Cold Fusion or Cold Fiction?
Fleischmann and Pons Experiment
These two Utah professors apparently created a nuclear reaction in a test tube, at room temperature and without any extreme temperature. They claim they created over 100 times as much energy than they had before they started. The implications of such a finding would mean that we found a cheap, clean and reliable producer of an unlimited amount of energy. The political and economic implications of this finding are obvious.
Flaws of the Experiment**
· Absence of radiation - The most important indicator of nuclear fusion, radiation, was conspicuously absent in quantities commensurate with known fusion processes.
· Radiation levels would have been lethal to campus - The amount of neutron radiation that should have been generated would have been lethal to the campus population of the University of Utah, and instead Fleischmann and Pons reported much lower levels (on the order of billions of times less).
· Palladium “disappeared” - One of the critical pieces of “evidence” put forth by these two was that a block of palladium used in the experiment had been vaporized, and some of the room in which the experiment was running had been ruined. However, no one was in the room at the time of this explosion, and it is also plausible that a chemical explosion could have caused the same results.
· Equipment Errors - A gamma-ray detector they had set up was being read incorrectly, and they recorded an artifact rather than actual data. Additionally, they rounded many of their numbers on the electrolysis apparatus to integers, leading to a number of inconsistencies and inaccuracies concerning the energy input versus the energy output. It has been since shown that the power “gain” measured by Fleischmann and Pons is a result of these rounding errors, combined with a number of assumptions they made.
· A second explanation - Pons and Fleischmann measured this heat calorimetrically and "when they added up the power integrated over time they got an energy of millions of joules per mol, which is not chemistry. They thought they had found a nuclear reaction. Their evidence for nuclear products was very poor and weak, and in once case, erroneous. However, subsequent, much more careful measurement by them and others confirmed that mega-joules, millions of joules per mol of thermal energy release has occurred." (http://www.evworld.com/archives/interviews2/mallove1.html)
**(All of the in depth info came directly from Tim Bramfeld’s article, “Pathological Science: Cold Fusion.”)
Voodoo Science vs. Limitless Possibilities
Steven Jones - BYU - Doing same experiments, but found cold fusion could not produce energy in large enough amounts for practical use (http://www.fdavidpeat.com/bibliography/books/coldfusion.htm - F. David Peat’s Cold Fusion book website.)
· Inconsistent results - Follow-up experiments popped up all over, all with opposite results; some proved Pons and Fleishmann’s work, others disproved it.
· Voodoo Science - These inconsistencies divided the scientific community into two school: skeptics and diehard believers.
From Edmund Storms’ page “[Cold Fusion has] been duplicated hundreds of times in laboratories throughout the world and the subject has been discussed in over 3000 papers, many in peer reviewed journals. Unfortunately, because of the rejecting attitude of conventional scientists, much of this information is not available in scientific journals.”
· Political Implications and Conspiracies - http://business.gorge.net/zdkf/zdki/zil-cfc.html
· Further Proof - http://www.evworld.com/archives/interviews2/mallove1.html
· Naval support - http://www.infinite-energy.com/IEHTML/FEATURE/FEATR/44Navy.html