Re[2]: cold fusion?

[bkolb@arinc.com]

>rnross@bcsc02.gov.bc.ca
>
>Is it my imagination or is radsafe "down" ?  If not does anyone remember
>cold fusion?  I know the fusion was not producing heat but was there another re
>action or was it just bad experimental technique?


In spite of the facts that the Department of Energy hasn't funded 
a single cold-fusion experiment since 1989 and the Patent Office 
routinely rejects any application that claims to involve cold 
fusion, there is considerable private interest in the still unexplained
phenomenon.  Envision a small sealed flask filled with heavy water and
short piece of platinum wire wrapped around a piece of palladium.  The wire
carries an electric current that heats the water close to the boiling
point.  Imagine that every watt of electric power going in produces 1.5
watts of heat and you'll have some idea of what Dr. Dennis Cravens at
Vernon Regional Junior College is seeing today with such an apparatus.  The
same thing is going on at SRI International in Menlo Park with funding from
the Electric Power Research Institute where as much as 50% excess heat has
also been observed.  Several big companies and universities in Japan will
be receiving $30-million over the next four years to investigate the "new
hydrogen energy," a Japanese euphemism for cold fusion.  The Japanese are
also funding continued research by Pons and Fleischmann in a French Riviera
laboratory where they routinely get 150-170 watts output with 40-50 watts
input.  Meanwhile Eneco Inc. in the U.S. is quietly acquiring rights to
patents that could be issued on cold-fusion inventions.  The mainstream
scientific community, however, continues to disregard the phenomenon as
nuclear fusion because there is little or no radiation produced; by
conventional wisdom, the results claimed by Pons and Fleishcmann should
have produced enough gamma radiation to kill them both.  As Doug Morrison
at CERN points out, the laws of physics seem to apply everywhere in the
universe except in cold-fusion experiments performed by believers.  The
jury is still out on an alternative explanation for the observations,
however.

bill kolb
bkolb@arinc.com