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Science Technology

Cold Fusion in a Breadbox Instead of a Bottle 438

Posted by Zonk from the mmm-bread dept.
rawbytes writes "For the last few years, mentioning cold fusion around scientists has been a little like mentioning Bigfoot or UFO sightings. After the 1989 announcement of fusion in a bottle and the subsequent retraction, the whole idea of cold fusion seemed a bit beyond the pale. But that's all about to change. A very reputable, very careful group of scientists at the University of Los Angeles (Brian Naranjo, Jim Gimzewski, Seth Putterman) has initiated a fusion reaction using a laboratory device that's not much bigger than a breadbox, and works at roughly room temperature. This time, it looks like the real thing." From the article: "Scientists have gotten fusion to occur in the laboratory before, but for the most part, they've tried to mimic conditions inside the sun by whipping hydrogen gas up to extreme temperatures or slamming atoms together in particle accelerators. Both of those options require huge energies and gigantic equipment, not the sort of stuff easily available to build a generator. Is there any way of getting protons close enough together for fusion to occur that doesnt require the energy output of a large city to make it happen? The answer, it turns out, is yes."
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Cold Fusion in a Breadbox Instead of a Bottle More

Cold Fusion in a Breadbox Instead of a Bottle

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  • It's a Dupe (Score:3, Informative)

    by alanw ( 1822 ) * <alan@wylie.me.uk> on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @02:47PM (#12749992) Homepage
    http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/2 8/1518226&tid=232&tid=14 [slashdot.org]

    Thursday April 28, @16:57

  • I'll believe it... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dirtside ( 91468 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @02:48PM (#12750013) Journal
    ...when I see multiple peer-reviewed articles reporting that others have been able to duplicate this experiment. :P

    • Re:I'll believe it... (Score:5, Funny)

      by nurhussein ( 864532 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @02:52PM (#12750072) Homepage
      Does a duplicate post [slashdot.org] count?

    • Re:I'll believe it... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman@gmaYEATSil.com minus poet> on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @02:56PM (#12750136) Homepage Journal
      I'm sure it's real. In any case, it's not the "Cold Fusion" everyone is looking for. We've got a host of "cold" fusion options today including the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor and Sonofusion. Neither one manages to produce positive net energy output. What was so striking about the original Cold Fusion experiments was that they produced more energy than was put in. *If* it's actually fusion (and not just a weird chemical reaction) and *if* we can make it regularly reproducable, then Cold Fusion could essentially change the world.

      Imagine a car that only needs to be refueled every few months/years. Or a power system for your home that is independent from the Grid. Or ships that no longer have to rely on Diesel. That is the temptation of Cold Fusion. Unfortunately, our physics and engineering are not quite that good yet. But I'm sure it's only 20 years away... ;-)
      • What strikes me as funny, is now that the proof of concept is out, doesn't that just make it an engineering challenge? Could they quadruple the output by carefully arranging the crystal(s) and conductor? Could they increase it 100fold? (Even though I'm well aware that this still wouldn't be near breakeven).

        How far can it be pushed, with this one method?

        Can they fuse something other than deuterium? Helium, lithium maybe? Don't some of the other elements have interesting fusion properties? (Seem to remember
        • Can they fuse something other than deuterium? Helium, lithium maybe? Don't some of the other elements have interesting fusion properties? (Seem to remember that boron would produce some sigificant voltage in the form of beta radiation).

          I've got a much better solution to their problem. Just add some U-235 to the mechanism. Say, about 51kg. If my calculations are correct, that should fix their energy production problems in no time flat! ;-)
        • Whatever they do its always going to be a better neutron sourse than a power source.
          I think the interesting thing you are referring to about boron is that it readily accepts (thermal) neutrons. It then fissions and releases a fair amount of energy in the form of an alpha particle and a lithium nucleus.

        • Re:I'll believe it... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @04:24PM (#12751152) Homepage
          is now that the proof is out, doesn't that make it an engineering challenge?

          No.

          You could have said the exact same thing about any of the couple dozen fusion devices produced to date. Between bremsstrahlung losses and input energy requirements, most fusion devices are physically unable to even approach their input energy.

          Not that there aren't interesting techniques to watch. ITER is almost guaranteed to work; whether it will ever be economical is a big question. Muon-catalyzed fusion is interesting because if you can stop the muon from sticking to helium so frequently (which some researchers claim to be able to do), you can have a single muon cause numerous reactions, and easily pay off the generation cost. Sonofusion is new, and relatively unexplored, so there's plenty of potential. Inertial electrostatic confinement is old and has only been making baby steps since then, but does keep on improving (I'd be interested in seing how some of the penning-trap gridless and magnetically-shielded grid designs work out), and has interesting potential to be scaled up to everyone's favorite, boron-hydrogen fusion. Focus fusion is another interesting highly scalable design to watch.

      • ... including the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor and Sonofusion.

        Did anyone else read that as "son of Fusion" instead of "sono-fusion"?

    • Well its been duplicated. But its not really cold fusion.

      " The current cold fusion apparatus still takes much more energy to start up than you get back out, and it may never end up breaking even. In the mean time, the crystal-fusion device might be used as a compact source of neutrons and X-rays, something that could turn out to be useful making small scanning machines."

      :( and here I was all ready to make my own cold fusion car...

    • Re:I'll believe it... (Score:5, Informative)

      by KernyKat ( 721157 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @03:41PM (#12750662) Homepage
      I'll believe it... ...when I see multiple peer-reviewed articles reporting that others have been able to duplicate this experiment. :P
      From the article:
      This experiment has been repeated successfully and other scientists have reviewed the results: it looks like the real thing this time.

      • Re:I'll believe it... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by zCyl ( 14362 )
        From the article:

        This experiment has been repeated successfully and other scientists have reviewed the results: it looks like the real thing this time.

        Note that this is not the same as OTHER groups reproducting a result. But as others have said here, the physics certainly fits such that even if this were flawed, it's certainly believable that non-breakeven fusion could be done in a similar fashion.

        With that said, the setup is a clever arrangement. :)

      • Re:I'll believe it... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdeversNO@SPAMcis.usouthal.edu> on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @06:37PM (#12752553) Homepage Journal
        I'll believe it... ...when I see multiple peer-reviewed articles reporting that others have been able to duplicate this experiment. :P

        From the article:

        This experiment has been repeated successfully and other scientists have reviewed the results: it looks like the real thing this time.

        *ahem*

        From the comment:

        I'll believe it... ...when I see multiple peer-reviewed articles reporting that others have been able to duplicate this experiment. :P

        In other words, an article in the Christian Science Monitor -- a fine newspaper, but not a scientific journal by any stretch -- in which the reporter casually asserts without citation that "other scientists" have "reviewed" the results, does not an independent confirmation make.

        You can't just wave your hands and say "oh yeah, others have repeated it, others have reviewed it, we're done here." Who are these others? What exactly did they find, and how closely did everything match the original inputs & outputs? What kind of "review" did they do? We're still just dealing with anecdotes and hearsay, not scientific analysis.

        What the grandparent poster implicitly asked for, reasonably, was [presumably refereed] articles in [presumably credible] scientific journals documented that other [presumably non-pseudo-science] researchers had taken the procedure described here, replicated the experimental apparatus, conducted their own trial of the experiment, and then verified that the results they obtained were in agreement with the ones predicted by the original researchers. If all that happens, then, and only then, are we getting somewhere.

        Until then, this doesn't sound like much more than yet another cold fusion pipe dream.

    • Re:I'll believe it... (Score:3, Informative)

      by bcrowell ( 177657 )
      There's no particular reason to doubt it, and assuming it's true, it's not even particularly exciting or promising as a way of producing useful energy. "Fusion" is a broad term. Particle accelerators fuse nuclei all the time, and there's nothing unusual about doing it with beams that have been accelerated by an electrostatic field [yale.edu]. A small tandem van de Graaff accelerator can easily be fit in a small room, and some colleges run them for use in undergraduate and graduate lab courses. The thing is, nuclei are
  • Am I completely wrong in saying... That is some pretty sweet stuff!
  • "For the time being, don't expect fusion to become a readily available energy option. The current cold fusion apparatus still takes much more energy to start up than you get back out, and it may never end up breaking even. In the mean time, the crystal-fusion device might be used as a compact source of neutrons and X-rays, something that could turn out to be useful making small scanning machines. But it really may not be long until we have the first nuclear fusion-powered devices in common use."

    While it m

  • This is Old News (Score:5, Informative)

    by waynegoode ( 758645 ) * on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @02:49PM (#12750028) Homepage
    This is old news. The original report was published [nature.com] in Nature [nature.com] in April.

    It was reported on in the press (MSNBC [msn.com]) and Slashdot had a lively discussion here [slashdot.org] and slashdotted a UCLA server. There is more at a (hopefully non-slashdotted) UCLA website [ucla.edu].

    • Re:This is Old News (Score:3, Interesting)

      by metlin ( 258108 )
      Well, here's the abstract and a short description [ucla.edu].

    • Re:This is Old News (Score:3, Interesting)

      by radtea ( 464814 )
      Not only is this old news, it still isn't cold fusion. From the article:

      Warming the crystal by about 100 degrees (from -30 F to 45F) produced a huge electrical field of about 100,000 volts across the small crystal.

      They are using a pyroelectric crystal to generate a strong electrical field to accelerate protons sufficiently to get fusion. Dumping a lot of energy into individual protons to get them to fuse is hot fusion.

      This article has to be one of the worst examples of science reporting I've ever see

      • Re:This is Old News (Score:3, Interesting)

        by xee ( 128376 )
        From the pedia [wikipedia.org]...
        Cold fusion [wikipedia.org] is a name for any nuclear fusion reaction that occurs well below the temperature required for thermonuclear reactions (which occur at millions of degrees Celsius).
        I think this fits the bill.
    • Not just that, but the Slashdot story is a raw cut-and-paste of the CSM article! Slashdot editors: please take down this story or re-word it. Fair use does not include grabbing the first several paragraphs of an article and re-posting as your own, even when it's submitted by a volunteer stringer.

  • Better link (Score:2, Informative)

    by Otto ( 17870 )
    More info here: http://rodan.physics.ucla.edu/pyrofusion/ [ucla.edu]

  • Cautious but optimistic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eunuch ( 844280 ) * on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @02:50PM (#12750032)
    The article clearly notes that this is nowhere near break-even. Yet, as it notes, there are many applications beyond positive energy production. If it is a good source of neutrons, then it is well worth the effort.

    I am optimistic. We have a slightly-puritanical mindset that we have to work for everything. Well...we are coming upon an easy and elegant solution to our energy problems. Even fission needs to be explored more as we find newer ways to contain the radiation (nuclear batteries lasting years could come soon if we get over our hangups).
    • Umm, it's been possible for quite a few years to produce non-self-sustaining fusion reactions with a net energy loss. The only thing new here is that it is done in a slightly different way.
    • It's a neat, small, easy-to-use source of small quantities of high-energy neutrons, useful for applications like portable backscatter scanners.

      It's not a potential power source, and it's not a cold fusion device. It's based on the same principle as every other fusion-based neutron source, like the fusor, or pulse neutron tube - you use an electric field to accelerate nuclei to a very high energy and slam them into a target. The only difference about this device is that it uses this tiny pyroelectric crys
  • is that an accredited research institution?

    google doesn't seem to think there is a "University of Los Angeles"

  • macromedia (Score:2, Funny)

    by bano ( 410 )
    it took me a second to figure out why a macromedia product was even coming in a bottle in the first place

  • Heady group (Score:5, Informative)

    by metlin ( 258108 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @02:50PM (#12750054) Journal
    That's a pretty heady group.

    Putterman [ucla.edu] is particularly famous for his work on sonoluminescence.

    Funnily enough, this is not really the core research of Putterman, his earlier work has largely been in the area of blackbody radiation, sonoluminescence and certain related quantum phenomena.

    More technical details would be nice.

  • Christian Science Monitor to the rescue (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheTranceFan ( 444476 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @02:52PM (#12750082) Homepage
    It's a good thing we've got the Christian Science Monitor's crack staff of writers to help us with the complicated moral issues:

    "...fusing two hydrogen nuclei together to get helium, famously powers our sun (good), as well as hydrogen bombs (bad)."

  • What next? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cally ( 10873 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @02:54PM (#12750103) Homepage
    Xbox 360 -> PPC
    Apple -> Intel
    Transmeta go out of business
    Cold fusion

    What the hell can happen next? My money's on Bill Gates being found dead with a grapefruit up his arse up a crack whore alley...

    • Re:What next? (Score:5, Funny)

      by gclef ( 96311 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @02:59PM (#12750184)
      Debian will release stable...oh, wait.
    • My money's on Bill Gates being found dead with a grapefruit up his arse up a crack whore alley...

      personally that sounds more like Ballmer's thing. Haven't you read his book "Grapefruit Sodomy and Crack Whores, That Sort of Thing Is My Bag, Baby"?

    • Is that Bill Gates will have "seen the light" and releases all the windows source to the public domain.
    • Yeah, you heard it from me first. Apple is going to Intel architecture. IBM and AMD already work together on new process stuff. AMD is fairly cheap for a company that tries to compete with Intel. If IBM wants to maintain any kind of volume production of a modern processor, AMD looks like a great buy. This combination would have the superior x86 chip design AND the capacity to compete with Intel in a significant way. This of course leads to "Dell uses IBM".

      Yeah, the worlds changing fast lately.

    • Duke? (Score:3, Funny)

      by doublem ( 118724 )
      Duke Nukem Forever goes on sale?

  • Alert to Naysayers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @02:55PM (#12750129)
    When fusion-in-a-bottle was announced those years ago the ideal of clean, cheap, essentially unlimited power brought out the naysayers quickly. Jeremy Rifkin saying [fortfreedom.org] "It's the worst thing that could happen to our planet" comes to mind.

    I expect an even greater number of such clowns hitting the news any time now. It's only a shame that each will get far more than the 15 minutes they've already used up.

  • nice, very simply nice.

    now i have an x86 powermac run on my coldfusion generator.

    nice
  • In addition to this being old news, as noted by others...

    Let me just note that cold fusion works and always has. This has been known since the 1920's; it is called quantum tunneling. This isn't even a matter of debate. The only "small" issue is the many orders of magnitude difference between the yield obtainable in practice and what is needed for breakeven.

    So just saying that cold fusion was achieved is no data at all. The question of whether the technique scales to the breakeven point is absolutely criti
    • Thats not cold fusion....
      For "cold" atoms, the tunnel barrier is way to high and broad... thats not a few orders of magnitutes too low, its hundreds...

      The only way ever to get fusion (and not even in the break even way of things, just like 1 reaction per mol per century) is the very far end of the bolzmann tail, which isnt cool anymore.

      Just think about it: There are detectors for neutrino experiments using thousands of tons of water or other stuff (like that in japan, nakasomthing), under EXTREME survilan
    • One of the positive consequences of the original cold fusion flap was a careful recalculation of tunnelling cross-sections in various hydrogen isotopes. The conclusion was worthy of Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--at least one of the cross-sections was revised upwards by something like a factor of 10E30, which moved it from "negligable" to "mostly negligable."

      IIRC, Steve Koonin at Caltech did the work, and the result was a tunneling fusion rate per DD molecule at room temperature of something like 10E-40
  • MSNBC (ugh.. I know) April 27 [msn.com]

    ---

    So how come we haven't heard more about this? Does it not produce a lot of energy?

  • OMG (Score:5, Funny)

    by c0ldfusi0n ( 736058 ) <admin.c0ldfusi0n@org> on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @03:00PM (#12750194) Homepage
    OMG, I'm on slashdot!!

    /sorry
    //had to
  • My network staff has it running in the server room :)

  • Old news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @03:05PM (#12750241)
    McGuyver did this in Ep. 26 with a matchbox, two cotton buds, a filling from his tooth and some scotch tape.

  • Dammit Scotty! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dr. Bent ( 533421 ) <ben&int,com> on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @03:05PM (#12750251) Homepage
    From the article:

    Instead of using high temperatures and incredible densities to ram protons together, the scientists at UCLA cleverly used the structure of an unusual crystal.

    That crystal wouldn't happen to be Dilithium [wikipedia.org] would it?
    • I know you were joking but:
      1) Everyone knows dilithium moderates mater anti-matter reactions, not fusion
      2) The actual crystal was lithium tantalate ... just need to replace the tantalate with another lithium then things will get real interesting ;)

    • Oddly enough... (Score:2, Redundant)

      by raygundan ( 16760 )
      It is a Lithium Tantalite crystal. Perhaps marketing will rebrand it "Dilitium(tm)" once the system is workable outside the lab.
    • Judging by what Krystals do to my arse it's no WONDER this worked!
  • Was it just me, or did anyone else out there jump at the first mention of "crystals" in the article? My first thought was "OMG lightsabers".
  • it was done decades ago by philo farnsworth [wikipedia.org] (who also invented the television)

    it was even done by a college freshman [deseretnews.com] a few years ago

    this isn't news!

    the REAL news is when we have a fusion device that releases more energy than it consumes

    so until the slashdot editors catch the clueboat

    "For the last few years, mentioning cold fusion around scientists has been a little like mentioning Bigfoot or UFO sightings."

    should read

    "For the last few story dupes, mentioning old news about cold fusion around slashdot
    • it was done decades ago by philo farnsworth (who also invented the television)

      That figures. Someone invents cold fusion and the tv, and which one does humanity cling to dearly?
  • Fusion could be useful once they learn how to make true superconductors that operate at normal tempatures so the loss of energy is minimal and possibly can make more energy than is required to maintain the reaction.
  • And here I thought pyrofusion was what happened to a slashdotted CPU...
  • If you are a high voltage, Tesla coil like, electronics geek/nerd and ham radio operator (haha just joking) it appears that we might have enough stuff in our typical junkboxes to accomplish the same experiment. Technology rules!!

    Sincerely, Rob N3FT
  • When and where can I pre-order my Mr. Fusion energy system? And does it come with the DeLorean retro-fit kit?
  • He's been saying this for years, and everyone assumed he'd gone off the deep end.

    I still think he's nuts, but it looks like he may have called this one correctly after all.

  • Oh well (Score:2)

    by malx ( 7723 )
    The current cold fusion apparatus still takes much more energy to start up than you get back out, and it may never end up breaking even.

    1. I guess this one might be the genuine article then...
    2. ...but by the same token, it's hardly earthshattering news.
  • if energy-net-positive cold fusion was ever really achieved in a resonably small form factor? That is, a real Mr. Fusion was invented?

    The socio-economic earthquake would be 11.0 on the Richter scale. The oil companies would go bankrupt. 99 out of 100 'service stations' would be abandoned, dilapidated blights on the landscape. The Middle East would be all of a sudden much less important to the western world, and Israel would all of a sudden have no big body guard named Uncle Sam. All cars would be electric

  • In addition, I have long, fine hair, and was often made a victim of the Van de Graf generator - the little metal ball with a rubber belt inside it that creates enough static electricity to make your hair stand on end. Yeesh.

    Rather, I call "[-1, Off-Topic]" on the article's author and the entire Christian Science Monitor editorial staff.

  • Apple switching to intel.
    Cold Fusion.
    OMG?

  • mesoatoms (Score:2, Informative)

    by AndreyFilippov ( 550131 )
    You'll never get the electric field strong enough to bring protons together - it is the same crap as bottled fusion.

    Real cold fusion is about meso-atoms that are much smaller because muons are heavier than electrons. And so they could be moved closer to each other while being still neutral. Use Google - http://www.google.com/search?&q=mesoatom+fusion [google.com]

  • Well, what about these ideas .... (Score:4, Informative)

    by ankhank ( 756164 ) * on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @07:20PM (#12752954) Journal
    Let's see -- they've talked about cracks in the electrodes, and stressed crystals.

    Can we make a better fusion device using precise fabrication tools? -- produce exactly the right materials and spacing to create tiny little accelerators, artificial crystals, to optimize this procedure?

    If so, can we make a "sea urchin" with a few thousand such little accelerators, all pointed precisely at a tiny pellet -- a miniature version of the giant laser devices currently being built?
    Build the capacitor, the accelerators and the fusion core all on a little chip, wind it up ...

    If so there'd be a nice pellet for for a fusion pellet gun to use to drive an Orion-type spacecraft. Even if it DID take more energy to manufacture than it'd produce, it'd be one heck of a good way to store energy for, um, rapid decomposition devices (things that go boom).

    Or, a wholly different approach --

    I've always wondered what would happen if someone manages to cause fusion to occur between a couple of Bose-Einstein Condensates.

    Make them out of, on the one hand, tritium atoms, and on the other hand, deuterium atoms. Result, one large 'atom' of each element. Very large. Then clap your hands. Fusion?

    Or better yet, use condensates of boron and hydrogen, of course.

    The boron-hydrogen method is described as currently being worked on (not using Bose-Einstein condensates -- using something like the Philo Farnsworth accelerator), if I read it correctly, here:

    http://www.focusfusion.org/energy2.html [focusfusion.org]

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