CBS news last night did a "60 Minutes" programme including a 12 minute feature on Cold Fusion research 20 years on - it's now called LENR (low energy nuclear reactions) or CANR (chemically assisted nuclear reactions). There’s a 15 second advert first before the video (that I’ve embedded below) starts.
I've been following the almost underground pariah science that has been done in this area since 1989 and, as I've mentioned before, I've contributed to a couple of publications about the subject. Cold Fusion is going to get hot again soon. If you want to follow developments, here are links to probably the two best web resources around for a general overview and also detailed scientific papers.
CBS’s piece left out probably the “hottest”, most convincing (to sceptics), piece of recent research which was done by the US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.The video below is a relatively non technical explanation of what the SPAWAR centre found – that there is hard evidence of nuclear reactions taking place in the cells beyond the well-established fact that more heat is generated than can be accounted for by the conventional calculations of chemistry. Briefly,they see tracks in a plastic radiation detector (CR39) that are hard to explain without taking them as strong evidence that energetic nuclear particles are formed in the test cells, which should not be there according to conventional nuclear physics.
2 comments:
Hmm. I'd like to see power generation on a decent scale - i.e. city usable before I'd give it much credence. After all New Scientist ran a piece on "cloaking technology" - very Star Trek - but you have to be nano-molecule size for it to work.
Maybe you're missing the point. As there is so much evidence that there are real nuclear effects that can be generated in relatively benign circumstances (as opposed to in the heart of a nuke - bomb or station), this shows that there is an entirely new field of energy physics to investigate.
10's of thousands of scientists should get to work using an Edisonian approach (trying everything) to figure out everything about it.
The effect holds out the promise of everybody having their own power supplies - everybody could go "off-grid". Imagine how that would alter the dynamics of civilisation, sustainability and global power balances.
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