Possible long term energy solution...

Read this article in a journal that I subscribe. Here is the link and
an optimistic quote below-- a clean technology much preferable to
nuclear power plants and the radioactive waste that would come from
them.

' At a DARPA review meeting held at his Purdue lab on 1 March,
Taleyarkhan gave a demonstration to a group of officials and
researchers that included Putterman and scientists from Impulse
Devices Inc., a company in Grass Valley, Calif., betting on bubble
fusion as a commercially viable energy source.'

cliff84373...

. . .

On the one hand this is very interesting, especially since it is an
IEEE article. On the otherhand, I remember clearly the announcement to
the world by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, in Salt Lake City, in
1989, that they had discovered cold fusion.

Alvin Toda...

Yes, that debacle really took years to sort out. But IIRC there was an
explosion at IIRC a nearby lab in Palo Alto that was mysterious. I
think that they may be still refining their work to make the effect
more reproducible? Now and then IIRC there are some reports... But no
one takes it seriously.

'"We had a demonstration, a live demonstration in our lab,"
Taleyarkhan told Spectrum. To detect the neutrons that he says are
proof of fusion, Taleyarkhan used special plastic track detectors.
These are transparent rectangles 2 by 1.3 centimeters and about as
thick as a credit card that register the passage of neutrons that hit
them; the tracks left are observable under a microscope. Taleyarkhan
placed two pieces close to the flask and one away from it to serve as
the background measurement. After several hours of exposure, only the
pieces next to the flask had a significant number of neutron tracks.
"It's actually live data. Unambiguous. You don't have to depend on
electronics and fancy equipment. You see this thing in front of your
eyes," Taleyarkhan says.'

Rumpelstiltskin...

Cold fusion again, heh? This is going to take a passle
o' talkin' to get anybody to look twice at it. Commercially
usable cold fusion has become today what perpetual
motion machines were 50 years ago, and what snake-oil
remedies were a hundred years ago.

Alvin Toda...

Quite true. But there is a private company that is interested. That
should tell you a lot about the commercial value.

Regarding the scientific dispute, it seems to me that the side of
Taleyarkhan is winning. I notice that his critics tend to blame him
rather than themselves for their failure to reproduce his experiment.
For example, his collaborator even visited his one of chief critics
and told the critic that his vessel design is flawed-- that it would
never produce fusion, and sure enough it didn't. Why don't his critics
take good advice? Are they so suspicious of his advice that they want
to ignore it? Further, the article mentioned that even his simple
demonstration (important because it ruled out instrumental and
systematic errors in the experiment design) in a neutral third party's
lab facilities was criticized by his detractors for not having enough
back up measurements.

To a certain extent I can see their point: they wanted to see a middle
point between the detectors close to the expt setup and a point far
away in the background. If the source of the neutrons of the
experiment had really been the lab setup than the incidence of
radiation at the midpoint would have been in the intermediate range.
But this kind of criticism is really nitpicking, and the very human
and political nature of the debate will drag on for years more, until
more researchers can duplicate Taleyarkhan's experiments (or not).

Rumpelstiltskin...

Cold fusion would be really something if we could get it, to be
sure. I don't see a good reason it would be impossible: it might
be possible to locally distort an energy probability distribution
enough to set off a small number of starter fusings, maybe, but
of course I don't really know anything about it. I'm all for
people looking into it more. If cold fusion could be done in a
way that had commercial prospects, it would be a boon for
mankind if used for energy, or a curse if used for war.

Alvin Toda...

Indeed, we will probably be in a completely new technological age. The
abundance of energy may have just as much an effect as computers have
had in our economy and society. This technology is longer term than
most other alternative energy schemes. Most experts say this is off
about 50 years. But with oil by then at $100 a barrel, almost any
other scheme might be cheaper?

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom: it is the
argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves" -- Wm. Pitt the Younger