Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is “significant” evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.
The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.
“Our finding is very significant,” said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.
“To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a LENR device,” added the study’s co-author in a statement.
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Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss’s published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.
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But Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, said the study was “big” and could open a new scientific field.The neutrons produced in the experiments “may not be caused by fusion but perhaps some new, unknown nuclear process,” added Krivit, who has monitored cold fusion studies for the past 20 years.
More information here (thanks to Cage Match).
“Neutron tracks revive hopes for cold fusion”
Please note that cold fusion has been replicated thousands of times by over 200 labs such as Los Alamos of BARC. You can read all about this at any university library. I have a collection of 1,200 peer-reviewed journal papers about cold fusion which I copied from the libraries at Los Alamos and Georgia Tech.
You will find a list of 3,000 papers on this subject, and 500 full text papers here:
http://lenr-canr.org/
Excess heat, tritium, neutrons and helium from cold fusion have been observed by thousands of researchers worldwide, often at high signal to noise ratios (thousands of times above background). There is not the slightest chance all of the observations are experimental error.
Whether the effect can be made into a practical source of energy remains to be seen.
This still seems just a bit too iffy. Indirect evidence of energetic neutrons, and little of that, it seems. Anyway, what good are energetic neutrons to most people? They’re toxic and they compromise the integrity of the structures they encounter. What we want is a measurable, preferably relatively large, thermal output.
When two other labs have replicated the experiment with better neutron detection equipment, maybe then I’ll pay attention.
Either that, or when the price of electricity drops by 25% or more…
This is NOT the first time neutrons have been detected. Pons and Fleischman reported neutrons and then had to retract the claim. So have many of their followers. The trouble is that neutrons are electrically neutral and so are not all that easy to detect. You don’t just go down to the storeroom and check out a neutron detector like you would a Geiger counter. All of the claims of neutron detection turn out to have been like this one — by chemists and others who are not nuclear physicists and are not familiar with the problems and spurious signals that arise from attempts to detect neutrons.