoever - there are plenty who can argue but they haven't got a clue what they're talking about) can give against CF is that 1) It can't happen unless it's millions of degrees, in other words, "all fusion must be or act like hot fusion". And people will cite the lack of hot-fusion behavior as evidence against cold fusion. When they are exposed to credible research by credible organizations that says in fact that there ARE gammas and neutrons, but that they are observed to have a very short path (literally staying within the metallic lattice before being reabsorbed), that is always dismissed as "experimental error" or misinterpretation of the data. But 30+ labs have confirmed this observation. Collusion in a hoax, or - are they all delusional and incompetent?
And of course there are those who made their minds up about the whole phenomenon back in 1989/1990, when the initial problems with experimental replications cropped up, and - as I stated earlier, once people make up their mind about something with certainty, the mind simply sees no point in wasting further effort on examining more information about something that is already "known" to be false. Hence, they miss ALL the new data that has come out that has resulted in vast, vast improvements in experimental replications (one VERY small example is that the Pd cathode must be COMPLETELY submerged at all times - because H or D diffuses through the metal like water through a screen, and if any of the Pd is exposed, the loading H or D simply flows through and diffuses into the air above the the exposed cathode, and so the cell can never load. Over 50% of the failed replications had exposed Pd cathodes, or employed a welded Pd wire which ran to the cathode, effectively creating a hydrogen-hose right out of the experiement. There are literally dozens of examples like this that caused the bulk of experimental replication failures...)
So - to make a long story short - yes, I'm playing here. But I have enough of the data to feel confident that I actually have a shot at getting some excess energy. A lot of the electrolytic-type CF cells that have gotten positive results weren't much better than what I'm going to make. And I have no "publish or die" requirements hanging over my head (although I am going to document the whole process in rigorous detail - just in case I do get something interesting!) But me playing with a technology doesn't mean the technology is a toy. I've been playing with electronics since, literally, I was 4 years old. And to echo Bean's comments, it is true that there were some very respectable experts at the time flight was being experimented with - by bicycle mechanics if I recall correctly - who stated with great certainly and with the weight of great scientific evidence to back them up - that flight could never be realized.
All great truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
-Schopenhauer
Ditto.
-Xanatos
:-)
On the door of my laser lab I have a yellow caution sign that shows someone getting zapped by a laser. The text: "CAUTION: BIG SCARY LASER - Do not look into beam with remaining eye"
:-)
Found a copy on the web for your enjoyment! :-)
Don't laugh - 10mm x 20mm is fine for this scale, and surface irregularities and defects seem to have some positive influence in initiating and sustaining the reaction (lending further credence to the SPP theories, such as Widom/Larson.
Now just awaiting the Pt wire, then off to my jeweler friend! :-)
Dave
However, it varies by a long stretch as spectra absorption in any matters are quite important. It's possible to get away with 100 milliwatts laser to initiate the fusion nuclear reaction. It's also the time domain that really matter much (one example of that is the laser diode-based range finder which extract few megawatts from 10mW laser diode within few nanosecond time fired) - you really still want to dump as much energy as possible because you still want the optic tweezer effect to do the dirty deeds for you - squeezing Hydrogen atoms together. You may want to try shorten the laser pulse enough to attempt to extract as much energy from the laser as possible without drawing too much electricity (there are couple tricks to do that - Q-switching is one of that).
Also, there is one fun thing to do if you got the access to Xenon strobe-fired Nd:YAG laser assembly (often sold as surplus, pulled from military tank rangefinder assembly), you can put the fast-focal convex lense in the front of your laser - you would see the dot of light at the focal point as the laser emission ionizes the air. It do take about 10 - 70 millijoules to do that, though. It just becomes easier when you use more powerful output (some rangefinder lasers do the job fine).
Still, I appreciate your answer as it's actually valid. And, the warning sign is entertaining (also a surefire way to keep the curious visitors out).
Edit: 10 x 20mm Padillium's quite expensive. And, it's pretty much more than enough for most purposes.
Oh, and I want to ask you, xanatos, do you actually have digital-storage geiger counter? That would be handy in weeding out false readings as you already know WHEN the reaction occur, so you can focus on real reading. Just asking. An example of what I was talking about: http://www.magnii.com/products/usb-rad121.html
BTW, I researched the nuclear physics in my free time, and I have quite good understandings (some of knowledge is actually useful for understanding how much electron shells required to initiate X-ray lasing - the spectra of X-ray laser emission are dependent on number of electrons and number of shells which is a tad complicated but when studied in detail, it became clear to me). I originally wanted to construct Helium-II or III ion laser which emits at 13.6 nanometer Oxygen-III lines or a tad longer wavelength. Not easy stuff to perform (electronics required to be able to do that are quite complicated - have read through couple scientific journals and some patents on gas-discharge X-ray lasers already). One such link to the X-ray spectrum listing in the periodic table is that one; http://www.physics.org/explorelink.asp?id=3151&q=tool¤tpage=1&age=0&knowledge=0&item=9
Here's the thing: I've never said fusion has to behave like hot fusion. Muon catalyzed fusion certainly exists. But it has to act like fusion. And in any fusion reaction, the energy comes from the difference in packing density between the source and product particles. There are a very limited number of possible fusion reactions even if you assume the magic ability to push the nuclei together by hand. All of them have characteristic outputs because the difference in packing energy shows up as kinetic energy of the product particles, and maybe a gamma photon. There's literally nowhere else for the energy to go. And this energy isn't an unpleasant side effect; it's the reason you're running the reactor. It's your desired output. It's so fundamental that when Fermi built the first fission reactor, he didn't even waste his time looking for heat; he proved its operation by measuring particle flux.
Now all of these reactions that produce neutrons or protons produce them with energies in the MeV range, which will travel a considerable distance through solid matter. None of them produce or ever could produce slower particles with less range, because no matter what mechanism you use to combine the nuclei -- heat (which means inertia), muons, introducing them at a singles bar -- the amount of energy which is released is fixed. If you are not getting these outputs, it means that whatever you are observing isn't fusion.
I am fairly open-minded about new things. I spent some time hanging around with what was then called the New Age community in the early 1990's. (Hey, I was selling semiprecious gemstones, and they were a customer base.) I met a lot of earnest, intelligent people who were convinced that various forms of woo were scientific fact. I can attest from personal experience that if you do some of the experiments that Robert Anton Wilson suggested in his writings, or build the machines described by G. Harry Stine in On the Frontiers of Science, you may have some very strange experiences. (And no drugs required. The brain is quite capable of high weirdness all on its own.) There is a large subclass of these people who are convinced that some barely observable phenomenon is the leading edge of The Next Big Scientific Thing. ESP of course. Dowsing. Crystal power. Orgone energy. Pyramids. Psychotronic wishing machines. Radionics. What all these things have in common is that they seem to work well enough for enough people, many of whom are serious and credible, that there are groups pushing them collecting data and making the case that they reveal some As Yet Undiscovered Law of Science. What they also all have in common is that they don't work for everybody, and when they do work the documentation is just credible enough to allow for some doubt.
Every single one of those people thought they were Orville or Wilbur. Every single one of them thought they had a darn good case for their pet cause, that they were using the pith balls that would become the electric dynamos of the next technological breakthrough.
As I said, I'm pretty open minded. I've given a lot of stuff a try that most science-minded people would just laugh at. I did some of Wilson's experiments and built some of Stine's machines. And I even got some very weird results. But I did learn to take one thing to heart: Real technology does not resist scaling. Yes there were experts who said flight was impossible (though there were others who thought it might come from the bicycle industry). Orville and Wilbur ended the argument by successfully building an airplane. And it only took them a few years to do that, because the stuff they tried at small scale reliably worked for other people and when they scaled it up. When they scaled up Fermi's reactor to make plutonium and electricity at Hanford, it worked pretty much as expected. There was a setback involving fission product poisoning, but Fermi quickly figured it out and corrected for it.
When Pons and Fleishman were in the news I was skeptical of cold fusion because I knew heat was the last thing you'd worry about in an experimental reactor, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt until the numbers came in from others, both for failing to replicate and for asking how they were still alive if they had generated that much energy without shielding. Today I'm skeptical of it because it follows an all too familiar pattern. Considering the amount of interest shown in it, if it was real someone would have made it scale by now, or at least have a larger scale experimental failure to investigate.
You certainly brought up a good point as why are they still alive - 1,000 to 10,000 rads is enough to kill anyone instantly while 10 - 100 rads causes some delayed symptoms. That got me wondering why that would be a good reason to doubt cold fusion - in a way. I would definitely shield anything that involves ANY kind of nuclear reaction in my experiment...
Man, like, you're such a downer! When was the last time you had your aura, like ... you know ... cleansed?
Seriously, you bring some solid science to the discussion, and it's nice to have it available as an anvil against which to hammer other points of view.
-Phil
Thanks for your considered responses. I appreciate all of your viewpoints, and being that I just really enjoy this research, and now the beginnings of an actual experiment, complete with all sorts of fun calculations, designing, building and hopefully soon some fizzing Palladium... I will continue to follow my gut that says that there may be something here we just haven't encountered before. Perhaps the Pd (and other materials) do catalyze the reaction somehow, as well as moderating it... I don't know. But my gut tells me I'm correct. ANd one thing I've learned over the decades I've been involved in various forms of tech - my gut has ALWAYS been right when it comes to technology. Could it be that this could be the first time it'll be wrong? Sure. But my track record in feeling out technological and scientific matters has been impeccable. And that, multiplied by the numbers of highly reputable, qualified people (and I don't mean Rossi, Defkalion, etc - I mean LANL, MIT, CERN, NASA, etc.) - allows me to have a very high degree of confidence going forward.
I know that these reactions need to be energetically balanced, and many of the researchers show math and talk about gammas and ultra-cold neutrons, and claim that this shows the reaction IS balanced, and show more math that I really can't follow - but my math education pretty much stopped after diff & integral calc, and even that's gotten somewhat rusty.
Ultimately, time will prove things out, one way or another, and one of us will get "I Told You So" rights :-) In the interim, I'll keep posting items of high-value by (what I consider to be anyway) reputable sources - MIT, DARPA, LANL, CERN stuff, so that those who are so inclined can keep up with interesting data and developments.
And of course, I'll be posting my progress, with photos, data, and video, so you can all laugh along with me, or at me as you choose :-) Either way, I'll be having fun, and I'll gain first-hand experience in the process, rather than only reading and viewing others' work.
But my cathode is here now, and it needs my attention! :-)
More soon,
Dave
PS., Dr. Mario: In the early days of CF there was a question going around: "If the reaction is nuclear, where are the dead grad students?" :-)
Nevertheless, I would prefer my nuclear reactor shielded with Lead, concrete or immensed in the deep pool of water, for our own safety, if I was to perform the cold fusion experiment.
True story: If you shine a laser at the milky base of a quartz crystal, the milky part will diffuse the light and the crystal will look like it's lit up from inside. If you dont see the red dot where the laser beam enters it's not clear at all where the light is coming from. So I've got an old ca. 1988 He-Ne laser tube mounted in an acrylic box, which is a pretty neon lamp in its own regard even without the beam, and at one of the last gem/mineral/woo shows we sold at I set the laser up on a platform at one end of our booth, and a fist-sized crystal at the other. Since the air was clear it wasn't obvious at all that there was a beam passing across the table and that that was where the crystal's illumination was coming from.
So these two teenage girls come up with a rather impressive collection of spiritually meaningful jewelry, and the crystal catches their eye. One girl reaches out to pick up the crystal and, of course, as soon as her hand blocks the beam it stops glowing. She of course froze, and I just went "Awwwwwww, damn. You know I had to meditate over that thing for three weeks to get it to glow like that?"
I'm not totally evil though. Then I showed them the laser.
[video=youtube_share;BXPF19MVBmA]
- and yet it still refuses to lie down and die ?
Sure the jury is out, because there is not yet an accepted atomic-level model, but there are enough replicated experiments that a LOT of man-hours are going into this.
I'm less interested in the 'is it real' - as units are being sold, as in the 'what does it cost to operate' - which is a more important question
(and also nicely includes the first question).