Wow, it’s been more than two years since I commented on Less Wrong. Great article here, though, as usual with cold fusion, it still contains some misunderstandings. Let me dispose of some of them by fiat.
Anything to do with Rossi is not science. There have been demonstrations and tests, including one with a level of independence that remained inadequate. Rossi is commercial, his methods are secret, and so any reports from him cannot be reproduced. It’s trivially easy to dismiss Rossi as a fraud, but on closer examination, the matter is complex. He might be a fraud, or he might have something, and most of us, to know the truth about it, will have to wait. Personally, I don’t trust a word he says without verification, which has nothing to do with fraud, necessarily, but everything to do with his being a commercial actor with possible motive to confuse competition.
Something like this is true with Swartz, though Swartz does disclose much more. In the end, it is proprietary ttechnology and crucial details are withheld. So while Swartz may have put on some interesting demos, again, this is not really science, and Swartz has an … interesting … reputation in the field. Swartz, in general, thinks that almost everyone else is wrong.
When I first saw Iwamura’s results, I thought this was IT. Conclusive. However, the devil is in the details, and that was six years ago, I’ve learned a great deal since then. As noted, NRL was unable to replicate, even though working with Iwamura. To be sure, NRL has had great difficulty replicating any cold fusion results. I don’t know why. I have discussed this extensively with an NRL researcher, and he has, in fact, seen results that convinced him that the phenomenon was real. However, this is the bottom line: sketchy and anecdotal results are far from enough to overturn a massive rejection cascade, which cold fusion went through in 1989, and the effects linger.
Direct evidence is needed. It exists.
What is remarkable is that the author here seems to be unaware of it. I attempted to cover that in the Wikipedia article, because this is amply found in reliable source. It was excluded, and so was I.
It remains missing, in spite of secondary peer-reviewed source. Editors who would have known to place it have been banned.
(Iwamura’s results are still on the table, they have not been rejected. However, the significance of those results is entirely unclear. The reactions reported are not those reported by others. Transmutation reactions are somehow “sexy.” However, the best established transmutation in FP Heat Effect experiments is to tritium, and that is about a million times down in level from helium. it’s like the neutron results: people get all excited by them, but levels are very low, at best roughly a million times down from tritium. All this distracts from the main event. It’s exciting because those results are “nuclear,” and thus unexpected in a chemical environment. But nobody ever looked this close before.)
Cold fusion was very much unexpected. The name could be misleading. Pons and Fleischman actually claimed an “unknown nuclear reaction,” and they knew full well that what they had found didn’t match the known deuterium fusion reaction. I could give many reasons why that’s impossible under the PF conditions. There is an obvious conclusion: the effect is not the known deuterium fusion reaction. It is something else.
However, it is fusion, as to result, and what is being fused is deuterium, but that straight fusion reaction is very well-known, and half the reactions produce tritium and half produce a neutron, the latter would be at fatal levels if the heat produced were from this.
Instead, helium is produced. d + d → helium plus gamma is a very rare branch, normally. In this case, the helium and heat are commensurate, and at the fusion ratio, but that is wonky! I.e., if there is a single nuclear product, there must also be a gamma, and those gammas are not observed, the energy ends up entirely as heat. There are proposed mechanisms that handle this, but none of them, so far, match experiment enough to be useful, none have been tested and confirmed.
Cold fusion is a mystery. That’s been my theme, now, for some years. We do not know how this reaction takes place. We know some of the conditions, and we know the result (heat and helium). See my paper in Current Science: http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0574.pdf
Running a Fleischmann-Pons experiment is still very difficult. There are protocols now with “success” at greater than fifty percent, i.e., more than half of the cells will show statistically significant heat, sometimes much more than that. The search for a “reliably reproducible experiment” distracted many from studying what was already available, protocols that sometimes generate the heat. What is needed, then, is to measure helium. Helium is not easy to measure, at the levels involved. There is always a concern about leakage. However, leakage is unlikely to produce helium that is correlated to the heat production (and “heat” in these cases is not very hot, not enough to, say, foster leakage. In some work, the cell is held at constant elevated temperature, so the “excess heat” is how much that heating is backed off to maintain the temperature). This work has been done many times, see my paper. Don’t pay much attention to the diagram, that was eye candy wanted by some. It is a result, but it could be very confusing, that’s from gas-loaded work, not a Fleischmann-Pons experiment.
The fact is that this work could all be done again. It has not had a priority in the field for about a decade, because people working in the field already know that helium is the main product (almost entirely). If anyone is still not convinced that the Anomalous Heat Effect—as it is now being called—is real, supporting research to confim this with increased precision would be in order. (Right now, Storms estimate, the reaction Q is 25 +/- 5 MeV/4He, compared to a theoretical value of 23.8 MeV/4He. The difficulty is in capturing and measuring all the helium, but it can be done. McKubre’s best work has the error bars at 10%, and that is still quite a bit seat-of-the-pants.
Setting aside the commercial efforts, which are almost entirely with nickel-hydrogen reactions, we think, palladium deuteride as a fuel may never be practical. However, we won’t really know until we understand the mystery. Palladium is scarce. Unless reaction efficiency can be drastically increased, there isn’t enough palladium to handle our energy needs. That’s why nickel and hydrogen are so interesting, but … the science behind NiH is nowhere near as well established as with PdD. We don’t know the product, for example. Storms thinks it is deuterium, but he has no evidence, just a theory.
(The correlation is not weak, it is very strong. In particular, in extensive experimental series, if there is no heat, there is no anomalous helium. If there is heat, there is almost always commensurate helium, and the exceptions are not only rare, but explainable.
As to explosions, I know of none that were clearly nuclear. SRI was chemistry, and that might be so of others. The most interesting was a melt-down, not an explosion, the original Pons and Fleischmann event from 1984. In that case, the heat might have been nuclear; it was the P&F account of the damage that may have convinced the University of Utah to back these electrochemists. They responded by scaling down. Probably a good idea.
Wow, it’s been more than two years since I commented on Less Wrong. Great article here, though, as usual with cold fusion, it still contains some misunderstandings. Let me dispose of some of them by fiat.
Anything to do with Rossi is not science. There have been demonstrations and tests, including one with a level of independence that remained inadequate. Rossi is commercial, his methods are secret, and so any reports from him cannot be reproduced. It’s trivially easy to dismiss Rossi as a fraud, but on closer examination, the matter is complex. He might be a fraud, or he might have something, and most of us, to know the truth about it, will have to wait. Personally, I don’t trust a word he says without verification, which has nothing to do with fraud, necessarily, but everything to do with his being a commercial actor with possible motive to confuse competition.
Something like this is true with Swartz, though Swartz does disclose much more. In the end, it is proprietary ttechnology and crucial details are withheld. So while Swartz may have put on some interesting demos, again, this is not really science, and Swartz has an … interesting … reputation in the field. Swartz, in general, thinks that almost everyone else is wrong.
When I first saw Iwamura’s results, I thought this was IT. Conclusive. However, the devil is in the details, and that was six years ago, I’ve learned a great deal since then. As noted, NRL was unable to replicate, even though working with Iwamura. To be sure, NRL has had great difficulty replicating any cold fusion results. I don’t know why. I have discussed this extensively with an NRL researcher, and he has, in fact, seen results that convinced him that the phenomenon was real. However, this is the bottom line: sketchy and anecdotal results are far from enough to overturn a massive rejection cascade, which cold fusion went through in 1989, and the effects linger.
Direct evidence is needed. It exists.
What is remarkable is that the author here seems to be unaware of it. I attempted to cover that in the Wikipedia article, because this is amply found in reliable source. It was excluded, and so was I.
It remains missing, in spite of secondary peer-reviewed source. Editors who would have known to place it have been banned.
(Iwamura’s results are still on the table, they have not been rejected. However, the significance of those results is entirely unclear. The reactions reported are not those reported by others. Transmutation reactions are somehow “sexy.” However, the best established transmutation in FP Heat Effect experiments is to tritium, and that is about a million times down in level from helium. it’s like the neutron results: people get all excited by them, but levels are very low, at best roughly a million times down from tritium. All this distracts from the main event. It’s exciting because those results are “nuclear,” and thus unexpected in a chemical environment. But nobody ever looked this close before.)
Cold fusion was very much unexpected. The name could be misleading. Pons and Fleischman actually claimed an “unknown nuclear reaction,” and they knew full well that what they had found didn’t match the known deuterium fusion reaction. I could give many reasons why that’s impossible under the PF conditions. There is an obvious conclusion: the effect is not the known deuterium fusion reaction. It is something else.
However, it is fusion, as to result, and what is being fused is deuterium, but that straight fusion reaction is very well-known, and half the reactions produce tritium and half produce a neutron, the latter would be at fatal levels if the heat produced were from this.
Instead, helium is produced. d + d → helium plus gamma is a very rare branch, normally. In this case, the helium and heat are commensurate, and at the fusion ratio, but that is wonky! I.e., if there is a single nuclear product, there must also be a gamma, and those gammas are not observed, the energy ends up entirely as heat. There are proposed mechanisms that handle this, but none of them, so far, match experiment enough to be useful, none have been tested and confirmed.
Cold fusion is a mystery. That’s been my theme, now, for some years. We do not know how this reaction takes place. We know some of the conditions, and we know the result (heat and helium). See my paper in Current Science: http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0574.pdf
There is another article in that Current Science issue by Mike McKubre that fully addresses why there were so many early replication failures. http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0495.pdf
This is all quite well-known.
Running a Fleischmann-Pons experiment is still very difficult. There are protocols now with “success” at greater than fifty percent, i.e., more than half of the cells will show statistically significant heat, sometimes much more than that. The search for a “reliably reproducible experiment” distracted many from studying what was already available, protocols that sometimes generate the heat. What is needed, then, is to measure helium. Helium is not easy to measure, at the levels involved. There is always a concern about leakage. However, leakage is unlikely to produce helium that is correlated to the heat production (and “heat” in these cases is not very hot, not enough to, say, foster leakage. In some work, the cell is held at constant elevated temperature, so the “excess heat” is how much that heating is backed off to maintain the temperature). This work has been done many times, see my paper. Don’t pay much attention to the diagram, that was eye candy wanted by some. It is a result, but it could be very confusing, that’s from gas-loaded work, not a Fleischmann-Pons experiment.
The fact is that this work could all be done again. It has not had a priority in the field for about a decade, because people working in the field already know that helium is the main product (almost entirely). If anyone is still not convinced that the Anomalous Heat Effect—as it is now being called—is real, supporting research to confim this with increased precision would be in order. (Right now, Storms estimate, the reaction Q is 25 +/- 5 MeV/4He, compared to a theoretical value of 23.8 MeV/4He. The difficulty is in capturing and measuring all the helium, but it can be done. McKubre’s best work has the error bars at 10%, and that is still quite a bit seat-of-the-pants.
Setting aside the commercial efforts, which are almost entirely with nickel-hydrogen reactions, we think, palladium deuteride as a fuel may never be practical. However, we won’t really know until we understand the mystery. Palladium is scarce. Unless reaction efficiency can be drastically increased, there isn’t enough palladium to handle our energy needs. That’s why nickel and hydrogen are so interesting, but … the science behind NiH is nowhere near as well established as with PdD. We don’t know the product, for example. Storms thinks it is deuterium, but he has no evidence, just a theory.
(The correlation is not weak, it is very strong. In particular, in extensive experimental series, if there is no heat, there is no anomalous helium. If there is heat, there is almost always commensurate helium, and the exceptions are not only rare, but explainable.
As to explosions, I know of none that were clearly nuclear. SRI was chemistry, and that might be so of others. The most interesting was a melt-down, not an explosion, the original Pons and Fleischmann event from 1984. In that case, the heat might have been nuclear; it was the P&F account of the damage that may have convinced the University of Utah to back these electrochemists. They responded by scaling down. Probably a good idea.