Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The European Union is so desperate for their clean energy push to yield a viable solution, they have just given €3,999,870 to a Palladium electrolysis cold fusion research team.
EU announces funding for four next-gen clean energy solutions
December 24, 2020
HERMES – hydrogen-metal systems for clean energy
The HERMES project is revisiting the cold fusion concept, which emerged back in 1989 with the claimed discovery by the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann from Britain and Stanley Pons from France of excess heat production during electrolysis of heavy water (deuterium oxide) using a palladium electrode at room temperature.
At the time, the discovery was thought to offer a pathway to cheap clean energy but the finding remained controversial due to lack of replicability. Recently interest in the topic has revived with the scientific advances of the intervening years.
HERMES intends to draw on these to study the effects of hydrogen and deuterium loaded in palladium at room and intermediate (up to about 800oC) temperatures. Such modern characterisation techniques also allow reproducibility.
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Read more: https://www.powerengineeringint.com/renewables/eu-announces-funding-for-four-next-gen-clean-energy-technologies/
From the project website;
Breakthrough zero-emissions heat generation with hydrogen-metal systems
Project description
In pursuit of the cold fusion dream as a solution to the world’s energy needs
In 1989, electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons made headlines with their claim to have produced excess heat using a simple apparatus working at room temperature. Their experiment involved loading deuterium in a palladium metal. As many experimenters failed to replicate their work, cold fusion remains a controversial topic in the scientific community. Nevertheless, a vociferous minority still believes in this elusive phenomenon. Since 2015, Google has been funding experiments into cold fusion. Although no evidence has been found for this phenomenon, it is clear that much pioneering research remains to be conducted in this poorly explored field. The EU-funded HERMES project will employ advanced techniques and tools developed over the last few decades to investigate anomalous effects of deuterium-loaded palladium at room and intermediate temperatures.
Objective
Disruptive energy generation technologies are urgently required to stave off catastrophic climate change. Now, more than ever, is the time to also to consider unconventional options. The subtopic c. Breakthrough zero-emissions energy generation for full decarbonisation of this call aims to answer this need. All of the research areas identified by the call are highly unconventional. As electrochemists, we will contribute to this call by working on hydrogen-metal systems. We propose to study hydrogen (and deuterium) evolution in unconventional conditions, i.e. on metal-hydrides and the main motivation for this work is based on the recent Nature perspective “Revisiting the cold case of cold fusion”. When loading deuterium into the Pd lattice, there is a chance that something very interesting will happen, resulting in production of excess heat. The first report of such reaction was published 30 years ago, but quickly dismissed by the scientific community. But what if there is really something? Can we afford to not to investigate this further, considering the current climate crisis? Google has recently funded a research project in this area, getting some interesting results but failing to produce excess heat. However, the team concluded that it was very difficult to achieve the required conditions reported for starting the excess heat production, and that “there remains much interesting science to be done in this underexplored parameter space.” This is a high risk/high reward project, but with aid of all the improved techniques and tools developed in the last 30 years, we believe that it is worth revisiting the topic. We will use state-of-the-art technologies to prepare, characterize and study electrochemical Pd-D system, both at room temperature and at temperatures up to 1100 K. We will focus on method development, with the special emphasis on reproducibility. If no nuclear effects are observed, we will gain information of the isotope effects for hydrogen evolution.
Read more: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/952184
The Nature article “Revisiting the cold case of cold fusion” on which this snowball of research funding is based was published in May this year.
At least with hot fusion there is a measurable release of energy and fusion neutrons. Nobody has to argue about whether you were squinting at the calorimeter just right.
I guess if you have a burning urge to investigate ways of extracting zero point energy from empty space, or a plan to send a robotic mission to the forest moon Pandora to retrieve a sample of unobtanium, now might be a good time to ask the EU for funding. Remember to mention the climate crisis.
Is there anything in basic physics that would make people think that this could actually happen?
Plenty of scientists have advanced speculative theories, e.g. Theory of Bose–Einstein condensation mechanism for deuteron-induced nuclear reactions in micro/nano-scale metal grains and particles.
The problem is the theories don’t appear to be accompanied by evidence that something is happening.
And there is significant evidence nothing is happening. If compressing deuterium into strange states produced fusion you would have expected reports of anomalous radiation and heat from attempts to create hydrogen based room temperature superconductors. Some superconductor experiments compress hydrogen or deuterium compounds to millions of atmospheres in diamond anvils. If any quantum oddness which allows a shortcut to fusion was going to happen you would expect to see it under such extreme conditions.
I was quite jazzed with the initial 1989 announcement by P-F, being interested not only in terrestrial energy but energy for space propulsion (my field). I did a lot of research, and concluded that it might be worth a look – a result I reported in a lengthy review paper to my bosses at TRW.
Because of an offhand observation I included in a two-sentence paragraph in that paper (to metallic hydrogen), I was tasked to perform an experimental program to see if hydrogen-loaded palladium might become a superconductor at room temperature! That was definitely NOT my idea, but I agreed because it would give me an excuse to engage the burgeoning cold-fusion community on company time.
We found that, in fact, palladium wire’s resistivity was reduced by an amount proportional to the overpotential applied in the electrolytic cell. But the maximum change was 6%.
I learned a lot about electrochemistry, both theoretical and practical. After attending the first International Conference on Cold Fusion in Santa Fe, and seeing the difference in setups between researchers who got excess heat and those who didn’t, I found two common factors in the first that were absent in the second. Their calorimetry, which was uniformly just fine, wasn’t the problem. It was that the excess heat people were using unregulated power supplies, and there was always evidence of electrolyte breakdown (snaps and flashes). Since none of the groups used voltage and current measuring devices having the bandwidth to record brief transients in input power, the excess heat people didn’t realize that they were intermittently dumping in extra joules – joules which integrated out over time in the calorimetry, and were measured accurately. So I lost interest.
Decades later, humorously enough, I ran across an article where researchers had found that hydrogen-loaded palladium wires became superconducting at above 30 K, though not in the range of “high temperature” superconductors (77 K). Still, the phenomenon was not expected at all. So I guess my management at TRW deserves more credit than I gave them at the time.
Mike: Rocket propulsion is my field too. As a hobby, I check into the Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) group every few months. Their current front runner is the results from Mizuno’s lab. Here’s their site:
https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/
Dan D
Thanks!
Oh ye of little faith in imagineering! Come fly with me-
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Cold fusion! Wow. And they rejected my research proposal for studying the use of a zero Ohm resistor.
Ya know…I believe that when the Zero Ohm resistor is properly combined with 2 of the 3 poles of the Flux Capacitor, and proper harmonics are applied true cold fusion will finally be realized. You owe it to the world to self fund your Zero Ohm resistor research
You could use it (0R) to bugger up your calculator.
Zero emissions extremism
I am amused by the nay sayers out there. I sold the equipment that produced the cold fusion results at U of U. My company felt this might be the future of energy production and supplied similar equipment to many universities and national labs. I know by first person experience that many of these experiments emitted unexplained heat. The fly in the ointment was the race to perfect HOT FUSION was in the forefront of scientific experimentation. Those who depended on the very expensive research into hot fusion were not pleased by the very cheap cold fusion experimentation because it was drawing funds from their paychecks. As a result many of the cold fusion critics were hot fusion experts… You can look it up, I was there. Do I know what made the cold fusion work? I took a lot of physics in collage and my answer is no; I have no Idea. What I know is, it worked from time to time but no one spent enough time or money to find out why it worked and why many attempts to duplicate this failed. As the climate change proponents say… we need to do further experiments, if you will just give us a little more money.
Good way to give the French President’s nephew a small donation and not expect anything to be delivered back
Look for the Clintons to suddenly get interested in cold fusion….
I researched Nd wrote about this extensively in the energy chapter of ebook the Arts of Truth in 2012. Covered in the Chaper ‘Recognition’. Had the futher advantage of sending Mororola’s top theoretical physicist to Pons and Fleischmann’s Toyota funded French lab. There was a there, there. But not every experiment, and without ever producing boiling water- so no useful energy density.
The Navy’s SPAWAR ran a skunkworks program that explained why, since declassified. The phenomenon is concentrated in the microdefects in the palladium wire structure. Nothing like uniformity possible.
About 2006 (if I recall correctly) a theoretical explanation was provided by Widom and Larsen (WL Theory) as a property of the weak force, in effect reverse radioactive beta decay, and the same basic thing that drives the formation of neutron stars via gravitational collapse. This theory led to ‘old fusion’ being renamed ‘low energy nuclear reactions’, (LENR).
The key to LENR in Earths weak gravity field is electron excitation above about 0.78 mev to enable their proton capture and thus neutron formation. There are two possible mev routes, surface plasmons and EMF.
NASA built surface plasmon chips. Worked, but impossibly expensive for any bulk energy. Will never scale.
Brillouin Energy demonstrated EMF in the lab using high frequency AC, BUT was never able to get the net energy gain above two (electricity in, heat out)
So real, but a practical technical dead end. Their effort to build a 4x gain device failed.
The EU stuff just shows they haven’t even done the homework I did way back when.
With the right kind of ‘diplomacy’ they can throw in a Nobel Prize.
Does it come with backup solar panels and windmills?
A good friend of mine was highly embarrassed when shortly after the initial cold fusion results were announced, they announced that they had duplicated the results. A few days later they had to retract their results when a member of the team discovered that on of their probes was being used at a temperature outside what it had been calibrated for.
When they got a new probe that was calibrated for those temperatures, the effect they were looking at disappeared.
Energy scams come and go.
Electricity too cheap to meter is here to stay.
No really, I will explain. You need a meter to tax old denseless people for the energy they need to hear and cool our homes. I hate to think how much it is costing for goverment to tell me to wash my hands.
My dream job of designing new reactor went away the day POTUS elect Clinton announced his secretary of energy. Nuclear power was officially dead.
One of my subsequent jobs that was fun was developing biomass renewable energy. In nuclear power I got to be an engineer. In renewable energy, I had to learn to write business plans. The ways goverment taxes energy is amazing.
When the power company sends you a bill who do you blame, the power company or your elected taxing authority?
Also worked on the geological repository. I learned how government spends money. The only thing the US DOE is good at spending money. In the US, rate payers fund storage of spent nuclear fuel. I also learned that we do not need a lang term solution to spent nuclear fuel. I already knew this being an expert of short storage but by then I had reviewed computer printouts for the next three glacial maximums.
Our planet is still in the same ice age pattern that it has been for millions of years. Spent nuclear fuel should not be left in the path of glacial Lake Missoula. So was my house. Should I have disclosed that to the new owners.
During the nuclear is dead period, I also learned about lawyers. No matter how you make electricity, some crackpot is against and will file a restraining order to stop it. This will kill a small renewable energy projects.
Turns out nuclear was not dead. A few years after POTUS was elected I was working as a design engineer in new reactors. Even worked in China.
So here is the deal with fusion. The world does not need a infinite supply of energy energy. I finite supply of energy will do do nicely for our wonderful lifestyle.
No matter what the energy source, it takes a equipment to convert it to energy to more useful electricity. This requires engineers to design, operators to run, and a staff to maintain.
We like to get paid so we can buy power too cheap to meter.
Fusion and fission produce heat by converting mass to energy to make steam. The steam plant will be the same. Power plants that convert a small amount of mass to a huge amount energy are small. Smaller than a Walmart.
While fusion is always 30 years in the future, fission passed the learning curve stage 30 years ago. The most significant change I have seen is large containment buildings protected and an outer shield building. Expensive to build with a large equipment hatch but reduces maintenances cost over the life of a power plant.
Bottom line is that producing the power that is needed is not a problem. Energy scams are based on ignorance.
“but the finding remained controversial due to lack of replicability”
I didn’t think replication mattered anymore.
cold fusion is junk science. A cultural superstition.
Overcoming the strong nuclear force for two protons doesn’t happen outside of fission nuclear bombs and stellar cores, and maybe a Tokamak fusion compression gadget. The emission of fast neutrons and neutrinos is the telltale signature of actual fusion of nuclei.
Whoever is pushing cold-fusion to gullible bureaucrats and ignorant politicians is simply a conniving snake-oil salesman. But I’m sure the paycheck is nice if they can get it.
800C is “cold”?
Compared to a million plus that is needed for “hot” fusion.
I have some cold fusion in my fridge,
you can have it for 5million !! (bring your own cool box)
Must be kept below 95f or the whole thing degrades in under 20 seconds?
Converting lead to gold is a low risk high yield option and would probably be as successful
Quoting David Solan::
“Claiming real science is “magic” is always wrong, no matter how marginal that science may be, and in order to refute the crackpots you should never resort to such low blows.”
I agree with him, it is a sad observation that the people who answer in this site are not scientifically mature enough to follow the scientific discipline.
I have been following cold fusion as an outsider, my field being particle physics, but I cannot agree that negative results from experiments should stop research, particularly in a subject so complicated mathematically.
I want to remind everybody of the complexity of quantum mechanical phenomena, and fusion is basically a quantum mechanical phenomenon. Think of the complexity of lasers, and the discovery of holography. Electromagnetism is simple but the phenomena involve a fortuitous coherence between classical dimensions and the quantum mechanical frame.
I am fairly certain that there could be an analogous coherence leading to cold fusion, if researchers are clever enough . in their experimental search.
If you look at the amount of money that goes into “climate science” it is good that some money goes into researching cold fusion. I agree with David that it is a long shot that even if it exists, it will be useful for energy production, but if you asked a 19th century researchers if lasing was possible you would be laughed out of the room.
I will add that , some of the more recent results are not negative, as Rud Istvan says i his homment below. The more to support that research should not stop.
The same scam and money ‘.000.000€ as the solar road in the north of france. That was queitly removed a while ago.
Well, this doesn’t look like a good bet to me – but I note from the link that: ‘The funding (under the new Pathfinder scheme for deep-tech research and innovation is aimed to support visionary ideas that may – or perhaps may not – translate into reality.’
So this isn’t part of the EU’s primary approach, but theoretical/out there research.
Deflect, cover up, obfuscate — repeat
NASA has also turned to same magic to progress future spaceflight –
Yes, clean bitcoin mining
Bitcoin Miners in Nordic Region Get a Boost From Cheap Power (yahoo.com)
Funded Euro babble
I was asked to attend a Skype presentation from a group that had developed a process to “improve” distillate fuel oil. The “improvement” was to mix the oil and water and run them through a capillary, increasing the heat content of the fuel. Mind you, this was not improving the combustion of the oil, but increasing the actual maximum heat content measured in a bomb calorimeter. I let them ramble for a while and then delivered the zinger: Where does the “extra” energy come from? The answer from the German expert was “cold fusion.” I could not even begin to hide my disgust at having my time wasted. We never saw them again.
Which one will be the Biden science advisor? The best candidate must be flashy and bold behind the podium like John Holdren.
I’ve got a proposal for turning lead into cobalt and rare earth elements without pollution. We will green the world and I only need E 50 million.