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Cold Fusion Heats Up, Again

Pamela Mosier-Boss and colleagues at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California, are claiming to have made a “significant” discovery – clear evidence of the products of cold fusion using a special plastic to track neutrons. The researchers placed a sample of CR-39 plastic in contact with a gold or nickel cathode in an electrochemical cell filled with a mixture of palladium chloride, lithium chloride and deuterium oxide, so-called “heavy water”. When a current was passed through the cell, palladium and deuterium became deposited on the cathode.

After several weeks, the team found a small number of “triple tracks” in the plastic three 8 micrometre wide pits radiating from a point. The team says such a pattern occurs when a high-energy neutron strikes a carbon atom inside the plastic and shatters it into three charged alpha particles that rip through the plastic leaving tracks.

If you recall back in 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons proposed a their experiment as proof of cold fusion. Problem is their work could not be reproduced by anyone else. But the story caught the public imagination because the cold fusion process would mean a cheap, clean and limitless source of power. And when it didn’t pan out, many conspiratorial types started in with the old claim that the government was suppressing the discovery to aid “Big Oil”. Gee… if this free energy is so repressed, why is the latest news coming from a lab with such close government and military ties? You would think they would be easy to hush-up.

To be sure Hot Fusion does occur, it’s what powers stars like our Sun, Hot fusion reactions have been done by researchers, but so far the process requires putting in more energy than is produced, So fusion is a reality, but many scientist think cold fusion remains science fiction. Many in the field prefers to categorise the work as evidence of “low energy nuclear reactions”, something observable at tiny scale and sensitive recording equipment of a lab, but useless for any real work. It will be interesting to see what happens with the latest discovery and more importantly, if it can be scaled to a useful size.