Cold Fusion Breakthrough … What’s A Neo-Marxist World Leader To Do?
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Obama claims we need to end our dependency on fossil fuels that cause global warming, and find renewable alternative energy sources …
BUT … he also says we need to de-fund the military (in so many words) and cut funding to unproven whatnot(s)
FOX:
Navy Chemist May Have Rediscovered ‘Cold Fusion’
Twenty years ago this week, a pair of previously unknown scientists stunned the world by announcing they’d done the impossible by achieving nuclear fusion in a lab flask at room temperature.
Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons quickly became celebrities as the news media hailed them for discovering a cheap source of nearly limitless power. But it all fell apart as other scientists couldn’t duplicate their results, and the pair later admitted they’d made mistakes in the experiments.
Now a U.S. Navy researcher, speaking on the anniversary of and in the same city where they made their announcement, thinks Fleischmann and Pons may have been right.
In a paper presented on Monday, chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss told the annual convention of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City that her team had gotten “very significant” evidence of some sort of nuclear reaction.
“To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from an LENR device,” said Mosier-Boss, a researcher at the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, in a press release.
• Click here to read the American Chemical Society press release.
Highly energetic neutrons, which Mosier-Boss’ team detected using special neutron-trapping plastic, are emitted from atoms splitting apart — or fusing together — and indicate that a serious nuclear reaction is going on.
“LENR” stands for “low energy nuclear reaction,” which in this case happens in a lab flask containing palladium chloride mixed with deuterium, or “heavy water” made with a special form of hydrogen — the same setup Fleischmann and Pons used.
When an electrode was dipped into the flask and the power switched on, Mosier-Boss said, odd patterns of triple neutron strikes would appear on the adjacent plastic receptor.
Fleischmann and Pons’ results centered on unexplainable excess heat resulting from the reaction. Mosier-Boss didn’t get that, but the neutrons are even more significant.
“People have always asked ‘Where’s the neutrons?’” Mosier-Boss said in the press release. “If you have fusion going on, then you have to have neutrons. We now have evidence that there are neutrons present in these LENR reactions.”
Nuclear fusion occurs at the center of stars, which fuse together hydrogen nuclei to create helium. It creates enormous amounts of energy, but takes pretty huge amounts of heat to happen at all.
Humans have so far generated the necessary heat only by detonating fission-based atomic bombs, which heat up cores of special two-neutron hydrogen to create a second, fusion-based explosion — a hydrogen bomb.
Decades of efforts to create controlled nuclear fusion, which could power reactors endlessly using cheap, abundant hydrogen, have so far been fruitless.
Scientists in possible cold fusion breakthrough
WASHINGTON – Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is “significant” evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.
The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.
“Our finding is very significant,” said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.
“To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a LENR device,” added the study’s co-author in a statement.
The study’s results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The city is also the site of an infamous presentation on cold fusion 20 years ago by Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons that sent shockwaves across the world.
Despite their claim to cold fusion discovery, the Fleishmann-Pons study soon fell into discredit after other researchers were unable to reproduce the results.
Scientists have been working for years to produce cold fusion reactions, a potentially cheap, limitless and environmentally-clean source of energy.
Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss’s published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.
“It fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons,” he told the Houston Chronicle.
“The whole point of fusion is, you?re bringing things of like charge together. As we all know, like things repel, and you have to overcome that repulsion somehow.”
But Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, said the study was “big” and could open a new scientific field.
The neutrons produced in the experiments “may not be caused by fusion but perhaps some new, unknown nuclear process,” added Krivit, who has monitored cold fusion studies for the past 20 years.
“We’re talking about a new field of science that’s a hybrid between chemistry and physics.”
(AFP)
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