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Cold
Fusion’s No Better Reheated
The
announcement on the April 19th edition of 60-Minutes on CBS served the
important purpose of presenting the enormous potential of fusion to
provide virtually limitless, cheap, and pollution-free energy.
Mastering fusion will be mankind’s greatest advance since mastering
fire. While fusion is a vitally important objective, the so-called
“breakthrough” announced by 60-Minutes is bad science and bad
journalism.
The
key claim made by the scientists 60-Minutes interviewed was that excess
heat was generated by a reaction they say they do not understand.
There’s nothing magic about reactions that release energy – candles
generate more heat than the matches which light them. Every fuel we
burn – coal, natural gas, diesel, gasoline – generates excess heat;
that’s why we burn them. The only remarkable thing about this
announcement is that the proponents acknowledged they didn’t understand
it.
I
once saw Siegfried and Roy make a tiger disappear five feet in front of
me. That was very impressive, but I don’t think it was magic. The
60-Minutes announcement isn’t nearly as impressive, and it certainly is
not new science.
Chemical
reactions, such as the one discussed last night, release energy by
rearranging electrons in molecules. The energy of any chemical reaction
is therefore millions of times less than is required to change an atom
of one element into an atom of different element. Chemical reactions
can’t change lead into gold or deuterium into helium; only nuclear
reactions have enough energy to do that.
If
these scientists were serious about providing real proof of achieving
cold fusion they should have shown evidence of helium gas being
generated in the reaction. Fusion in the Sun and all other stars is
based on hydrogen and deuterium nuclei being converted into helium.
Detecting helium is easy to do and would provide a definitive test, as
any competent scientist in this field is well aware.
If
this were a sincere effort to advance energy technology and solve our
critical energy and greenhouse gas problems, why didn’t the scientists
present this definitive evidence?
If this were a sincere effort to inform the public of a vital field of
scientific development, why didn’t 60-Minutes interview experts in
nuclear physics? Promoting more “junk science” can only make the public
understandably less interested in supporting real science.
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