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.
Just to touch on the idea of oil companies disappearing, Amoco, Shell, and Schlumberger have all worked with CF. Both Amoco and Shell published papers with positive results. They are available on the web.
I’m sceptical that what is being demonstrated is fusion. I think it may be more likely to be fission based on reported transmutations. There is a theory, Widom-Larson, which used weak-interactions do explain what’s going on. Not being a theoretical physicist, I can’t judge all the subtle possible errors in the theory.
I wonder if I could get further amplification, cites, refs on this as well …
.
This is a truely amazing breakthrough! Think about this: If you connect enough of these things together in a branching configuration (tree) then you can, conceivably, produce infinite output energy from only 400W input. This changes everything!! Even better, the 400W input could be tapped from the infinite output.
Even greater, just one of these devices connected in a loop configuration should spool itself up to infinite energy. Where do I sign up to invest?
Clearly we do not know everything about the world. If we did,
why would we have the WUWT blog? As a physicist, I am a
bit skeptical. But having spent some time in researching a thing
or two, I know the knowledge of mankind is quite limited.
There is something going on with “cold fusion”. We just do not know
what it is. The current state of cold fusion is like LEDs in 1900 or
so. People were occasionally and accidentally making LEDs out of
broken silicon carbine and steel needles a century ago. It was 50
years before there was a good explanation and good reproducibility.
Today we take LEDs for granted, and can buy many varieties for
pennies.
Cold fusion will be nice, but I hope the research also sheds light on
compact carbon-nickel-hydrogen lattices. When we can store
hydrogen gas at high density and low pressure lots of opportunities
open up.
r says
Big Oil? If anyone, probably more like “Big Battery” (“Big Electrode?”).
That’s an energy storage technology, not an energy producing technology. A boat-load of energy needs to be provided to make the alloy, which is then stoichiometrically consumed to make hydrogen “on-demand”. Not a bad idea if you actually have a boat-load of energy going unused someplace and a fleet of vehicles that can use the hydrogen.
Methinks Big Oil can sleep peacefully a little while longer.
Personally, I tend to have a “one month rule” on Universtiy press releases and the subsequent fawning hype from the media. They (the press releases) typically either quietly disappear, never to be heard of again, or get shot down in flames. On rare occassions, they survive infancy long enough to be meaningful.
You can usually get an idea after about a month.
I am not attesting as to the operations of this device or the validity of the claim, but I read in one description of this setup, that in addition to he apparent “absorbtion” of a proton by the nickel nucleus there was a subsequent beta+ decay (positron) radiation that was the supposed source of heat through positron / electron annihilation. That would in fact make this an antimatter reactor. Fantastic if true, but how the proton overcomes the coloumb barrier is still very unclear to me.
The problem with “Cold Fusion”, even if real, is that most experiments only produce a small amount of excess power when one estimate requires at least 10x over input to realize a viable energy source because of the conversion inefficiencies involved in putting the energy to real usage through the intermediate machinery required.
Some interesting papers from more creditable sources for followers:
From South West Research Institute:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHreviewofex.pdf
And reply:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEaresponset.pdf
From Los Alamos National Laboratory:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/StormsEelectrolyt.pdf
MIT’s Gene Mallove
http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/mitcfreport.pdf
I do believe that the hot fusion groups have too much control over grants (which, much like AGW groups, might explain some of the outright hostility) for this kind
of research and that probably the answers will eventually crop up in something much simpler from an independent sector. Hot fusion has tremendous drawbacks not the least of which is its complexity. I suspect that is why it is always “20 years” to commercial usage. Again something simpler may apply:
http://focusfusion.org/
It also always possible that DOD has effective processes or patents under wraps because of classification which puts a stop on release of, or any future work on it by the inventor. In this case, a back door approach that the mainstream physics disparages and could be put in place before it was controlled would be the most effective.
@wayne, Dave Springer
I read their paper. It is very lacking in details and is impossible to even venture a guess what they are seeing. For example, they say a mass analysis using SIMS at Padua Univ. showed masses in the range 63-65 and they attribute this to copper. I can tell you, I’ve spent a lot of time behind a mass spectrometer. Lots of compounds have fragmentation patterns that yield these masses. They don’t mention nor show the fragementation pattern, which any good science paper would show. Therefore it’s impossible to say if it’s copper or fragments of an organic compound.
Here’s what I think: they’ve reinvented “Raney nickel ” which is a classic catalyst for hydrogenation. It’s been around since the turn of the 20th century.
They state in the paper that they use Ni, H, and additives. So if the “additive” has an organic molecule especially with a couple double bonds, you have an exothermic reduction reaction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogenation
You need some energy to heat up the nickel substrate to a critical temperature (400 watts I gathre), then it takes off and continues until all the hydrogen or “additives” are used up (yielding 12,000 watts). You are not converting mass into energy. It’s simple chemistry known as catalytic reduction.
Here’s a classic example many college students are shown in intro chemistry classes. Take a large flask and put a few milliliters of methanol into the bottom. Take a piece of platinum wire and heat it red hot. Hang the wire in the flask which is full of methanol vapors. The wire glows red hot for several minutes as the methanol is reduced on the platinum wire. Since the reastion is exothermic the wire stayd red hot. If the flask is big enough you can get the wire to glow the entire lecture.
Svein Utne says:
January 23, 2011 at 5:46 am
“Preliminary report from Italy:
http://22passi.blogspot.com/2011/01/report-ufficiale-esperimento-della.html”
Interesting but so long as the guts of the device remain shrouded from view there’s no assurance that some other power source isn’t concealed within. Given the water cycling through the system and water being the byproduct of hydrogen combustion and no way to measure oxygen consumption (if any) from the ambient air in the room the wary skeptic might suspect there’s a second bottle of hydrogen hidden inside that is being burned to produce the excess heat. Measuring the weight of the entire apparatus instead of just the hydrogen supply bottle might have ruled that out even if the water in and water out were weighed as the weight of the apparatus would have changed due to oxygen being drawn inside to make water from the hydrogen – i.e. the excess water could be hidden inside but it would weigh more than the hydrogen alone. Of course there could also be an oxygen bottle hidden inside so I guess the only real way to assure there’s no deception involved is to take the thing apart and look at everything inside it.
Or am I missing something that would rule out the possibility of deception?
If energy amplification (more net energy out than in) is possible then some basic laws of Chemistry and Physics are bogus or somehow inapplicable. Is the idea here that the Ni is a “fuel” that stores potential energy – like coal? Or, is the idea that without the necessary input of energy the Ni atom is alchemized into Cu producing fusion energy? Can anyone comment on this?
_Jim says:
January 23, 2011 at 8:10 am
“Care to extend or amend?”
I suppose I should now that you mention it.
We don’t know of a practical way to do that via nuclear fusion.
We do it via nuclear fission in nuclear power plants and radio-isotope thermoelectric generators, and even exothermic chemical reactions technically lose a bit of mass equivalent to the energy released.
The usable energy produced by the above means is rather costly though. Nuclear power plants are far from the least expensive means of producing electricity and RTGs are so expensive they’re only used in unmanned space exploration where there’s no other practical choice due to the cost of boosting mass to far flung reaches of the solar system.
Is that sufficiently amended?
In the article this is said:
“The proof comes with the team’s examination of the nickel material after use – the copper is plainly there – found using an atomic microscope at the University of Bologna.”
I do research in environmental geochemistry, which often turns out to be a lot of materials science. As a result, I use a lot of electron microscopy in my line of work.
A) “Atomic microscope” suggests a high-resolution transmission electron microscope (HR-TEM). Only HR-TEM has the resolving power to see down to an “atomic” level, though this is typically on the order of the lattice level, and not so much individual atoms. Though there are microscopes and microscopists out there that can get atomic resolution.
B) Copper contamination is the most common form of contamination in all forms of TEM and HR-TEM. In fact, carbon coated Cu grids are used to prepare and provide support to samples in the transmitted electron beam. Therefore, unless you use another kind of grid, you’re going to have Cu contamination by default.
C) Even if you don’t use a Cu support grid, there are myriad other places for Cu contamination. For example, the sample rod used to introduce the samples into the microscope probably is mostly Cu or is some alloy thereof, as it has to be conductive. Plus their are probably all kinds of other components with Cu in them in the microscope because of its conductivity, and the need to make electromagnets to focus the electron beam.
Conclusion) The fact that they found Cu in their sample with “atomic microscopy” aka electron microscopy, comes as no surprise. We find Cu contamination in every sample we run unless we take care to use gold grids. One can only hope their microscopist controlled for contamination issues it, or they are smart enough to have controlled for contamination.
If any of you have read my comments over the last several weeks wherein I’ve objected to and refuted people denigrating “cold fusion”, all I can say is “I told you so”.
And practically all of the objections to this phenomenon listed by people above are based on ignorance of the subject–that, or they’re irresponsibly skeptical and ignore the possiblity and obviously don’t do one ounce of study and research. (Guys, the Internet is useful for upgrading your knowledge and it only makes you look silly to make statements that painfully show you’ve taken no effort to do so.)
I’ve seen several mentions of the lack of gamma ray particles. Guess what–LENR absorbs any gamma rays it produces, making it a near perfect form of nuclear energy production, so citing that as evidence nothing is happening shows you’re woefully misinformed–Requiring a signature of hot fusion as a requirement for LENR fusion is just silly–there’s more than one way to fuse elements together and while hot fusion seems to be the predominant method now working in the universe, it isn’t the only way (there’s also the possibility of using “cold fusion” to destroy radioactive byproducts from nuclear power plants, which would completely eliminate any objection to greatly expanding these power sources).
The first paragraph says “the original Cold Fusion research was seriously flawed” and I ask what original Cold Fusion research are you referring to? Philo T Farnsworth built spherical devices he used for his cold fusion research that predated the U of U research by decades–one of these devices sits in a museum that features Farnsworth’s other notable achievment not a mile from where I live.
The tests in the development of high voltage electrical switches nearly a century ago found that helium was a common byproduct. This was rejected out of hand as being “impossible”, but now it is regarded as an example of nuclear fusion at relatively low temperatures–hence in the realm of “cold fusion”.
Dismissal of the Navy’s research by some here is unfortunate and misinformed–the Navy has painstakingly examined it since anything that might have promise as a phenomenal energy source is worth investigating, especially in light of advancements made in the science by investigators in other countries. It is unfortunate that the hot fusion cabal was able to completely destroy all funding for this phenomenon–requiring that it be replicated 100% of the time is very unfortunate; if it works even part of the time, that should spur additional research into the science (did Edison require 100% success from the get go when developing the light bulb?)
I’m convinced the LENR/CANR phenomena are real and a potential source of significant energy. There’s enough energy in the heavy water fraction in a cubic mile of seawater to power mankind’s energy demands for the next 1,000 years. That’s certainly worth pursuing; indeed, wouldn’t it be worth $billions in research funds? I say yes, indeed it would. Too bad we’ve thrown $billions away on hot fusion with no promising results–a fraction of that should have been directed toward “cold fusion”. But now the US is woefully behind the rest of the world in what appears to be the most promising energy source imaginable. We won’t benefit from it if we don’t work on it.
Roger Knights says:
January 22, 2011 at 10:44 pm
“Park is fully on-board the conformist/consensus bandwagon along with his conventional-minded fellow-scoftics:”
Hmm … I wouldn’t assume that being wrong about global warming would automatically make Robert Park wrong about cold fusion.
“Cold Fusion” … “Bologna University Report…”
Is it April first already?
BarryW says:
January 23, 2011 at 7:08 am
“The Greens are going to go nuts since deep down they hate civilization. ”
Nah, they already are.
John M
Yes, that’s it precisely. The aluminum-gallium solves the problem of the explosive nature of hydrogen. A car can drive around with a tank of water that is slowly released onto the aluminum- gallium to produce hydrogen on demand. The aluminum-gallium is later recycled with electricity. (Maybe an aluminum-gallium block could be exchanged at a service station to be recharged.) It allows one to use electricity to run a high horse-power hydrogen combustion engine, as opposed to a weak magnetic electric motor.
Sounds good on paper anyway.
jim karlock says:
January 23, 2011 at 4:13 am
I think the author may have been thinking about smaller engines suitable for vehicular use. Still probably not steam engines though but rather Stirling engines which have better power-to-weight ratios in small engines and because the working fluid is completely contained so there’d be no exhaust at all no need to carry around a tank of water. The heat generated by the apparatus wouldn’t be extracted via steam but rather something like a liquid salt. I believe that’s what is currently state of the art in small solar-thermal generators. A parabolic dish or fresnel lense is used to heat a crystal salt to very high temperature fluid and the fluid is pumped through the hot side of a Stirling engine the output shaft of which is used to drive an ordinary electrical generator.
Greenies don’t want free, clean energy. They want a 95% reduction in humane beings. Free, clean energy would be the death knell to our planet in their Luddite minds. We are the problem not the clean energy, that’s just a step towards their goal. With fossil fuels banned how many of us could survive on the land when we each get 10 sq. ft., and have no shelter etc. Fossil fuel/AGW is just a means to wipe out humane beings off the earth!
All you do to prove your case is hook a steam turbine to the output and make it self-sustaining. The fact that they come before the public yet again without doing it suggests that it can’t be done and that they are frauds. I would love for this stuff to work, but, these guys don’t seem to have anything but an opportunity for more funding.
wesley bruce says:
January 22, 2011 at 11:45 pm
Thanks for that write-up. I haven’t followed LENR closely enough to be much more than aware that P&F replication was ambiguous enough that some low-key research into the possibility has been ongoing ever since. In other words reports of the death of LENR are highly exaggerated.
I wasn’t aware that there was a delta-T limit precluding higher efficiency heat engines and steam turbines. Thanks for the heads up for pointing out that high dT destroys the delicate catalytic substrate. Continuous regeneration of the substrate sounds expensive. Can you elaborate?
Well, it would be easier to convince me had they not claimed no radioactivity found in the Nickel residual.
Journal of Nuclear Physics (which is not a journal)
A new energy source from nuclear fusion
S. Focardi & A. Rossi
“No radioactivity has been found also in the Nickel residual from the process.”
Nickel has five stable isotopes with mass numbers 58, 60, 61, 62 & 64. The most abundant one is 58Ni, it is about 68% of it by mass. If it absorbs a proton (Hydrogen nucleus), it becomes 59Cu (a Copper isotope with mass number 59). It is not stable, decays into 59Ni with a halflife of 81.5 sec. Now, 59Ni is not stable either, it decays to 59Co (the only stable isotope of Cobalt), but its halflife is 76,000 years. Therefore, as reaction times are much shorter than that, it inevitably gets enriched in the residual.
For all other stable isotopes of Nickel the claimed reaction path (n)Ni – (n+1)Cu – [(n+1)Ni] ends in a stable isotope of either Nickel or Copper.
There may be other unstable isotopes coming from secondary reactions operating on unstable intermediate products, but still, 59Ni must be the most abundant one. I can see no indication this radioactive isotope was found in the Nickel residual, even if it would give much more support to the claim some nuclear reaction is going on indeed than any amount of steam.
Of course there is no theoretical explanation regarding how the proton is supposed to overcome the Coulomb barrier either. Electron shielding in the crystal lattice or collective lattice modes are only linguistic constructs that may or may not hint at a would-be proper theoretical description of the phenomenon.
They have filed a patent, that much is true.
WO/2009/125444 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CARRYING OUT NICKEL AND HYDROGEN EXOTHERMAL REACTIONS
But the description is vague.
Anyway, if it is not a hoax, all energy problems are solved for the remaining lifetime of the solar system, as Nickel is pretty abundant in Earth’s crust (about 0.01%, annual production exceeds one million tonnes even now). Also, it looks like replacing heat production units with this Nickel-Hydrogen reactor in existing power plants would be a cheap & easy ride.
I wonder how the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement or all the other environmentalist schemes to exterminate billions of souls could be justified if it turns out to work as advertised.
It is a pity that there are so many naive customers and investors out there that scams are profitable. In this case everyone is very suspicious. World “knows” that cold fusion is a hoax. Is there money to be made if this is not real? If I buy a boiler to my house, a have to pay it about month after its installation. If it is not working I owe nothing. Additionally I should get a guarantee several years ahead. How could this be different?
The demo itself proves nothing. There are lots of ways to do it without real stuff starting from editing the video to hiding a fuel tank inside the cover. Wikipedia tells that e.g. gasoline contains 35 MJ/l (13 kWh/kg) which comparable to the energy released in the demo. An obvious reason to arrange a test like this is that the target customers have seen the apparatus and are convinced that it is working as they say. But still, I would like more respect to scientific method including solid measurements.
Many important claims are thrown but not proven. I understand secrecy but it makes patenting the invention and peer reviewed publishing impossible. Because there is a good comment about patenting above, I skip that now. AGW is not the only area of science where peer review process is flawed. It is really hard to get innovative new stuff approved while press releases spam us with low quality mainstream research.
beng says:
January 23, 2011 at 6:08 am
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.
This gets me jumpy. I mean, I’ve heard about neutron bombs at the end of the cold war. Then I also read that this gadget needs enough energy for a “safe shutdown” or whatever. Should I calm down, or not?
Ed Zuiderwijk says:
January 23, 2011 at 8:12 am
This is of course total bunkum. Also the attempt to explain it (read the pdf article) is
junk science. The binding energy per nucleon is at its highest for the elements Fe, Cobalt Nickel. The reaction Ni+p -> Cu is therefore endothermic. Sorry folks, but this paper is clearly due for publication on April 1st.
Yes for endothermic,but they are not calling it fusion, they are calling it “capture”. So the title of this post is misleading as far as the mechanism they have in their head.
Trying to see their thought processes ( hand waving here) : In a shell model of the nucleus the energy level of Cu 59 exists ( resonance scattering? ) above the energy level of Ni58. The proton “shielded” by the electron of Hydrogen has a probability of occupying this level and thus creates a Cu59 which then as unstable decays and gives the decay energies.
Wishful model I think.