Foreword: I gave Ric Werme permission to do this essay. I don’t have any doubt that the original Cold Fusion research was seriously flawed. That said, this recent new development using a different process is getting some interest, so let’s approach it skeptically to see what merit it has, if any. – Anthony
Cold fusion isn’t usual fare for WUWT, at best it’s not a focus here, at worst it’s sorry science, and we talk about that enough already. However, it never has died, and this week there’s news about it going commercial. Well, it won’t be available for a couple years or so, but the excitement comes from a device that takes 400 watts of electrical power in and produces 12,000 watts of heat out.
Most people regard cold fusion as a black eye on science. It’s credited with the advent of science by press release and its extraordinary claims were hard to reproduce. Yet, unlike the polywater fiasco of the 1970s, cold fusion has never been explained away and several experiments have been successfully reproduced. Neutrons, tritium, and other products kept some researchers working long after others had given up. Even muons (from Svensmark’s Chilling Stars) have been suggested as a catalyst. Everyone agrees that theoretical help would provide a lot of guidance, but for something that flies in the face of accepted theory, little help has come from that.
Grandiose claims of changing the world have been lowered to “show me something that replaces my water heater.” Attempts at scaling up the experiments that could be reproduced all failed. Even had they worked, a lot of systems used palladium. There’s not enough of that to change the world.
As media attention waned, the field stayed alive and new avenues explored. Some people active in the early days of Pons & Fleishman’s press conference are still tracking research, and research has continued around the world. There are publications and journals, and conferences and research by the US Navy. And controversy about a decision to not publish the proceedings of a recent conference.
The term “Cold Fusion” has been deprecated, as focus remains on generating heat, and heat to run a steam turbine efficiently is definitely not cold. Nor is it the 30 million degrees that “Hot Fusion” needs. The preferred terms now are LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) and CANR (Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions). I’ll call it cold fusion.
I keep a Google alert for news, and check in from time to time, and last week came across notice of a press conference about a cold fusion system that is going commercial. The reports beforehand and the reports afterward said little useful, but some details are making it out. Whatever is going on is interesting enough to pay attention to, and since WUWT has developed a good record for breaking news, it’s worth a post.
The bottom line is that Italian scientists Sergio Focardi and Andrea Rossi have a unit they claim takes in 400 watts of electricity and, with the assistance of nickel-hydrogen fusion, puts out 12 kilowatts of heat. Okay, that’s interesting and the power amplification doesn’t require some of the extremely careful calorimetry early experiments needed. The elements involved are affordable and if it works, things become interesting. (There are undisclosed “additives” to consider too.) The reactor is going commercial in the next few years, which may or may not mean it’s ready.
Several details have not been disclosed, but there will be a paper out on Monday. Dr. Rossi reports:
Yes, I confirm that Monday Jan 24 the Bologna University Report will be published on the Journal Of Nuclear Physics. I repeat that everybody will be allowed to use it in every kind of publication, online, paper, written, spoken, without need of any permission. It will be not put on it the copyright.
Major caveat – the Journal Of Nuclear Physics is Rossi’s blog. Peer review is:
All the articles published on the Journal Of Nuclear Physics are Peer Reviewed. The Peer Review of every paper is made by at least one University Physics Professor.
So it’s not like they’re getting published in Nature, Scientific American, or even a reputable journal. Still, it ought to be a welcome addition.
The mechanism involved is claimed to be fusion between nickel and hydrogen. This is a bit unusual, as the typical claims are for reactions involving deuterium (proton + one neutron) and tritium (proton + two neutrons) with the gas filtering into a palladium lattice. In this case, it’s reacting with the substrate.
Nickel has several isotopes that naturally occur, the belief is that all participate in the reactions. In http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/files/Rossi-Focardi_paper.pdf discusses finding copper, which has one more proton than nickel, and various isotopes that do not occur in natural nickel. It also observes that gamma radiation is not observed while the reactor was running. Comments in other articles make suggestions about why that is. Apparently they see a short burst of gamma waves when the apparatus is shutdown.
Rossi leaves several hints in his comments, e.g. instability when the pressure of the hydrogen is increased, including explosions. (The commercial unit is designed to need enough electrical power so it can be shut down reliably.)
The best summary of the calorimetry involved is by Jed Rothwell who has been involved since the early days. He notes:
The test run on January 14 lasted for 1 hour. After the first 30 minutes the outlet flow became dry steam. The outlet temperature reached 101°C. The enthalpy during the last 30 minutes can be computed very simply, based on the heat capacity of water (4.2 kJ/kgK) and heat of vaporization of water (2260 kJ/kg):
Mass of water 8.8 kg
Temperature change 87°C
Energy to bring water to 100°C: 87°C*4.2*8.8 kg = 3,216 kJ
Energy to vaporize 8.8 kg of water: 2260*8.8 = 19,888 kJ
Total: 23,107 kJ
Duration 30 minutes = 1800 seconds
Power 12,837 W, minus auxiliary power ~12 kW
There were two potential ways in which input power might have been measured incorrectly: heater power, and the hydrogen, which might have burned if air had been present in the cell.
The heater power was measured at 400 W. It could not have been much higher that this, because it is plugged into an ordinary wall socket, which cannot supply 12 kW. Even if a wall socket could supply 12 kW, the heater electric wire would burn.
During the test runs less than 0.1 g of hydrogen was consumed. 0.1 g of hydrogen is 0.1 mole, which makes 0.05 mole of water. The heat of formation of water is 286 kJ/mole, so if the hydrogen had been burned it would have produced less than 14.3 kJ.
What should we make of all this? In a skeptical group like this, some healthy skepticism is warranted. On the other hand, the energy release is impressive and very hard to explain chemically or as physical storage in a crystal lattice. It will be interesting to see how things develop.
Maybe I’m just too cynical, but I was wondering what relationship Dr. Giuseppe Levi (the author of the test report) has with the two inventors? I noticed that he reported some of the data was lost during Test 2… why wasn’t the test repeated?
Having said that, the report was a ‘warts and all’ report, including the error with the weighing of the gas bottle. I have to wonder why the adhesive was added during the test, though.
This ‘cold fusion’ does not apparently have anything to do with the studies that do find some marginal reaction occuring.
The photo looks suspiciously just like a picture of a con.
Here is a link to a 60 Minutes piece on Cold Fusion:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/17/60minutes/main4952167.shtml
Notice how it is on the table and not ‘black boxed’ like this Italian claim or certain aspects of climate science.
Nick Palmer, just thought I’d say thanx for the post and article.
When you see claims like this, you should look for components of unreality, where you have to enter into a bizarre fantasy to believe it.
The first problem has already been pointed out: the process makes no conventional scientific sense.
Where it gets really bizarre, is how they have a timetable of plans to commercialize the product, as if it will be no problem bringing a nuclear powered device into home use within the year. SRSLY?
USA is on the verge of stomping on Iran and North Korea, but these guys can bring a radioactive nuclear device to market in a year, with no government intervention, or query about using novel nuclear reactions.
Of course, it’s all harmless, too. The first reaction they tried to work, does not produce a lethal cocktail of particles and radiation, and requires no waste disposal strategies.
SRSLY?
Ric Werme :
January 23, 2011 at 3:24 pm
I will be keeping an eye on the blog. Might be late on Monday, and then you all will have woken up :).
RockyRoad says: (January 23, 2011 at 9:27 am)
If any of you have read my comments over the last several weeks…
I have, and have been intrigued. If (as I suspect) your comments inspired Ric to present this topic to Anthony, then thanks… indeed, thanks, anyway.
Before jumping into theories, one should check if the effect really occurred. The whole thing looks as a mixture of dilettantism in experimentation with ubounded faith in cold fusion, plus a heavy scent of scam. Couple of things are fishy.
First, they did not measure the total amount of supplied water. They only checked “flow rate” once, under unspecified conditions: “The flow rate was 146 g in 30 seconds.” (from “Marianne Macy report”). The scheme of water supply is not described either. When water boils, vapor back-pressure might vastly reduce their “calibration” of “flow meter”. So, I take it that the total water flow was not measured but “estimated”.
Then, they had some suspicious “bottle” of hydrogen, with some unspecified valve under unspecified pressure. The size of entire device is not specified either. At claimed 20 atm of pressure, it can contain a lot of hydrogen to catalyze into something without the valve ever open. The bottle of hydrogen looks more as a decoy.
More, from patent application:
http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/docservicepdf_pct/id00000009056757?download
“The above mentioned apparatus, which has not been yet publicly disclosed, has demonstrated that, for a proper operation, the hydrogen injection must be carried out under a variable pressure.” When pulsating pressure is involved, averaging could be a big suspect, as usual in this kind of junk sciences.
All this pitch about reducing greenhouse gases and 52 trillion tons of oil equivalent (in patent application!) is highly suspicious too, and makes this subject right into the topics of this website.
On a side note, there are companies that are selling to unsuspecting idiots super-economical water heater systems based on “trickle power”, the scam that is based on elementary mistake in averaging pulsating currents and voltages. Nothing is new.
Ah, the nostalgia. I remember when, as a freshman at BYU back in 1979, I worked as a night janitor on campus. My supervisor showed me how to override the security keypad to a laboratory door with my passkey and static electricity so that I could walk through the lab to access a room that needed to be cleaned. There were tanks of water and pumps and wires everywhere — and lots of radiation warning signs. I hope that my passing through didn’t throw off any measurements (I tried to be careful with my broom handle).
You gotta admire the stubborn dedication of janitors. My nephew at Michigan State told me that the lab he works at does their own cleanup in order to control for that variable. I hope there aren’t any carpets near their door.
Berényi Péter :
What about the 61Ni+p -> 62Cu transition? (61Ni is 1.14% in nature).
That would be a transition from spin -3/2 for 61Ni (the sign got lost in my earlier list) to
+1 for 62Cu. Hence a forbidden transition unless one can conjure up 4 anti-neutrinos with spin -1/2 (a reaction never seen anywhere, I may add).
kramer says:
January 23, 2011 at 8:33 pm (Edit)
> “And controversy about a decision to not publish the proceedings of a recent conference.”
> Anybody got a link to this?
From http://www.lenr-canr.org/News.htm :
AIP Abruptly Cancels Publication
October 2010
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) abruptly cancelled the publication of the peer-reviewed proceedings of the March 2010 American Chemical Society National Meeting cold fusion session.
On October 5, the AIP sent Dr. Jan Marwan, the proceedings editor, a short letter saying: “Having received the technical presentation and PDF files related to the “New Energy Technology Symposium”, AIP’s Publisher’s Office has had a chance to evaluate the contents of the material presented. Based on this evaluation, AIP has decided to exercise its right under Section C.1(a) of the Publishing Contract to decline publishing the proceedings and materials as an AIP publication. . . .”
The proceedings book was in the final stages of preparation when it was cancelled. If the decision is final, we hope we will be able to upload a copy of the book here at LENR-CANR.org.
Roger Carr says:
January 23, 2011 at 9:30 pm (Edit)
No, I’ve also been one of the “it’s not dead yet” commenters. I figured a 12 kW reactor couldn’t and shouldn’t be ignored.
Ed Zuiderwijk:
January 23, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Please.
In your musings you are forgetting the spin of the proton which is 1/2
Captured in an l=1 level it can give a nucleus with 3/2.
So Ni58 spin 0 can allow spins 3/2 with the addition of the proton’s extra spin and captured on an l=1 energy level, as Cu59 ; this should settle the parity too.
I can’t get on Rossi’s website at the moment. “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded”. A lot of interest obviously.
But considering Ric Werme’s early report a little further up, I am now even more skeptical now than 24 hours ago. So much promised, so little delivered. That’s a very bad sign.
Also, I’d like to mention something that had to be mentioned a lot earlier. Body language is a good indicator of the mood. In the photo that accompanies the post, Rossi is seen with his arms crossed (I saw that in the vid, too). Crossing arms is a defensive posture. It signifies negativity and lack of confidence.
Rossi doesn’t look as though he’s scored a goal. He doesn’t come across like he’s confident with his findings. That’s not a good sign at all.
——————
Ric Werme,
Their server is probably overloaded, I am getting the following error when I click the link.
John
I think it is a critical mistake to identify the process as being any kind of nuclear fusion.
The experimenters imply they do not know what process is actually causing their reported ‘excess energy’. Why say nuclear fusion then, this will cause inherent skepticism. It is careless to state it is nuclear fusion without actually knowing the process involved.
Step one is independent repeatability of the experiment and consistency of results that show the ‘excess energy’ produced according to the current researchers.
Step two is if there is something really generating excess heat then find the physicl process that causes it. The two steps are not necessarily done in series, could be parallel.
John
419 in progress? “We have discovered this endless energy source and since we are a bit low on money, cannot capitalize on the idea. If you would be so kind as to send us all your savings, we would then give you 99% of the trillion dollar profits…”
Something of this caliber without being bought out by the main players of the global energy market is impossible, thus this will soon be followed by the suckering of the suckers.
I believe that to many of the authors, who have released reports about their experiments and observation of heat being developed in a reactor, when water vapor is present at a temperatur between 700 and 900 degrees celsius, that they try to force an explanation for their observation to fit either their background in physics or chemistry rather than have a very close look at the similar features that is found in the different cathodes that are used to make a cathalytic process happen.
They should also have a close look at the papers produced by professor Pemg Chens team at cornell University.
In any case at this point in time it is not important to known, which theory is the right one, but instead concentrate on repeating and prouving the observed results are correctly reported.
The paper is out at “http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/”
At first glance it discounts proton tunelling (impossibly low probability) and also positron anihilation (no gammas). The only explanation offered seems to be “shielding of the Coulomb barrier”. But they stick to their guns and give experimental results of “energy amplification”.
I can’t understand what they are talking about. Anybody out there who knows more nuclear physics than I do? (shouldn’t be difficult!).
“cannot overcome”? Why not?
Then we’ll be sure not to give “science” any credit when there’s a breakthrough.
Let’s put it this way: The null hypothesis–that there’s no such thing as “cold fusion”–has been falsified thousands of times. OK?
Failure to replicate doesn’t mean there’s “nothing there” for sure, it just raises the likelihood that error or fraud were involved. But if the claimed effect keeps reappearing, that tends to rule those suspects out and points the finger at “gremlins”–unsuspected factors. These occur often in materials science. (It took lots of brute force experimentation with doping formulas before the transistor was made reliable and efficient. But the numerous failures were no deterrent, once the effect had shown itself.)
Ed Zuiderwijk says:
January 23, 2011 at 10:13 pm
That would be a transition from spin -3/2 for 61Ni (the sign got lost in my earlier list) to +1 for 62Cu. Hence a forbidden transition unless one can conjure up 4 anti-neutrinos with spin -1/2 (a reaction never seen anywhere, I may add).
Come to think of it, can’t gamma photons (spin 1) emitted make up for the spin deficiency in (x)Ni+p->(x+1)Cu+gamma transitions? That way you would not need your neutrionos.
Let me understand this, Rossi has for 2 years been heating a commercial building with a new nuclear energy source no one understands?
Firstly, ehm, did he mention this to the occupants and to people within a 10 km radius?
Secondly, why is the Italian government not surrounding the building with soldiers and safeguarding the device for national interest. Surely every spook in the world would be around that building by now, just in case.
Thirdly, with such enormous and very observable claim – of heating a building for 2 years and having a 1 MW commercial unit in production – Rossi can’t just be be mistaken. This claim must either be true and monumental or outright intentional but very short lived and thus stupid fraud.
Interesting.
Roger Longstaff says:
January 24, 2011 at 1:58 am
I can’t understand what they are talking about. Anybody out there who knows more nuclear physics than I do? (shouldn’t be difficult!).
There is a model a few threads below, that tries to explain with atomic theory what might be happening. It depends a lot on the fact that Ni is in nano-crystals.
I sketched something similar in a post upstream.
Electrons in a crystal belong to the whole structure, and the denuded proton could be sitting in an interstitial defect where for some reason the probability function of overlap with an l=1 energy level of Ni58 is large enough when the catalysts ( which we do not know) and the temperature is appropriate to make a Cu59.
The physics is all handwaving. I agree that replicability of the effect should be the priority.
Michael Cejnar says:
January 24, 2011 at 3:25 am (Edit)
> Let me understand this, Rossi has for 2 years been heating a commercial building with a new nuclear energy source no one understands?
My guess would be there’s some short link between Rossi and the owner. If the factory’s facility manager could cut his heating bill by 90%, that would make pretty good impetus.
> Firstly, ehm, did he mention this to the occupants and to people within a 10 km radius?
I would assume so, the facility manager where I work would be smiling a lot (though we have a lot of computers, we likely spend more money on cooling). That, or he’d be really puzzled how this strange contraption got added to HVAC system one weekend.
There has been one fatality in LENR research due an overpressured vessel and failed reliefe valve, see http://articles.latimes.com/1992-01-04/news/mn-1181_1_fusion-research , but so far nothing has warranted a 10km warning. Homes with natural gas are likely a greater risk of a major explosion.
Popcorn time!