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It is difficult to imagine a more profound reversal
of scientific fortunes than what has been emerging in the "cold
fusion" field. One of the most disputed anomalies in the history of
science is inexorably heading toward acceptance by the scientific
community.'
Dr. Eugene Mallove
....If we could produce electric effects of the
required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence
on it could be transformed. The sun raises the water of the oceans
and winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in state of
most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and
wherever desired, this mighty life-sustaining stream could be at
will controlled. We could irrigate arid deserts, create lakes and
rivers and provide motive power in unlimited amount. This would be
the most efficient way of harnessing the sun to the uses of
man......
Nikola Tesla, June 1919
Sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared
to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to
whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
T.H. Huxley
Introduction
The central claim of cold fusion adherents is that a
nuclear reaction (fusion of deuterium) can be initiated and
maintained in an electrochemical apparatus not much different from
the setup used to demonstrate the breakdown of water into hydrogen
and oxygen in a high school chemistry lab. If this claim could be
successfully verified, it promised nothing less than a total
solution to the world's energy supply problems.
The claim first appeared in the press in March of 1989,
and provoked considerable public and scientific interest. It was put
forward by respectable scientists (Fleishmann and Pons of the
University of Utah) and was supported by reports from other
respectable scientists that they had been able to replicate those
findings. These initial claims, however, were soon met by
counterclaims from equally respectable labs and investigators, to
the effect that the initial findings could not be replicated.
In 1989, two scientists who claimed to have discovered
the energy of the future were condemned as imposters and exiled by
their peers. Can it possibly make sense to reopen the cold fusion
investigation? A surprising number of researchers already have.
Nuclear Transmutation: The Reality of Cold Fusion
The announcement of cold fusion in March 1989 at the University
of Utah was greeted with worldwide hysteria. Drs. Martin Fleischmann
and Stanley Pons had claimed that an electrochemical cell with heavy
water electrolyte and a palladium cathode put out so much excess
energy that the mysterious phenomenon had to be nuclear, and was
probably a process related to nuclear fusion. Newspapers and
magazines said it might be a major scientific discovery with the
potential to end the energy crisis and revolutionize society. For a
few heady weeks the public took it seriously and waited anxiously
for laboratories to replicate the results. Many scientists quickly
took sides for or against cold fusion – mostly against. Then, by the
end of the summer of 1989 the official word came, in an
authoritative report written by a select panel of experts under the
auspices of the Department of Energy: cold fusion was a bust. It did
not exist. It was an experimental error. It could not be reproduced.
Nearly every scientific journal, magazine and newspaper on earth
reported this, and cold fusion abruptly dropped out of the
headlines. The story, it seemed, was over. Actually, it had barely
begun. Only a few thousand electrochemists in the world were
qualified to do the experiments, and most of them were too busy or
not interested in trying. In that autumn as public interest faded
and the U.S. Department of Energy pronounced a death sentence, a
small number of experienced scientists prepared serious, full-scale
experiments. One of them was Tadahiko Mizuno, an assistant professor
who had been doing similar electrochemical experiments for more than
twenty years.
Mizuno wrote this short book about his work and personal
experiences. It is the best informal account yet written about the
daily life of a cold fusion researcher. It gives you a sense of what
the job feels like. It is not intended to be technical. For
technical details, the reader is invited to examine Mizuno’s
numerous scientific papers, some of which are listed in the
references.
One event described here which is not described in the technical
literature is an extraordinary 10-day long heat-after-death incident
that occurred in 1991. News of this appeared in the popular press,
but a formal description was never published in a scientific paper.
1 Mizuno says this is because he does not have carefully established
calorimetric data to prove the event occurred, but I think he does
not need it. The cell went out of control. Mizuno cooled it over 10
days by placing it in a large bucket of water. During this period,
more than 37 liters of water evaporated from the bucket, which means
the cell produced more than 84 megajoules of energy during this
period alone, and 114 megajoules during the entire experiment. The
only active material in the cell was 100 grams of palladium. It
produced 27 times more energy than an equivalent mass of the best
chemical fuel, gasoline, can produce. I think the 36 liters of
evaporated water constitute better scientific evidence than the most
carefully calibrated high precision instrument could produce. This
is first-principle proof of heat. A bucket left by itself for 10
days in a university laboratory will not lose any measurable level
of water to evaporation. First principle experiments are not
fashionable. Many scientists nowadays will not look at a simple
experiment in which 36 liters of water evaporate, but high tech
instruments and computers are not used. They will dismiss this as
“anecdotal evidence.”
It is a terrible shame that Mizuno did not call in a dozen other
scientists to see and feel the hot cell. I would have set up a
24-hour vigil with graduate students and video cameras to observe
the cell and measure the evaporated water carefully. This is one of
history’s heartbreaking lost opportunities. News of this event,
properly documented and attested to by many people, might have
convinced thousands of scientists worldwide that cold fusion is
real. This might have been one of the most effective scientific
demonstrations in history. Unfortunately, it occurred during an
extended national holiday, and Mizuno decided to disconnect the cell
from the recording equipment and hide it in his laboratory. He
placed it behind a steel sheet because he was afraid it might
explode. He told me he was not anxious to have the cell certified by
many other people because he thought that he would soon replicate
the effect in another experiment. Alas, in the seven years since,
neither he nor any other scientist has ever seen such dramatic,
inarguable proof of massive excess energy.
Here is a chronology of the heat-after-death event:
- March 1991. A new experiment with the closed cell begins.
- April 1991. Cell shows small but significant excess heat.
- April 22, 1991. Electrolysis stopped.
- April 25. Mizuno and Akimoto note that temperature is
elevated.
It has produced 1.2 H 107 joules since April 22, in
heat-after-death.
- The cell is removed from the underground lab and transferred
to Mizuno’s lab. Cell temperature is >100 deg C.
- April 26. Cell temperature has not declined. Cell transferred
to a 15-liter bucket, where it is partially submerged in water.
- April 27. Most of the water in the bucket, ~10 liters, has
evaporated.
- The cell is transferred to a larger, 20 liter bucket. It is
fully submerged in 15 liters of water.
- April 30. Most of the water has evaporated; ~10 liters.
- More water is added to the bucket, bringing the total to 15
liters again.
- May 1. 5 liters of water are added to the bucket.
- May 2. 5 more liters are added to the bucket.
- May 7. The cell is finally cool. 7.5 liters of water remain in
the bucket.
Total evaporation equals:
- April 27 10 liters evaporated. Water level set at 15 liters in
a new bucket.
- April 30 10 liters evaporated. Water replenished to 15 liters
- May 1 5 liters replenished.
- May 2 5 liters replenished
- May 7 7.5 liters remaining.
Thus, evaporation since April 30 is: 15+5+5-7.5=17.5 liters.
Total evaporation is 37.5 liters.
The heat of vaporization of water is 540 calories per gram (2,268
joules per gram), so vaporization alone accounts for 85 megajoules.
Energy OUTPUT/INPUT = 119476 / 72801 = 1.64
One aspect of the heat-after-death event seems particularly
strange. It is as if the cathode is trying to maintain stasis inside
the cell. After the external 60 watt heater was turned off, the
heat-after-death reaction increased just about enough to compensate
for the loss of external heat. This sounds like an instrument error.
It prompted Mizuno to double check all instrument readings with
meters attached directly to the sensors. As unbelievable as this
sounds, it is a real phenomenon which others have observed. Stanley
Pons noted that the cold fusion effect has a kind of “memory.” After
a perturbation, temperature tends to return to a fixed level.
Perhaps this is not so strange. The physical configuration of
deuterons in the metal controls the power level.
Tiny spots in the surface of the cathode are probably formed in
what Edmund Storms of Los Alamos National Laboratory calls “a
special configuration of matter” with highly active, densely packed
deuterium. Until these spots change or disperse, the nuclear fuel
being fed into the reaction remains constant, so the cell tends to
return to the same power level. A chemical wood fire works the same
way. You can partially douse a roaring fire. If the fire does not go
out altogether and the wood remains in the same position, after a
while it will start burning again and return to its former power
level. Pons and Fleischmann used a three-minute pulse of heat to
“kick” their cells from low level heat to the high level heat that
rapidly increased to boil off. The heat was generated by joule
heating from externally supplied power, but once the cathode was
boosted into higher activity the external power could be withdrawn
and the cathode continued to self-heat – thus “heat-after-death.”
Metal undergoing cold fusion ‘wants’ to be hot and will keep
itself hot, prolonging the reaction. When Mizuno put his cell in the
bucket of water the reaction began to turn off, presumably because
the water in the bucket cooled the cathode. It did not quench the
reaction immediately because the cathode was fairly well insulated
inside a large thermal mass. Later, the water in the bucket warmed
up well above room temperature, ten liters of it evaporated, leaving
the cell surrounded by air. The cell began to self heat again and it
returned to its previously high level of activity. Storms thinks
that in the special configuration, the deuterium diffusion rate is
slower at high temperatures than usual. Normal Beta-phase palladium
deuteride will de-gas more rapidly when it heats up. Storms thinks
that when the temperature falls (or is lowered by a thermal shock),
the deuteride converts to Beta-phase and begins rapidly de-gassing,
and the cold fusion effect goes away.
Mizuno has often talked about the prehistory of cold fusion. Most
great discoveries are visited and revisited many times before
someone stakes a permanent claim. People sometimes stumble over a
new discovery without even realizing what they see. Mizuno did his
graduate and post graduate work on corrosion using highly loaded
metal hydrides. His experiments were almost exactly like those of
cold fusion, but they were performed for a different purpose. In
retrospect, he realized that he saw anomalous events that may have
been cold fusion. At the time he could not determine the cause, he
did not imagine it might be fusion, and he had to leave the mystery
unsolved. No scientist has time to track down every anomaly. I
expect many people saw and disregarded evidence for cold fusion over
the years. Mizuno makes a provocative assertion. He says that long
before 1989 he wondered whether the immense pressure of electrolysis
might produce “some form of fusion.” He says: “This kind of
hypothesis would occur to any researcher studying metal and hydrogen
systems. It is not a particularly profound or outstanding idea. It
never occurred to me to pursue the matter and research this
further.” He appears to downplay the role of Pons and Fleischmann.
Perhaps he exaggerates when he says “any researcher” would think of
it, but on the other hand Paneth and Peters and others did
investigate this topic in the 1920s. It has been floating around the
literature for a long time. Pons and Fleischmann deserve credit
because they did more than merely speculate about it. They succeeded
in doing the experiments to prove it. Perhaps cold fusion is
self-evident in the way that many great
discoveries are. An ordinary genius finds an obscure and
difficult truth which remains obscure even after he publishes,
except to other experts. A superlative genius makes a discovery that
few other people imagined, yet which everyone later agrees is
obvious in retrospect. When T. H. Huxley learned of the theory of
natural selection, he reportedly exclaimed: “why didn’t I think of
that!”
Within days of the 1989 announcement Mizuno set to work on a
“crude, preliminary” experiment. He built the cell in single
afternoon, which is in itself astonishing. His purpose was to detect
neutrons, which he along with everyone else in 1989 assumed would be
the principal signature of the reaction. Months later it became
clear that heat is the principal signature and neutrons appear
sporadically. The neutron flux is a million times smaller in
proportion to the heat than it is with hot fusion. His colleague
Akimoto, an expert in neutron detection, soon convinced him that the
instrumentation must be improved and the cell must be moved to a
well-shielded location before meaningful results might be obtained.
The underground laboratory housing the linear accelerator, close by
on campus, was the ideal spot for the experiment, but it is hardly
an ideal place for people. It is dark, dank, and unheated in winter,
as Mizuno well knew from years of doing graduate research there.
After weeks of operation, the experiment showed slight signs of
generating 2.45 MeV neutrons. Mizuno decided to get serious.
Here we learn what real a scientist is made of. While the rest of
the world rushed to judgment, Mizuno buckled down and began a second
“serious” experiment. The preparations took eight months. Mizuno and
a graduate student worked long days building and testing the cell,
and preparing the anode, cathode, electrolyte, and controls. They
planned to run at 100EC and 10 atmospheres of pressure, so they ran
pressure tests at 150EC and 50 atmospheres, improving the seals and
connections until they saw no significant pressure decline for days.
Finally they were ready to begin the first test run. The hysteria
was long past. The press and the establishment had dismissed cold
fusion. Real experiments by people like Mizuno were getting
underway. When these tests were finished and documented, a year or
two later, they constituted definitive proof of tritium, excess heat
and transmutation. It is tempting to think that the tragedy of cold
fusion boils down to . . . a short attention span. If only Nature,
the newspapers, the DoE and the American Physical Society understood
that you cannot do a research project in a few weeks, they would
have withheld judgment until Mizuno, Fritz Will, Melvin Miles and
others published in 1990 and 1991.
In person, Mizuno is charming, self deprecating, optimistic and
brimming with ideas. In the book he describes the dark side of the
story: the frustration, the boredom, the endless guerrilla war with
scientists who wanted to stop the research, and science journalists
who appeared to thrive on the outpouring of supposedly negative
results, and the fruitless battles to publish a paper or be heard at
a physics conference. Research means years of hard work which must
often be done in appalling circumstances: in an unheated underground
laboratory, late at night, in Hokkaido’s Siberian climate.
Experiments must be tended to four times a day, from eight in the
morning until eight at night, seven days a week, without a holiday
or a weekend off.
He describes these travails, but he does not dwell on them, or
the controversy and politics. He revels in the fun parts of cold
fusion: the discovery, the sense of wonder, the rewards. Mizuno does
not waste his time moping or worrying. He gets to work, he does
experiments, he teaches and encourages students. The first 5,000
copy printing of this book sold out quickly in Japan. Mizuno was
thrilled because, he told me, “undergrads are buying it, and calling
me with questions.” He and I wanted to move the Sixth International
Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF6) out of the isolated mountaintop
resort hotel in Hokkaido, back to the city of Sapporo, and into the
grubby Student Union meeting hall on campus. We wanted to open up
the conference and allow free admission to students.
We think that when engineering and physics majors drift into such
conferences and realize what is happening, cold fusion will take
off.
Despite the troubles, Mizuno remains confident that we will
succeed in the end. The research will be allowed, papers will be
published, rapid progress will be made. Others, like Fleischmann,
are deeply pessimistic. Some of the best scientists in this field,
including Storms, are deeply discouraged by the constant struggle
and expense. They sometimes tell me they are on the verge of
quitting. But Mizuno has never flagged, never doubted and never lost
hope. As Storms says “we must have hope, we have no other resources
in this field.”
Mizuno wants to make practical devices. He wants to improve
reproducibility and scale up. He talks about the scientist’s
obligation to give society something of value. He and Dennis Cravens
are the only cold fusion scientists I know who say that. He
succeeded in replicating the original Pons and Fleischmann palladium
cold fusion in three experiments, but it was difficult and the
reaction proved impossible to control, so he did not see much future
in it. Instead of trying to improve the original experiment by
repeating it many times with minor variations, the way McKubre,
Kunimatsu and others have attempted, Mizuno decided to try other
materials and other approaches. He is a one-man R&D consortium. Some
may criticize him for trying too many things and spreading himself
too thinly. As I see it, Mizuno is doing his share. The rest of the
world is to blame for not following his lead. He worked on ceramic
proton conductors for years, he published detailed information in
professional, full-length papers, and he assisted Oriani by
fabricating a batch of conductors for him (a week of difficult labor
on Oriani’s behalf). No other scientist has been as cooperative,
willing to share data, and willing to assist others replicate. If
Mizuno has left jobs unfinished, others should have taken up these
jobs.
Mizuno concentrates on the rewards, the progress, the heady sense
of excitement, the breathtaking possibilities. If progress has been
slow, it has been real, and the scope of the research has broadened
immeasurably. In 1989 we thought we had stumbled onto one isolated
uncharted island. It turned out we have discovered a whole new
continent. No wonder our exploration of it is taking longer than we
expected. Over the years I have asked many scientists where cold
fusion may be taking us and how big the discovery might be. Only
Martin Fleischmann has shown a deep understanding of how many
ramifications it may have.
Mizuno describes few moments of epiphany. There are moments of
excitement, but most of the triumphs are long expected, and a good
result does not mean much until you make it happen again, and again
after that. There are few revelations. The scientists do not
suddenly grasp the answer. They gradually narrow down a set of
possibilities. Often the same possibilities are examined,
discounted, and then reconsidered years later. Recently, Mizuno,
Bockris and others have increasingly focused on so-called “host
metal transmutations,” that is, nuclear reactions of the cathode
metal itself. The cathode metal was inexplicably neglected for many
years. The term “host metal” is misleading. It was an unfortunate
choice of words. It implies that the metal acts as a passive
structure, holding the hydrogen in place, cramming the deuterons or
protons together. The metal is a host, not a participant. The
hydrogen does the work. Now, it appears the metal itself is as
active as the hydrogen. The metal apparently fissions and fusions in
complex reactions. Now the task is to think about the metal, and not
just the hydrogen. Theory must explain how palladium can turn part
of itself into copper and other elements with peculiar isotopes.
One of the few “Eureka!” events in this book is the moment when
Mizuno and Ohmori saw the scanning electron microscope images of the
beautiful lily-shaped eruptions on the surface of Ohmori’s gold
cathodes. This was visual proof that a violent reaction takes place
under the surface of the metal, vaporizing the metal and spewing it
out. Later, these vaporized spots were found to be the locus of
transmutation. Around them are gathered elements with an isotopic
distribution that does not exist in nature. The only likely
explanation is that these isotopes are the product of a nuclear
transmutation.
Mizuno describes the wrong directions he has taken, the dead
ends, the mistakes. For years he ignored the most important clue:
the host metal transmutations. He did not check the composition of
the used cathodes. After his first big success produced tritium and
spectacular heat-after-death, he opened the cell to find the cathode
was blackened by something. He thought it must be contamination, and
he was disappointed that his painstaking efforts to exclude
contamination had failed. After puzzling over it for a long time he
scraped the black film off the cathode with glass, and prepared the
cathode for another run. Years later he realized that this black
film was probably formed from microscopic erupted structures similar
to those on Ohmori’s cathodes. He says in retrospect he was throwing
away treasure. Even Mizuno, an open minded, observant and perceptive
scientist, has to be hit over the head with the same evidence many
times before he realizes it is crucial. Other people are worse.
Mizuno was blind for a long time; other cold fusion scientists
remain blind to this day. They are unwilling to do simple tests that
might reveal the nature of the reaction. IMRA is a sad example.
Informed sources say IMRA researchers never performed an
autoradiograph on a used cathode.
A recurring theme in this book is money. Mizuno frets, schemes
and struggles to reduce expenses. He worries about the consumption
of heavy water at $8 or $10 per day. He does not reveal in the book
why these trivial expenses bother him so much: most of the money
comes out of his own pocket. University discretionary funding
allotted to professors in Japan does not begin to cover the expense
of cold fusion research. It would be called “noise level funding” in
the U.S., or “sparrow’s tears” in the Japanese idiom. Most of the
other professors at Hokkaido remain hostile toward this research,
and unwilling to allocate more money for it, so Mizuno often pays
for equipment, materials, travel expenses and so on himself. Over
the years the research has cost him tens of thousands of dollars,
which is a great deal of money for a middle-class Japanese family.
Cold fusion research consumes a constant flow of new equipment. The
Japanese scientific establishment and the university barely tolerate
this research. Still, Mizuno is better off than he would be at most
U.S. universities, which have essentially banned this research.
Mizuno describes the dank, underground laboratory. He does not
mention that his own laboratory is the size of a broom closet and so
crammed with equipment you can barely fit in the door. The roof
leaks. A large sheet of blue plastic is suspended over the corner of
the room, funneling the rain water down to a sink and away from the
computers, meters, power supplies and complex, delicate, beautiful
handcrafted experimental apparatus, made of aluminum, stainless
steel, platinum, palladium, gold and silver.
Atlanta, Georgia 1998
The above article by Jed Rothwell is
an introduction to the English Edition of
Nuclear Transmutation: The Reality of Cold Fusion
by Tadahiko Mizuno, Jed Rothwell (Translator)
Dr. Tadahiko Mizuno
Department of Nuclear Engineering
Hokkaido National University, Japan
BOOKS
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It is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching
their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature. - Nikola Tesla
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