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.
Nooooooooooooo! Running this voodoo trash radically lowers my estimation of the WUWT blog. People make mistakes. People get deluded. People lie. Any one of these is a sufficient explanation.
[Reply: Sifting out the truth through discussion educates a wider audience. ~dbs]
Seems like a lot of confusion here rather than cold fusion.
Perhaps we need to start at the beginning!
What is Energy?
We know that it can neither be created nor destroyed, that in itself leads me to think that it is free by definition but what is it.
We also know that it can be “transformed” but what does that really mean.
One should at least mention the central websites for Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) work, and the recent Widom-Larsen theory that allegedly resolves the controversy. The first stop is —
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
where one can find a library of downloadable files. At the least, one sees that the LENR field has developed legs. There are too many positive results for a simple hoax or error in calculation.
The Widom-Larsen theory is presented at Krivit’s New Energy Times site —
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml
There is now a split between the ‘old school’ cold fusion workers, who think the Coulomb barrier can be overcome by some simple means, and the W-L people, who are conservative by comparison. There is a long essay by Steven B. Krivit on this aspect.
A number of other new energy concepts, from the conservative to the exotic (or hoax?) level, can be found at the Pure Energy Systems website —
http://peswiki.com/energy/News
Bit more detail…
http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2011/01/17/cold-fusion-from-italy-nearly-commercial-ready/
Evidently this prototype has been up and running producing heat for month long runs… now that make me stop and get real curious.
Funny that after it was discredited. However, the US Navy continued to look into the matter.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/03/navy-scientists/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,510589,00.html
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4081892/Cold-fusion-experimentally-confirmed
http://www.lenr-canr.org/Collections/USNavy.htm
http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue44/navy.html
If cold fusion goes commercial then maybe Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons deserve a long overdue apology as well as a Nobel Prize?
Since Park’s book Voodoo Science has been brought up in the discussion, here is an extract from my review of the book for Times Higher Education:
“The reader is perhaps beginning to get the general picture. One starts off with an opinion that a belief is wrong and creates an argument to justify this opinion. The arguments spread by word of mouth and are never updated with contrary information that may subsequently arrive, thus becoming the “correct position” to take. It is perilous to say anything that indicates doubt about whether this position is in fact correct (though a certain proportion of scientists look more closely and can see the cracks in the official position). This effectively prevents any work in the areas concerned being published in the major journals where they will be seen by others.
“Cold fusion — the suggestion that hydrogen nuclei can be made to fuse together and thereby generate considerable energy at near room temperature, using an electrochemical process instead of the usual very high temperatures — was a claim that seemed initially very unlikely to be true, though not totally ruled out. After some workers found themselves unable to reproduce the results initially claimed by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989, a high degree of scepticism arose in the scientific community, especially after the publication of an official report declaring the absence of any evidence that fusion had taken place.
It is interesting to look both at Park’s account of the history of cold fusion and at that of the protagonists, presented in a video documentary Cold Fusion: fire from water (available from http://www.infinite-energy.com). Park impresses on the reader the fact that if the process that generates the heat is really fusion then one would expect to see fusion products. He fails to mention here, as the video does, that the small amount of such products anticipated, given the amount of energy generated, was eventually observed, and in just the right quantity. All mention of positive results, such as the experiment where, by what appears to be a sound method, it was found that the energy generated was considerably in excess of anything that could be explained conventionally, is collapsed into a paragraph where Park notes that many claims are soon withdrawn because of errors being found (as also happens in ordinary science).
“This device legitimises the dismissal of all positive results, and so also the corollary cold fusion is no closer to being proven than it was the day when it was announced. This is a seriously misleading statement.
“There are scientific arguments against cold fusion, but equally there were arguments against continental drift. The fact that theories have been proposed to provide a mechanism seems not to impress Park as much as the argument made by Douglas Morrison of CERN, that one should be “suspicious” if one cannot get the same result in an experiment every time. Perhaps he would find such a circumstance less suspicious if he were a material scientist rather than a high-energy physicist.”
“excitement comes from a device that takes 400 watts of electrical power in and produces 12,000 watts of heat out”
Amazing!
Before the excitement dies down, does anybody want to buy any snake oil?
Even if it works.
Would there not be waste heat of some sort? Getting rid of it implies some sort of expense or environmental impact.
The bill at the home is many times per unit of power what it costs to generate. Distribution is much more expensive than generation. The cost of power is more a function of the maximum you would ever want than the average.
I would like to quote from my book: – Electricity as applied to Mining, by A Lupton, GD Parr and H Perkin dated 1903.
…Up to about the early seventies of the past century, little or no use, as a means of lighting and transmission of power, had been made of the suble agent we are pleased to term ‘electricity’…
Those Victorian could use words ‘suble agent’.
Further on in the book …What is electricity? To this but a very indefinite answer can be given. In fact, no one really knows what it is….
So there you have it, honesty, harnessing of a suble agent, all because the Victorians were humble enough to say …We don’t really know…
And for those who may not know, the electrical term Volts is of Italian origin.
As they used to say in the Saturday morning pictures …Continued next week…
Sounds a bit like a NiH battery to me.
On the other hand, these “out of the box” theories are usually worth looking at, and if anything interesting emerges then independent laboratory experiments can advance the understanding. A similar case in point is the “EMDRIVE” rectionless engine – can it be independently reproduced? Experience tells us that 99% of these new concepts are flawed, or just impossible, but if you don’t look at all of them you cannot find the 1% that might just work.
I know the mechanism. It runs on Orgone energy.
Since nobody else has mentioned it yet, I thought people might be interested to see the patent application Rossi has made, which provides some details about the experimental setup used. This is available here. The written opinion of the international searching authority (the European patent office) is particularly interesting. It seems unlikely that the application will be granted, at least by the EPO.
This has to be one of the highest quality threads for a long time, in terms of the comments posted. As an investor, I wouldn’t go anywhere near this, even when it has been demonstrated running for a week. On the other hand, I have no doubt that some form of cold fusion is achievable even if we never discover it in a usable form.
Looks interesting but seems to be the mark2 version of a Perpetual Motion Machine. To produce all that power there must be a lot of power in or energy generation approaching that of a nuclear reactor. And no gamma rays. The perfect solution to the nuclear power problem of radioactivity, if it can be made to be stable which this system seems not to be.
In the mechanical age, people looked for perpetual motion machines. In the nuclear age, people look for perpetual motion reactions. The laws of thermodynamics state (in plain English) “you don’t get something for nothing”
So if I put 400w into a system to get 12000w out, somewhere along the way the system acquired 12000w energy. Maybe it was the mining and processing of the nickel or platinum or complex catalyst, but you can be sure that when the entire system is considered, you don’t get free energy.
Dave Springer says: Oil companies would become worthless overnight
Not unless you replaced the entire FLEET of all oil powered vehicle overnight.
This problem, fleet change is also why wind and solar are at best ‘bit players’ even if they were dramatically economical today (and they are not). The average car in America is kept for about a decade (rising each year…) so even a perfect e-car today would take a decade to obsolete oil. Now add that a new technology would take a 1/2 decade minimum to enter commercialization…. and you are looking at 15 years.
That is the absolute MINIMUM.
Pons & Fleishman got a raw deal. Their calorimetry was state of the art, it is just that the state of the art was found inadequate to support their extraordinary claims. Of course, what they faced was simplicity itself compared to performing calorimetry on the earth. To characterize this community as “skeptical” is an oversimplification, we not only question, but have an awareness of how much is open to question. We can note that the extreme AGW projections require a net positive feedback to CO2 forcing, while evidence still allows that the feedback may actually be negative, and that surprisingly the complexity of quantum mechanics in solid state physics is such that the physicists have found it difficult to conclusively rule out some possibility of low energy nuclear reactions. In both cases we will follow the evidence, and err on the side of having open minds.
The beauty of this is that I don’t have to try and understand the it. If its real, someone will replicate it, and then dozens of people will, and soon it will be obvious that its real – or not, if no one can replicate it.
Sadly the same is not true of AGW. Hence all the argument.
Just one team, secret ingredients and recipe, works for half an hour, published in a blog… wake me up if something real happens.
Popular Science
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-01/italian-scientists-claim-dubious-cold-fusion-breakthrough
So far the only acknowledgement from a source I recognize. Popular Science is nostalgic for me. My first computer design at the first place that hired me out of college made the cover of Popular Science in March 1983. (Lower left, Jonos). I still do a bit of consulting work for the company that made it. Me and one other engineer, not counting a mechanical engineer who did the chassis, did it from the ground up. Back in those days we were still designing printed circuit boards on light tables with mylar and tape at 4x scale then having them photographically reduced to generate the masks used in production. I’m not sure if we’d started using programmable array logic (PALs) by then or not or whether we were still using discrete TTL logic chips. PALs made logic design a whole lot easier. It was right around that time we began using them.
http://books.google.com/books?id=XARMtUUMxm8C&printsec=frontcover&lr=&rview=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
My suggestion would be http://artoftrolling.memebase.com/2011/01/20/advice-troll-in-through-the-out-current/
Fake free energy machines have been “about to go commercial” for a very long time. Before that we had “turn lead into gold” scams.
Humans are gullible.
Patience, mostly. If they can, indeed, produce energy cheaper than today, then everyone can work out the science later. The biggest caution would be to not put more than one of your nickels into their project(s).
Oh gawd! The Popular Science article on this has a caption under the picture of the device:
I was a principle R&D engineer in Dell’s laptop business beginning in 1993. First the Latitude line and then later with the Inspiron line. Both of those lines didn’t exist when I arrived and both are still going today. So I’ve got two odd personal connections into this cold fusion project. I hope it’s for real!
“Mark Twang says:
January 23, 2011 at 1:16 am
By the way, can somebody tell me how to register a Disqus account so I can post my Chomsky comment at RawStory? I can’t figure it out.”
I know the frustration. Most comment pages that require that stupid Disqus and whatnot also enable you to comment anonymously or with a moniker.
Any web page that demands you have a Disqus and whatnot isn’t worth reading or following. WTF is Disqus, anyway?
Sorry, mods. OT, I know. Just trying to help.