I have never commented on the subject of fusion energy because for the past few years there has been a dearth of material available. It is almost like fifty years of ongoing research on the tokamak is simply coming up empty and no one wishes to admit it.
After saying that, recent articles in Analog have brought us up to date on the efforts of private groups tackling the issue. In particular, work by the late Dr Robert Brussard are now been reported on and they appear to be very encouraging. It seems possible that where money failed, imagination may succeed. Once again, we can be nervously optimistic.
I recommend that everyone reads these articles, even though they are not easy to track down. In the meantime, I would like to make two observations.
Firstly, the enthusiasm over cold fusion generated by Pons and Fleishmann over their experiments should have been stillborn. A successful experiment would have resulted in the instant death of the scientists, but few observers understood that and those that did were unable to stand in the way of a good story.
Secondly, once you forget about tokamaks, one can consider a number of other fuel scenarios like the boron cycle which is totally safe. This makes multiple efforts to make a fusion reactor very promising.
The key article in Analog is by Tom Ligon who reported on the subject as early as 1998 and then got directly involved with Brussard. He has published an update in the January 2008 analog.
There is now a necessary belief that fusion energy will be achievable and perhaps even cheap. And its availability will actually eliminate over time all other sources of static energy.
A note to my readers. It has been just announced that a massive deep water oil field off Brazil has been discovered that is several hundred kilometers in length and will contain several billion barrels of very good oil. It will not see the market for a decade but will certainly allow other producers to produce full out in the meantime. Of course, it is not enough to plug the soon to be expanding hole in production but it provides hope that an extra decade of conventional oil may be located in the deeps.I recommend that everyone reads these articles, even though they are not easy to track down. In the meantime, I would like to make two observations.
Firstly, the enthusiasm over cold fusion generated by Pons and Fleishmann over their experiments should have been stillborn. A successful experiment would have resulted in the instant death of the scientists, but few observers understood that and those that did were unable to stand in the way of a good story.
Secondly, once you forget about tokamaks, one can consider a number of other fuel scenarios like the boron cycle which is totally safe. This makes multiple efforts to make a fusion reactor very promising.
The key article in Analog is by Tom Ligon who reported on the subject as early as 1998 and then got directly involved with Brussard. He has published an update in the January 2008 analog.
There is now a necessary belief that fusion energy will be achievable and perhaps even cheap. And its availability will actually eliminate over time all other sources of static energy.
4 comments:
You wrote:
"Firstly, the enthusiasm over cold fusion generated by Pons and Fleishmann over their experiments should have been stillborn. A successful experiment would have resulted in the instant death of the scientists, but few observers understood that . . ."
This is nonsense. Every observer, including Pons and Fleischmann, understood perfectly that the ratio of neutrons to heat was anomalous, and impossible according to conventional theory.
Nevertheless, the heat, tritium, helium and other nuclear effects were real, and they have been replicated at Los Alamos, Amoco, Mitsubishi and hundreds of other world class laboratories. Over a thousand peer reviewed papers describing these replications have been published in mainstream journals. I suggest you read a few of them before commenting on this research. You will find a bibliography of 3,000 papers and 500 full text papers at our web site:
http://lenr-canr.org
- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org
I stand corrected. That is what comes of using another writer's non central throw away comment.
It is also good to know that the work is finding its way into the literature which if I recall correctly was not true several years ago. At least there was a lot of frustration then over attitudes.
A recent survey article will be welcome.
In the meantime, we are now able to catch up on the current status of Brussard's work which been a device is something that most readers can get their heads around.
I recall attempting to defend the possiblitity of cold fusion on the basis of our basic ignorance of local field strengths of the molecular structures been worked on. Are we really further ahead?
You wrote:
"I stand corrected. That is what comes of using another writer's non central throw away comment."
Yes, people make many uniformed comments about cold fusion. I apologize for the testy response. But it is absurd to imagine that a Fellow of the Royal Society would be unaware of the fact that 1 W of plasma fusion produces a deadly flux of neutrons. That was immediately understood and it was dubbed "the dead graduate student problem"; i.e., "Why isn’t the grad student dead?"
"It is also good to know that the work is finding its way into the literature which if I recall correctly was not true several years ago."
Actually I think the bulk of the papers were published between 1990 and 1995. Most of the researchers have subsequently retired or died. Cold fusion is an old man's game, because of the political opposition. You have to have tenure and seniority, or someone will stop you from performing the experiment. That is why the principal authors include mainly distinguished people such as Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger, Fleischmann (FRS), the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin; the chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, a Fellow of China Lake, a retired member of the French Atomic Energy Commission and so on. If a younger scientist tries to perform an experiment, or even talks about cold fusion, his career will end abruptly. Several of the senior scientists were booted out of their jobs despite tenure.
"A recent survey article will be welcome."
Ah . . . I do not have an on-line index by date. I can generate that with the EndNote files here, but I do not have one at the web site.
"I recall attempting to defend the possibility of cold fusion on the basis of our basic ignorance of local field strengths of the molecular structures been worked on."
That question pertains to theory, about which I know little or nothing. You would have to read Schwinger or one of those chaps.
"Are we really further ahead?"
I cannot judge whether progress has been made in the theory side of the research, but experimentally, tremendous progress has been made, specially in the last five years. Some of the developments which I think are most important include:
A collaboration with SRI, the Italian National Nuc. Labs, and a corporation in Israel have made the original Fleischmann-Pons bulk palladium experiment quite reproducible. I think they recently said 80% of their latest experiments worked. They define "Significant Excess Heat" as follows: "The output power exceeded the input power (COP) by at least 100%. Maximum COP obtained is 600%, it lasted for 24.5 hours. The longest period of Excess Heat obtained was 134 hours at COP of 150%." (Dardik)
Mitsubishi Res. Center (Iwamura). They have done a series of transmutation experiments starting around 1995 as I recall. They do ~6 runs per year, and as far as I know every one of them has produced positive results for the past 10 years. The effect is 100% reproducible. (It is reproducible but very difficult to replicate because the equipment costs millions of dollars.) It has been independently replicated by the Nat. Synchrotron laboratory and Toyota, although their results are not as clear or impressive.
I think the most important results are in what is called "lukewarm fusion." This is done with a low-temperature plasma that produces far more reactions than conventional plasma theory predicts, because of the presence of the metal target. (“Low temperature” meaning thousands of degrees rather than 400 million deg C, used at PPPL.) See, for example, Claytor (Los Alamos), several Russian researchers. This was done in a particularly convincing fashion by Rout et al. (BARC), who observed 10E16 tritium atoms where theory predicts only 10E9. See:
Experiments Autoradiographs
I just uploaded the most promising lukewarm result yet:
Storms, E. and B. Scanlan. Radiation Produced By Glow Discharge In Deuterium. in 8th International Workshop on Anomalies in Hydrogen / Deuterium Loaded Metals. 2007. Sicily, Italy.
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEradiationp.pdf
Storms can generate lukewarm fusion on demand, instantly, producing at least 10E8 particles per second. He has confirmed this with a G-M counter and a silicon detector. The heat from the reaction is presently too low to measure with calorimetry, but every indication is that the reaction rate will increase exponentially when voltage is increased, and the heat should then be detectable. (Voltage is limited with the present configuration, but a new cell will allow higher voltage.) This may even lead to practical applications, which, in turn, Arthur Clarke and I predict may lead to a Brave New World. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/ClarkeACthecominga.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/BookBlurb.htm
- Jed
You wrote:
"I stand corrected. That is what comes of using another writer's non central throw away comment."
Yes, people make many uniformed comments about cold fusion. I apologize for the testy response. But it is absurd to imagine that a Fellow of the Royal Society would be unaware of the fact that 1 W of plasma fusion produces a deadly flux of neutrons. That was immediately understood and it was dubbed "the dead graduate student problem"; i.e., "Why isn’t the grad student dead?"
"It is also good to know that the work is finding its way into the literature which if I recall correctly was not true several years ago."
Actually I think the bulk of the papers were published between 1990 and 1995. Most of the researchers have subsequently retired or died. Cold fusion is an old man's game, because of the political opposition. You have to have tenure and seniority, or someone will stop you from performing the experiment. That is why the principal authors include mainly distinguished people such as Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger, Fleischmann (FRS), the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin; the chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, a Fellow of China Lake, a retired member of the French Atomic Energy Commission and so on. If a younger scientist tries to perform an experiment, or even talks about cold fusion, his career will end abruptly.
"A recent survey article will be welcome."
Ah . . . I do not have an on-line index by date. I can generate that with the EndNote files here, but I do not have one at the web site.
"I recall attempting to defend the possibility of cold fusion on the basis of our basic ignorance of local field strengths of the molecular structures been worked on."
That question pertains to theory, about which I know little or nothing.
"Are we really further ahead?"
I cannot judge whether progress has been made in the theory side of the research, but experimentally, tremendous progress has been made, specially in the last five years. Some of the developments which I think are most important include:
A collaboration with SRI, the Italian National Nuc. Labs, and a corporation in Israel have made the original Fleischmann-Pons bulk palladium experiment quite reproducible. I think they recently said 80% of their latest experiments worked. They define "Significant Excess Heat" as follows: "The output power exceeded the input power (COP) by at least 100%. Maximum COP obtained is 600%, it lasted for 24.5 hours. The longest period of Excess Heat obtained was 134 hours at COP of 150%." (Dardik)
Mitsubishi Res. Center (Iwamura). They have done a series of transmutation experiments starting around 1995 as I recall. They do ~6 runs per year, and as far as I know every one of them has produced positive results for the past 10 years. The effect is 100% reproducible. (It is reproducible but very difficult to replicate because the equipment costs millions of dollars.) It has been independently replicated by the Nat. Synchrotron laboratory and Toyota, although their results are not as clear or impressive.
I think the most important results are in what is called "lukewarm fusion." This is done with a low-temperature plasma that produces far more reactions than conventional plasma theory predicts, because of the presence of the metal target. (“Low temperature” meaning thousands of degrees rather than 400 million deg C, used at PPPL.) See, for example, Claytor (Los Alamos), several Russian researchers. This was done in a particularly convincing fashion by Rout et al. (BARC), who observed 10E16 tritium atoms where theory predicts only 10E9. See:
Experiments Autoradiographs
I just uploaded the most promising lukewarm result yet:
Storms, E. and B. Scanlan. Radiation Produced By Glow Discharge In Deuterium. in 8th International Workshop on Anomalies in Hydrogen / Deuterium Loaded Metals. 2007. Sicily, Italy.
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEradiationp.pdf
Storms can generate lukewarm fusion on demand, instantly, producing at least 10E8 particles per second. He has confirmed this with a G-M counter and a silicon detector. The heat from the reaction is presently too low to measure with calorimetry, but every indication is that the reaction rate will increase exponentially when voltage is increased, and the heat should then be detectable. (Voltage is limited with the present configuration, but a new cell will allow higher voltage.) This may even lead to practical applications, which, in turn, Arthur Clarke and I predict may lead to a Brave New World. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/ClarkeACthecominga.pdf
http://lenr-canr.org/BookBlurb.htm
- Jed
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