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US Review Rekindles Cold Fusion

Warming Up to Cold Fusion

Physics Today April 2004 - DOE committed to review of cold fusion science results

San Francisco Chronicle Technology News Report  - Power to the People, the return of Cold Fusion.

New York Times Tempest in a Test Tube: 10 Years Later Cold fusion

BBC ONLINE "Should The Cold Fusion Dream Die?"

Nov 98 Wired Magazine "What If Cold Fusion is Real"  Chief Scientist Russ George's work is featured

Dec 98 Sonofusion in Popular Science "Star in a Jar"

Why Does The World Need Cold Fusion?

Energy in the Next Millenium

Sir Arthur C. Clarke in The Journal Science

 

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"Science is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Thomas Edison

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First Paper showing Experimental Evidence of  Cold Fusion at the American Physical Society 1998

  Sono Fusion

Laboratory Equipment Now Available

Evidence for Micro Nuclear Events in Thin Foils

Helium Bubbles in Nuclear Reactive Palladium

American Chem Soc. April 1994 Paper

Cavitation Induced Micro-Fusion

Electric Power Research Institute Demonstration Proiect Report

Real Time Mass Spectroscopic Evidence of Massive Helium production from deuterium catalytic fusion

Y. Arata's 1997 Japan Academy Paper showing heat and helium isotopes using the DS Cathode

 

Bio for  Scientist Russ George

Russ George's Invited Presentation to the U.S. Secretary of the Navy

 

Real Audio NPR Science Friday Interview
Click to listen to Russ and a leading HOT Fusion scientist on the US National Public Radio April 9th,99 (Drag the Real Audio slider about 3/4 of the way through the segment to find Cold Fusion)

Real Audio Interview on Jeff Rense Radio
Listen to Russ and radio host Jeff Rense talk about fusion energy.
23 April 99 (Once the adverts finish and the program begins again drag the Real Audio slider about 3/4 of the way through the segment to find Cold Fusion)

 

Quotes and Jewels from Great Minds for the skeptical reader

References and Reading Materials

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

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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

 

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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

 

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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.

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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"

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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."

 

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The Importance of Fusion in the 21st Century Hot, Cold, and otherwise

Russ George

By the middle of the 21st century, the modern world will face an energy crisis of extraordinary proportions (the third world already is in the thick of the crisis). The total world population is expected to nearly double by 2050, to about ten billion people. With continued industrialization and modernization of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, world energy consumption is projected to triple, to thirty trillion watts, over the same period of time. That this tripling estimate can occur assumes large as yet unachieved gains in efficiency of energy production or use. At the present rates of consumption, however, the world's known oil reserves will be depleted in about sixty years and natural gas in about one hundred years. While gigantic low-grade coal reserves might sustain some of the world's hungry appetite for energy for several centuries, the problems associated with mining and the high level of environmental pollution produced by coal-fired power plants will aggravate an already precarious world ecological balance.

Whatever the cost, energy is fundamental to an acceptable quality of modern life. The requirements and desires of the people of the developing world will not be denied. How these requirements or demands are to be met in a world with diminishing energy resources is not clear but there are some ominous signs. Witness the recent additions into the once exclusive nuclear weapons club by India and Pakistan via there testing (1998) of sophisticated nuclear weapons. A dozen or more other "non-nuclear" nations are now surely capable of producing a complete menu of strategic and battlefield nuclear weapons along with sophisticated delivery systems.

Today the 75% of the people in the "less developed world" consume only 33% of the world energy. In 25 years the booming populations in those same countries will be consuming 85% of the worlds energy. By any measure, the world must find new sources of energy in the coming decades -- sources that will augment the inevitable increase in reliance on solar, renewables, and nuclear fission. Not to do so is to sentence the entire world to severe deprivation and intense competition for a dwindling energy resource.

The search for alternative energy sources had led to a highly publicized international research effort to develop fusion -- the process of combining hydrogen nuclei that powers the sun and the stars - as a practical energy source. While gigantic and astronomically expensive hot fusion projects struggle to overcome apparently insurmountable technical and radioactive waste issues almost no other research funding has been made available to alternative fusion research. The high technology fusion energy technologies if they are ever completed will likely never be within the reach of the poorer nations of the world. Of course on the darker side of these hot fusion programs is the direct application much of the work performed has to the creation and maintenance of nuclear weapons.

Today the leading fusion energy advances are being made via the remarkable discovery of cold fusion that produces abundant energy and unlike uranium fission and hot fusion no long-lived or penetrating radioactive by-products. Various forms of "cold fusion" offer the prospect of an environmentally attractive and secure long-term energy source, with a virtually unlimited fuel supply of deuterium obtained from ordinary water. As cold fusion reactions now observed are for example adapted to household heating a small supply of heavy water costing perhaps $50 dollars might heat a home for many years. A side benefit is that cold fusion reactions appear to be self limiting in that they occur in tiny exotic nano-domains of matter. Such domains destroy their reactivity if energy is tapped too fast or in too large amounts preventing the application of this energy for making weapons of mass destruction.

These alternative lower cost forms of fusion energy  "cold fusion", contrary to what the hot fusion community expends considerable effort to decry and discredit, are very real. Professors Fleischmann and Pons announced their discoveries in late March 1989 and were quickly catapulted from Prof. Pon's dim University of Utah basement labs to the international limelight. The most noted effect in those experiments was production of heat. But since the experiments were not conducted in plasmas at the tens of millions of degrees that hot fusioneers had insisted were the required minimum for fusion reactions the reactions were dubbed and of late drubbed "cold fusion".

What was most important about the original experiments was the suggestion that when one mixed hydrogen isotopes, mostly deuterium, with certain metals using electrochemical loading techniques one could observe the production of large amounts of anomalous heat. Now in 1997 hundreds of scientists around the world have discovered other methods of working with hydrogen isotopes in solid lattices to produce heat and some nuclear products that are so substantial they far outstrip any known or conceived chemical reaction mechanism.

We have successfully demonstrated our devices and methods at Los Alamos National Laboratory and at SRI International for the US Electric Utility Industry. We are working to commercialize useful scientific and consumer devices over the next few years.

 

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Arthur C. Clarke in

ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY:
Presidents, Experts, and AsteroidsSir Arthur
Excerpted from Science

"For more than a century science and its occasionally ugly sister technology have been the chief driving forces shaping our world. They decide the kinds of futures that are possible. Human wisdom must decide which are desirable. 

...Even more controversial than the threat of asteroid impacts is what I would call perhaps one of the greatest scandals in the history of science, the cold fusion caper. Like almost everyone else, I was surprised when Pons and Fleischmann announced that they had achieved fusion in the laboratory; and surprise changed to disappointment when I learned that most of those who had rushed to confirm these results were unable to replicate them. Wondering first how two world-class scientists could have fooled themselves, I then forgot the whole matter for a year or so, until more and more reports surfaced, from many countries, of anomalous energy production in various devices (some of them apparently having nothing to do with fusion). Agreeing with Carl Sagan's principle that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs" (spoken in connection with UFOs and alien visitors), I remained interested, but skeptical...

...The literature on the subject is now enormous, and my confidence that "new energy" is real slowly climbed to the 90th percentile and has now reached the 99% level. A Fellow of the Royal Society, also originally a skeptic, writes: "There is now strong evidence for nuclear reactions in condensed matter at low temperature." The problem, he adds, is that "there is no theoretical basis for these claims, or rather there are too many conflicting theories."

Yet recall that the steam engine had been around for quite a while before Carnot explained exactly how it worked. The challenge now is to see which of the various competing devices is most reliable. My guess is that large-scale industrial application will begin around the turn of the century--at which point one can imagine the end of the fossil-fuel-nuclear age, making concerns about global warming irrelevant, as oil-and-coal-burning systems are phased out.

Finally, another of my dubious predictions: Pons and Fleischmann will be the only scientists ever to win both the Nobel and the Ig Noble Prizes."

Read the entire piece at Science's archive site

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From my own archives!

Date sent: Mon, 20 Apr 1999 21:40:12 +0600
To:
rgeorge@d2fusion.com
From:
Sir Arthur Clarke
Subject:
Re: Cold Fusion

Dear Russ,
Just to acknowledge - please keep me informed of progress. I'm
beating
the drum for you!  All good wishes.

Arthur

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  Jump to added papers about sono fusion experiments

 

1999 and 1998 American Physical Society Papers

Russ George has presented presented his work in papers at APS meetings in 1998 and 1999. The 1998 paper was the first paper the American Physical Society has accepted that presents data showing proof of "sonofusion and cold fusion." This years (1999) presentation showed additional evidence of this phenomenon in observations of helium produciton. (The 1999 paper was prepared too late to appear in the APS Conference Abstracts but is presented in full on this web site.) For the 1998 paper See the APS Web Site (http://www.aps.org/BAPSMAR98/abs/S4170002.html)

 

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