The black box in the corner

After a survey of what's happening with photovoltaic power stations and grid energy storage (you can find a list of large-scale photovoltaic power plants currently in operation at the Sun Energy site), I ended up back at cold fusion, the black box.

While still as unpopular as ever, the topic has acquired some new variants, such as muon-catalyzed fusion which, according to Wikipedia is "is well established, real, and repeatable."  Also, there's pyroelectric fusion and a polywell.

***

Polywell WB-6 model assembled, Wikipedia

***

One of the problems with cold fusion was the inability of independent labs to repeat the original experiment, as the Wikipedia article on cold fusion states:

Many scientists tried to replicate the experiment with the few details available. Hopes fell with the large number of negative replications, the withdrawal of many positive replications, the discovery of flaws and sources of experimental error in the original experiment, and finally the discovery that Fleischmann and Pons had not actually detected nuclear reaction byproducts.

However the U.S. Navy persisted with its own work, zeroing in on the low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) and chemically-assisted nuclear reaction (CANR) aspects of cold fusion.

According to an article at Phys.org (March, 2009), there may be a "'Cold fusion rebirth."  Quoting the article:

Researchers are reporting compelling new scientific evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the process once called "cold fusion" that may promise a new source of energy. One group of scientists, for instance, describes what it terms the first clear visual evidence that LENR devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists view as tell-tale signs that nuclear reactions are occurring.

***

An experimental "cold fusion" device produced this pattern of "triple tracks" (shown at right), which scientists say is caused by high-energy nuclear particles resulting from a nuclear reaction Credit: Pam Boss, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR), phys.org

***
For reference three sites offer current information:  Cold Fusion Times, Cold Fusion Now, and LENR - Cold Fusion.  There's also an interesting article at ExtremeTech (a number of comments say too good to be true).

-- Marge

Science: an update on cold fusion

In 1989, a research team at the University of Utah reported that they had produced unexplained excess energy during their electrolysis research.  The Wikipedia article on cold fusion describes their results thus:

Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, then one of the world's leading electrochemists, [reported] that their apparatus had produced anomalous heat ("excess heat"), of a magnitude they asserted would defy explanation except in terms of nuclear processes. They further reported measuring small amounts of nuclear reaction byproducts, including including neutrons and tritium. The small tabletop experiment involved electrolysis of heavy water on the surface of a palladium (Pd) electrode..

Here is a simple example of the lab setup for electrolysis:

The media flocked to the prospect of a cheap source of energy that didn't require depletable products.  But most physicists were skeptical, especially of any reaction that produced more energy than what was put in.  The reported results could not be reproduced by other labs; and eventually Pons and Fleischmann were discredited.  However, some groups continued to experiment, particularly the U.S. Navy and New Hydrogen Energy Institute in Japan.

Here is an image of the setup used by the researchers in Japan:

The Wikipedia article further states:

After 1991, cold fusion research continued in relative obscurity, conducted by groups that had increasing difficulty securing public funding and keeping programs open. Research continues today in a few specific venues, but the wider scientific community has generally marginalized the research being done and researchers have had difficulty publishing in mainstream journals.

The Japanese group has discontinued work on cold fusion, but the groups that have continued have renamed their efforts to avoid the negative reactions of the scientific community to the term cold fusion.  The new nomenclature includes:

 ...Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) or Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions (CANR), also Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reactions (LANR), Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (CMNS) and Lattice Enabled Nuclear Reactions... --Wikipedia

The U.S. Navy has a library of papers on this topic at LENR-CANR.org.

What do you think -- is it the real thing this time?

-- Marge