Cold Fusion Energy Science
Starter Lesson
A Starter Lesson in Cold Fusion
This starter lesson is in the form of a science tutorial designed to provide a background for understanding cold fusion, a radiationless form of fusion energy, and its difference from other energy sources. It has been written for students and non-professional readers.
A Science Tutorial
There are now four distinct types of energy production: 1) chemical energy, that powers our cars and most of our civilization, 2) nuclear fission energy, as used to generate about 15% or our electricity, 3) plasma fusion nuclear energy, which powers the sun and most stars, and 4) cold fusion nuclear energy, which initially appeared as unexplained heat in the laboratory studies of a pair of experimenters. The three types of nuclear energy produce 10 million times as much heat per pound of fuel than occurs with chemical energy. How do these types of energy differ?
Protons and Electrons. The Hydrogen Atom
Nature has provided us with 2 types of stable charged particles, the proton and the electron. The proton is heavy, normally tiny, and has a positive charge. The electron is light, normally diffuse and fuzzy, and has a negative charge. The positive charge and the negative charge attract each other, just like the north pole of a magnet attracts the south pole of a magnet. When you bring 2 magnets together with the north pole of one facing the south pole of the other, they pull together, bang! When they bang into each other they release a little bit of energy in the form of heat, but it is too small an amount to easily measure. To pull the magnets apart you have to do work, which is another way of saying you have to use up energy. It's almost like pulling a rock back up a hill. Rolling the rock down a hill actually creates a little heat, and pulling the rock back up the hill takes energy.
In the same way the positive charge of the proton pulls on the negative charge of the electron and they stick together, releasing energy in the process. The simplest atom is a hydrogen atom, designated H. The hydrogen atom is nothing but one fuzzy electron hugging a compact proton. The proton is the nucleus of the hydrogen atom. If you knock the electron off the hydrogen atom you get a positive ion H+, which is nothing more than a lone proton. An ion is the name applied to an atom or molecule that has lost or gained one or more electrons, hence is no longer electrically neutral.
Fig. 1.2,1 A hydrogen atom consists of a proton embedded in a fuzzy cloud of electron charge. This figure is a computer plot of electron density taken from "Chemistry, experimental foundations" by R.W. Parry, L.E. Steiner, R.L. Tellefsen,. and P.M. Dietz (Prentice Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, NJ, 1970).
Other Atoms
Other atoms (oxygen, nitrogen, iron, etc.) have different numbers of protons inside them, which means they all have different plus charges. The nucleus of the helium atom has 2 protons inside it, hence has plus 2 charge, and requires 2 electrons to neutralize its charge. When 2 electrons stick to it, it becomes a helium atom. The oxygen nucleus has 8 protons and has charge 8. When 8 electrons stick to it, it becomes an oxygen atom. The nitrogen atom has 7 electrons, while iron atoms have 26. But all the atoms are built more or less the same way, with a compact positively charged nucleus embedded in a cloud of fuzzy electrons. The fuzzy cloud surrounding the hydrogen nucleus is shown in Figure 1.2,1 The difference in size between the compact nucleus and the fuzzy electrons is enormous. The sun has a diameter only about 100 times that of the earth. The electron cloud in an atom has a diameter which is about 100,000 times that of the nucleus. This is a big number. If a proton was increased in size to be the width of a blade of grass and placed in the center of a football field, the electron cloud would enclose the whole football field. Cube these numbers to get the difference in volumes.
Chemical Energy
The atoms, all electrically neutral, can actually join with each other and release more energy. This is another way of saying that they can join into more stable configurations. The negatively charged electrons in an atom try to configure themselves so as to get as close as possible to their positively charged nucleus, but their fuzzy nature requires that they take up a certain volume of space. However, if they join together with the electrons of another atom they can usually find a tighter configuration that leaves them closer to their positively charged nuclei. For example, 2 hydrogen atoms can join together into a more compact configuration if each hydrogen atom contributes its electron to a 2‑electron cloud, which the separate protons share. In this manner they form a grouping of the 2 electrons in a single cloud, together with the 2 isolated protons spaced apart from each other but still within the electron cloud. The result is a heat-producing chemical reaction in which 2 H atoms combine to form a hydrogen gas molecule. The H2 configuration is the hydrogen molecule, and when you buy a tank of hydrogen gas, H2 molecules is what you get. Furthermore, the 2 electrons of the H2 molecule and the 8 electrons of the O atom can find a still more compact configuration by combining their electrons to create the water molecule, plus heat. The water molecule is really a single cloud of electrons in which are embedded the three point-like nuclei to form a minimum energy configuration. So when we burn oil or coal, we change the configuration of the electrons to produce more stable arrangements of point-like nuclei embedded in electron clouds, liberating heat. So much for chemical energy.
Strong Force and Neutrons
We have slid over one point. How does Nature construct a nucleus containing two or more protons in the first place? After all, each of the protons has a positive charge, and the positive charges repel each other very strongly when they are separated by a tiny distance, equal to the distance across a nucleus. The repulsion of like charges is just like the repulsion between the north poles of two magnets when they are pushed together the wrong way. Something must overcome this repulsion, or else the only kind of atoms we would have would be those of hydrogen. Fortunately, this is not what we observe. The answer is that there is a second kind of force which acts on protons. This is the strong nuclear force. The nuclear force is a very strong attraction but requires particles to almost sit on each other to have any effect. It is often called "the strong force". Also, there is a second kind of heavy particle, which is just like a proton, except that it has no positive or negative charge. It is not pushed away by the proton's plus charge. This other kind of particle is called the neutron, since it is electrically neutral. A peculiar fact of life is that it exists in stable form only inside a nucleus. When not in the nucleus it changes into a proton, an electron and a very light anti-neutrino in about 10 minutes. But it lasts forever inside a nucleus.
Nuclear Fusion
The neutron and the proton very strongly attract each other once they get close enough together, and then they combine to form a highly stable pair called a deuteron, which we designate D+. The single deuteron, when it combines with a single electron, forms the heavy hydrogen atom called deuterium, designated D. A second nuclear reaction, called fusion, occurs when two deuterons make contact. When they can be forced together so as to make contact, the 2 deuterons fuse, making a doubly charged particle. The grouping of 2 protons and 2 neutrons is even tighter than the proton-neutron grouping in the deuteron. When neutralized by 2 electrons, the new particle is the helium atom, designated He. Larger groupings of neutrons and protons exist in nature and serve as the nuclei of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and iron, etc. atoms. All of these groupings are made possible by the strong force, which is felt between protons and neutrons only when they are in contact or share the same nucleus-size volume of space.
Nuclear Fission
Normal nuclear energy power plants are powered by nuclear fission energy, not fusion energy. During the early history of the universe massive stars were formed. In the explosion of these massive stars, lots of different types of nuclei were formed and exploded back into space. Second and later generation stars and planets were formed from this mix, including the sun. In the explosion process probably every possible stable configuration of protons and neutrons was produced, plus some almost-stable groupings, such as the nucleus of the uranium atom. There are actually 3 different types of uranium atom nuclei, called uranium-234, uranium-235, and uranium-238. These "isotopes" differ in their number of neutrons, but they all have 92 protons. The nuclei of all uranium atoms can go to a lower energy configuration by ejecting a helium nucleus, but this process occurs so rarely that the Earth's uranium has already lasted over 4 billion years.
The uranium nuclei are unstable in another way. In general, groupings of protons and neutrons are happiest if they have about 60 protons-plus-neutrons. The uranium nuclei contain more than three times this number. So they would like to split in two, which would release a lot of heat. But nature doesn't provide a way for them to split apart. They have to first go to a higher energy configuration before splitting in two. However, one of the three forms of uranium nucleus found in nature called uranium-235 and designated 235U, gains the needed energy if it captures a neutron. The energized nucleus that results from neutron capture then splits apart with the release of an enormous amount of energy, and incidentally with release of additional neutrons. The additional neutrons can then split more uranium-235 nuclei, keeping the reaction going. This is what happens in nuclear power plants, where the heat, which is the end product of the nuclear splitting process, is used to boil water, generate steam, and turn electrical generators. (One also gets lots of radioactive products, which are a nuisance to dispose of safely and constitute an environmental hazard lasting many human generations.)
Hot Fusion
We are now also in a position to understand hot fusion (plasma fusion) nuclear energy. As mentioned in lesson 5, the groupings of protons plus neutrons is most stable when the numbers of neutrons and protons approximate those found in the nucleus of an iron atom. Just as uranium has too many neutrons plus protons to be comfortable, so the light elements like hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen have too few. If the nuclei can be made to make contact under proper conditions, they can combine to create more stable groupings, plus heat. This is the process of fusion. Nature has found a way of doing this in stars like the sun. All Nature has to do is heat compressed hydrogen hot enough and wait long enough and plasma fusion will occur. If Nature were to start with deuterium, which already has a paired proton and neutron, the task would be relatively easy in a star. Temperature is a measure of how much speed an atom of a given type has as it bangs around inside a cloud of such atoms. The higher the temperature, the higher the speed and the closer the atoms get to each other momentarily during a collision. In a star the temperatures are high enough that all the electrons quickly get knocked off the atoms, so one is really dealing with a mixed cloud of electrons and nuclei, called a plasma. At very high temperature the nuclei occasionally get close enough during collisions for the pulling-together short range nuclear force to turn on. Then the nuclei can stick together and go to a lower energy grouping of protons plus neutrons, releasing heat.
There is an international hot plasma fusion nuclear energy program, which is an attempt to carry out this process in the lab using deuterium and mass-3 hydrogen (whose nucleus is a compact grouping of 1 proton and 2 neutrons) as the gas. Hot fusion requires that the gas plasma be contained at temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees, which can be done with the help of magnetic fields, but only for 1 or 2 seconds. The hope is to contain the gas for longer times. During the period of high temperature containment nuclear reactions occur during collisions. The main form of energy release is ejection of high energy neutrons and protons. The proton energy quickly converts to heat. The neutron energy can also be converted to heat, but makes the equipment highly radioactive. It then becomes difficult to repair the equipment, which could make hot fusion a poor candidate for commercial power production. In any case hot fusion power is a dream that is still probably at least 50 years away. It has been impossible to keep the hundred million degree gas away from the container for more than 1 second. Electrical instabilities occur in the plasma gas. In the most successful experiment a power output of 16 Megawatts was achieved for less than 1 second, and the fusion energy produced was less than the energy used to heat and confine the gas. But most scientists view hot fusion as the only way to achieve fusion power. Plasma fusion produces less radioactivity than fission power, is relatively environmentally benign, and has a virtually limitless fuel supply on earth. (more than a billion years at present energy usage rates).
Cold Fusion
Cold fusion promises a less costly and non-radioactive way of releasing nuclear fusion energy. Cold fusion relies on a different way of letting the protons and neutrons in one nucleus make contact with those in another nucleus, so that the nuclear force can bring them into a more stable configuration. Nuclei have sometimes been modeled like drops of liquid. For water droplets to combine, they must make contact. The same joining together occurs with nuclei. The requirement for any nuclear reaction to occur is that the reacting nuclei either make contact or come to share the same volume of space. The sharing condition is called particle overlap. In plasma fusion particle overlap is brought about briefly by banging the nuclei together so as to overcome momentarily the repulsion of the two positive charges which try to keep the particles apart. In cold fusion particle overlap conditions are achieved by making deuterium nuclei act as extended fuzzy objects like electrons in a metal, instead of like tiny points. The fuzziness is dictated by the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle. When an electron is part of an atom, its fuzzy volume is called an "orbital". The conduction electrons in a metal are in very extended orbitals. Cold fusion occurs when the deuterons are in metal-type electron "orbitals".
A cold fusion reactor, i.e., an apparatus that promotes cold fusion, makes deuterons behave like electrons in a metal. When a heavy hydrogen atom is added to a metal, it loses its electron to the metal. The deuteron moves into the metal and occupies a position where it is surrounded by the metal atoms. The metal atoms are in an ordered array, which is embedded in a sea of electrons, called the "fermi sea". The atoms make room for the deuteron and the fermi sea neutralizes the deuteron's positive charge. Each deuteron has its own little volume. This is not the form of hydrogen that supports cold fusion. To get two or more deuterons to share the same volume one most go one step further. In a metal, electrical current is carried by the fermi-sea electrons, which act more like vibrating matter waves than like point particles. This behavior is part of the famous wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics. If electrons did not become very extended objects inside solids, there would be no transistors and no present day computers.
The wave-like form of electron inside a metal is called a "quasiparticle". The secret of cold fusion is that one needs quasiparticle deuterons. This need for quasiparticle geometry has not been recognized. Once a quasiparticle deuteron is created, its positive charge is shared between many local volumes. The deuteron has been "partitioned". The repulsion force between two such deuterons is enormously reduced and no longer keeps the deuterons cleanly separated. The nuclear strong force comes into play, pulling the partitioned deuterons together to form a stable helium nucleus in quasiparticle form. Nuclear reaction energy heats the metal without release of dangerous radiation.
To study cold fusion the experimenter has to entice some of the deuterons to assume the quasiparticle form. The cold fusion experiments discussed in this paper demonstrate the radiationless release of cold fusion heat. Five years ago no one knew how to do it reliably. New materials in the form of clusters of metal atoms called nanometals have greatly improved reliability. Since cold fusion promises more than a billion years of energy without the problems of global warming or radioactivity, an urgent effort should be made to learn how to make commercially affordable heaters.
Fission vs. Fusion Atomic Power
Fission Power
More about atomic energy. Atomic energy is the same as nuclear energy. It has a bad reputation because of its radioactive waste and its association with the atom bomb. A group of major countries is seeking a safer form of nuclear power (less contamination), and has undertaken a global program on plasma fusion energy, called ITER, to meet this goal.
Today's atomic power is mainly a classical nuclear physics discipline. It is concerned with generation and capture of free neutrons, and the splitting of uranium and plutonium atoms. Generation of massive amounts of heat by uranium fission is made possible by three aspects of nuclear physics. First, the most stable nuclei are those corresponding to mid-mass elements with a mass somewhat heavier than iron. Language-wise, protons and neutrons are lumped together and called nucleons. The lowest energy arrangement of nucleons is the most stable nucleus. The iron we mine is a mixture of 4 different nuclei, each having a different mass. This is to say that iron has 4 stable isotopes. The most abundant form of iron nucleus is the iron-56 isotope, which is written 56Fe. It has 56 nucleons, of which 30 are neutrons and 26 are protons. The other isotopes have the same number of protons, but a different number of neutrons. The uranium used in nuclear power plants is the uranium-235 isotope, written 235U. It has 143 neutrons and 92 protons. It is a much less stable than 56Fe in the sense that its binding energy per nucleon is much lower than that of 56Fe and much lower than that of other elements in the mid-mass portion of the Periodic Table of elements. At the beginning of WWII it was already known that if a uranium nucleus could be split into two pieces, a lot of energy would be released.
Nuclear power became available when a way was found to split a uranium nucleus into 2 pieces. In nuclear power plants it is not the 235U nucleus that splits. It is its neighbor isotope 236U. When 235U absorbs a neutron, it becomes 236U in a highly excited state. The over-energized 236U nucleus has too much vibration energy and flies apart in 2 pieces: it undergoes fission. The reason that 236U is so highly excited is that even-numbered nuclei are generally much more stable than neighboring odd-numbered nuclei.
The 2 fragments produced by fission of uranium have a higher neutron/proton ratio than other nuclear configurations in the mid-mass range of elements. The excess neutron/proton ratio makes the fission fragments unstable and highly radioactive. As a result, neutrons inside the nucleus want to decay into protons plus electrons and antineutrinos, in a process called beta-decay (b-decay). The emission of b-rays (high energy electrons of nuclear origin) is frequently accompanied by emission of gamma‑rays (high energy x‑rays of nuclear origin). Successive conversion of neutrons into protons eventually creates stable nuclear end-products.
Plutonium-239 is a man-made nuclear fuel produced when the most common form of uranium, 238U, absorbs a neutron. The 238U isotope is about 140 times more plentiful than the 235U isotope in mined uranium. The reaction sequence is
238U + n => 239U => 239Np + electron + antineutrino + gamma ;
239Np => 239Pu + electron + antineutrino + gamma ,
where n is a neutron, Np is Neptunium, and Pu is plutonium. 239Pu is a synthetic nuclear fuel and acts much like 235U.
Operation of a commercial nuclear power plant depends on a neutron chain reaction. When a 236U nucleus splits in two, it produces free neutrons in the fragmentation process. On the average, more than one free neutron is produced. It would take one free neutron per fission to keep a chain reaction going if no free neutrons escaped or were lost in "sterile" absorptions that do not produce fission. But some neutrons are always absorbed in non-fission reactions. The power plant operator must ensure that just the right number of neutrons get absorbed in "sterile" absorptions. Otherwise, heat production will either increase exponentially, or die down exponentially. The power plant maintains a desired number of free neutrons by mechanically inserting or removing a control rod containing a non-fissionable neutron absorber, like cadmium or boron. In contrast, the bomb maker seeks to make the increase in number of free neutrons as fast as possible.
As you can see, the physics of commercial power plants is much the same as that of an atomic bomb. There is a difference in the 235U/238U ratio in the fuels employed. But guaranteeing that no bombs are being made in a nation running its own nuclear power plants is a difficult task. This task is assigned to an international monitoring agency. Nuclear proliferation is probably the most serious problem threatening the survival of a not very peaceable 6-billion person world society.
Fusion Power
The alternate way of harnessing nuclear energy is fusion. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the sun. The enormous amount of hot hydrogen gas in the center of the sun supports a very low rate of nuclear reaction, in which normal hydrogen H is slowly being converted into helium over the course of a few billion years. The gradual release of nuclear fusion energy is sufficient to keep the center of the sun very hot. The energy gradually leaks out of the sun in the form of infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light. The visible light energizes the biosystem of Earth, of which we are a part.
The fusion process in the sun is called "plasma fusion". The global community has committed billions of $ to develop plasma fusion as an alternative form of nuclear energy, with the goal of generating electricity with less radioactive waste than produced by fission, while tapping an essentially endless supply of heavy hydrogen fuel. Unfortunately, plasma instability problems associated with containing the required super hot plasma have delayed the development process. There is no guarantee of success. Some would say that the likelihood of commercial success in the 21st century is small. Although the radioactivity problem is small compared to that of uranium fission, it is not negligible. Radioactive equipment is costly to repair. The amount of future effort in this area is uncertain.
In addition to plasma fusion, fusion has been made to occur at laboratory equipment temperature. Laboratory temperature fusion is called "cold fusion". There are two forms of cold nuclear fusion energy that have been demonstrated in the laboratory. The first discovered form was observed in 1956, in a reaction called "muon-catalyzed fusion". Muons are radioactive unstable particles that were first identified in cosmic rays, and subsequently found as secondary decay products in nuclear physics accelerator experiments. There are 3 types of muons: positive, negative, and neutral. The negative muon is very much like a heavy electron. Its mass is ~200 times that of an electron. It is an unstable "meson". The negative muon decays into an electron and a muonic antineutrino in about 2 microseconds (2.1 x 10^-6 s). If you mix negative muons and hydrogen gas, you end up with very small hydrogen ionic molecules like H2+ in which the separation between paired hydrogen nuclei is about 200 times smaller than in a normal H2 molecule. In terms of volume ratio, which determines density, the factor is 8 million. The element hydrogen H has 3 isotopes, 1H, 2H, and 3H. These are often designated H, D, and T, where D stands for deuterium and T stands for tritium. H and D are stable isotopes, whereas T is a man-made radioactive isotope. Nuclear physicists generally use "d" for the deuterium nucleus, which is called a deuteron. Muon-catalyzed fusion works best with the DT+ muonic molecule, but also is observed with the D2+ muonic molecule. The reaction process always creates copious neutrons, energetic particles, and sometimes gamma-rays. The process was explained quantitatively by J. D. Jackson in 1957. Many studies have been carried out to see whether there could be some way of efficiently producing enough negative muons to make muon-catalyzed fusion a practical energy source. The process is not a good candidate for future energy production. The energy required to replace the decaying muons turns out to be greater than the electrical energy that could be produced.
The clean energy cold fusion discussed in this book is the second form of cold fusion. Unlike muon-catalyzed fusion, it does not depend on high density. It is a remarkably beneficent form of nuclear energy. It was discovered by two chemists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons (F-P), about 20 years ago. Because high densities are not involved, and because of a special "quantum" geometry that must be imposed, there is no emission of energetic particles or gamma rays allowed. The primary nuclear product is helium, which is a harmless gas. The response of the consensus science community was disbelief. Fusion heat production without radiation seemed too good to be true. Cold fusion violated the consensus view that chemistry can never affect nuclear physics. Fusion without neutrons and energetic particles violated every aspect of known fusion physics. Initial skepticism was increased by quick attempts to reproduce the F-P experiments. These first verification experiments showed little evidence of fusion heat. Even F-P had difficulty in reproducing their first results for a half year. Nevertheless, a few scientists accepted the initial published laboratory evidence. They questioned the majority view, respected the F-P data, and stuck to the rule that lab and observations are the boss. Eventually, F-P and a number of others obtained new evidence that some sort of nuclear process was being made to occur by chemical means. Today's evidence is conclusive.
During cold fusion's first decade, supporting evidence for heat production accumulated, but poor reproducibility of the F-P process persisted. Only the research team of Yoshiaki Arata and YueChang Zhang (A-Z), using nanometer size palladium powder, seemed to get consistent results If the F-P discovery was correct, there was some sort of instability or unknown factor involved. An inconsistent process is not the sort of thing one needs for generating home heat and electricity. It is not surprising that research support in this area has been lacking.
We now know a lot more about the F-P process than we did in the early 1990s. Conditions leading to heat production have been identified. Studies have shown a quantitative match between helium production and nuclear heat produced. Two types of instability that have plagued earlier work have been identified. A-Z methods involving a new type of fine metal powder have recently led to easier reproducibility. Empirical factors that control F-P heat production in bulk metal have been identified.
Cold fusion depends on a physical configuration that can only be understood in terms of quantum mechanics. However, one does not need quantum mechanics to understand the engineering and operation of the new experiments that have shown that workable cold fusion heaters can be built. But, one does need some quantum mechanics to understand why the cold fusion process works.
THE QUANTUM WORLD
Welcome to the quantum world. It is a quirky and interesting world. It is the source of the stunning advances in communication and computing technology that have revolutionized the way we live. Today's communication technology seems incredible to those who grew up in the pre-television world. In the 1940s Dick Tracy had a wrist watch radio like today's cell phone. He was a hero detective in the comics. What was dreamed about has become every day use. The first television screens were based on flying electrons directed towards points on a fluorescent screen inside a heavily evacuated picture tube. Images were in black and white. Today's wall-wide flat screens were 25th century dreams. During WWII, the computers used in calculations leading to the atomic bomb were carried out on mechanical adding and multiplication machines, or were done with slide rules based on logarithm mathematics. Today's portable computers were beyond imagination. In this century we are seeing a similar revolution in diagnostic medicine, where we identify proteins produced in response to an individual's genetic code. The idea that little semiconductor-based wafers could identify an individual's gene-directed protein production was just not conceivable 2 decades ago. Choosing medical treatments based on an individual's gene-influenced chemistry is just beginning.
Cold fusion is a product of the quantum world. It is part of what is called solid state physics, where strange quantum states describe equally strange and useful behaviors. Solid state physics is being harnessed in an incredibly diverse world of new devices. The peoples of today's world use these devices in every day living as they pursue their multi-tasking lives. Historically, changes have always occurred, but the scale and rapidity of changes are faster than ever. Part of the reason is that new discoveries in the solid state physics have opened incredible new opportunities. The first few years after new technologies become available are years of relatively rapid change. After a new area of discovery has been around for a while, the pace of development usually slows. Today's exceptional rate of change is probably due to globalization. The whole world contributes to today's advances, and the dominance of a few leading countries is a thing of the past. What is learned in country A is quickly passed on to countries B, C, and D. The advances in cold fusion would have been impossible without a global sharing of experiences and views.
In the near future the quantum world will start impacting the world of energy supply. It is none too soon. We are already producing oil at close to the maximum expected rate. This rate is unsustainable over even the present century. Discovery of adequate new oil supplies is considered unlikely. The technology that supports today's 6.6 billion people depends on resources that are going to decline. Moreover, the impact of this full utilization threatens many ecological systems that are valued by the world community. The quantum world has already begun to affect the energy field by its development of solar cells and new battery materials. These inventions are useful and can provide relief during the transitional period when fossil fuel energy is still available. But it seems doubtful that they can adequately support the fast paced society to which we have become accustomed. The New Energy technology examined here is different. It taps a resource base that can support the energy needs of 6.6 billion people for at least a billion years. The new technology makes use of a relatively unfamiliar portion of the same quantum world that has given us today's solar cells. The timing is good. We are going to need a lot of new energy by mid-century, if not before. Those who worry about global warming say that we need it now.
Like most other technology advances, like the invention of steam engines and knitting machines, most people will enjoy the benefits of the devices while not understanding the details which make them practical. However, we are in a decision-making period, which makes it important that a larger number of people understand how cold fusion works and the principles that makes it possible. Decisions based on knowledge and understanding are needed to guide investment of intellectual effort, capital, and government support. Research, development, and economic strategy will determine how soon the fruits of discovery are enjoyed. The Clean Energy cold fusion field has recently reached the point of having demonstrated heat production in several devices, but very few understand the physical and chemical science that catalyzes the configuration change that enables the new fuel to fuse and release heat. Most experimenters only know that energy release can be made to occur, but they don't know why it works. We need more persons who understand what is happening and the opportunity that it presents.
This book is really in two parts. Part 1 addresses the classical current engineering world of energy. It includes the previous chapter, which describes uranium-based nuclear fission power, and also the high temperature option of plasma fusion power. These processes are labeled "classical" because they are not really part of the quantum world. It distinguishes cold fusion from both these two classical nuclear-based processes. Part 1 then goes on to discuss early cold fusion and so-called LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction) experiments, and how they have evolved toward the engineering of cold fusion heaters. This evolution is discussed in the EXPERIMENT Section of Part 1. These experiments were carried out using classical techniques and without a detailed understanding of the quantum mechanics that underpins the cold fusion process. The EXPERIMENT Section addresses the experiments that have shown that cold fusion processes have been made to occur in the laboratory, and looks at the new materials that have ensured future success. It outlines the need for similar studies to make it a commercial success. The reader does not need to understand the quantum world to understand the nuts and bolts of the cold fusion option. Part 1 is largely understandable in terms of ordinary chemistry and classical physics. It is expected that most readers will be primarily interested in Part 1, since it explains why cold fusion is a near term solution to the growing energy-environment crisis.
Part 2 is THEORY. Cold fusion theory is very interdisciplinary. Fortunately, most of THEORY is related to atom and molecular chemistry, and can be understood in terms of chemical orbitals. The language of orbitals lends itself to pictures, so that the underlying mathematics can be largely avoided.
10 Years of Confusion
This book focuses on F-P Clean Energy cold fusion. The name "cold fusion" was first applied to a room temperature fusion process now called "muon-catalyzed" fusion. Muon-catalyzed fusion produces lots of radiation. The story of the radiationless cold fusion controversy is pretty well known. See Wikipedia topics Cold Fusion and Condensed Matter Nuclear Fusion. 20 years ago two well known chemists, former master and student, had a crazy vision. They thought, "Could the separation between chemistry and nuclear physics be total?", as enshrined in scientific orthodoxy.* "Maybe the peculiar chemistry of hydrogen in palladium metal could allow a new form of nuclear fusion to occur. Maybe some strange and rejected claims from the past were real." These were two respected chemists. Professor Martin Fleischmann was a Professor at Southampton University and a Member of the Royal Society. His former student, Professor Stanley Pons, was Head of the Chemistry Department at University of Utah. Both Fleischmann and Pons (F-P) were authors of a large number of professional papers. They decided to get together and work in the lab, which is what they did during the late 1980s. And they saw some strange things. They sometimes seem to get back more heat flowing out of electrolysis cells than the energy they were adding in the form of electrical power. Was this extra heat energy the result of chemistry-induced nuclear fusion? If so, it was what they were looking for. They finally decided that their observations were valid. They announced their findings in 1989 and published their results in the Journal of Electroanalytic Chemistry. There was euphoria. But cooler heads said, "This can't be true". Thus began two decades of dispute, the "cold fusion" controversy which still continues.
* The Fleischmann quotes in this Chapter are remembrances and interpretations of conversations between Fleischmann and the author.
Much has happened since that time. The world has become obsessed with global warming and the price of fuel. Societal conflict has engulfed the world's major oil producing countries. Revolutionary changes have evolved in relations between former world power contenders. Asian countries have become leaders in manufacturing and science. Mapping of genomes and identification of genes have created enormous new understandings in biology and medicine, and have led to recognition of the close kinship between the peoples of the earth. The new words in fashion are "common ancestor".
The world's rejection of cold fusion has not been universal. There have been important exceptions. Reifenschweiler published evidence that tritiated titanium powder decayed more slowly than normal radioactive tritium. His observations preceded the F-P announcement. Julian Schwinger, arguably the most profound of U.S. born theoretical physicists, resigned from the American Physical Society when they refused to publish his thoughts on cold fusion. He subsequently published his thoughts in the German journal Zeitschrift fur Naturforschung. Independent research teams headed by Mel Miles and Mike McKubre identified the cold fusion nuclear product, helium gas, which was measured in the theoretical expected amounts. Yoshiaki Arata and YueChang Zhang (A-Z), a second highly competent professor and former student team, repeatedly generated fusion heat using deuterided nanopalladium metal. Nonetheless, the conflict between accepted scientific theory and F-P cold fusion continued.
The first 10 years of cold fusion research is well documented in a sequence of international conferences and their published Proceedings. The first seven meetings were held in the US, Italy, Japan, Monaco, and Canada. More recent meetings have added China, France, and Russia to the hosting countries. The conference proceedings were published under a variety of names. The world conferences have come to be referred to as the International Conferences on Cold Fusion (ICCF), with the compilation of papers listed as Proc. ICCF1 through Proc. ICCF13. There are also publications in a variety of refereed Journals, like Fusion Technolog., the J. Electroanal. Chem., and Japan J. of Appl. Phys. There has also been an independent series of important conferences on the Black Sea in Russia.
The individual ICCF conferences have been exciting and historic events. The F-P observations of radiationless nuclear fusion challenged accepted physics even more than had the discovery of high temperature superconductivity, which occurred a few years earlier. The first meeting was held in Salt Lake City at a time of great excitement. The ICCF1 Proceedings starts with three papers by McKubre et al., Applebee et al., and Schreiber et al, each of which presents strong evidence of radiationless fusion heat, called excess heat. Many of the characteristics of excess heat generation, like the occurrence of multiple-hour "bursts" of heat production and a need for high D/Pd ratio were present in these introductory papers. A special conference event was an encouraging talk by Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger. Schwinger may be the most important US‑born theoretical physicist. A year later, ICCF2 took place a few miles from where physicist Volta lived on the shores of Lake Como in Italy, and not far from where Mussolini met his dismal end. A fabulous location for a meeting. The meeting was a spirited one, challenging the rejection of cold fusion by the main stream physics community. One highlight was a presentation by Liaw showing evidence for fusion heat at 460 deg C, using molten salt electrolysis to plate D- ions onto palladium metal. M. Miles and B. Bush et al. presented the first evidence for helium production correlated with excess heat at the calculated heat per atom ratio. The ICCF3 conference took place in port city Nagoya, where subway signs are in English as well as Japanese. Participants were hosted by Mr. Minaru Tayoda, best known for his company's motor cars. At the reception fabulous food and drink were served on tables decorated with beautiful ice carvings. In his welcoming talk he said "Cold fusion is not a matter to be studied by a single enterprise or nation. I have confidence that it will become the greatest asset as an eventual energy for mankind, to be shared among the world". Mr. Toyoda passed away before the Proceedings were published. At the time, Mr. Toyoda was supporting research institutes in Japan and France. McKubre et al. and Kunimatsu et al. reported more quantitative data showing the necessity of high D/Pd ratio in production of excess heat, Storms showed that Pd metal had to have near-formula density for heat production, and F-P show that a major production of excess heat occurs during boil-dry events, in which all electrolyte evaporates during the heat release event. The fusion heat was calculated from the heat of vaporization of the boiled water. Discussions were animated. Proceedings Editor H. Ikegami suggested that "cold fusion" would be better called "fusion in solid state".*
The scene was very different at ICCF4, which was sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) on beautiful Maui Island in Hawaii, where the temperature and rainfall changes as you drive up the gentle side of a mountain, and the ocean carves a natural bridge at the ocean's edge. Among the memorable papers was one by Gozzi et al. At ICCF3 Gozzi had described a beautiful test assembly involving 10 cold fusion electrolysis cells and 60 large volume neutron detectors, all individually metered so that any heat release event in one of the electrolysis cells could be checked for neutrons recorded in neighboring counters At ICCF4 he described an improved torus of electrochemical cells and neutron detectors, and presented the carefully analyzed results. Cells 2, 4, 8, and 10 produced periods of 2 to 19 W of excess heat. After thorough data analysis the conclusion was that "There was no statistical evidence of neutron emission from the cells". This is strong evidence that the cold fusion process generates no detectable neutrons. Pons and Fleischmann reported on their observation that heat continues to be generated after boil dry events for a considerable period of time after electrolysis input power has ceased. They named the phenomenon "Heat after Death". Julian Schwinger gave his final thought-provoking talk, summarizing his thoughts on cold fusion. He suggested a connection between a 3He reaction and 5Li decay, both of which lead to 4He. Further examination of his suggestion indicates the existence of an excited state of 4He near its ground state. The world's failure to support Schwinger's work will be a sad note in physics history. ICCF5, in Monaco was noteworthy as the first of the ICCF conferences at which A-Z presented their excess heat observations from nanometer Pd. Two of their run curves are included in Supplement 1.** Reifenschweiler reported on his discovery that tritium absorbed in small crystallites of titanium has reduced radioactivity. He had worked on portable neutron generators which used tritium stored in this form since 1961. His data show that imposition of lattice geometry onto tritium blocks the tritium nuclear decay process. McKubre et al. showed his important empirical formula that fits his team's observations of heat production in terms of measured experiment parameters: current density, D/Pd ratio, and the passage of deuterium into and out of a Pd metal surface. Again the meeting location was exciting and the presentation environment great, provided one didn't lose too much money at the gaming tables.
* Arata and Zhang posted the name Solid State Plasma Fusion ("Cold Fusion") next to the entrance door to their lab at Osaka University.
** Supplement available on www.cfescience.com.
Each succeeding conference has similarly had its share of noteworthy research results. The EXPERIMENT Section begins with ICCF6 and a visit to A-Z's laboratory at Osaka University. ICCF6 is also noteworthy for the first report of excess heat by Iwamura et al. using deuterium permeation through a Pd plate containing a metal oxide. EXPERIMENT will show that interfaces between an ionic oxide and nanometal will likely to play a key role in development of commercial cold fusion heaters.
