September 5, 2012

CRAP - RIP Martin Fleischmann

Your brain may take a few seconds to recover the name and then you will politely chuckle at the Cold Fusion fiasco of the late 1980's but that dog is still very much alive. Martin died August 3rd. From the UK Guardian:
Martin Fleischmann obituary
Accounts of the cold fusion claims of the Czech-born electrochemist Martin Fleischmann, who has died aged 85, and his American-French former student Stanley Pons often assert that their results could not be replicated. This implies that their original experiments, carried out at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, in the 1980s were flawed. Cold fusion has since come to be commonly regarded as a delusion, but the true situation is more complicated.

The Fleischmann-Pons experiments were motivated by the idea that hydrogen fusion, the source of the sun's heat, which goes very slowly at ordinary temperatures, might go significantly faster if the nuclei involved were brought closer together, as when hydrogen is absorbed at high density in a material such as palladium. The project was more successful than anticipated: returning to the laboratory after one weekend, when the apparatus had been turned off, the pair found that so much heat had been produced that a large hole had been melted into the bench and concrete floor. As a precaution they reduced the scale of the experiment and announced their findings at a press conference in 1989.

While the original nuclear claims appear to have been erroneous � it was not their area of expertise � the parallel claim relating to excess heat production is different. Some scientists failed to replicate this, but others were successful, notably Michael McKubre of SRI International, California. At the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, a nuclear product, tritium, was detected, indicating that nuclear processes were indeed occurring.

Fleischmann and Pons continued their efforts in France from 1992 until Fleischmann retired three years later and returned to Britain. In 2004 a US Department of Energy report supported the view that the excess heat claims were valid, but had little influence on general opinion. Though the nuclear difficulties were eventually resolved, the fact that heat had been observed in excess of anything that can be explained on the basis of the usual mechanisms was neglected, or talked away.

The fact that many who tried to reproduce the phenomenon failed should not have been considered conclusive, since phenomena in materials are sometimes difficult to reproduce. Scientists convinced that there was a real effect continued work in the area over the years in several countries, including France, Italy, the US, and Japan, often with government support. Some, hopeful that the process might ultimately become a useful source of energy, concentrated on increasing the power generated.
There are a couple of teams working actively in this field and getting "curious" results. Next couple of years should be interesting -- these people plus LFTR and EMC and someone somewhere will make a lot of money. Makes me sick to my stomach that so much of your and my money is being pissed away on Solyndra and their crony ilk (And I am looking at you: Solar and Wind) when there is a known body of good solid science and engineering out there working on real solutions. Posted by DaveH at September 5, 2012 10:30 PM
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