Cold fusion

[Metranon]

well, i'm not one to post "serious business" usually but found this fairly interesting

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/ny_te...ion_10017.html

so the device isn't that useful for producing large amounts of energy yet, however, as the team notes, it has other important scientific uses related to being able to well, produce neutrons...these include security scanners for bombs and the like in scanning through most materials, as well as medical applications such as in X-ray machines and radiation therapy for cancer

discuss

[Hippos II]

i know a kid who made a particle gun out of smoke alarms lOLZ

[Zaniel]

100% of reports of cold fusion so far are total bullshit, what they usually don't say is that they're using a generator the size of a half a city block to create theoretical fusion between like 2 atoms. Sure it's "cold", there isn't enough energy to power a grasshopper fart.

Anyway, without really being able to tell what they're actually doing from that article I'll tell you the best way to determine if scientific theory XYZ is true or desparate scamming to maintain one's research grant. After the dude has published in some major paper the details of his work then if 100 different labs in different countries (and preferably different continents) can reproduce the experiment in their own labs, then you're on to something. Two labs in the same country headed by two old college buddies doesn't count.

/cynicism off

[Metranon]

supposedly this machine creates 200,000 electron volts of power, which is enough neutrons for use in X-ray machines and security detectors

also this fusion takes place at room temperature as opposed to previous experiements which had hugely larger costs because they required extremely low temperatures to achieve a fusion reaction.

[Neppy]

Do you understand how little power 200,000 electron volts is?
from a website: Approximate energy of an electron striking a color television screen.......20,000 eV

Its about 24 orders of magnitude away from something useful

[Cathan]

I read about some cold fusion experiment where they were financed over a billion dollars to build it and it ran off the power of a 120 AC standard home outlet. Basically they came up with this idea to chainlink a bazillion volts of electricity stored in this big system to get the thing started but it didn't take some massive generator to pull it off. Maybe in the end their method to mass produce the energy from 1 standard outlet is more impressive than the cold fusion, I really don't know.

[Eomer]

Zaniel's scepticism is misplaced. This setup isn't designed to produce power or anything like that, it's designed to produce neutrons for medical tests and that sort of thing. This is actually a fairly big deal that someone's reproduced the results from about a year ago from a seperate team. They still don't quite understand the physics and chemistry behind these experiments. Up until last year, no one even believed cold fusion was possible.

[Bralkan]

Originally Posted by Eomer

Z They still don't quite understand the physics and chemistry behind these experiments. Up until last year, no one even believed cold fusion was possible.

The man that invented the internal combustion engine didn't know the physics behind it. He just knew it worked. Just as an anecdote.

[Benito Fireslinger]

this is not cold fusion, but cool nonetheless

[Eomer]

Care to explain how fusing two atoms into one and releasing neutrons at room temperature is not cold fusion?

[Benito Fireslinger]

cause my physics prof said so...

here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroelectric_fusion

Pyroelectric fusion
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Pyroelectric fusion is a process of nuclear fusion induced by an electric field from pyroelectric crystals. The basic principle is that the pyroelectric effect is used to generate a strong electric field (gigavolts per metre), by heating the crystal from −30°C to +45°C in a few minutes. The strong field is used to accelerate a beam of the chamber's deuterium atoms from a needle-thin tungsten probe tip mounted on a copper disk into a solid target containing deuterium. Some of the deuterium atoms fuse, producing helium and neutrons. Like muon-catalyzed fusion, the process does not appear to be able to generate net power, but may have other uses.

A UCLA team, headed by Brian Naranjo, has observed the nuclear fusion of deuterium nuclei in a tabletop device in April 2005. The device uses a lithium tantalate (LiTaO3) pyroelectric crystal to ionize deuterium atoms and accelerate the ions towards a stationary erbium dideuteride (ErD2) target. Fusion of two deuterium nuclei results in the emission of helium-4 nuclei (alpha particles), about 1000 2.45 MeV neutrons per second, and gamma rays. The team anticipates applications of the device as a tabletop neutron generator, or in "microthrusters" for space propulsion. It is possible that there may be applications related to nuclear weapons, although this possibility is not discussed in the research paper.

Nuclear D-D fusion driven by the pyroelectric effect was proposed by Naranjo and Putterman in 2002. It was also discussed by Brownridge and Shafroth in 2004. The possibility of neutron production (by D-D fusion) was first proposed in a conference paper by Geuther and Danon in 2004 and later in a publications discussing electron and ion acceleration by pyroelectric crystals. The key ingredient of using a tungsten needle to produce sufficient ion beam current was first proposed and demonstrated in the 2005 Nature paper.

This development is not related to earlier claims of tabletop fusion having been observed during sonoluminescence (bubble fusion). In fact, the leader of the team behind this development was one of the main critics of these earlier prospective fusion claims.

[Eomer]

Meh, I guess it depends on what your definition of "cold fusion" is. My impression was that it basically was any process that has nuclear fusion take place at reasonably normal temperatures (ie: not several million degrees kelvin in a massive magnetic containment field).

[Bralkan]

funny how most problems are a problem are semantics, isn't it?

[Benito Fireslinger]

If this was actual cold fusion then it would have garnered ALOT more fame than this. Cold Fusion would theoretically solve the world's energy crisis.

Cold fusion is the name for a claimed nuclear fusion reaction occurring well below the temperature required for thermonuclear reactions (millions of degrees Celsius) in a relatively small "table top" apparatus.

[Eomer]

Reading the definition you just gave, I'm not sure why this "pyroelectric fusion" experiment isn't considered cold fusion (other than it not producing a net gain in energy). It pretty much mirrors the definition I gave.