Monday, May 07, 2007

Navy Heats Up Cold Fusion Hopes

Cold fusion, the ability to generate nuclear power at room temperatures, has proven to be a highly elusive feat. In fact, it is considered by many experts to be a mere pipe dream. Cold fusion has gotten the cold shoulder from serious nuclear physicists since 1989, when Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann were unable to substantiate their sensational claims that deuterium nuclei could be forced to fuse and release excess energy at room temperature. Spawar researchers apparently kept the faith, however, and continued to refine the procedure by experimenting with new fusionable materials. However, a recently published academic paper from the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego reports that Spawar scientists Stanislaw Szpak and Pamela Mosier-Boss have achieved a low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) that can be replicated and verified by the scientific community. Szpak and Boss now claim to have succeeded at last by coating a thin wire with palladium and deuterium, then subjected it to magnetic and electric fields. The Spawar method shows promise, particularly in terms of being easily reproduced and verified by other institutions. Such verification is essential to widespread acceptance of the apparent breakthrough.

Submitted by Shaun A. Saunders

2 comments:

Steven Krivit said...

Bennett Daviss' article in New Scientist on May 3 is a follow-up piece to the in-depth article on the SPAWAR San Diego research by Steven Krivit and Daviss published in New Energy Times in November.

Apparently, New Scientist chose to neglect the term "low energy nuclear reactions," which those of us observing, and working in the field have now adopted.

The term "cold fusion" was never chosen by Fleischmann and Pons; it was wished on them by the press. It was and is a poor descriptor for the phenomenon. The concept of fusion remains highly speculative, a variety of phenomena are clearly not fusion, and then there is the Widom-Larsen not-fusion theory. (http://www.newenergytimes.com/wltheory)

Related New Energy Times stories:
Report on the 2006 Naval Science and Technology Partnership Conference (Sept. 10, 2006) (http://newenergytimes.com/news/2006/NET18.htm#FROMED)
Extraordinary Evidence (Nov. 10, 2006) (http://newenergytimes.com/news/2006/NET19.htm#ee)
Extraordinary Courage: Report on Some LENR Presentations at the 2007 American Physical Society Meeting (March 16, 2007) (http://newenergytimes.com/news/2007/NET21.htm#apsreport)
Charged Particles for Dummies: A Conversation With Lawrence P.G. Forsley (May 10, 2007) (http://newenergytimes.com/news/2007/NET22.htm)

P.S. If you want to use my photograph on your site, that's fine, but please do not edit out the photo credit. Here is the source file in case you want to fix this problem http://newenergytimes.com/news/2006/19IMG/CR-39Detectorw.jpg
Alternatively, you can add "Photo by Steven B. Krivit" on the image that was "borrowed" from our our site and that will be satisfactory.
Steven Krivit
Editor, New Energy Times

Beam Me Up said...

Mr. Krivits, thank you so much for your imput. I know I found it informative. As to the photograph, I had no idea that it was a borrowed picture and have deleted it from my site. Thank you for the update.