|
DOE Calls for Funding of Cold
Fusion Research
US Review Rekindles Cold Fusion Debate - Nature on-line news
Dec. 02, 2004
"Claims of cold fusion are
intriguing ..." states cold fusion panel.
The findings, which were released
on 1 December by the US Department of Energy, rekindle a 15-year-old
debate over whether nuclear fusion can occur at room temperature.
The review is a positive step
for the field of cold fusion, according to David Nagel at George
Washington University in Washington DC, who co-authored the summary
of cold-fusion work that the panel reviewed.
Researchers finally caught the
ear of the US energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, who commissioned
the review in August 2003 from the department's science directorate.
Although the reviewers remained
skeptical, they were nearly unanimous in their opinion that the
energy department should fund well-thought-out proposals for cold
fusion. Nagel says that he expects many in the long neglected field
to submit research plans in the coming months. "I will be among
them," he adds.
The New Scientist
11 Dec 2004
DOE WARMS TO COLD FUSION
"Grab a beaker of heavy water and a pair of palladium electrodes: it's time
to start experimenting with cold fusion again, without any need for
embarrassment. A review of cold fusion research for the US Department of Energy
has recommended that the DOE remain open to the idea". ...
Read more.at The New Scientist.....
Warming Up to Cold Fusion
Washington Post By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, November 21, 2004;
Page W22
On a quiet Monday in late August -- a time of year when much of
the Washington bureaucracy has
gone to the beach -- a panel of
scientists gathered at a
Doubletree Hotel set between the
Congressional Plaza strip mall
and a drab concrete office
building on Rockville Pike. They
sat around a U-shaped table
decked with laptops, with three
government officials at the
front, ready to hear about an
idea that, if it worked, could
change the world.
The panel's charge was
simple: to determine whether
that idea had even a prayer of a
chance at working.
The Department of Energy went
to great lengths to cloak the
meeting from public view. No
announcement, no reporters. None
of the names of the people
attending that day was
disclosed. The DOE made sure to
inform the panel's members that
they were to provide their
conclusions individually rather
than as a group, which under a
loophole in federal law allowed
the agency to close the meeting
to the public....
Read the rest of the story at
this
Washington Post Link
DOE
warms to Cold Fusion
Physics Today April 2004
"I have committed to doing a review" of cold fusion, says James
Decker, deputy director of DOE's Office of Science. Late last year,
he says, "some scientists came and talked to me and asked if we
would do some kind of review on the research that has been done"
since DOE's energy research advisory board (ERAB) looked at cold
fusion nearly 15 years ago. "There may be some interesting science
here," Decker says. "Whether or not it has applications to the
energy business is clearly unknown at this point, but you need to
sort out the science before you think about applications.
To read the full story visit this
Physics
Today Link
Energy Department accepts
scientists' request
to revisit cold fusion
By Kenneth Chang
The New York Times April 2002
Cold fusion, briefly hailed as the silver-bullet
solution to the world's energy problems and since discarded to the
same bin of quackery as paranormal phenomena and perpetual motion
machines, will soon get a new hearing from Washington.
Despite being pushed to the fringes of physics, a small group of
scientists has continued work on cold fusion, and they say their
figures unambiguously verify the results of the original experiment
in 1989, showing that energy can be generated simply by running an
electrical current through a jar of water.
Last fall, cold fusion scientists asked the Energy Department to
take a second look at the process, and last week the department
agreed.
A British magazine, New Scientist, first reported the news this
week, and James Decker, deputy director of the science office in the
Energy Department, confirmed it in an e-mail interview.
"It was my personal judgment that their request for a review was
reasonable," Decker said.
The research is too preliminary to determine whether cold fusion,
even if real, will live up to its initial billing as a cheap,
bountiful source of energy, said Peter Hagelstein, a professor of
electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology who has been working on a theory to explain
how the process works. Experiments have generated small amounts of
energy, from a fraction of a watt to a few watts. Still, Hagelstein
added, "I definitely think it has potential for commercial energy
production."
Read the full story at this link
NYTIMES DOE
Power to the People, The Return of Cold Fusion
San Francisco Chronicle News March 16th 1999 Technology Reporter Hal Plotkin's Column
"On Friday, March 26, 1999, the director of Menlo Park-based SRI International's Energy Research Center, Dr. Michael McKubre, will present the results of SRI's 10-year, $6 million-dollar effort to replicate the cold-fusion experiments of chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. McKubre's startling conclusion: Pons and Fleischmann were on to something. It might not be nuclear fusion, McKubre says. But a new, clean source of power may, in fact, be on the horizon. The SRI findings will be delivered at the centennial meeting of the American Physical Society in Atlanta..... " Read the full story on the SF Chronicle Web Site *************************** New York Times 23 March 1999 Tempest In A Test Tube: 10 Years Later Excerpt - "Ten years ago, on March 23, 1989, Dr. Pons, then chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Utah, and Dr. Fleischmann, a top British chemist at the University of Southampton, set the world of science on its head by announcing in Salt Lake City that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature in a jar of water. They claimed, in effect, to have tamed the sun, unleashing its might on the earth without destructive side effects. Hailed in headlines as the greatest discovery since fire, cold fusion was seen as promising to provide a safe, cheap and virtually inexhaustible form of power, ending human dependence on oil and redrawing the geopolitical map to make Salt Lake City the energy capital of the world. Best of all, it was outrageously simple. .... Surprisingly, despite a decade long cold bath of criticism, cold fusion is still alive today and apparently doing well in the scientific underground. Researchers around the globe quietly claim success at getting tantalizing results, if not blistering heats ready to topple the status quo. This hum of low-level work confounds skeptics and delights believers. "It's as alive as it's always been," Dr. Fleischmann, 72, said in a telephone interview from his home in Britain. Successful tests, he added, continue to show that whatever is happening has to be nuclear in nature. "It can't be chemical," he said. "The energy quantities are too large, orders of magnitude larger." Read the full story at the NY Times Web site *************************** BBC.ONLINE Tuesday, March 23, 1999 Published at 17:58 GMT Sci/Tech
Should the cold fusion dream die? Excerpted from the story: "For a while, it seemed that the world was about to change for ever. One scientist said: "By the year 2000, every household will have a cold fusion power source." But it never happened. Exactly 10 years ago on Tuesday, the world was introduced to the concept of cold fusion at a press conference at the University of Utah. Dr Stanley Pons and Professor Martin Fleischman from Southampton University in the UK said they had achieved fusion in a test tube. Now, a decade later, many scientists and commentators have dismissed it entirely. There are cold fusion conferences, but they attract only enthusiasts and rarely the media. Impoverished science This is a pity. Cold fusion researchers feel outsiders in the scientific effort. Mainstream scientists ignore them. The result is that neither camp talks to each other and science is the poorer because of it. Millions of dollars are still being spent on it and large labs still hope to explain and develop the technology. Cold fusion has had only a tiny fraction of the effort and resources that have been lavished on "hot" fusion research. And we have had virtually no return on that investment. We should give the cold fusion camp time and encouragement." Read the full BBC story on-line at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_301000/301893.stm *************************** Popular Science Magazine December 1998 Cover story on Sonofusion titled:
"Star in a Jar." The article leads in with the statement, "Bubbles blasted by sound produce a mysterious blue light and temperatures hotter that the sun's surface, in a simple jar of water. Why that is happening is giving physicists fits." This report describes the work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle who are working to generate controlled fusion using ultrasonically driven bubbles. The work described leaves out the work of Scientist Russ George who has reported for more than five years in seminars at Lawrence Livermore and other national laboratories on his direct observations of nuclear fusion using ultrasonically driven bubble collapse. The difference in our version of "SONOFUSION" and that described is the article is about the expectation versus the reality of being able to initiate and control these reactions. While Lawrence Livermore hasn't yet seen the reaction and doesn't expect to achieve significant energy production we have repeatedly shown reactions producing over 100 watts of power in demonstration experiments conducted several years ago for the Electric Power Research Institute. ***************************
Wired Magazine November 1998 "WHAT IF COLD FUSION WERE REAL."
By Charles Platt In the lengthy 18 page story the author describes various work in this field starting with the original discoveries of Pons and Fleischmann in 1989 and culminating with the work by Scientist Russ George at SRI International confirming that indeed cold fusion is real.
Excerpts from the article: What If Cold Fusion Is Real? It was the most notorious scientific experiment in recent memory - in 1989, the two men who claimed to have discovered the energy of the future were condemned as imposters and exiled by their peers. Can it possibly make sense to reopen the cold fusion investigation? A surprising number of researchers already have. By Charles Platt October 98 Wired Magazine "...in the hills overlooking Santa Fe, New Mexico, a retired scientist named Edmund Storms has built a different kind of fusion reactor. It consists of laboratory glassware, off-the-shelf chemical supplies, two aging Macintosh computers for data acquisition, and an insulated wooden box the size of a kitchen cabinet. While JET's 15 European sponsor-nations have paid about US$1 billion for their hardware, and the US government has spent $14.7 billion on fusion research since 1951 (all figures in 1997 dollars), Storms's apparatus and ancillary gear have cost less than $50,000. Moreover, he claims that his equipment works, generating surplus heat for days at a time. Storms is not an antiestablishment pseudo scientist pursuing a crackpot theory. For 34 years he was part of the establishment himself, employed at Los Alamos on projects such as a nuclear motor for space vehicles. Subsequently he testified before a congressional subcommittee considering the future of fusion. He believes you don't need millions of degrees or billions of dollars to fuse atomic nuclei and yield energy. "You can stimulate nuclear reactions at room temperature," he says, in his genial, matter-of-fact style. "I am absolutely certain that the phenomenon is real. It is quite extraordinary, and if it can be developed, it will have profound effects on society." "...We walk down an echoing hallway (ed.- at Stanford Research International SRI, Menlo Park ,CA), into a smaller room crammed with equipment. Amid the steady hum and whine of cooling fans, a large, Russ George a bearded guy wearing khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt is sitting in front of a video screen." "... George and SRI put the same ingredients (palladium catalysts and deuterium - ed.) into a sealed 50-cc stainless-steel flask and wrapped it in a heating element. A tube from this flask is connected, now, to a mass-spectrometer - an enigmatic steel cabinet standing behind the video screen. "This mass-spec is sensitive enough to detect the difference between helium and deuterium," says Russ George. "And the video display, here, will tell us how much helium is generated." Any production of helium would be stunning proof that fusion is occurring, because helium only results from nuclear reactions. No known chemical interaction can create it." "Within another few days," says Russ George, "if the helium level continues to rise, then we'll have the proof." "Epilogue It's 10 days since I visited SRI International. I call Russ George and find him bubbling with enthusiasm, because the mix of carbon, palladium, and deuterium is now generating 10 parts per million of helium - twice the level in ambient air. The only conceivable source of this helium is a nuclear reaction, and George feels that it's the best-ever proof of cold fusion. "It makes all the sacrifices worthwhile," he says." Read the complete story at Wired On-line! "What If Cold Fusion Were Real" *************************** Why Does The World Need Cold Fusion? World population to reach 8 billion by 2026 Excerpted From CNN
April 2, 1999 Web posted at: 8:17 AM EST (1317 GMT)
"The world's population is currently pushing 6 billion and will climb to 8 billion by 2026, the Census Bureau reported Friday. And the total will reach 9.3 billion by 2050, the agency projected in a a new study. The growth of human population has been, is now, and in the future will be almost entirely determined in the world's less developed countries, the Census report said." *************************** |