Cold fusion really works

A review of earlier cold fusion experiments with better instrumentation has shown that cold fusion does indeed occur. To be sure this is still a long way off from being commercialized but now that cold fusion has been shown to actually occur it should receive a decent amount of funding. Here's hoping that one day we all have cold fusion generators in our cars and our homes, and the notion of paying per unit of energy becomes as quaint as using a horse for transportation. I can't even begin to imagine how much virtually free energy (no costs beyond the generator itself) would improve things on this planet.

you think they're going to let you have electricy for free?!

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Rothrandir said:
you think they're going to let you have electricy for free?!

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If the theory is sound, the Chinese will make it work.

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PhotonBoy said:
If the theory is sound, the Chinese will make it work.

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Tritium, which also is produced during the fusion reactions, was measured and the amount produced was found to be consistent with the observed neutron production rate.


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Well more Tritium illumination available also /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

On a more serious note. I hope this pans out /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/happy14.gif

I think Darell already has a car running on one of these.

Hey that's my alma mater.
And some of my x-prof too.
Those guys are a little wacky in the head sometime but they're pretty smart.
Nothing else to do in upstate NY so all they can do is stay in the lab & research /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crackup.gif

Like Wits' said, FREE Tritium too! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

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modamag said:
Nothing else to do in upstate NY so all they can do is stay in the lab & research /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crackup.gif

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/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/duh2.gif
What! Man, you must not be an outdoors person. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif I could fish all day, every day in upstate NY. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleye11.gif

Collapsing bubbles cause a temperature of 100 million Kelvin. I don't know Kelvin but that doesn't sound cold to me /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Cold or hot, it's amazing stuff.

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LEDmodMan said:
What! Man, you must not be an outdoors person. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif I could fish all day, every day in upstate NY. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleye11.gif

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I don't think you'll like ice fishing after living in <0F for more than 14 yrs /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif
And during the summer it's D@#& humid sometime. But great place for hiking & camping through.

Kelvin is just Celsius plus 273.15. Zero Kelvin is absolute zero (no temperature at all) and a change of 1 Kelvin is the same as a change of 1 degree Celsius. Yep, 100 million Kelvin is pretty hot. Roughly 180 million Farenheit.

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eluminator said:
Collapsing bubbles cause a temperature of 100 million Kelvin. I don't know Kelvin but that doesn't sound cold to me /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Cold or hot, it's amazing stuff.

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It's a really high temperature, but I've gathered from the article that it's localized to such a tiny volume of space that it would dissipate itself to room temperature very quickly in the event of a containment loss and likely not even damage its immediate surroundings.

This 1998 article also helps show the race for cold fusion:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/coldfusion.html

What the original 1989 experiment produced was probably something more along the lines of a chemical reaction. In my understanding of how the universe produces energy it requires heat (random motion of atoms), or in one simple word "jiggling". This occurs in the formation of stars where the force of gravity pulls clouds of matter together thereby increasing the gravity and pulling in more matter, which causes ever increasing pressure/heat (jiggling atoms). When the temperature reaches 18 million degrees Fahrenheit nuclear fusion begins and thus a star is born. The heat of a star can produce elements up to iron, but the heavier elements aren't possible without the tremendous, but brief, superheat of a supernova.

The concept of cold fusion borders on science fiction. Alchemy (changing lead into gold for example) was a myth of the ancient world. Today we know that requires the heat of a star, and we can't replicate such temperatures here on earth, which is basically what cold fusion is supposed to do. So from what I understand, cold fusion would be more then just an energy source, but a way to change an atom into another atom. Imagine the ability to interchange elements. For example gold could be manufactured.

There are some new radical ideas coming out of science. One has shown mathematically that exceeding light speed is theoretically possible. It involves reaching near light speed and getting caught in the event horizon of a rotating black hole, thereby increasing your speed beyond that of light from the perspective of normal space. This is simple terms is like throwing a ball down the corridor of a moving bus. The maximum speed you can throw the ball is amplified by the speed the bus is traveling when measured by a person standing on the sidewalk.

Another weird concept involves artificially distorting space in a laboratory condition by the means of some sort of array of energy beams (sorry I had trouble comprehending what they were). The space within the tunnel of beams becomes distorted; or rather time within them is slowed down. The general idea is that once this device is turned on, time at one end is near frozen, and a message could be transmitted from one end to the other which is in the past. The past being as far back as when the device was first activated. I really had trouble understanding this but found it interesting.

Ive read all the free energey stuff online, over unity and heard the shows on art bell and coast to coast am. About a year or so ago there was a rash of free power generators one from a guy from every country. Never heard anything after that. One was selling for 25 grand and could make 12kwatts till the 4 deep cycle batteries expired that ran it for about a year or so. THe batteries didnt power it, but where required to make it run. Even if it did work, it would take nearly 25 years of use to break even at the rate of power in VA at a few cents a kw. One guy had an infinite running cf light, well til the light failed. I believe his name was tom bearden. Anyway, he too wated a lot for his light and if you do the math, its cheaper to just use what we got unless you need something to light your lava tube three miles below the surface or on another planet.

I think for mobile power, you cant go wrong with thermal electric generation. Thats what they use on the power hungry space crafts.

Well, one thing is for certain - we won't be powering our gasoline cars from this energy. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif

Actually, we can change atoms into other types of atoms. We can turn lead into gold, or anything else into gold. It's much more common to turn gold into other things though. That's often what's done in particle accelerators.

We can also replicate the temperatures involved in stars, but it's pretty hard to get the pressure as well. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/naughty.gif

Anyway, we can do fusion already. It happens in the more powerful types of atomic bombs for example. The energy comes from the mass that's lost in converting atoms to different types. All the particles still exist after the "reaction," but the total mass is lower. E=mc^2. c is the speed of light, so that's a huge energy for just a little bit of mass. Cold fusion simply attempts to do this without needing lots of heat (ala uncontrollable reaction - bomb) and would be very safe. I'm not holding my breath.

bubble driven fusion is not "cold fusion" in the Ponds Flieshman, paladium cell sense. It's a completely different idea.

Fusion is actually fairly easy to do. I can build a fusion reactor in the basement with only a few weeks of work using inertial electrostatic confinement. The problem is that it's no use and just deadly poisoning myself with neutrons... There is a commercial product that you can buy as a neutron source for lab experiments that uses fusion to make them

http://users.tm.net/lapointe/IEC_Fusion.html

and if you really want you can build your own fusor, some fun links:

http://torsatron.tripod.com/fusor/
and lots more info at:
http://www.fusor.net/board/index.php?site=fusor

problem is that the reaction doesn't make anything useful. You have to fuse something different to make something useful. the still debated holy grain would be a proton/boron reaction that would release free electrons. Put a collection grid outside the containment grid and you might be able to catch the electrons and make electricity. Unfortunately, the electrons are very energetic and you would have to expend power to slow them down before you could catch them and there are numerous other issues to making it work, which is why it doesn't work yet...

This is not FREE energy as it's coming from something and not nothing /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif Cold fusion in a palladium cell wouldn't be free energy either, free energy is when you stick a bunch of coils together with an oscillator and use a DMM with no knowledge of measuring AC current and think that you're getting out more than you're putting in, when in reality you're not /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif Measuring the actual power in such a system is very hard to do properly.

First I think I was the only one who thought that.

from wired.com -
Michael McKubre, director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International: "I am absolutely certain there is unexplained heat, and the most likely explanation is that its origin is nuclear."

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cobb said:
I think for mobile power, you cant go wrong with thermal electric generation. Thats what they use on the power hungry space crafts.

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The thermo-electric power generation technique is used on probes/devices going a long way from the sun. 'Fer example, those probes traveling out to Saturn, Jupiter, Pluto, and beyond. At those distances from the sun, it's just not practical to use solar arrays.

What they do is to take a low density nuclear (nukular?) pile that generates heat, and attach thermocouples. The other end of the thermocouples are attached to a radiator facing space, so as to generate a temperature differential across the thermocouples. The temperature differential coaxes the little electrons across the thermocouple, in much the same way that photons shove electrons across the junction in a solar panel, thereby causing electrons to flow and do work.

It's a wonderfully simple device that will provide power much longer than you'll be alive, but not all that practical for use here on earth. Would you want to have a big lump of radioactive material next to you? Or maybe you could wrap a chunk of the stuff in lead, and use it as a hand warmer for cold days? /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Steve K.

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It's a wonderfully simple device that will provide power much longer than you'll be alive, but not all that practical for use here on earth. Would you want to have a big lump of radioactive material next to you? Or maybe you could wrap a chunk of the stuff in lead, and use it as a hand warmer for cold days?

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Yea, no kidding, and we're not talking sample sized amounts of material here, but something you couldn't lug around with you /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

I vaguely remember these numbers, but went back and looked them up:

Galileo has 1 (i think) plutonium thermoelectric power generator with 17.2 pounds of plutonium-238 on board and generates only slightly more than 20 watts of power with it. Cassini has 3 generators totalling 72 POUNDS of the stuff and still only generates around 700 watts. I think the upward practical limit of a single thermoelectric generator is around a killowatt.

The 238 is not fissionable, so you can't use it to make a regular bomb, and the half life is 88 years, so the output would reduce to half (or less) in that much time...

But they rock for space ships that go away from the sun...