NASA partners with Global Energy Corporation to develop 10kW Hybrid Reactor Generator

    Quote from JulianBianchi

    It is a logical fallacy to claim that tritium levels should be similar to those expected from D-D fusion in order to prove nuclear origin. Because this assumes a priori the type of nuclear process.


    I have a pretty long response to this, so I've broken it up into 4 parts in different posts.


    4. Tritium?


    I don't know if anyone can identify errors or artifacts in Will's measurements from the publication alone. But neither can one rule them out, or for that matter rule out deception or sabotage from the publication alone.


    But in the post-APS cold fusion era, for trace levels of tritium to be taken seriously would take some kind of consistent body of results from several different laboratories. The results were already not consistent with the claimed levels of excess power, so they should at least be consistent with other tritium measurements.


    However, tritium claims were more closely associated with controversy than consistency. The largest claims came in the period immediately after March 1989, from preliminary experiments. As time past, and the experiments became more careful, the claims became more cautious, and finally negative in some cases, and then tritium experiments all but stopped, without a single interesting question about it answered. In Storms 2010 review, his vague description of what is known 20 years later is almost comical: "It is rarely produced in cold-fusion environments and has no correlation to heat and helium generation. [...] As is the case with all of the cold fusion reactions, this one is also sensitive to conditions on the cathode surface where tritium originates. These rarely formed conditions handicap a study..." He never says what the conditions are.


    Claytor pursued tritium at LANL for years, and the last report I've seen is from 1998, where he still claims tritium, but admits that "due to the subtle and weak nature of the signals observed, we have taken many precautions and checks to prevent contamination and to confirm the tritium is not due to an artifact". The appeal of looking for tritium was that it is so scarce in nature that production in cold fusion would be unmistakeable, and yet after 8 years, they were evidently no more definitive than the excess heat measurements.


    McKubre also studied tritium for a long time with funding from EPRI, and in his final report in 1998, he says "No tritium generation was observed." and elsewhere: "...we may nevertheless state with some confidence that tritium is not a routinely produced product of the electrochemical loading of deuterium into palladium."


    Will, it would seem, abandoned cold fusion even earlier, and from what I could determine, became involved in conventional battery research. That seems an odd career move for someone who has confidence that he has proved LENR. It is odd that Storms does not cite Will's paper in the tritium section of his 2010 review, considering he is pals with Rothwell, and Rothwell often cites Will as irrefutable proof of LENR.


    Taken together, the tritium results are anything but definitive, and even the researchers seem to have lost confidence in them.

    Quote from JulianBianchi

    Either all these labs completely screwed up their analyses (I call this Shanahan's law, a nasty version of Murphy's law), or the underlying phenomenon is nuclear and different from D-D fusion.


    The notion that all the scientists who claims cold fusion are mistaken in their interpretation (not completely screwed up) is not at all implausible to me. As described above, the complete tritium picture is entirely consistent with artifacts or experimental errors. Just the scarcity of current research on tritium suggests that.


    And I would say the same for the excess power measurements. Considering one trajectory: P&F claimed tens of watts with a COP of 4 or so in the very early papers. Then McKubre came along and in one of Rothwell's favorite papers, claims about a half a watt with a COP of about 1.1. That suggests nearly all of P&F heat was artifact, but still McKubre claimed a positive result, and that it was easily achieved. Then in his 1998 report he said "With hindsight, we may now conclude that the presumption of repeatable excess heat was premature, and that has limited progress achieved....". McKubre kind of abandoned that line of research, saying at one point he got tired of trying to "science cold fusion". In the mean time Toyota shut down the P&F lab in France, and Pons abandoned the field.


    And after this, the number of people doing electrolysis experiments seemed to decline rapidly. The number of experimental claims of excess heat in such experiments reported in refereed mainstream literature dwindled to next to nothing. I think the last paper is almost a decade ago.


    Like tritium, there is no progress in understanding or characterizing excess power. There are more kinds of experiments that claim it, but there is no systematic scaling determined, no commensurate reaction products measured. The situation has led to laments from several prominent names:


    Rothwell in 2001: "Why haven’t researchers learned to make the results stand out? After twelve years of painstaking replication attempts, most experiments produce a fraction of a watt of heat, when they work at all. Such low heat is difficult to measure. It leaves room for honest skeptical doubt that the effect is real."


    Hagelstein in 2012?: "aside from the existence of an excess heat effect, there is very little that our community agrees on"


    McKubre 2018: "Nearly 30-year old anomalies should have grown to adult maturity and self-sustainability or been buried and forgotten. By various factors we have been heavily constrained from pursuing and accomplishing the one thing that would make anomalies go away: correlation, preferably multi-correlation"


    Saalfeld 2003 quoted in Newscientist: “For close to two years, we tried to create one definitive experiment that produced a result in one lab that you could reproduce in another,” Saalfeld says. “We never could. What China Lake did, NRL couldn't reproduce. What NRL did, San Diego couldn't reproduce. We took very great care to do everything right. We tried and tried, but it never worked.”


    So, I see it like other pathological sciences, where many scientists can get it wrong. In the case of polywater, according to Diamond (in Scrutinizing Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2855-8_9) there were over 400 publications on polywater before the Deryagin admitted the phenomena were probably due to impurities. And many of these were in the best journals: Nature, Science, JACS etc. Of course, polywater was debunked, and cold fusion probably never will be because of the wide gamut of conditions and phenomena claimed. In that sense it's more like homeopathy or dowsing or perpetual motion, which will likely never die either.

    Quote from JulianBianchi

    Still today only a few physicists are openminded enough to accept the latter with the majority hiding behind their prejudices.


    Actually, I think most advocates do not keep an open mind to the possibility that they may be wrong about cold fusion. Skeptics on the other hand, while nearly certain it is bogus, would change their mind in a heartbeat if the right evidence came along.


    Just go back one post in this exchange where I wrote: "Certainly, the DOE panel reported having doubts. They concluded “that the present evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process termed cold fusion is not persuasive.”"


    But since you said there was no doubt by the end of 1989, I was referring to the first DOE panel. But yes, the 2004 one also expressed doubt.


    > There were 6 supporters, 10 opponents and 2 undecided (my count).


    Yea, well, not that it matters for this point, but your count is wrong. They were unanimous in recommending no special funding for the field, which can only mean they did not consider the field to have sufficient merit. Only one person said the evidence for nuclear reactions was conclusive. All the others expressed some qualifications (if real) on the question of nuclear reactions.


    But even your count proves there was doubt, and that's contrary to there not being doubt.


    There are others who wrote books about their doubt, like Close, Huizenga, Taubes, and Park, and those who wrote skeptical newsletters for a decade while attending all the meetings (Morrison). Doubt was and is everywhere. It is dishonest to say there is no doubt.


    You yourself said in 2001 that there was "room for honest skeptical doubt that the effect is real".


    > The opponents did not examine the data. Their doubts were based on theory and ignorance. They made only a few statements about the experiments and these statements were wrong. So they don't count.


    If you had said there was no doubt among those who agree with you, or there is no doubt among those who have no doubt, or even there is no doubt among those who count by your criteria, I would not have objected.


    But you said without qualification that by the end of 1989 there was no doubt whatever.


    And that's just wrong.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    I do not know of any group of scientists who have examined the data, found errors, and published them. Do you know of any such publication? (I have asked you several times before but you have not responded.) If you will not tell me what report you have in mind, I have no way of evaluating your statements.


    Actually, you mean found what *you* consider to be errors, because I know you're familiar with papers that claim to have found errors. But as I said, I don't see value in rehashing 30 year old papers. What's happened since is completely consistent with cold fusion being pathological science.


    Anyway, I have addressed the question, but I gather you didn't read the response, or you didn't like the response. Here's a cut and paste response from another post:


    I don't agree that a skeptic must explain every observation in experiments that claim cold fusion to remain skeptical, any more than a believer needs to explain the mechanism for cold fusion to believe it is cold fusion. This is a matter of judgement, and if one judges artifacts, errors, deceptions, or bias to be more likely explanations than unprecedented, unidentified radiationless nuclear reactions, particularly with the absence of commensurate reaction products, then one remains skeptical.


    Finding errors or artifacts or alternative explanations in others' experiments from the written report alone is mug's game. What would be needed is to go into the lab, but this is time-consuming, and if the skeptics are satisfied (based on the wildly erratic and marginal results reported from different groups, and the examinations of the evidence by expert panels) that the likelihood of a nuclear explanation is vanishingly small, then they would regard it as a waste of time. If the effect is real, skeptics are prepared to wait for MFMP (or someone) to identify a killer experiment. We're not holding our breath.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    How about you?


    I already said, I see no value in rehashing 30 year-old papers. The failure of advocates to improve the evidence in 30 years, the erratic and marginal claims, the failure to find any correlations (as McKubre laments), the decrease in the size of the effect as experiments improve, the abandonment of experiments without any progress, the absence of a single experiment that anyone can use to prove the effect etc etc are all characteristic of pathological science, and highly uncharacteristic of legitimate science. So, whether Lewis made a mistake or not, his skepticism has been vindicated.


    Quote

    Perhaps you have made consensus fallacy ("appeal to popularity").

    Considering the consensus of experts to be more reliable than the consensus of people who got sucked in by Rossi is not a fallacy. Indeed, one's entire undergraduate education in science is a case of appealing to expert consensus. I consider the expert consensus that our solar system is Copernican to be reliable even though I have not myself examined the necessary data to reach that conclusion.


    Obviously it's better to examine the evidence oneself, if one is qualified, and if the results or claimed results are still relevant. But as I've argued at length, at this point, what has happened since is more relevant. And what has happened since is to me far more consistent with artifacts and confirmation bias than unprecedented nuclear reactions. Rossi showed how artifact (or deception) and confirmation bias can sway pretty much the entire cold fusion community.

    Quote from JedRothwell

    If Lewis's result is incorrect, any conclusions based upon it are invalid, no matter how many people go along with those conclusions, or how much they shaped public opinion in 1989.


    Unless the only conclusion is that they shaped public opinion.


    You're still not catching on. I cited the "huge bubble of enthusiasm" to show that mainstream science welcomed the possibility of cold fusion with enthusiasm. The sentiment changed when the evidence was examined, so it is most plausible that the change in sentiment is due to the examination of the evidence.


    So yes, even if Lewis had been wrong, if that helped shape mainstream opinion, it is still consistent with mainstream judging the claims on evidence, and not being seduced by corrupt self-interest.

    Quote from Eric Walker

    Just an example of what might be needed which is not inconsistent with this: a slight distorting of the electron cloud surrounding the nucleus might alter the screening a small but appreciable amount. The Gamow barrier calculation is extremely sensitive to minute changes in barrier width, so not much of a change would be required. There could also be an outsize effect from transient asymmetries in this screening across the nuclear volume.


    After catching up a little on the (off topic) matter of spontaneous alpha decay of heavy atoms my impression is the following.


    Inside a heavy nucleus like that of U238, stable clusters of two neutrons plus two protons, aka alpha particles, are zipping around bouncing on the inside of the nucleus boundary surface. The bouncing force is due to the imbalance in the nucleon-nucleon forces at the surface, the alpha particle is pulled back when it tries to escape. But the alpha particle has accomplices in its continuous jail break attempts. All the protons try to push it out via long range electrostatic repulsion, the more protons the harder the push. This is why atoms above lead become more and more unstable with increasing atomic weight. When the alpha particle after perhaps a billion years of continuous trying suddenly escapes it does so with high speed, it has a kinetic energy of at least 3 MeV.


    So what part in this process can the atomic electron cloud play? For simplicity we assume that the electron cloud is spherically symmetric. Newton's Shell Theorem is valid for gravitation from spherically symmetric mass distributions like the Earth, but it works equally well with electric charge instead of mass. It states that there is no field inside a spherically symmetric shell. This means that at the critical moment of separation the electron cloud has negligible influence on the alpha particle. During the whole passage through the electron cloud the pushing from the protons will outweigh the pull from the electron shells below the alpha particle. This fact in conjunction with the high kinetic energy of the alpha particle makes me believe that the influence from minor deformations of the electron cloud due to external electric fields on the alpha decay rate must be minute. And even less inside a van de Graaff generator!

    @ Roseland67,


    Quote from Roseland67

    I prefer to refer to the fact that in 7 years Rossi has never ever once produced anything that anyone anywhere has ever properly tested.

    Ever, ever, never once!

    Doesn’t that set off warning alarm bells in your head?


    It is not necessary to wait years to realize that the Ecat tests have not been performed correctly. Actually, the first alarm bell rang in my mind almost immediately after the January 2011 demo (1). In a couple of months, the alarm bells became an orchestra (2).


    It took a little longer to realize that all those flaws were not involuntary mistakes, but deliberate deceptions aimed at convincing the public that the CF/LENR are real.


    What I said in my previous post is that this incredible farce was successful: many people, some main stream media, several political representatives became convinced that LENR was real and could have provided useful energy at industrial level in a few years. Eventually, thanks to the Ecat initiative, dozens of million dollars have been collected and these funds are still at disposal of the LENR community.


    The other thing I said is that, contrary to what every unbeliever (of the first or last hour) keeps saying here, nobody has been fooled by Rossi, because nobody ever believed directly in Rossi.


    For example, JR said many times that he was highly suspicious of Rossi, but he incessantly invited the people to believe in the reality of the Ecat results claimed by many LENR experts and physics professors, because this people could not have been fooled by a method so simple as the water flow calorimetry. Therefore, the entire Ecat initiative has been driven by chains of misplaced trusts, but none of them was based on Rossi credibility.


    (1) http://www.energeticambiente.i…ala-11.html#post119167978

    (2) http://www.physicsforums.com/s…hp?p=3219628&postcount=83

    Just a note about Louis Reed's argument with Jed.


    My own view aligns pretty closely with that of Louis. I have no theoretical problem with the possibility of some LENR nuclear reaction mechanism. There are tantalising hints that screening in some lattice systems might be enough for this to be significant, and certainly nothing to dismiss that possibility except that you might expect experimental evidence of it all over physics - a weak negative.


    My problem is the claimed experimental evidence on LENR, which does not stack up with that hypothesis. That is a great shame, and anyone can live in hope, although as we have seen with Rossi it can be foolish to live in too much hope.

    Ahlfors.


    10pCi / hour is an incredibly small generation rate for Tritium. Its activity is 9800Ci/g, so we have here claimed generation of 1E-15g/hour.


    To work out power from this (based on mass difference)


    Max 10Mev / atom.


    1.3E-16 * 6E23g = 1E8 atoms / hour


    so altogether 1E15 eV / hour


    1eV is 1.6E-19J so we have 1.6uW!


    As Louis has pointed out, the Li levels here are so far below what would make for measurable heat anomalies it is absurd.


    I'd not dismiss the claimed very low fusion rates in high shielding lattices, though not sure this evidence is convincing. But, that is far far away from being what LENR proponents claim, or being related to other (non-tritium) LENR evidence, though to be fair I suppose it is LENR!

    If the diversions have settled down for now, I thought it appropriate to bring up a bit of perspective on the importance of the GEC/GRC contract.


    Let us, for the moment and for the sake of argument, accept that NASA is not simply a passive "partner" in this endeavor, that it actively supports GECs efforts to produce a 10 kW to 100 kW generator. Does this have larger implications for the future of power generation?


    Probably not. You need to keep in mind what NASA wants such a generator FOR. They don't want to generate power to light homes, they want power for long-term, deep-space missions. And what are they using now? Radioisotope Thermal Generators (RTGs). Yeah, the same sort of thing Matt Damon recovered in The Martian. This document gives an overview of the costs involved, and a notable number which can be backed out is the cost per kilowatt. In round numbers, the Mars RTG ran just about a million bucks per watt. Cassini was better, on the order of 100k per watt.


    None of these numbers is remotely interesting for terrestial power generation, but NASA is intensely interested in any technology which would (credibly) promise increased efficiency, as this would lower payload weight. A fission/fusion hybrid would seem an obvious approach, since the byproducts of one process would boost the other - and I notice that on this thread there does not seem to be a consensus as which process would be which.


    But none of this can be considered of obvious importance to the larger world of power generation. NASA's requirements simply diverge too far from everyday needs to make them "important". While the principle would bear paying attention, there is simply no guarantee that such an approach would scale up to something practical (where "practical" is understood to be for non-NASA values of practical).


    So, I submit that the OP counts as interesting, but at this stage of the game (even granting the assumption of partnership in the enthusiastic sense that OP used - and I firmly believe that sense is inappropriate) calling it "important" seems a gross exaggeration.

    Quote from H-G Branzell

    This fact in conjunction with the high kinetic energy of the alpha particle makes me believe that the influence from minor deformations of the electron cloud due to external electric fields on the alpha decay rate must be minute.


    Your analysis takes you away from the quantum mechanical one by getting too concrete with the details. The Gamow theory of alpha decay is understood to be an early, relatively accurate attempt to model the rate of alpha decay quantitatively. It's an early attempt, because a genuine quantum mechanic these days would disavow the ability to know whether there is an alpha particle rattling around the nucleus, trying to escape. Nonetheless the theory is remarkably accurate, because by hook or by crook it is able to estimate the alpha decay rate to within one or two or three orders of magnitude or so in a subset of cases. That may not sound very accurate, but consider that alpha decay rates range over some 20 orders of magnitude (going from memory).


    Change the Coulomb barrier width a small amount, and out of the calculation comes an alpha decay rate that is different by some orders of magnitude than it would otherwise have been. How do electrons factor into this? Their negative charge alters the width of the Coulomb barrier (which surrounds the nucleus), making it more or less likely for this kind of transition to occur (actual mechanism unknown). This is what the Gamow calculation assumes. How does all of this actually work under the hood? One can only speculate, as you have done admirably above, along the lines of Gamow himself.


    The case of oblong deformed heavy nuclei is an interesting and illustrative one. Alpha particles are more likely to be emitted at the poles of these nuclei, where there is less of a Coulomb barrier to traverse, than at the waist.


    I'm going to speculate that you can assume that the electron cloud penetrating the nucleus (and, around the nucleus, the Coulomb barrier) is not spherical, given the various p, d and other non-spherical electron shells. Does this matter, in light of the constant smearing of the electron orbitals as they rotate around in three dimensions? I suspect it does matter, because the timescale on which nuclear events occurs is much faster than that that pertains to the activity of electrons. I'm going to guess that you can assume in the steady that state the electron cloud is radially symmetric around the nucleus. What happens when there is some asymmetry that is momentarily introduced? Perhaps not much, as you have suggested. Alternatively, perhaps there will be significant tidal forces that come into play as the very short-range and very strong nuclear force works to compensate against Coulomb repulsion of the protons in a Coulomb field that is no longer radially symmetric.


    Given the uncertainties in how the whole process works, and the dubious assumption of spherical distribution, there's a question in my mind as to whether the shell theorem will be of help here.

    Quote from THHuxleynew

    anyone can live in hope, although as we have seen with Rossi it can be foolish to live in too much hope.


    Your point is a reasonable one, THH. But I think it would be a mistake to compare the quality of the hope raised by folks of the caliber of Tom Claytor, Brian Oliver and Robert Duncan, on one hand, and Rossi, on the other. Over the years there have been a number of experimentalists with relevant training who, having looked into the matter, have said "there seems to be something there." That provides the basis for a qualitatively different kind of hope than, for example, Rossi's antics.

    Quote from WhatRoughBeast

    So, I submit that the OP counts as interesting, but at this stage of the game (even granting the assumption of partnership in the enthusiastic sense that OP used - and I firmly believe that sense is inappropriate) calling it "important" seems a gross exaggeration.


    Your points are all good, but one detail to mention to give additional context. There's the question of whether what GEC are looking into is a thing, scientifically speaking (and, by extension, a possible variant of LENR). And there's the question of whether it can be turned into a practical source of energy.


    Most of the arguments here and elsewhere over the past three decades have focused on the first question — is LENR/cold fusion scientifically a thing? The question of eventual power generation is a speculative side discussion. If/at such a time as there is mainstream scientific consensus that LENR has an experimental basis, the question of terrestrial power generation will become an interesting one. It seems to me that it would be premature to make any pronouncements about the promise of GEC's process for power generation before getting everyone on the same page about whether it has a scientific basis, given the unknowns.

    Quote

    So, when you accuse MIT of fraud, it's because they are corrupt, and when MIT accuses P&F of fraud it's also because they are corrupt.


    Reminds me of the classic conundrum:


    A man is walking in an alley at night and he walks by a window in which he sees a naked woman, he stares. The police come by and arrest him because he's a peeping tom.


    A woman is walking in an alley at night and she walks by a window in which she sees a naked man, she stares. The police come by and arrest him because he is an exhibitionist.

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