http://www.chron.
Scientist may have cold fusion breakthrough
By ERIC BERGER
significant new results that indicate cold fusion-like reactions.
If the work by analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss and her colleagues
is confirmed, it could open the door to a cheap, near-limitless
reservoir of energy.
Thats a big if, however.
Todays announcement at the national meeting of the American Chemical
Society comes in the same location Salt Lake City as one of
sciences most infamous episodes, the announcement 20 years ago by
chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann that they had produced
cold fusion.
Unlike nuclear energy reactors and bombs, which split atoms, the atoms
in stars such as the sun fuse together to produce spectacular amounts
of energy, so much so that we are warmed by a stellar furnace 93
million miles away.
Devising a fusion-based source of energy on Earth has long been a
clean-energy holy grail of physicists.
Pons and Fleischmann claimed to have created fusion reactions in a
tabletop experiment, at room temperature. Their claims of producing
small amounts of excess heat -- energy -- in their experiments were at
first met with excitement, then skepticism and finally derision as
other scientists were unable to reproduce the results.
Nevertheless, in the years since, a small group of scientists has
continued trying to produce fusion reactions at low temperatures.
If such experiments did produce fusion reactions, they would generate
highly energetic neutrons as a byproduct. These are what Mosier-Boss
says her San Diego-based group has found.
If you have fusion going on, then you have to have neutrons, she
said. But we do not know if fusion is actually occurring. It could be
some other nuclear reaction.
Todays announcement is based partly on research published by
Mosier-Boss group last year in the journal Naturwissenschaften
this sense, she has not repeated the mistake of Pons and Fleischmann,
who announced their findings before they had been tested by the
peer-review process and published in a scientific journal.
But that does not mean the results indicate cold fusion, said Paul
Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss
published work.
Fusion could produce the effect they see, but theres no plausible
explanation of how fusion could occur in these conditions, Padley
said. The whole point of fusion is, youre bringing things of like
charge together. As we all know, like things repel, and you have to
overcome that repulsion somehow.
The problem with Mosier-Boss work, he said, is that it fails to
provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at
room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to
exclude other sources for the production of neutrons.
Nobody in the physics community would believe a discovery without such
a quantitative analysis, he said.
Still, the announcement may turn heads, given its stage at the American
Chemical Societys big meeting and the fact that the organization
promoted it to science journalists in advance.
Its big, said Steven Krivit, founder of the New Energy Times
publication, which has tracked cold fusion developments for two
decades.
Krivit said the neutrons produced by Mosier-Boss experiments may not
be caused by fusion but perhaps some new, unknown nuclear process.
What were talking about may be more than anybody actually expected,
he said. Were talking about a new field of science thats a hybrid
between chemistry and physics.
eric.berger@
Brought to you by the HoustonChronicle.
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