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.
E.M.Smith says:
January 23, 2011 at 3:17 am
Dave Springer says: Oil companies would become worthless overnight
Not unless you replaced the entire FLEET of all oil powered vehicle overnight.
———————
A bit of an exaggeration there. But if you were an investor and owned stock in an oil company would you be interested in buying more oil company stock or selling off what you had if this cold fusion thing is for real? Panic selling could easily reduce the value of oil companies down to some small fraction of their book value. Exploration equipment and the value of any reserves or fields or leases they owned would be looked at askance. Refineries ditto. Of course they’d still retain the value of office equipment, office buildings, and things of that nature. So not quite worthless and not quite overnight but close enough to say it with literary license.
DeNihilistSo if this works, then back to steam energy?
JK: Err, most modern electric generation is via steam – coal, natural gas and nuclear all make steam to turn the turbines connected to the alternators. The only difference is the fuel – chemical or nuclear.
Thanks
JK
Hypothetical question:
How long would you keep your current automobile if you could purchase a replacement vehicle at about the same price as a new car today only the replacement never needed refueling? I’m pretty sure I’d want to ditch my gas hogs in short order.
But the thing is, virtually free clean energy has far reaching implications beyond that. Just about every manufactured item in the world has a large cost component that can be traced back to the price of energy because energy is consumed in just about everything from cement and steel to celery and sausage. Everything would become much less expensive to manufacture including new vehicles with power plants that never needed refueling.
I’m not sure what all would happen but I’m sure it would cause super-size political and economic disruption that could be fairly called earth-shaking if not earth-shattering.
“thus, 58 g nickel will generate the same energy as that provided by 30,000 ton oil, that is 517 tons/gram.”
Crikey! Hang on to your small change.
There is much to be cautious about in this story. Cold Fusion, if it were possible, will truly revolutionise the economy and the society. But it sounds too good to be true.
The only upside to our expectations is that there have been many ‘crank’ scientists who were later proven to be correct.
I’ll remain skeptical of cold fusion until a year after the first commerical unit is sold and proven to operate as envisioned.
Nevermind the US Navy’s interest in the research. The military is famous in pursuing and experimenting with quite wacky ideas. This might well be one of them.
Thank you for opening this topic to the world again, Anthony; and my thanks to Ric Werme for being the messenger. “Cold Fusion” has intrigued me since first announced.
I note again, in case anyone missed it, wesley bruce’s comment (January 22, 2011 at 11:45 pm): “About 13 teams duplicated the F&P effect in the first months. The claim that it was not replicable was and is outright lie.”
But we are becoming, sadly, used to that.
And as an educational side note only on Hoser’s comment and Mark T.s I had to check out “bakatare”.
“It means stoopid or foolish. Its basically the same word as baka.” (Too cynical for me.)
The dilema of Fusion to produce energy
Thermo-nuclear fusion for power — physics is well understood but engineering is almost impossible
Cold Fusion — physics (chemistry?) poorly understood, bordering on unscientific but engineering is simple and straightfoward
Uh, David L, you’re getting the energy out through fusion. In other word, it’s not perpetual. I thought that was made pretty clear.
Mark
I think I know how the trick is done. The paper mentioned above doesn’t have details about the apparatus, but it does sound similar to what BlackLight Power was using and I had major doubts about that.
Background:
Stanford and Iris Ovshinsky of Energy Conversion Devices (Ovonics) were featured on PBS’ Scientific American Frontiers (link to the show). These are the people behind United Solar Ovonics (Uni-Solar) which make very good flexible solar cells “by the mile” (show segment link). Earlier in the show, a vehicle of the Ovshinsky’s was featured that used a metal hydride hydrogen storage system (show segment link), aka a Solid Hydrogen Storage System (link to some info and pic).
What I found very notable was the heat given off when reloading the hydrogen (filling up). The connector used had water line fittings, the storage tank needed circulating cooling water to keep it from overheating. In use, the tank is heated to release the hydrogen.
Now examine the BlackLight Power process, as in their Solid Fuel Reactor, which uses Sodium Hydride and whatever-else is in their “Solid Fuel.”
The reactor cell is heated, which would drive out any hydrogen stored in the metal hydride, which likely doesn’t have much if any to begin with. This is “initiating the reaction.” The heater is turned off, the hydrogen is fed in. With removal of the generated heat, the hydride can continue to soak up hydrogen until it’s at saturation for the temperature it’s at. Properly control the rate of heat removal and the incoming hydrogen flow, you could get a nice flat rate of “energy generation.”
Voila. Assemble the reactor with properly prepared materials, heat, turn off heat and feed in hydrogen, get far more energy out than the heater put in.
That’s my guess for the BlackLight process using sodium hydride and whatever-else. I’m also guessing this “new” “cold fusion” process uses a hydride somewhere, perhaps in the “special additives.” There may even be a hydride being formed during operation, as part of the initial heating.
Beyond that, to speculate on what might be happening although I far prefer my previous musings, I wonder if the assembled apparatus could be acting like a battery, specifically something like a nickel-metal hydride battery. Newly put together and heated, it could just be waiting for the introduction of the hydrogen to finish becoming a new ready-to-be-discharged battery, no charging needed, which then self-discharges with elements of physical design and/or substrate composition providing a resistance leading to heat generation at a certain rate. The BlackLight process uses a metal hydride, this new process uses nickel and “special additives.” The possible electro-chemistry seems to be present.
And in BlackLight’s case, sodium hydride reacts strongly in water, can explode in air, and may be doing interesting heat-producing things to the apparatus and whatever else is in the “solid fuel.”
Offhand, to me, it looks like a hydride soaking up hydrogen could account for the energy being released, with possible additional reactions making up any deficit. If they get around to releasing at least enough details of this “new cold fusion method” as they have about the BlackLight process, I, and others, can better ascertain if this is the case.
This should be up my alley. What killed cold fusion was the small energy, comparable to the energy needed to create the palladium lattice, and it is chemical in size.
Here they claim energies that are much larger than available from chemical effects.
They do not give details of the experiment. They propose explanations by hand waving.
What are needed are experiments that will prove these propositions.
If it is electron screening, as they hand wave, that allows the proton to get next to the Ni nucleus and fuse into copper, there are a number of experiments that should be quoted or done to show that the process is happening: detect neutrons, detect gammas, measure isotope composition before and after. Then the check of the energy released per fusion and the amount of Hydrogen consumed, etc .
Now if they can demonstrate that this works, i.e a hundred fold amplification of energy in to out, there will be experiments galore to study the effect, even if their proposed models are full of holes.
David L says:
January 23, 2011 at 3:13 am
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.
—
Bet you never took the time to read his paper at:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/files/Rossi-Focardi_paper.pdf
You should, if he’s credible, which his paper on the surface looks like it is, matter is being transformed to energy, not strickly fusion but a transformation. Might be better not to look too shallow. I see your point if there are not nuclear changes occuring.
This statement “the commercial unit is designed to need enough electrical power so it can be shut down reliably” is a bit ominous given they admit they don’t know the theory behind the mechanism.
Dave Springer says: Oil companies would become worthless overnight”
The gasoline automobile did not kill the horse industry nor the electric car industry over night. It took decades.
@Dave Springer
Well only if they were staffed and led by complete buffoons without an idea in their head beyond ‘ground, dig, oil, money’ would your assertion be true. And they are not. Oil companies employ some very bright people. Especially in science and engineering.
History suggests that this is not the case, and that they are just as capable of recognising technological change as the next organisation, and strategically repositioning themselves accordingly. And whatever happens, there is good ‘annuity revenue’ from the existing oil product based equipment in service that will last a few decades or more.
An equally interesting question lies with governments. In UK currently, 63% of the pump price of unleaded petrol is just direct tax. Only 37% of the revenue goes to pay for oil company profits, extraction, refining, distribution and retail. So until they figure out a way to tax any ‘cold fusion’ device at least as effectively as petrol at the pump, then it is in all governments’ interests to continue the status quo. So here, they are in synch with the oil companies.
In case of any doubt, I have no financial interests in oil companies. And as I don’t keep a car, I rarely directly buy their products.
“The reactor is going commercial in the next few years, which may or may not mean it’s ready.”
Perhaps the first place to start looking is Dr Rossi’s bank account. How low is it? The above statement seems to me to be a “this is a ground floor opportunity for investors” pitch.
David L says:
January 23, 2011 at 3:13 am
Ever used a solar oven? That’s about as free as free gets. Keep in mind mass and energy different forms of the same thing with the conversion defined as E=MC^2
The problem is we don’t know how to convert mass to energy in any way that can be practically initiated or controlled. But if there were a way the conversion factor is ridiculously large.
The energy contained in every gram of matter is 25 million kilowatt hours. That’s enough to power an 18-wheel truck at highway speed for many decades or run a large cement plant for a year. The atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki lost about one gram of matter each which left the scene as energy – all the energy released by the weapon, just a portion of which leveled an entire city, weighed just one gram.
There is widespread popular belief that state of the art theories in physics can explain everything. This is generally true but only for everyday scales in size larger than a single atom and smaller than a galaxy. The smaller and larger scales stuff is happening that we don’t understand. At the small scale for instance nobody can explain why or how the lattices in high temperature superconductors allow electrons to travel through them with zero resistance. At the large scale no one can explain why galaxy clusters are moving apart at an increasing rate of speed when gravitational attraction should be bringing them closer together at an increasing rate of speed. Gravity turns into a repelling force across vast distances? Some totally unknown force overcomes gravity across vast distances? No one knows.
My opinion is that if odd atomic lattice structures can enable electrons to somehow flow through them with zero resistance then it isn’t incredible that odd lattice structures can somehow enable protons to fuse. Both are equally mysterious. The only difference is we have empirical knowledge that high temp superconductors actually work while low temp nuclear fusion has yet to be empirically demonstrated to the satisfaction of most people but yet it isn’t quite as physically impossible as most people believe and the efforts to empirically the effect never completely ended after the widespread failure to replicate Pons & Fleichman’s experimental results. It isn’t in the same class as perpetual motion – at least not yet.
Price of oil, might take 15 years to go down significal from todays price, but the price of stocks in oil companies will go down faster.
What, they ran one experiment 10 days ago for one hour and are already talking about building a commercial plant. Is it April the 1st?
Preliminary report from Italy:
http://22passi.blogspot.com/2011/01/report-ufficiale-esperimento-della.html
The device is a type of Nickel-Metal Hydride pile that produces heat. Replacing the Nickel after its oxidised will be cheap, no?
Its principal operating mode is Fission, separating Carbon-based meat-puppets from their Au.
From David on January 23, 2011 at 3:03 am:
Those pages say they are being phased out, check the new system. Here’s that link:
http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2009125444
Ah, it gets better and better.
It uses a tube filled with nickel powder, pressurized and heated. They point to copper in the recovered nickel powder as proof the fusion reaction occurred.
The tube is made of copper.
Mark T says:
January 23, 2011 at 4:46 am
Uh, David L, you’re getting the energy out through fusion. In other word, it’s not perpetual. I thought that was made pretty clear.
Mark”
Yeah, I know it’s not the same. I was using a little poetic license to basically say that humans are always seeking something for nothing. Call it fission or fusion, solar or wind power, geothermal, or whatever you want. Bottom line is you’re going to have to work for it, Nothing is for free.
Without reading the details, I can still say that unless one can detect alot of heat and most importantly, high-speed neutrons from the reaction, there’s no useful energy production.
There is not enough information here to decide anything. What was in the box. How much hydrogen, nickel, air, water (assuming the steam came from water and not from burning H2). What is left in the box? How much energy was consumed making the nickel and the hydrogen? I think that wait and see is a good idea.
Lief/Josualdo: –
Regarding your comment about the length of test, hereto an excerpt from their patent application.
…A practical embodiment of the inventive apparatus, installed on October 16, 2007, is at present perfectly operating 24 hours per day, and provides an amount of heat sufficient to heat the factory of the
Company EON of via Carlo Ragazzi 18, at Bondeno
(Province of Ferrara)
John Marshall,
The apparatus that they’ve hooked up changes Nickel into Copper. Now, from an economic point of view that is a bad idea as Nickel is dearer than Copper (Approx US$12 v 4.5 per lb.) Perpetual motion? Hardly the claim.