Cold fusion: real after all?

The prevalence of fraud, misreporting of experimental conditions as more solid than they were, publication biases, and other problems can produce bogus literatures that look more solid than this (aside from the prior), e.g. parapsychologists have many experiments that appear to replicate to a substantial degree in the parapsychology literature.

Given the initial flurry of attention to attract people to the the topic this field doesn't look particularly surprising to me on the assumption that it is studying a non-existent phenomenon. If that's explained, then I don't see reason to pay attention at all.

ETA: What probability did you assign to cold fusion of this sort existing when you first made this post, and what probability do you now assign in light of the evidence found by other commenters?

1. Mitchell Swartz's experiments at MIT

Mitchell Swartz doesn't look to be actually employed by MIT. So far as Google was able to tell me, he runs his experiments independently and what he done at MIT was a guest demonstration of his results hosted by Peter Hagelstein (who does work at MIT). So I suspect talking about 'Mitchell Swartz's experiments at MIT' might be misleading. But I'm really not sure as it's hard to find anything on the guy, so it would be nice if you could clarify any of this.

I think this is Swartz's webpage. Try clicking on the first link, I dare you. And links to Peter Hagelsteins personal page at his MIT faculty page are dead. No information on the mini-course except the videos and crackpotty-looking cold fusion news sites. So I can't really tell to what extent it was 'a course at MIT' rather than 'that thing two dudes did, inside MIT's buildings.' Fishy.

There's a rather unprofessional PDF put together by a team at the Naval Research Center which disputes the significance of Iwamura's findings:

http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GrabowskiKevaluation.pdf

Short summary: They replicated the experiment but got no praseodymium. Undeterred, they received some samples from MHI, which also came up empty. Finally they went on site - and the only time they were able to observe praseodymium was when MHI researchers retrieved the samples and they were analyzed on-site. They also observed environmental praseodymium contamination.

We don't have anything for the Toyota replication of the experiment, unfortunately.

Well, that may be a case of science acting quite seriously Bayesian. No theoretical backing for something at ordinary energies = very low prior. Making deuterium in-situ with electrolysis = obfuscation of the process, which is bad too. The stuff about extreme purity of palladium being necessary, that lowers prior probability even further because now not only you have cold fusion, but it is also sensitive to impurities in far away lattice points. Which is very weird for a non-semiconductor.

Then, on various interesting bits of evidence. Strong excess heat, that sounds good, but strong excess heat implies possibility of making a working product out of it, and no one did, so assuming a possibility of strong excess heat you get a lot of evidence now that it doesn't work.

Explosions, you can of course spin this as evidence and claim that energy stored was insufficient to cause the explosion, which sounds like evidence, but look, you're postulating that explosions which apriori (given theoretical ignorance) can range from microscopic to a megaton blast, fit in the window of a dynamite stick.

So you get a very low prior for it working, and then, in absence of a theoretical model, you have really wide expectations which make the evidence weak - as the evidence comes in you end up postulating extra things about your fusion - i.e. switching to hypotheses with lower priors.

edit: and you have simultaneous lack of neutrons and lack of hard gamma radiation. So, somehow, not only the energy gets distributed (which you can argue would be provided by time symmetry on the same unknown mechanism that collides the deuterons), either something happens to neutrons, or the D-D fusion does only follow the neutron-less branch.

edit: a better way to state it: For all new evidence, the "its mistaken" provides a strong prediction: the group will be unable to make a commercial product, the explosion will not level the city block (edit: and it won't be a lot of micro explosions that look obviously very weird), the experimenters won't die of radiation sickness, and so on and so forth. It assigns the probability of 1 to those things not happening, and when they don't happen, by the Bayes formula, it's probability stays the same. Whereas "its real" assigns <1 probability, and according to Bayes formula, drops in its probability any time anything dramatically nuclear does not happen. Interestingly, the experimenters themselves seem to heavily rely on this "nothing dramatically nuclear can possibly happen" model when they don't buy lead shielding, don't move experiment to a remote location, and the like.

They just have to show that there exists some set of experimental conditions for which cold fusion occurs.

It's not that people are claiming it doesn't work because there are so many conditions that fail to cause cold fusion. It's that for each individual set of experimental conditions it has not been replicated. If there is a set of conditions under which cold fusion happens, either we have failed to find it yet, in which case we have no evidence for it, or we have found it, in which case all the replication attempts must have been somehow flawed.

I'm sort of surprised that this article is only at zero. I would expect it to be lower because:

(1) it has nothing whatsoever to do with rationality (except, I guess the bit at the end), and (2) it is almost certainly wrong (for the reasons given by DanielLC and OrphanWilde.

The poster is a guy who "[doesn't] know what to think" about a dude whose entire history is scamming people with alternative energy sources. Doesn't make him a bad person -- it just makes him bad at evaluating evidence.

I wrote this 10,000-word blog post arguing that cold fusion is not real after all, on the basis of the experimental evidence. (The rest of the blog, 30 posts or so, spells out the argument that cold fusion is not real, on the basis of our knowledge of theoretical physics.) Obviously the conclusion is no surprise to most people here ... but I still think the nitty-gritty details of these arguments are interesting and are somewhat hard to find elsewhere on the internet.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Interesting but still highly doubtful. The Toyota reproduction of Iwamura is not clearly documented. And a team of researchers at University Missouri (SKINR - Kimmel Inst. "Nuclear Renaissance" - Robert Duncan) has not yet confirmed the appearance of energetic particles. This bunch is hosting a meeting called ICCF18, a crackpot-type conference of cold fusion enthusiasts found here: http://iccf18.research.missouri.edu/organization.php

What IS interesting is the recent patent issued to a research group inside the U.S. Navy's SPA-WAR division "Method for Generating Particles (Patent 8419919) http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8419919.html How the patent office could grant this type of cold fusion patent is beyond comprehension - but the Navy probably has big plans or is deluded. Still patents don't mean much and aside from the Italian loon and work at DARPA and ENEA, there is little peer-reviewed evidence of anomalous heat beyond Swartz and Hagelstein at MIT - even if Swartz is an MIT graduate.

One final thought, the Edison Electric Inst. recently published a paper on encroaching distributed energy systems stealing customers from the grid (mostly solar PV.) IF, big IF, there was any veracity to the commercialization of cold fusion, I would expect a utility consortium of this sort to issue a similar warning to their members. http://grist.org/climate-energy/solar-panels-could-destroy-u-s-utilities-according-to-u-s-utilities/

My wake-up call regarding regarding cold fusion came from Ron Maimon's writings at Physics Stack Exchange, e.g. here and here. It was especially startling to learn that there were prior observations, going back decades, of anomalies associated with deuterated palladium.

As for the physics of it, the two main problems seem to be (1) where does the energy to overcome Coulomb repulsion come from (2) why aren't lots of neutrons being produced. In the first link above, Maimon speculates (1) that the energy comes from a chain reaction in which inner-orbital electrons which individually have O(10 keV) energy are coherently excited (2) that deuteron-deuteron fusion occurs in close proximity to the palladium nucleus and this does something odd to the intermediate states.

So what assets should I be purchasing if this is all right?

This is complete rubbish. I refer you to the RationalWiki article on the topic, which we worked quite hard on and would welcome critique of. (Mostly it needs expansion.)

There is a continuing failure to find any cold-fusion method that consistently reproduces the supposed effect. The great majority of written-up experiments fail even to obtain excess heat. The primary research effort should be on improving reproducibility; instead, the cold fusion people live in a fantasy where their field has imminent practical engineering applications despite not having even reproducible science.

Personally, I was always fond of the totally impractical muon-assisted fusion concept. Way cooler than metal intercalation or cavitation.

Cold fusion exists, little doubt about that. Only that it is even much colder than people expect. I mean, it is a question of "when", not of "if", for two hydrogen atoms to fuse. That's elementary.

Perhaps a billion times colder fusion than the so called "cold fusion" is a fact of life.

No mention of Andrea Rossi?

Wow, it's been more than two years since I commented on Less Wrong. Great article here, though, as usual with cold fusion, it still contains some misunderstandings. Let me dispose of some of them by fiat.

Anything to do with Rossi is not science. There have been demonstrations and tests, including one with a level of independence that remained inadequate. Rossi is commercial, his methods are secret, and so any reports from him cannot be reproduced. It's trivially easy to dismiss Rossi as a fraud, but on closer examination, the matter is complex. He might be a fraud, or he might have something, and most of us, to know the truth about it, will have to wait. Personally, I don't trust a word he says without verification, which has nothing to do with fraud, necessarily, but everything to do with his being a commercial actor with possible motive to confuse competition.

Something like this is true with Swartz, though Swartz does disclose much more. In the end, it is proprietary ttechnology and crucial details are withheld. So while Swartz may have put on some interesting demos, again, this is not really science, and Swartz has an ... interesting ... reputation in the field. Swartz, in general, thinks that almost everyone else is wrong.

When I first saw Iwamura's results, I thought this was IT. Conclusive. However, the devil is in the details, and that was six years ago, I've learned a great deal since then. As noted, NRL was unable to replicate, even though working with Iwamura. To be sure, NRL has had great difficulty replicating any cold fusion results. I don't know why. I have discussed this extensively with an NRL researcher, and he has, in fact, seen results that convinced him that the phenomenon was real. However, this is the bottom line: sketchy and anecdotal results are far from enough to overturn a massive rejection cascade, which cold fusion went through in 1989, and the effects linger.

Direct evidence is needed. It exists.

What is remarkable is that the author here seems to be unaware of it. I attempted to cover that in the Wikipedia article, because this is amply found in reliable source. It was excluded, and so was I.

It remains missing, in spite of secondary peer-reviewed source. Editors who would have known to place it have been banned.

(Iwamura's results are still on the table, they have not been rejected. However, the significance of those results is entirely unclear. The reactions reported are not those reported by others. Transmutation reactions are somehow "sexy." However, the best established transmutation in FP Heat Effect experiments is to tritium, and that is about a million times down in level from helium. it's like the neutron results: people get all excited by them, but levels are very low, at best roughly a million times down from tritium. All this distracts from the main event. It's exciting because those results are "nuclear," and thus unexpected in a chemical environment. But nobody ever looked this close before.)

Cold fusion was very much unexpected. The name could be misleading. Pons and Fleischman actually claimed an "unknown nuclear reaction," and they knew full well that what they had found didn't match the known deuterium fusion reaction. I could give many reasons why that's impossible under the PF conditions. There is an obvious conclusion: the effect is not the known deuterium fusion reaction. It is something else.

However, it is fusion, as to result, and what is being fused is deuterium, but that straight fusion reaction is very well-known, and half the reactions produce tritium and half produce a neutron, the latter would be at fatal levels if the heat produced were from this.

Instead, helium is produced. d + d -> helium plus gamma is a very rare branch, normally. In this case, the helium and heat are commensurate, and at the fusion ratio, but that is wonky! I.e., if there is a single nuclear product, there must also be a gamma, and those gammas are not observed, the energy ends up entirely as heat. There are proposed mechanisms that handle this, but none of them, so far, match experiment enough to be useful, none have been tested and confirmed.

Cold fusion is a mystery. That's been my theme, now, for some years. We do not know how this reaction takes place. We know some of the conditions, and we know the result (heat and helium). See my paper in Current Science: http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0574.pdf

There is another article in that Current Science issue by Mike McKubre that fully addresses why there were so many early replication failures. http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/108/04/0495.pdf

This is all quite well-known.

Running a Fleischmann-Pons experiment is still very difficult. There are protocols now with "success" at greater than fifty percent, i.e., more than half of the cells will show statistically significant heat, sometimes much more than that. The search for a "reliably reproducible experiment" distracted many from studying what was already available, protocols that sometimes generate the heat. What is needed, then, is to measure helium. Helium is not easy to measure, at the levels involved. There is always a concern about leakage. However, leakage is unlikely to produce helium that is correlated to the heat production (and "heat" in these cases is not very hot, not enough to, say, foster leakage. In some work, the cell is held at constant elevated temperature, so the "excess heat" is how much that heating is backed off to maintain the temperature). This work has been done many times, see my paper. Don't pay much attention to the diagram, that was eye candy wanted by some. It is a result, but it could be very confusing, that's from gas-loaded work, not a Fleischmann-Pons experiment.

The fact is that this work could all be done again. It has not had a priority in the field for about a decade, because people working in the field already know that helium is the main product (almost entirely). If anyone is still not convinced that the Anomalous Heat Effect -- as it is now being called -- is real, supporting research to confim this with increased precision would be in order. (Right now, Storms estimate, the reaction Q is 25 +/- 5 MeV/4He, compared to a theoretical value of 23.8 MeV/4He. The difficulty is in capturing and measuring all the helium, but it can be done. McKubre's best work has the error bars at 10%, and that is still quite a bit seat-of-the-pants.

Setting aside the commercial efforts, which are almost entirely with nickel-hydrogen reactions, we think, palladium deuteride as a fuel may never be practical. However, we won't really know until we understand the mystery. Palladium is scarce. Unless reaction efficiency can be drastically increased, there isn't enough palladium to handle our energy needs. That's why nickel and hydrogen are so interesting, but ... the science behind NiH is nowhere near as well established as with PdD. We don't know the product, for example. Storms thinks it is deuterium, but he has no evidence, just a theory.

(The correlation is not weak, it is very strong. In particular, in extensive experimental series, if there is no heat, there is no anomalous helium. If there is heat, there is almost always commensurate helium, and the exceptions are not only rare, but explainable.

As to explosions, I know of none that were clearly nuclear. SRI was chemistry, and that might be so of others. The most interesting was a melt-down, not an explosion, the original Pons and Fleischmann event from 1984. In that case, the heat might have been nuclear; it was the P&F account of the damage that may have convinced the University of Utah to back these electrochemists. They responded by scaling down. Probably a good idea.

I must admit, this sounds odd - I wouldn't have predicted this result - but not inexplicable - I would predict that someone with the right incentive could fake this. As such, I still believe cold fusion isn't real, but I have updated my confidence in the relevant model downwards.

However, I will say one thing - if this works, someone should be making money off it. I don't care if it wont replicate; if it works consistently for you then you can use it to build a profitable business, which seems like it should make skeptics think again as well as producing profit.

Just don't ask anyone to invest in Cold Fusion, for God's sake. Start small.

Regardless of whether cold fusion is possible (who knows), and regardless of whether I am qualified to think it is possible (moderately so), and regardless of whether I think it possible (I certainly don't think anyone has managed it), I would never be convinced by this post.

You seem to think your argument is pretty convincing. Suppose it is. Suppose 99% of laypeople who have no idea if cold fusion is real believe it. Or 100%, or whatever. That has no bearing on whether cold fusion is real or whether I should believe it to be real from your post.

I would believe cold fusion is true on the word of others if they were experts (in nuclear physics). Your argument can convince any number of laypersons, but if it can't convince a significant portion of experts (and there's no reason it would, since it's just appeals to authority and very unconvincing hearsay) then I have no interest in it.

Great post!

I don't understand why this was downvoted.

Update on Rossi: independent test finds his device produces excess heat with energy density at least ten times higher than conventional energy sources.

Story here, critical response here, more positive responses here and here

Edit: Oh, right, and paper here

Whats Up Less Wrong

I am a Cold Fusion blogger and also have a news portal (drboblog.com) Thanks for this excellent article. Good reading and very well written.

I take my hat off!

Hope to see more coverage on Lenr/Cold Fusion

/ Love Dr Bob

Interesting article, but far from reality.

Compared to most article you cover a much wider scope of what is happening in science, but you miss most of what is happening industrially.

My point of view is that we are in a cas of paradigm change in nuclear energy, like the one Thomas Kuhn studied in "the structure of scientifc revolution".

That theory is clearly explaining why LENr is rejected. In such transition the old-school community choose the evidence that "are acceptable" so thet their position stay winning. IT IS IMPOSSIBLe TO CONVINCE WITH EVIDENCES. thait is a conclusion of Thosma Kuhn. Beside some More than Iwamura and toyota , moe than NASA GRC 89/2008 (and Tsignhua 2005, biberian 2007) replication of gas loading heat, more than mc kubre isothermal calorimetry, more tha ENEA report 41 showing He4/Heat correlatin, you can find tritium production, that simply show, prove that the mainstream position is undefendable. It is undefendable, but it is forbidden to critic it.

the evidence are clear today, that LENr cannot be inexistent. tritiuum, neutron, transmutation, he4, correlation, linke with crystallographic structure (and not metrology artifact).

as Thomas Kuhn says, it is impossible to convince wit evidence.

the only way is through a global theory, that encompass all the physics.

Clearly there is no good theory today, not widom larsen, not kim-zubarev BEC, not takahashi TSC...

NASA and Zawodny are wrong when claiming they have the final theory, yet I understand that they claim that just to allow the delusional mainstream to look at the fact. Because mainstream scientist, like a priest, don't look at evidence when they think it oppose their dogma.

In fact LENr does not violate physics, and it simply probably work by a process that simply physicists don't imagine yet. Like it happens for plane, when discovering the theory of wings. Widom-Larsen is showing an example of how a theory could respect quantum mechanic, and LENR... it does nor work, but the ideas pave the way, like TSC and Kim BEC.

The patent of NASA is loose in my opinion (I don't believe they have a real technology, unlike defkalion and brillouin who are filing patents).

beside those scientific question, the business is working on industrializing all http://www.lenrnews.eu/lenr-summary-for-policy-makers/

Rossi is unpredictable, yet Aldo Prois give Rossi some credibility. Defkalion despite the "very strange" disdain of US-based actors, seems very credible, and Nelson report, "very strangely" ignored, is clear that Defkalion have much more than a tea kettle (kW range), that they are not a fraud, that it is working on-demand, and that however the COP is validated only around 3, with hope to get better. they today claim on the first day, and much more later... they claim no need to publicity and that they have to refuse partners.. I can just confirm that underground there are few startups working on LENR projects, and some old-industry discretely contacting those actors.

I've made early this year an executive summary on that subject http://www.lenrnews.eu/lenr-summary-for-policy-makers/ In the introduction you can also follow the link to an article that discuss of why LENR is proved beyond any reasonable doubt.

Sure the discussion here is... Late.

less late that the one on APS.

-- AlainCo the techwatcher of lenr-forum.com