Mike Wofsey

http://www.inthefuture.com/iflog

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  Hi Jed,
  
  >> gets out eventually, usually through a bubbler (trap) and then into a
  >> mass spectrometer. But even if you let it out directly into the air it would
  
  Okay, that sounds safe, as long as their is a 100% baffle of some sort to trap the alpha particles.
  
  >> A glass or steel cell wall is much thicker, and will stop any alpha particle.
  
  I understand that, I didn't realize that all of the gas release is intercepted. I envisioned an open vent to the cell.
  
  >> “Letting the thing run itself out” until all of the deuterium converts to
  >> helium would take hundreds of years, or thousands, or millions of years,
  
  Nah, just jacket the electrode or else use a jacketed thin-film trap and control the dissociation into the unit cell through a vacuum.
  
  >> You breathe billions of alpha particles with every breath.
  >> They are called helium atoms.
  
  I don't breathe alpha particles if I can avoid it. Alpha particles are definitely not helium atoms, that lack of electrons makes the alpha particle very reactive, while helium is inert.
  
  >> Not after they stop moving (and de-ionize, I suppose).
  
  Yes, most of them react in the air, but there is always that tail end of the exponential that you need to worry about. But you guys use bubblers and traps, so then you're essentially looking at the exponential reduction of the tail of the exponential, which is safe.
  
  Anyway, best of luck with this cold fusion thing. We should chat sometime, my office phone number is 205-348-3779. I'm out of the office for the rest of this week, but starting next week I'll be there, after noon Central time, I have to teach summer session for the physics labs. Since I'm (temporarily at least) part of the evil academic establishment, I'll make sure I brainwash them to the value of photovoltaics, C.O.E. and Second Law of Thermo.
  Jul 02 12:37 AM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  >> 1. They never get out of the cells into the air.
  
  I thought you wrote that the gas products have to be released. Do you mean these cells are completely closed then?
  
  >> 2. They are not dangerous “in the air.” 1 cm of air will stop them.
  >> Less than 1 cm if the air is filled with smoke or steam will stop them.
  
  I accounted for that in my calculation. It's absorbs exponentially, so assuming you're standing about 5 feet from the cell you're only getting the tail of the decay. But that's enough.
  
  >> See: smoke detector, americium
  
  Yeah, there is an alpha source in smoke detectors. It measures changes in the radiation flux from things in the air cutting the flux, in that whole detector is only about 30,000 bq though, that's a completely different order of magnitude that what we're talking about.
  
  >> Everything that Fleischmann knows about this fills several textbooks.
  >> Storms put a lot of what he knows into his book. It is 312 pages.
  
  I understand, but those were published well after the initial paper couldn't account for all of those null results.
  
  >> The paper would have to be hundreds of pages long to characterize the
  >> difficulties. It would also have to be clairvoyant, since F&P were not even
  >> aware of many of the difficulties when they wrote it.
  
  So then they were fortunate the first time out. That happens too.
  
  >> Not really. It can’t be controlled. If you scaled it up, it would probably
  >> blow your head off.
  
  They can't find a way to control it? So why not just work with a small lattice and a small amount of 'fuel' and let the thing run itself out?
  
  >> Not even one tiny bit dangerous. No worse than a helium balloon.
  
  A helium balloon is full of an inert gas, there are no alpha sources in a helium balloon.
  
  >> In your entire lifetime you would produce even 1 kg of the stuff.
  
  The average human gives off about 7000 bq of radiation. How do you use this to compute 1 kg of alpha particles? We ingest a certain amount of Polonium and Uranium contamination, but again, this is nowhere near the flux from a 1 watt fusion source, assuming what you wrote is correct, about the Helium-4 output.
  
  >> The whole world will produce 6 tons per year. There must be billions of
  >> tons in the atmosphere already. (5.2 ppm * 5.2 * 10E18 kg = 267
  >> billion tons)
  
  There are billions of tons of Uranium contamination in ground water sources, but we're not gassifying it, standing next to the source and breathing in the alpha particles.
  
  >> By the time they come out, they are inert helium.
  
  Brush up on your statistical dynamics, airborne alpha particles are a real threat, they cause lung cancer. Just because they can be easily absorbed doesn't change the fact that they are many times more damaging to human cells than other radiation sources.
  
  >> Of course they are not open! All kinds of contamination would get in.
  >> They are not shielded against neutrons and gamma rays.
  
  I must be losing it. I thought you wrote that the cells are vented.
  
  >> Anyone can see what the measurements are. The problem is not simple.
  >> If it were simple, it would have been solved years ago.
  
  If you can get consistent data for the tritium, and you can account for all of the energy, writing the energy balance is not difficult. Jun 30 02:35 PM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  >> Alpha particles are helium-4, measured in the gas after they stop moving.
  >> I don’t think you could get a detector into a liquid cell or even a gas cell
  >> to catch them when they are formed. It doesn’t take much to stop them.
  
  They're dangerous in the air, much more so than any other kind of radiation. Again, I didn't see any data on how much alpha radiation was measured.
  
  >> That’s 24 MeV of energy PER HELIUM ATOM, when they measure helium.
  >> Not 24 MeV per palladium atom yet!
  
  I got that, it implies very accurate measurement of the helium.
  
  >> Of course it could eventually go much higher than 24 MeV, as new
  >> deuterons move into the lattice.
  
  You lost me. If they're claiming 24 MeV per reaction, how would that go higher? That's the amount they're claiming per reaction. Are you saying they might get a completely different kind of reaction?
  
  >> See McKubre or Miles.
  
  I read the former, there was nothing in there about any gas measurement, just heat measurement.
  
  >> I would say the biggest inconsistencies are in the tritium, gamma rays
  >> and neutrons. My guess is that the reaction produces varying amounts of
  
  I don't know. On the nuclear level, a reaction is a reaction. It's not like a chemical reaction, where there are varying statistics of the systems. The only way that I can see that there could be wide variability in neutrons and gamma rays is if there are several different possible reactions, or measurement error.
  
  Since you're sticking by the "no error" thing, I guess there must be several different kinds of reactions. This is definitely not like muon-induced fusion.
  
  >> Of course they knew a lot more than they put in the paper,
  
  That's not good practice, they are supposed to put in everything they can. A patent can be invalidated if shown that the writers didn't include critical details. Publishing is an all-or-nothing kind of deal.
  
  >> such as: “keep the electrolyte clean.” In other words, do not let cat hairs
  
  I understand that there were researchers who did this that didn't know electrochemistry. That doesn't include the people I know though, and they didn't measure any alpha particles.
  
  >> It was not luck at all. When they decided to do the experiment,
  
  But you wrote that it can take months of looking at nearly identical electrodes to find some that will work. None of that difficulty with characterization was in the paper.
  
  >> Many cold fusion reactions with input energy have reached 300% excess.
  
  If that's the case, that's commercially viable.
  
  >> No quite pocket change. Around $6 each I think, which would be ~$60
  
  Not transistors, I wrote the "first transistor." This guy: cnx.org/content/m11315...
  
  >> The plasma fusion people never tire of telling us that if cold fusion
  >> produces even 1 watt, everyone in the room should be dead within
  
  Lessee ... based on what you told me, I get that you're measuring no more that one alpha particle per 24 MeV, right? So that is one alpha particle per 3.85 x 10^-12 joules, so 1 watt is one joule per second, which leads to suggest that 1 watt of power would necessitate a flux of 2.6 x 10^11 alpha particles per second. How dangerous would this be? Unfortunately it's gaseous. Now, the max allowable Polonium in a human is 6.8 picograms. So assuming 5% of the alpha particles escape with the vented gas breather to the calorimeter, or 1.3 x 10^10 particles per second, and then of that, 5% or inhaled (based on sphere surface of about 5 meters from calorimeter) or 6.8 x 10^8 alpha particles per second that would enter the body. So, if 6.8 picograms is the threshold dose, that leads to lethality of about 10 nanograms of inhaled Polonium, which we are using to calibrate your "dead student problem." So there are 210 grams of Polonium per mole, which leads to a lethal dose of 3 x 10^14 atoms in localized tissue. Therefore, assuming one alpha particle per Polonium molecule, if you stood near a poorly contained Cold Fusion setup that was pumping 1 watt, you would get the lethal dose in about 24 hours. Now, if careful gas-trapping safety methods are used and assuming only 0.1% of the particles escape and only 0.1% is breathed in, the mortality comes closer to about ten times the conventional death-by-tobacco rates, since tobacco contains natural contaminations of Polonium 210. So, any statistical variance of Cold Fusion researchers dying of lung cancer? That would be a macabre way of proving that you are getting fusion!
  
  >> Hundreds of researchers have spent days or weeks working next to
  >> unshielded cells that produce anywhere from 1 to 100 W, and not one of
  
  Unshielded? They're breathing in -- assuming the measurements are correct -- straight alpha particles? I wouldn't be so cavalier with safety.
  
  >> The plasma fusion people think this proves that cold fusion is an
  >> experimental error or fraud. I think it proves that cold fusion is aneutronic.
  
  I'll take neutrons over alpha particles. Alpha just scares the snot out of me for some reason. Back before I got into theory, and I had to do some scintillation experiments with an alpha emitter, I was just a nervous wreck. One guy I know who works uses alpha sources for low-energy experiments does a full video run through using a dummy source before doing it for real. Gamma and neutrons don't scare me that much because I reckon we have evolved with some capacity to deal with ionizing radiation due to the Earth's history of magnetic pole reversals, which would allow in radiation when the Van Allen belts are down.
  
  >> Varying amounts. That’s a mystery.
  
  That's a key ingredient to do an energy balance. It's a pretty simple problem, but only if you know what the measurements are. Jun 30 02:42 AM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  >> The particular disparities you described have not occurred. Everyone who
  >> has measured helium has discovered helium, in roughly the same
  >> proportion to the heat (although the error bars are large.) Neutrons are
  >> either completely absent or if present at levels 10E10 or 10E20 times
  >> lower than plasma fusion, which is tantamount to being absent.
  
  Okay, I was mistaken in my understanding then, I apologize. So you're looking at roughly what proportion of helium compared to energy? Also, did anyone detect gamma rays, or beta or alpha particles? Is there any measurable difference in the other gas products, like Hydrogen, before and after charging? Also, you mentioned some experiments saw 24 MeV, and others saw less, some much less. Specifically, which energy measurements do you suspect as most accurate?
  
  Also, the error is not a huge problem, is it larger than 20 or 30%?
  
  I would like to write a simple energy balance given your "hero data" that is the most repeatable measurements for what you have. It will probably be wrong, but it's nice to start somewhere.
  
  >> There are other disparities and they are the source of the problem,
  >> as you say.
  
  Disparities in energy or gas products? Without the theory, of course it's hard to know which is possibly accurate, but it will be fun to attempt a balance anyway.
  
  >> It lacked critical details mainly because these details were unknown.
  
  He meant process details. Precisely what steps to take to reproduce his results. F&P must have known those steps, assuming they took careful notes. Of course, it's also possible that they lucked onto perfect electrodes the first time out, and didn't think anything of the difficulty in characterizing them. What that an issue?
  
  >> so in these respects it was a good paper.
  
  True, but if these things you write are true, that makes it important research, it still doesn't change the condition of the paper itself, which didn't clearly communicate how to replicate.
  
  >> I wouldn’t know about that. Fleischmann and officials at the University
  >> tell me and had to be published quickly.
  
  I patent and publish, and the USPTO hasn't changed their disclosure policy. If they filed the Provisional, they then have at least a year of confidentiality to publish. Then they need to file the Utility and the International agreements, and then they get more confidentiality while that awaits approval. It can increase the publishing window by another six to 12 months.
  
  But remember, they went public with their results before they or Jones published. Which is unusual. I thought that it had something to do with the Exxon Valdez, perhaps an energy consortium promised them some research funding if they would present that morning, which gave Exxon several hours to hold up the news about the tanker crash, and hopefully give the day's news a little spin toward the possibility of clean energy, rather than the reality of spilled crude all over Prudhoe Bay.
  
  But who knows on that one, it might just be pure coincidence.
  
  >> Cold fusion cannot be reproduced nearly 100% of the time,
  
  If it cannot be reproduced nearly 100% of the time, roughly what is the success ratio in your opinion?
  
  >> some cold fusion experiments have produced hundreds of times more
  >> energy than the best plasma fusion experiment in history, sometimes in
  
  Earth-based plasma fusion has obviously never hit break-even.
  
  >> 20 years than plasma fusion did in 60, at a cost roughly equivalent to
  >> one week of plasma fusion research.
  
  But you need to understand too, that there was (and is) a lot of experiment going on with the various Tokamacs, and confinement projects. All sorts of people tap into the ports and take various measurements, many of which have nothing at all to do with fusion. Confinement has also led to a larger understanding of related processes.
  
  >> You are asking the wrong person, as I mentioned.
  
  Fair enough, but you are the 'gatekeeper' of the CF publications, if someone wrote one down, you would know about it right? You have more overall knowledge of the field than anyone.
  
  >> people used to set up brand-new transistor facilities for about $50,000
  
  Remember the first transistor, it was made for little more than pocket change. And the part I love most about that is even today, the circuit diagram for a transistor is a pictorial of that first transistor with its own little personality. I remember reading somewhere that they don't know where that first transistor is, and that it may have been discarded. I am a lover of art, and I place the beauty of that one right up there with Monet. In my mind, given the result of its invention, as artwork, it is priceless.
  
  >> This is indeed a major stumbling block. This is why research should be
  >> carried out at national laboratories and other facilities not oriented to
  >> making a profit.
  
  National labs want to make profits too. But I don't see this as a problem the way you do. You write that nature cannot be patented, but the myriad of ways to harness nature can definitely be patented. Of course, we're bucking against the USPTO restriction, because someone important told them it doesn't work. But if the patents are prosecuted individually in the EU and Asia, it seems that would hold the I.P. in the U.S. when and if the USPTO restriction is lifted.
  
  >> It is not an attitude; it is a fact. (Or a very likely a fact.)
  
  I'm not trying to put wind in your sails, but I think this is not the problem you think it is. I don't see why the various configurations here could not be patented. I.P. can be be protected.
  
  >> That is not a supposition. It is an experimentally proven fact. As I
  >> mentioned, if they were gamma rays are neutrons I would be dead, and
  
  Nah, not necessarily. The body can repair a fair amount of radiation damage. These things don't run constantly, if they're just being used for research, and if it does have an actual reaction (of which we don't know) then you might see no more than a few hundred thousand becquerels, which won't kill you.
  
  >> It produces massive excess heat with absolutely no chemical reaction.
  >> It produces tritium.
  >> It produces helium commensurate with the heat.
  
  I would love to see some amounts/proportions of these. How much tritium?
  
  >> It does not produce dangerous levels of penetrating radiation.
  
  Okay, not dangerous, but even if it's some beta, it would explain the process.
  
  >> I did. But he knew hundreds of people, probably thousands. Still, I have
  
  It's quite a feather in your cap. He was very well-spoken.
  
  >> Yes. Emphatically. See the reasons described in the book.
  
  Urgh, you're going to make me read through the whole thing? I'm up to my eyeballs in work and research. Can't you summarize? I promise, when I finish all of this stuff I'm working on I will catch up with many of the books I've been meaning to read.
  
  >> No, we could use a million times more. For example, I think we should
  >> terraform Mars.
  
  I disagree. Mars might be the only planet of its kind in the Galaxy, why should we risk damaging (and completely changing) something like that? Same with the Moon. Should we 'terraform' Alaska or protect it as one of our few remaining pristine wilderness areas? Should we melt all the ice in Antarctica to get to the minerals and oil below? What's the point of damaging and changing all of these places? Should people try to live in concert with nature rather than trying to strong-arm her?
  
  >> Advanced technology properly done does not produce trash.
  
  I suggest that a Moon full of factories or a Mars with a changed atmosphere would resemble trash.
  
  >> “The ultimate purpose of cold fusion, or any technology, is to give
  >> people the freedom to do for themselves, take charge of their lives,
  >> and make themselves happy or miserable.”
  
  I no don't see technology as a liberating force, it's simply a force. Liberation can only come from within. And if we had a billion times more energy, but without evolved thought, we would simply be a billion times more enslaved. China has the Internet, but they can't discuss things the way you and I do.
  
  In my opinion, we currently have far more energy than we need, and we're wasting most of it in our attempts to live like kings and queens. and the end result of our striving for the materials of royalty is that we end up living like slaves. Jun 27 11:35 AM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  Hi Jed,
  
  >> Evidently it is not trivial, because thousands of experts including
  >> distinguished theorists have not yet solved the problem.
  
  It's not trivial because it seems nobody knows which data is correct and which is in error. You show me that one group gets 24 MeV, another gets 11, and another gets 0.5 MeV. One group measures no helium, another measures 0.3% flux. One group detects no radiation, another does. With all of this widely disparate data, it's difficult to know which set to use to write the energy balance. So theoretically, it's not a complicated thing, but there needs to either be concordance within the experimental community, or else someone needs to derive the theory and then someone else needs to find data to agree with it. Again, this is the problem of doing science without theory, it progresses very slowly.
  
  >> Of course! I suggest you read the papers. Or read any electrochemistry
  >> textbook. I am not going to spoon-feed you every detail.
  
  I didn't see any papers that had this data. And I am not interested in standard electrochemistry from a textbook, I am interested in bulk reactions in the lattice.
  
  >> That is nonsense. No one misled anyone. Every electrochemist I know
  >> who read the original paper knew the experiment was difficult. If
  >> non-experts were confused, that’s a shame but it wasn’t F&P’s fault.
  
  Awell-respected electrochemist claims otherwise, he says F&P's original paper lacks all of the critical details. That's not a good paper.
  
  >> paper had to be written in a big hurry, to protect U. Utah’s intellectual
  >> property.
  
  Not true. I.P. is filed first, which is not disclosed, and then the researchers have at least a year to publish, and can actually stretch that up to two years before disclosure. And you see what happens when they hurried, haste makes waste.
  
  >> This philosophy is the basis of the scientific method. If we had to have a
  >> theory to explain every anomaly, there would be progress in science.
  
  And how is that working out for you in Cold Fusion? You can't even give me a basic energy balance of the process.
  
  >> What are you talking about?!? Do you think they do not WANT a theory,
  >> or they are not looking for one? This is nuts. I said they do not have one
  >> now, and they do not need one to prove the anomaly is real.
  
  We don't know what the anomaly is. Is it Cold Fusion? Is it lepton-induced fusion, is it a new process? Is it systemic? Is it a new type of fission? Anomalys drive physicists insane, the Zeeman effect nearly led Pauli to the edge of unreason, and they put all their effort into solving it. But it seems to me that you are quite content to call it an 'anomaly' and then jump right into the commercialization phase.
  
  >> because no one knows how to do it yet, and because the people trying
  >> to do it are not funded and do not have the equipment they need.
  
  If it was no harder than making an advanced battery I would be able to buy a test Cold Fusion cell for a $0.5 million and get to work.
  
  >> It does not require tritium! You can separate deuterium from any water
  >> on earth, at a trivial cost compared to the energy yield.
  
  Let's be accurate here ... you meant to write "at a trivial cost compared to the energy yield of fusion." The extraction of deuterium is only affordable if you can make fusion work.
  
  >> The cost is of extraction is already thousands of times cheaper than oil or
  >> uranium, and it will soon fall to be millions of times cheaper, since the
  >> main cost component is energy itself.
  
  No true as it currently stands, because without a practical fusion generator, deuterium has no energy yield. If I extract oil, I am likely to get more energy out of the molecule than I put into extracting it. That is not currently so with deuterium, because we don't have a practical fusion generator ... right now deuterium is just an expensive variation of water.
  
  >> A force of nature cannot be patented. If one implementation is patented,
  >> there will a dozen others available.
  
  Wow, and you wonder why there is no funding for CF. With that attitude, why would any company invest a few billion into possibly making it work if someone else can just fiddle with their method and come out with their own system for $1 million?
  
  >> An ounce of heavy water (28 g) costs $28 retail. I can get it from China
  >> for $20. With cold fusion input power, any chemical company on earth
  >> could make it for $0.28. 28 g of heavy water is enough to power your car
  
  And gasoline used to be a waste product from the manufacture of kerosene, they literally used to throw out the gasoline because the energy density was (is) 1/4 that of kerosene (diesel). Gasoline is no longer discarded because it is now a valuable product.
  
  >> There is not a chance it will be regulated. You might as well try to regulate
  >> raindrops.
  
  Okay. But remember, plain old water is heavily regulated. It costs millions to get FDA approval for just regular old bottled water in each state. I doubt your enthusiasm for lack of regulation will cut too well with the DOE. But maybe, you never know. I'm encouraged by government's reaction to solar, they seem to be welcoming to it finally.
  
  And remember, all of my suppositions are pure fantasy, and assume that there is no radiation (gamma rays or neutrons, etc.) from the process. I have no idea of an energy balance that would accomplish zero hazardous output. If there are positrons (which lead to gamma rays) or neutrons, then suddenly that common fusion generator you envision will turn containment vessels 'hot.' I know, you are probably going to say that none of the Cold Fusion experiments measured any gamma or neutron flux or anything naughty, but if I'm skeptical about Cold Fusion, then I'm doubly skeptical that it can magically happen without byproducts. I have never seen one that can do that.
  
  >> lenr-canr.org/BookBlur...
  
  I'll have a look through your book.
  
  >> my late friend Arthur Clarke
  
  Nice, you knew him? My favorite Clarke quote: "How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when clearly it is Ocean."
  
  >> There will be no need to be lean. We will use a thousand times more
  >> energy people do today, and think nothing of it.
  
  Do we need to use a thousand times more energy than we use today? Is it possible that we already use a hundred times more energy than we need? Is it desirable to clog up orbit and the trash the moon with our manufacturing? What is the end purpose of this expansion you propose?
  
  >> A child playing a video game today has more computing power at her
  >> disposal than any scientist had in 1970, and the machine does more
  
  And at what cost? Can the kid with the video game do long division in his head? Can the scientist with the supercomputer do some pencil and paper theory to find out what is happening in his Cold Fusion test? Computing power is a good thing, as is energy, as long as it solves a problem or advances society. My computer uses 5% of its processing power to correspond with you, but 100% of its processing power to play a war or sports simulation game. From my perspective, all the computer needs from a societal point of view is the 5%, not the other 95%. Okay, maybe I want to do a Mathematica calculation on air pollution and then I want all the horsepower I can get. That's a good use. Maybe industry needs 1000 times the power for a few decades to build space stations with the intent to colonize space. That might be a good thing. But simply making energy for energy's sake seems hollow ... something like Karel Capek's original R.U.R., where after slaughtering the last of the humans, the robots then announce they will build many houses, simple because that is what the humans designed them to do.
  
  There has to be a need for this energy, and simply living lives of increased luxury doesn't sell me.
  
  >> yet no one considers this an extravagant waste of resources, and no one
  >> raises objections to it.”
  
  Not yet, it's new. How much new theory has come along since the advent of the personal computer? It seems that most new theory is now somehow connected to analyzing data, fitting curves, Fourier analysis, wavelets, etc.. Maybe all of this computing power has sapped our mental strength and imagination the same way all of our excess power has made us fat and lazy. Jun 26 03:41 PM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  >> There is no formula. It is not known yet. The purpose of the research
  >> is to discover the formula.
  
  As long as Cold Fusionists still believe in conservation of energy, conservation of lepton number, etc., it should be pretty trivial to find the formula. You just need to look at your input and output and fill in the blanks based on COE and lepton.
  
  >> You are asking the wrong person. Ask a theorist. Read theory papers.
  
  I'm too busy reading my collision-induced absorption papers. You're the C.F. expert, I thought you would link to the paper.
  
  >> theory on the other, I think it is more likely that the latter is correct.
  
  I agree. Always err on the side of Thermodynamics.
  
  >> Right. After electrolysis. The cold fusion process never begins.
  
  That's the after, what about the before? Do you have microscopy in some form of the uncharged electrodes?
  
  >> difficult) and then observe the bubbles on the surface as they degas.
  
  How do the working electrodes degas differently from the nonworking ones? This gives credence to the unit-cell thing, if they're degassing that is definitely a bulk effect, not a surface effect.
  
  >> I recommend you build a machine to speed up and automate the process
  >> of characterizing palladium.
  
  I'm not a researcher in this area. My research interest is in colloids, aerosols and molecular theory. As for automating the process fo charaterizing palladium, that seems like a stopgap method. The right thing to do is first know exactly why some cathodes work and why others do not. Has anyone done any solid before and after characterization research on the cathodes, like ellipsometry, field emission microscopy, tunneling microscopy, electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction?
  
  >> This illustrates why cold fusion research should be funded: so that
  >> researchers will not be forced to spend years or decades doing work
  >> that can be done in a few days with proper equipment.
  
  What can you do? Funding in science is rarer than a woman at a comic book convention. Everyone fights over the meager bit of NSF and other funding. You're going to have to duke it out with the astronomers, biologists, chemists, condensed matter theorists, manatee researchers, metallurgists, etc.. Blame President Bush's administration, they decimated NSF funding, and all we have to show for it is a $10 trillion national debt.
  
  >> Figure that out and you will win a Nobel prize -- assuming the
  >> establishment someday admits that cold fusion is real. I am not
  >> optimistic that will happen.
  
  Even if Cold Fusion is real that's not Nobel Prize material, assuming you have repeatable, consistent data, that's not a big job, it's just accounting for the energy and filling in the blanks.
  
  >> I have met at least 250 other electrochemists who agree, including
  >> Fleischmann and Pons.
  
  Why would they release a paper that unintentionally misled so many people? It's not transparent science, and now the whole field of CF is paying for it.
  
  >> Why Japan in particular? Why not researchers at Los Alamos, China Lake,
  
  That was just the one I mentioned.
  
  >> Theory is not needed to confirm that cold fusion is real.
  
  This philosophy is going to continue to hobble CF. Doing science without theory is like trying to find a destination without a roadmap. You wrote there there are wide, and disparate results. Without a theoretical framework -- even a starting point -- you have no idea with results are worthy and which are noisy.
  
  >> The main point of the tritium in this experiment is then that there are
  >> some nuclear processes involved. . . "
  
  Again, here is the problem of trying to find a destination without a roadmap. Let's say the results are spot on, how do you know you didn't inadvertently make some muons and are just producing muon-induced fusion? Then the mystery would not be the fusion, but rather how you made the muons. And if they found a way to make muons 'easily' that's Nobel work too. This near disdain for theory is wrong. Theory is your friend, it's your flashlight in the dark room.
  
  >> As a rule of thumb, to estimate the budget realistically, take the expected
  >> cost of the experiment and multiply by 10. Then double that answer. Do
  >> the same for the time and effort you think will be required.
  
  I have found this to be true for product development, although careful theory and then careful design can dramatically reduce an experiment's cost. Or in the words of my favorite condensed matter experimentalist ... "one day in the library is worth a week in the lab."
  
  >> usually put the entire electrode in the solution and run a wire down the
  >> middle in order to load from both sides. Otherwise loading would be
  
  The goal of the hollow electrode is not to improve the efficiency but to see -- conclusively -- the helium output and check the efficacy of the process. By checking the gas through a sealed and closed duct, there would be no other explanation for the gas products than activity in the bulk material.
  
  >> It is hard for me to understand why so many people furiously oppose
  >> this research, and grow livid with anger when someone proposes that
  >> a modest experiment be funded.
  
  Let's say, hypothetically, that you folks have found some way to produce the standard 24 MeV fusion result but without the necessary pressure and heat. And then let's assume that somehow, the positrons somehow don't collide with electrons to produce gamma rays and then they somehow don't irradiate the containment vessel and eventually produce nuclear waste. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that Cold Fusion truly is a perfectly clean energy source. Then let's say that CF gets commercialized by a handful of companies that own tightly-protect I.P.. What next?
  
  Well, based on what you say, Cold Fusion is very difficult and complicated. It requires deuterium and/or tritium, which is pretty tough to get, even if you can separate it from seawater. So do we really get limitless energy, increased a "billion-fold&quo... Probably not, because the technology (and fuel) is tightly controlled by a few consortiums. Do you think they're going to just give away all of that power? Will they be like the Founding Fathers with their energy, intent on liberty, or will they be like DeBeers, intent on protecting the value of a commodity that is not as rare as the price would indicate? If a consortium invested $200 billion into making commercial Cold Fusion a reality are they really going to just give away the power for pennies on the dollar, or are they going to need to be competitive with existing forms of energy?
  
  On the other hand, look at solar energy. History is being made and we're watching it happen. At this moment, solar electricity production is following a near Moore's Law curve for price per kilowatt. There are hundreds of companies competing with each other, and every one of them wants their panels on top of people's roofs, freeing electricity generation in the same way the Internet freed knowledge dissemination. Electricity generation is being taken on by the same people that put a radio in every living room, then a computer on every desk. Their raw material is sand, and their basic technology -- the photoelectric effect -- is over a hundred years old. Honestly, which source of power sounds more freeing to the common person, solar or cold fusion?
  
  And then, let's say that Cold Fusion is somehow able to eventually be made so simply that everyone can run to the local K-Mart and pick up a Cold Fusion generator to stick in their basement next to the water heater. They will still need deuterium and tritium, again difficult to isolate, and easy to regulate due to its potential for political instability. Do you think that these K-Mart fusionists will be able to order a gallon or so of heavy water for $10 that lasts them five years? Or do you think it more likely that an ounce of the fuel will cost them $1000 and last them three months? Do you really have that much confidence in the free market that deuterium will not be tightly regulated?
  
  Or, let's just say, in a real "Back to the Future" moment, that our beloved homeowner can buy a tabletop deuterium/tritium extractor that is powered by the fusion generator, and they simply need to go to the next aisle over at their K-Mart to get into the deuterium-making business, and the governments of the world cared not a whit. They simply pumped a few hundred gallons of seawater, extracted the deuterium and turned on their plasma television. Energy would be nearly limitless, dirt cheap and a new age of reason develops. Right?
  
  Again, I don't think so.
  
  What would we do with limitless energy? Would we have the robot drive the Cold Fusion flying Hummer a hundred miles to pick up the morning newspaper? Would we stroll out to our artificially-lit underground greenhouse and have the robot pick out a particularly delicious mango for breakfast? Limitless energy produces limitless excess.
  
  My point is this ... energy is important, it drives our bodies and our imaginations. Having an unlimited supply of the stuff will not necessarily make us a healthier society. In fact, it may make us a very ill society. You mention Global Warming. Is that a threat because we have filthy energy sources, or because we have had filthy and cheap energy sources for so long? Rather than try to solve society's ills with a magic bullet (like Cold Fusion) perhaps we need to let the patient learn to live healthy. We could start cleaning our atmosphere tomorrow if we made the kind of decisions that we need to make.
  
  For instance, sweating a little bit in the summer and using a solar-battery fan instead of a 220 volt, 120,000 btu air conditioner. Or taking a lower-paying job a few miles from home and walking or riding our bicycle to work instead of burning three gallons of gasoline to get there and back. Talking with our children and telling stories instead of plopping ourselves down in front of the plasma television with surround sound. Eating potatoes and apples for dinner that were grown from the farm down the road, instead of flying in exotic foods from halfway around the globe that someone irradiated so that they will keep better. Insulating our homes with 6-inch fiberglass insulation and using passive solar energy to heat, instead of keeping that 120,000 btu dual-phase heater on high all through February.
  
  You get my drift, no?
  
  We are economically and spiritually ill, in a sense. We don't need a pill to make us better, we need to learn how to live healthy. We need address our desires to live like kings and queens and instead see that living in concert with our neighbors can be satisfying.
  
  I'm an eternal optimist unfortunately, we'll solve our energy dependence by learning to live lean. And we'll learn to live lean through solar power. Jun 25 11:42 PM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  Hi Jed,
  
  I just had another discussion with the physicist that did the cold fusion experiments back in the 1990s and got the null result. I wanted to share the pertinent points with you ...
  
  1) He is definitely a qualified, experienced electrochemist, and has published at least 30 papers in the Journal of Electrochem.
  
  2) He felt the original F&P paper was dramatically lacking in necessary details.
  
  3) He has an open mind to the possibility of researchers in Japan getting positive results with this.
  
  4) He says he trusts the theoreticians on this, but also says that the theoreticians don't typically understand the electrochemistry.
  
  5) He feels that the fundamental problem here is that the electrochemists don't want to learn the theory, and the theoreticians don't want to learn the electrochemistry.
  
  6) He had an idea for an experiment that would more closely qualify if the process is happening or not, but it required more specialized equipment than he had. Specifically, he would make a hollow palladium negative electrode and let the solution infuse through it, and then measure for helium coming out through the top, from the center of the hollow electrode.
  
  In the solution, there are loose protons, due to the high dielectricity of the solution, and these can 'filter' through the bulk material of the negative electrode if driven to do so by a voltage gradient. The question is, do these loose protons somehow react in the unit cell of the lattice, and if so, how?
  Jun 25 05:03 PM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  >> See Iwamura, Miley, Mizuno, Bockris. Depth profiles show the
  >> transmutations waning at lower depths.
  
  Definitely, the deeper into the bulk material, the less likely the water can penetrate. But that still doesn't indicate a surface reaction, which is exactly that, a surface reaction, with an exponential decay past the skin. Combustion, for instance, is usually a surface reaction for obvious reasons, but I can't see how this could be.
  
  >> True, but many people do, and you had a lot to say previously.
  
  Based on past experience, but I can't comment on a paper I have not read yet. Incidently, do you have a link to a Jones' paper that is not of the muon-induced variety?
  
  >> “Percieved” by people who knew nothing about the experiment and had
  >> no business guessing about it. I have never heard an electrochemist
  >> say that.
  
  I never had the impression from F&P's paper that it was difficult, but I've seen that a lot, scientists often don't communicate the hard work that went into making something happen.
  
  >> I agree but it was an amazing accomplishment, and even if it has no
  >> practical application I am sure it will teach us much about biology.
  
  Eh, there is something offensive about it to me. There is something inhumane about messing with DNA, even for plants. It's presumptuous to think we can improve upon nature.
  
  >> You do, in fact, bet your life on such things, every day, in a thousand
  >> different ways.
  
  True, for instance in driving over a bridge. But incorrect assumptions can lead to vast sciences. The Earth-centered astronomy led to extremely complicated maths that simplified dramatically when they changed the assumption. Even today, there are very complicated perturbation systems that calculate the perihelion shift of Mercury so as to avoid using General Relativity.
  
  >> No, it isn’t. If cold fusion produced neutrons I would be dead, along with
  >> several hundred other people. Cold fusion does not produce a measurable
  >> level of neutrons.
  
  Okay, but the lepton numbers and energy still have to balance in the end. So what is the formula for the Cold Fusion process that you get in these cells? Instead of neutrons are you getting neutrinos and gamma rays? What radiation do they detect?
  
  >> the experiments prove that there are no neutrons. Period. Full stop.
  >> You can’t argue with experiments.
  
  I'm not arguing. There are fusion cycles that don't release neutrons, like the carbon cycle, right? But you are working nowhere near those temperatures. And there are theoretical room-temperature fusion processes that don't release neutrons directly, instead balancing with alpha particles and protons.
  
  But the problem here is that if I ask you about the formula, you then give me an answer that "experiment trumps theory." Scientifically, it's difficult to follow an argument where the well-behaved theory is used but the disagreeable theory is discarded. If you're not producing neutrons, then I would like to see just a simple input/output formula that accomplishes that. They should be able to provide that after all, since they are measuring alpha particles, gamma radiation and proton flux, right?
  
  >> The ones that do not work swell up, crack, or disintegrate.
  
  But I assume you mean they swell up, crack or disintegrate after the process. How can you tell before you charge them up?
  
  >> No it doesn’t. You can’t overrule Mother Nature on this.
  
  I'm open buddy, let's not overrule Mother Nature on this. Just show me the energy/mass balance. That's simple enough to just type in directly to this, without referring me to three papers in your index.
  
  >> It is, because it fuses deuterons to form helium-4 and 24 MeV of heat.
  >> Most scientists I know say that makes it fusion. Perhaps you have some
  >> other definition.
  
  That one is fine, but how does that balance? For instance, here is one that balances:
  
  (deuterium + tritium) --> (Helium + neutron + 17.6 MeV)
  
  Or if you want one that produces 24 MeV ...
  
  4 H --> (helium + 2 positrons + 2 neutrinos + 24.7 MeV)
  
  I'm not asking for anything top secret, I'm just curious about the balance.
  
  Clearly, there has to be something that it is emitting that can measured other than the energy, right? (Obviously other than the neutrinos.) Jun 24 01:39 PM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  Say Ytterbius,
  
  I don't know anything about LDK, do they own I.P. on the films they are producing?
  
  By the way, you are 100% right on your analysis, you think clearly, and should consider finishing your physics education. Go for the Ph.D., there will be a lot of opportunity in research for nanophotonics and quantum dots. The efficiencies that we are currently seeing will be dwarfed by the next generation of photovoltaics. When we are able to confine the results of the photoelectric effect to 1 and 2 dimensions, I suspect PV efficiencies will rise above 50%. Jun 24 11:22 AM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  >> It is hard to get the gas out of a closed cell and do accurate calorimetry.
  
  If you're doing accurate calorimetry, I assume the gas products have to be analyzed as they come out. If they''re venting the cell, they can check for helium on the output.
  
  >> Mainly because the helium ends up in the gas.
  
  I thought you wrote they weren't generally checking for helium output. I misunderstood.
  
  >> Also, transmutations and so on are mainly at surface levels.
  
  What transmutations? What is your evidence for claiming they are on the surface?
  
  >> I doubt it is anything as simple as “bringing them close together.” They
  >> remain farther apart in a lattice than in heavy water. Something more
  >> complex is going on, but I wouldn’t know what it is.
  
  It may be complex, but assuming you're getting fusion, the end result is simple, that Coulomb barrier has to be reduced enough to allow tunneling for the Strong Force to take over for a tiny percentage of the nuclei. How is it reduced? That's the mystery, but the obvious candidates are reduced internuclear distance, directional shielding by the lattice, etc.. You wrote that they "remain farther apart in the lattice than in heavy water." What data do you have to support this statement, and what do you calculate the internuclear distance to be in the lattice? What is the chirality and unit cell distance in your cathode material?
  
  >> Enyo and some others have found evidence that electrochemical
  >> overpotential in certain conditions with 1.5 V can produce 10E47 atm of
  >> pressure across areas on the surface. These are atomic-scale areas.
  
  How did they measure 10^47 atmospheres? Check out this article I wrote on surface pressures: focus.aps.org/story/v1...
  
  There was (is) a huge controversy in the field about that pressure, some say slightly above ambient, some say up to about 50 atmospheres. But measuring that pressure is difficult if not impossible, because when you the atomic force microscope in tapping mode, it can't differentiate the interface, it pushes the pressure fronts around rather than tapping the top. So I'm curious as to how they can measure that pressure. Is it an indirect measurement based on deformation?
  
  >> Fleischmann thinks it is a bulk effect. (He said some years ago.)
  
  If Fleischmann things it's a bulk effect, why do "most people" think it's a surface effect? What evidence do they have?
  
  >> Of course they analyze the output gas. They analyze everything. That’s
  >> what most of the expense and effort of an experiment goes into.
  
  Ah, excellent. And what is the helium increase on a typical experiment?
  >> at 10 to 100 times background, occasionally at a million times
  >> background, but every single one of these was also mistaken?
  
  There was not a tritium measurement in the paper you sent. Would you please send the link to a paper with the tritium measurement? Please don't tell me to look in the index, I would like to see what you consider to be a good experiment that measured the tritium and/or helium. I can't say anything without reading the paper.
  
  >> I regard that as pathological skepticism.
  
  You call it pathological skepticism, I call it "safe science."
  
  >> few hundred including several unreported ones.
  
  Did you know about the ones from the University of Alabama? The ones from CUNY? The one from Hunter?
  
  >> this was the most difficult experiment he ever replicated. The difficulties
  >> were obvious to these people from the moment they heard about it.
  
  That explains a lot, because at the time, perhaps due to F&P's paper, it was perceived as something fairly easy to do. This was also at the time that "room-temperature... superconductor research was hitting its stride, and these experiments were considered easier to do than those, so I guess that explains what went wrong for many people. I would like to talk with someone who understand the theory with this though.
  
  >> No, they don’t do that. You can read the papers and see they do not.
  >> No one knows exactly how much of the surface layer is participating, to
  >> what depth.
  
  Again, how do they know it's the surface? What data indicates that it is a surface effect? This is a critical aspect, because surface is a population squared effect and volume is a population cubed effect. On the macroscopic scale the difference is enormous.
  
  >> Of course. They all check. I have never heard of one who found a lot.
  >> There is some. It is hard to get every bit out. You have to bake-out
  >> cathodes, and then finally dissolve them.
  
  Helium is nonreactive, you should just be able to grind the cathode apart and check for an increase. Would you link to a paper that measured the helium from the cathode?
  
  >> Sure they are! How many times do you think Boyle’s law has been
  >> confirmed in the laboratory? Do you think there has any possibility it is an
  >> experimental error?
  
  But there is no "law" to be confirmed with Cold Fusion, and there is no such thing as a Boyle's Law experiment that does not have some degree of error. Error is inherent, at it's core, it's a quantum effect and it is impossible to take a measurement without error. Of course, on the macro scale, the error can be negligible.
  
  >> How about Ohm’s law? When Ohm’s law was first discovered, many people
  
  Actually, that's not a law. Plenty of things violate "Ohms Law" all the time, like an incandescent light bulb. Ohm's Law only covers resistors that are Ohmic, and only then within a fairly narrow temperature range.
  
  >> How likely is it that cloning mammals is an error, and Dolly the sheep
  >> was not actually a clone of her mother?
  
  Off the subject, but I don't understand the allure of cloning. Mother Nature's technique is far more advanced, she gathers together the best aspects of each cell and makes a new one, and with her method, the likelihood of DNA error is so much smaller.
  
  >> Cold fusion has no significant waste products.
  
  The containment facility is bathed with neutrons and becomes radioactive as surely as any fission plant. The difference between fission and fusion plants is that the former outputs waste, and the latter doesn't but after both are decomissioned, the containment is high-grade, fully-toxic nuclear waste.
  
  >> If all over energy came from cold fusion, it would produce less nuclear
  >> waste than a single coal-fired plant. (Coal fired plants spew far more
  >> radioactive garbage into the environment than uranium fission plants do.)
  
  Yeah, I know. But when coal plants are done, you can reuse the components, they aren't too hot to touch and they don't require containment in a miles-deep salt cavern.
  
  >> Of course. But you do not even need a microscope in many cases. You
  >> can see with the naked eye why many cathodes fail.
  
  Why? Why do some work and some don't? What is the surface feature that allow some to work but not others?
  
  >> Who knows why? There is no significant increase, and that’s all there is to
  >> it. In my opinion, cold fusion probably produces no neutrons directly,
  
  Fusion is fusion, plasma or otherwise, it produces neutrons. Perhaps Cold Fusion is actually a high-level effect but is actually not fusion then. That would explain a lot. Maybe they found something brand-new, and maybe they would get more traction if they stopped calling it 'fusion.' Howabout 'High-Z Reactor"? Jun 23 12:50 PM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  Hi Jed,
  
  One other thought about a possible (desirable) bulk defect in the cathode ... it's possible that the surface tension of the water in an area with negative curvature is enough to force the water into the unit cell. On the other hand, an area with positive curvature (which is most of the area on the outside of a well-polished cathode) wouldn't allow the necessary surface free surface energy of the water interface to force its way into the unit cells.
  
  Of course, surface tensions only exist at interfaces, so it would be a new calculation to find where the Kelvin barrier is between heavy water and nickel or platinum.
  
  Can you get hold of some TEM or SEM images of both effective and ineffective cathode tips, this would confirm or disprove this hypothesis.
  
  Think of it like this ... a particularly spry kid can climb up a narrow hallway by forcing his feet and back against opposite walls, but he can't do that on an open wall. Some crevasses at just the right width might allow the water to find a balance somewhere below its Kelvin barrier.
  
  I'm guessing the barrier for that combination would be somewhere around a negative curvature of radius 100 nanometers. Jun 23 09:52 AM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  >> Different study, as I recall. It is difficult to do accurate closed cell
  >> calorimetry plus helium in one experiment, although the Italians do.
  
  Why is that difficult? You should be able to just stick your gas sensor in one of the unused ports.
  
  >> There is hardly ever any in the electrodes. It is in the gas. It is a surface
  >> reaction.
  
  Wait a sec, how do you know it's a surface reaction? Do you have evidence to show it's a surface reaction? If you're talking about absorbing atoms into the metal lattice, and then bringing them close enough to tunnel through the barrier, then how could it be a surface reaction? There really are no closed unit cells on the surface, right?
  
  Which brings up another question, on the calculations you supplied, to find the average energy per atom did you compute the working electrode activity based on surface or volume? Because my estimate (between 10 and 100 eV per atom) was based on volume. If you base it on surface, the average energy would increase dramatically.
  
  >> I meant no chemical transformations. No products.
  
  How do they know there is no byproduct if they didn't spectro or analyze the output gas?
  
  >> Not necessary for the whole run,
  
  I'm definitely no calorimetery expert, but isn't careful energy budgeting critical when you're dealing with electrolytes? In essence, it's a battery, right? But you did say that they kept track of it.
  
  >> No, in the gas. Look at Miles, the Italians, and the McKubre replication of
  >> Arata and Case.
  
  If the reaction takes place in the unit cell, there should be helium in the unit cell too. I know that for a fact, because I saw an experiment where hydrogen (a smaller molecule) was mechanically held into the unit cell of nickel for weeks.
  
  >> If you can explain hundreds of megajoules per mole as conventional
  >> chemistry, with no detectable chemical changes, write a paper and I will
  
  Once you hit that 500 eV per atom mark, it's pretty tough to explain in any terms other than either fission or fusion. But please understand, I've seen error that has propagated in an ultrasound study for over twenty years. And of course you know that hidden variables were prohibited for thirty years before John Bell found an error in the original proof. So when the theory is screaming one thing, and the data screaming something else, it's wise to stay skeptical. But still, given that, even if nuclei are not actually fusing -- something even you should keep as a 'remote' possibility in the back of your head -- there seems to be some very interesting physics happening. For instance, what if the unit cells of the lattice are able to tie up the shell electrons and allow inner electron reactions. That might lead to a metastable state that could rapidly release energy at some point. This concept of 'mechanically' holding onto atoms in the unit cell is something U.S. physics has not looked at nearly as carefully as the Russians and Japanese, and I think that's unfortunate because it could lead to new types of compounds.
  
  >> There have not been thousands! That’s absurd. I know of only about 200,
  >> and I know why most of them failed.
  
  There has to be thousands, I personally know of about six, and I don't exactly get around too much. But remember, people don't publish null results, they bury them.
  
  >> If you think it is a data or calculation error, what error is it?
  
  Well, now I'm wondering about the comment you made about it being a "surface effect." If they calculated it as a surface effect, but it is actually a volume effect, then for even a small cat/anode, the number density of reaction sites could vary by a factor of a thousand. I'll bet it isn't a surface effect. I have experience with Kelvin barriers and other effects of surface features between 50 and 500 nm, and on the molecular scale, surfaces are like Hurricane Katrina, molecules just get ripped off and slammed in again, the only place that the fuel would be able to work down into the Coulomb barrier to tunnel would be in the unit cell, assuming the lattice could get the nuclei close enough or tie up enough EM force.
  
  >> “I think it is an unspecified mistake” is not a falsifiable argument.
  
  Agreed.
  
  >> I told you, 150% excess. In other words, 1.5 W out per 1 W in. It says right
  
  That wasn't the McKubre paper though, was it?
  
  >> >> "Did the cat/anodes show helium increase before and after?"
  >> Never heard of one that did.
  
  To me, that's sort of a problem. Do you know of anyone that checked?
  
  >> There is no chance they made an error. None whatever.
  
  Nobody is every willing to say that Jed. There is never such a thing as 'no error' unless The Almighty himself was down here working in a lab. Humans make all kinds of mistakes, that's the beauty of science.
  
  >> but powerful people make phone calls and budgets get cut and
  >> researchers fired.
  
  I look at this two ways ... I think this field is worthy of research and worthy of funding because fusion or not, there seems to be some important physics happening. At the same time, I think that any nuclear energy (hot fusion, cold fusion or fission) is an unsustainable energy source due to the waste products and societal costs. That's not to say it isn't better than coal or gas, it probably would be, but I think it's better for us to hold our with our current technology as long as possible until we can make the jump to a truly sustainable, clean energy source with low societal costs.
  
  >> I would suggest he pretest 10 or 100 cathodes at a time, by the way, to
  >> winnow out the 1% that will work. Otherwise you are looking at trial and
  >> error, which is to say 5 weeks * 100 cathodes, worst case.
  
  Interesting, so you're saying it only works for a handful of cat/anodes? Have you done electron microscopy of the cathodes that do work and those that don't so you can qualify why this happens? This is another push toward the volume-rather-than-sur... effect, I've seen this happen with STM, based on the relative heights of the tip, it could be that if you're only getting about 5% workable cathodes out of the bunch, it suggests a bulk defect of some kind. In this case, the bulk defect might allow the water to the safe-haven of the unit cells. Think of it as a harbor with plenty of safe places to moor a ship, as opposed to open coastline. If you look at all the coastline, you only get about 1 to 3% harbor.
  
  >> Are you sure you don’t mean ordinary Ontario Hydro heavy water? (But I
  >> doubt that would bust his budget, at $1000/kg.)
  
  Perhaps, I'll ask him next time I see him. He's a hockey fan like me, so we usually talk hockey for a half hour before getting around to physics. I'm really going to miss him when he goes back to Canada. I suspect you have the same feelings about the 'old guard' you know as well.
  
  >> By the way, that product often has bacteria growing in it, believe it or not.
  >> Proof of Darwinian evolution. Imagine a species evolving that quickly since
  >> 1940! Anyway, it fouls the electrodes and it remarkably difficult to kill. The
  
  Incredible! I never knew this.
  
  >> That never works! That's a waste of time. Ordinary radiation detectors
  >> above ground have never detected an anomaly in cold fusion as far as I
  
  Why? If you characterize the vessel, gaskets, and background, why wouldn't you be able to screen an increase in neutron flux. The below ground ones you mention might be sensitive enough for neutrino detection, but why bother with neutrinos? If they're pulling 1000 eV per atom, that should produce a measurable neutron flux.
  
  >> The experiment you describe is an example of treating cold fusion as if it
  >> were hot fusion.
  
  Neither of them were high energy physicists, they were low-energy and EM physicists, I trust they understood Fleisch and Pons well enough to set it up. Of course, like I said, error is part of life, so who knows? Jun 22 11:01 PM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  >> McKubre listed the number of electron-volts per atom of palladium
  >> elsewhere:
  
  From that same experiment?
  
  >> ~450 eV/atom normalized to the Pd lattice or to the deuterium in the
  >> palladium at a loading of ~1."
  
  450 eV per atom? That is very, very unlikely to be a chemical reaction of high-Z, but I suspect that either that data or calculation is flawed because it is larger than the other published cold fusion events by a factor of ten (!)
  
  >> arithmetic right, which is unlikely. Anyway, it sure as hell isn't a chemical
  >> reaction, is it? Especially since, as I mention, there is not 1 g of chemical
  >> fuel or ash in the cell.
  
  9000 eV per atom is definitely not a chemical reaction. But it is also so large that it begs analysis. How much energy was put into the system? Did the cat/anodes show helium increase before and after? Is the 9000 eV per atom excess? How long was the test interval? If they're getting an excess 9000 eV per atom over the life of the interval for the standard mass of the cat/anode, we're looking at an energy source that is ready for commercialization right now, hell, it would blow everything else out of the water. Either someone made a very large error or someone is very, very bad at marketing their results.
  
  Okay, I had a discussion with one of the old-timers here, and he set up a cold fusion test after the Pons/Fleischmann paper. He followed the paper precisely because that's the kind of researcher he is, I've known him for years and his technique and care is beyond reproach. He may have forgotten some of the details, but this is what he could remember:
  
  His working electrode (cathode) was palladium, his anode was platinum. His solution was Lithium Hydroxide which was brought into solution with heavy water which was obtained at great expense from a reactor in Canada. He ran the setup for 5 weeks, and had radiation detectors completely around the reaction vessel to find anything anomalous. After 5 weeks, he detected nothing anomalous.
  
  As an aside, after the null result on the cold fusion experiment, they still had heavy water that drained a huge chunk of their research budget. But he looked at nickel in water and in deuterium, and he found something that you wrote to Mark, that the nickel unit cell was as adept at absorbing hydrogen as the palladium. He was able to take the 'fulminated' nickel and watch it react in water. So even if cold fusion were to work, it wouldn't require platinum or palladium, nickel would probably work.
  
  At least from a theoretical perspective, if the unit cell in palladium can allow tunneling of nuclei through the Coulomb Barrier of induced deuterium, then there is no logical reason why nickel would not work as well.
  
  By the way Jed, I find this interesting partly because the concept of cold fusion relies on the unit cell of the metal lattice to bring nuclei close enough to tunnel through the Coulomb barrier. It may also tie up the shell electrons to lower the electromagnetic repulsion. Regardless, this is the same concept that Samuel Cohen used to describe "Red Mercury." He claimed that a molecular "box" was made with Mercury and Antimony which offers a unit cell of just the right size to hold onto a fissionable atom, which is 'mechanically' held inside of the unit cell "box". The Mercury-Antimony molecule, when chemically reacted then delivered the necessary energy -- and obviously symmetric -- to collapse the fissionable material. It's tough to ignore his hypothesis due to his pedigree of course, but lots of people say there is not enough energy to do it.
  
  Luckily this is not my area of research so I don't need to stress it.
  
  Have a good weekend. Jun 20 07:38 PM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  Hi Jed,
  
  >> Something like that, I guess. Like luminiferous ether, which was
  >> supposedly was part of everything from desks to marshmallows, but it
  
  Comparing the Coulomb Force to Ether, is like comparing Gravity to Astrology. Even back in the Ether's heyday, there were plenty of people that knew it had to be b.s. due to it's ridiculous properties.
  
  >> overrated, and much easier to penetrate than previously believed.
  
  If it is so easy to penetrate, why would they need such a high-Z material as palladium or nickel to construct the unit cell?
  
  >> See the LENR-CANR library under “J.”
  
  Please, specifically which paper, It's confusing, because the old name for cool fusion was cold fusion. I'm interested in his work in the conventional kind of "cold fusion" where the Coulomb barrier is tunneled not by muons, but by the unit cell of the lattice.
  
  >> This did not cover spectroscopy; that was discussed elsewhere.
  
  Elsewhere, meaning with a different study, or did they publish their spectroscopic results with the same study but in a different place? How do they know if there is any helium within the electrodes if they didn't measure it? And why wouldn't they make such a relatively simple measurement after going to all of that trouble?
  
  >> We know that a chemical change cannot be the cause of this heat for two
  >> reasons: 1. there is no chemical fuel in the cell
  
  Any chemical can be considered a 'fuel' if you can get more energy from dissociated it than it took to dissociate it.
  
  >> and no ashes found after the reaction;
  
  There is no visible ash from a stoichiometric reaction.
  
  >> 2. the heat far exceeds the limits of chemistry.
  
  How so? A regular chemical reaction yields something like 10 eV per atom, but that can be dramatically increased from inner electrons. Just ask yourself what the dissociation energy is of the second electron in a helium atom and you'll see that this amount of heat is within the scope of a non-nuclear reaction.
  
  >> Your computation, below, is incorrect.
  
  What computation and why is it incorrect?
  
  >> Are you suggesting they only measure the input power once every 11
  >> days? This is off-the-shelf, standard equipment that measures power
  >> thousands of times a second.
  
  No, why would you suggest that I would suggest such a silly thing? The difficulty of doing calorimetry over such a long period is in keeping track of the energy both in and out over such a long period.
  
  >> I do not know how you computed 10 eV per atom. Per atom of what?
  
  I estimated based on the mass of a typical electrode. Is there another way?
  
  >> 168 kJ. So this produce 3.9 times more energy than a chemical cell with
  >> an equivalent mass of fuel, and of course there is no chemical fuel in
  >> this cell.
  
  I have no way of checking your calculation since I don't have access to the original data and I'm not going to argue over someone else's data. But you're estimating something like 25eV per atom? How does that guarantee a fusion reaction? There are inner-electron reactions from dense metals with that energy. Isn't the dissociation energy of the second electon from helium about 28ev?
  
  >> chemical fuel or producing 1 mg of chemical ash, and you will understand
  >> why researchers are confident that this is not a chemical reaction.
  
  Okay, where is the data then? Please supply a paper that shows an increase in helium in the cat/anode before and after. Isn't that the acid test?
  
  >> Of course there is helium in the headspace and a little in the cathode,
  >> but it is rather difficult to capture.
  
  But not all that difficult to measure.
  
  >> We know only that a nuclear reaction is occurring.
  
  And the people that can explain the data in conventional, non-fusion terms are just skeptics to be ignored, right?
  
  >> Anyone can refute that.
  
  Go ahead, refute it. I am genuinely curious how you can rule out atypical chemical reactions.
  
  >> You have to read dozens of papers.
  
  A good paper has to stand alone, it needs to convince by itself.
  
  >> But to imagine that thousands of results from hundreds of labs are all
  >> wrong is, as Mallove put it, “to stretch credulity to the breaking point --
  >> to distort the meaning of scientific evidence to absurd limits.”
  
  Isn't that exactly what you're asking me to believe about that thousands of null results after Fleishman and Pons?
  
  >> Please understand we are talking about some of the world's most elite
  >> scientists, Nobel laureates, Fellows of the Royal Society, distinguished
  >> Professor of this, distinguished Fellow of the Institute that. Please do not
  >> presume you can tell these people how to do science or where to seek
  >> critiques.
  
  Big deal. A person's title is meaningless, it's the quality of their work that's important. If I have a question with anyone's research, I ask. My friends and I have found errors in all sorts of research ... skepticism is the engine of science, not adoring respect.
  
  >> F. Slakey, the Science Policy Administrator of the American Physical
  >> Society, wrote that cold fusion scientists are "a cult of fervent half-wits"
  
  That wasn't very nice.
  
  >> So, it is never wrong? In all academic disputes in recorded history
  >> Physical Review has always been on the right side? We need not look
  >> at experimental evidence; we can trust their judgment in this matter?
  
  Physical Review is usually neither right nor wrong, it's just a vehicle for the authors. If the referees are in general agreement on a matter than the journal just goes along.
  
  >> And there are plenty of others such Phys. Let. A.,
  
  Would you mind forwarding a reference to the Phys Let. A. papers? I would like to read those. Thanks, I would really appreciate that, because I couldn't find them.
  
  >> you should not ignore the work of thousands of scientists over 19 years
  >> because some US journals refuse to print their papers.
  
  Of course, agreed. But this is far outside of my research area, so the only way it's going to get my notice is if it is published in a mainstream journal, and since I don't live in Japan, Phys Rev is it. Would you go poking into Journal of Colloids to look up breaking news in colloids? Probably not.
  
  >> No, they have made far more progress toward commercialization
  >> working a shoestring than the hot fusion people have accomplished
  >> using ~$1 billion a year for 60 years.
  
  It all borders on boondoggle Jed. We should spend research money on research that will benefit society with as few side-effects as possible. Fusion energy -- in any form -- has the problem of nuclear waste. It also requires an elaborate infrastructure, which favors elite political structures, and is therefore not a healthy energy source in my opinion. Jun 20 06:49 PM

• Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]

  >> Well, Bockris called it a shibboleth.
  
  He called the Coulomb barrier a "shibboleth"... I can't imagine anyone would say that, the barrier is what gives the shape of matter, in everything from desks to marshmallows to our own loved ones. Is he implying that "Coulomb barrier" is a concept that doesn't mean anything out of theoretical circles?
  
  >> I wouldn’t know, but cold fusion is nothing remotely like plasma fusion.
  
  The Coulomb barrier has to be navigated for cool fusion as well. It's one of those absolutes in life.
  
  >> Apparently particles in metal lattices overcome the Coulomb barrier
  >> much more easily than plasma fusion particles do.
  
  Maybe, if the lattice is able to shield the particles, and thus reduce the internuclear distance to allow tunneling. That's the mechanism of cool fusion, except instead of the metal lattice, it's a lepton, usually a muon.
  
  >> I do not know enough about theory to comment. However, cold fusion is
  >> not based on theory; it is based on experiments, mainly in calorimetry.
  
  An understanding of the theory is necessary or else, there is no way to interpret the results.
  
  >> Ah, that is his earlier work. Yes, that was replicated. His 1989 cold fusion
  >> results have not been, to my knowledge. Especially not the so-called
  >> “mother earth soup” approach.
  
  I didn't know that he ever did anything but cool fusion, would you please supply a reference.
  
  >> Your gut feeling is not a valid scientific metric. You have to cite an
  >> experimental error in the calorimetry, mass spectroscopy
  
  Okay, I read the paper, it was interesting, and very well-written. I have a question though ... they reported that excess power was reported after an observation of several hundred hours. But since there doesn't seem to be any accompanying spectroscopy or chemical analysis, how can they conclude that the extra heat is not the result in a chemical change in the electrolyte? And they didn't mention how they kept track of the energy input. If the measuring span is on the order of 10^6 seconds, even a tiny variation in current in the reaction vessel versus the control. In this case, he mentions that the control rules out instrumental error, but I can't see how he can conclude that since the control is light water that obviously presents a different loading to the same current source. On the scale of 10^6 seconds, what would a variation of milliwatts mean?
  
  But if you simply assume the best, which I'm willing to do, and then look at figures 4 and 5, it seems that the excess energy could be taken as being above the approximately 10eV per atom with outer-shell electron transactions, that differentiates chemical from nuclear activity. But it doesn't eliminate reactions from heavy elements with inner-shell electron transactions. Unfortunately, this research doesn't examine output gases, so we have no way of knowing.
  
  >> Look in the main index under Rothwell. (The e-book I reference above
  >> is “Cold fusion and the Future” which you can read in English, Japanese
  >> or Portuguese.)
  
  I'm not sure which one, would you provide the link to the paper that you wrote on the subject that you would like for me to read?
  
  >> That is a theoretical issue of no interest to me. It is obvious that we do,
  >> in fact, have fusion, and that it can produce heat and power density high
  >> enough for practical applications. I couldn’t care less about how or why it
  >> works theoretically.
  
  It's important to have a rudimentary grasp of what's happening, if not just to be able to refute the physicist who suggests that the extra energy may be an inner-electron reaction. The paper that you supplied -- assuming all of the date is correct -- is not convincing to me. Perhaps you have a better paper of which you can forward a link?
  
  
  >> They have NEVER eschewed peer review.
  
  Please understand, in many areas of physics, research seek out people that will be most critical to their work, they look for people that have the most critique to offer. The SRI paper you sent to me needed some of that critical review I think, it was a very ambitious experiment that needeed some spectro data.
  
  >> This is your overactive imagination at work again.
  
  It's not my imagination. If the authors and journal sought the most critical referees, these results would be in mainstream journals, not sector-specific journals. Certainly the subject matter is of interest to all right?
  
  >> Believe me, they are sick and tired of people like you.
  
  That's too bad. Because in my original research in colloids I wish there were more people like me, people willing to actually give results as critical analysis as possible. The doubters and skeptics are a scientist's best friend, because those are the ones that find the holes.
  
  >> So, Physical Review is always right and it defines the mainstream,
  
  It definitely defines the mainstream, yes.
  
  >> whereas J. Electroanal. Chem. and the Jap. J. Applied Physics are “fringe
  >> science”?
  
  Definitely NOT, those are two excellent journals. But they are specific to certain research areas. Scientists should endeavor to make their results as widely available as possible.
  
  >> We can resolve any academic dispute merely by asking the editors at
  >> Physical Review and maybe Nature to decide for us
  
  The editors don't decide anything other than scheduling and coordination there, the debate and question is all done by the referees, who do not work for the journals.
  
  >> Unfortunately, most of the researchers who used to do cold fusion are
  >> retired or dead.
  
  They just couldn't make it work well enough for commerce huh? Sounds like cool fusion and hot fusion to me. But you have to admit, those thin film scientists sure made their science work ... amorphic photovoltaic panels are turning into a huge success. Jun 18 05:38 PM

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