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cold fusion LONG!



1) Can somebody recommend a review article, or book,
summarizing what was happening in the field of cold fusion
in the last ten years?

2) Skip the rest unless you are interested in the prehistory of
that fascinating, and still active, field.
Ludwik Kowalski

It is worth knowing that the 1956 discovery of muon catalyzed
fusion by Alvarez was not the only precursor of the cold fusion
announcement. Here are some interesting episodes; I am quoting
them from Chapter 6 of the 1989 book of F. David Peat, "Cold
Fusion: The Making of a Scientific Controversy"

By the way, according to this book, first speculations about
a possibility that muons may facilitate nuclear fusion at room
temperatures were made, in 1948 (by A. Sacharov, the father
of the Soviet H bomb and, independently, by F.C. Frank, in
England.) Luis Alvarez was not aware of these speculations
but his data, on tracks of muons in boubble chambers filled
with liquid hydrogen and deuterium, confirmed them.
Alvarez was guided by another father of H bomb, E. Teller.

*********************

"On September 17, 1926, Reuters news agency carried a
report that two German scientists had, after years of
experimentation, succeeded in transforming hydrogen into
helium "with the aid of particles of metal." Two respected
German scientists, Fritz Paneth and Kurt Peters, working
at the Chemical Institute of the University of Berlin, believed
they had evidence for nuclear fusion within palladium. Of
course, the whole idea of nuclear fusion was not properly
understood at that time; quantum mechanics was only a year
old, the neutron had yet to be discovered, and the fusion of
hydrogen nuclei as the source of energy in the stars had not
yet been worked out. Scientists did know that a curious new
element, helium, could be found in the sun's atmosphere but
was exceedingly rare on earth. This helium had to be a
by-product of the energy-producing reactions that occur
inside the sun itself.

What Paneth and Peters had done was to pass hydrogen gas
through a thin, red-hot tube of palladium. In the gas that came
out the other end, Paneth and Peters detected a very small
amount of helium. Somehow helium was actually being created
out of hydrogen inside the palladium—curious anticipation of
the Frascati fusion of 1989! The two scientists persisted with
their experiments and discovered that they could increase the
amount of helium by using other preparations of palladium. The
next step was to see if there was any possibility of a mistake.
After carefully searching for all possible sources of error,
Paneth and Peters published their results in 1926. Helium was
being created out of hydrogen by some unknown fusion process.
[Was he ridiculed as an alchemist? To dare such publication one
had to be100% sure; being only 99.99% sure was probably not
good enough.]

But in April of the following year, a retraction appeared. The
two scientists had discovered that tiny amounts of naturally
occurring helium were absorbed on the surface of the glass
vessels used in their experiments. When this glass was heated,
the small amounts of helium were released. They also discovered
that one of the catalysts they had used in the experiments—
platinized asbestos—gave off absorbed helium when heated. In
other words, they could not be 100 percent certain that the
helium they had detected was actually being "created" by nuclear
fusion, rather than being simply the result of contamination.

In February 1927, however, a Swedish scientist -- John Tandberg
of the Electrolux Research Laboratory -- filed a patent for "a
method to produce helium and useful energy." The process was
based on the effect discovered by Paneth and Peters, but Tandberg
claimed to have discovered a method to "significantly increase the
efficiency in order to produce useful energy." This patent was not
granted, but Tandberg and his colleague, Torsten Wilner, continued
to experiment with heavy water—samples were obtained from
Niels Bohr. The Swedish notebooks on cold fusion are now in
the possession of Bertil Wilner, son of Tandberg's collaborator.

***********************

With the explosion of interest in nuclear and elementary-particle
physics, and the new theoretical tools of quantum mechanics and
quantum field theory, those rumors of cold fusion were simply
forgotten. But hints that something curious could be happening
inside metals still surfaced occasionally. For example, in 1978
three scientists from the A. F. Ioffe Physiotechnical Institute in
Leningrad announced that they had discovered an unusual
concentration of the rare isotope helium 3 in certain metals.
Helium 3 is produced during one of the possible fusion reactions
between deuterium atoms:

Deuterium + Deuterium = Helium 3 + Neutron

B. A. Mamyrin, L. V. Khabarin, and V. S. Yudenich knew that most of
the helium in the universe occurs in the form of helium 4 (an atom
containing two outer electrons and a nucleus of two protons and
two neutrons). But there is also an alternative isotopic form of
helium called helium 3 (also written 3He), in which the central
nucleus has two protons but only one neutron. Within the earth's
crust, only around one in every 10 million (or even fewer) helium
atoms occurs in this rare form; a similar proportion is found in the
earth's atmosphere. The three scientists discovered that helium
gas that had become trapped in a number of pure metals contained
a much higher proportion of helium 3. A number of different metals
were heated to drive out the absorbed helium, and the amount of
helium 3 and helium 4 was measured. To the scientists'surprise,
many of the 300 different samples studied contained very large
amounts of helium 3 and no detectable helium 4!

This was a staggering result, for it meant that the amount of
helium 3 was up to a million times higher than normal. Moreover,
the Soviet scientists discovered that this isotope was not
uniformly distributed throughout the metal. It almost looked as
if it had been created in tiny patches—around 1 cubic millimeter
in size. Where was this helium 3 coming from? In the view of
Jones and his co-workers at Brigham Young University, the answer
was staring everyone in the face. It was the direct result of nuclear
fusion. A variety of gases, including deuterium, are naturally
absorbed within metals. Suppose that a spontaneous nuclear fusion
of this deuterium begins. The result of this fusion will be the
creation of that rare isotope helium 3.

One possible fusion reaction is:

Deuterium + Deuterium = Helium 3 + Neutron

Another possibility is:

Deuterium + Deuterium = Tritium + Proton

This reaction generates tritium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen.
Was there also evidence for unusual concentrations of tritium
in metals? Sure enough, this rare isotope of hydrogen was also
found. Could nuclear fusion have been going on under our noses
all this time without scientists noticing it, a perfectly natural
process that occurs in many metals?

Steven Jones and the Brigham Young group had also talked to
Harmon Craig at the University of San Diego, who gave them
information about some other helium 3 anomalies. For example,
Craig had discovered curious pockets of helium 3 in diamonds
that had been cut by a laser beam. It appears that while absorbed
helium 4 is distributed quite uniformly throughout the crystal,
the rare helium 3 isotope occurs in tiny, localized pockets. Could
these be associated with local areas of compression in which
deuterium atoms fuse to produce helium 3?

These various clues are the circumstantial evidence that cold
fusion may not be as bizarre or obscure as everyone had thought.
Indeed, fusion may be a perfectly natural process in a variety of
systems but one that had simply escaped widespread notice
until March of 1989! " [The announcement of cold fusion.]

This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the AAPT.