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During the period 1989-1992, I was a member of a team employed by Kanza, Inc., of Topeka, Kansas, to develop a cold nuclear fusion research project. Ultimately, after great struggle, we were able to get a SINGLE test of ONE concept made at a major university. The negotiation of the contract to test that ONE concept took two years, due to threatened interference from the U.S. Department of Energy. Near the end of the negotiations, the University's Vice Provost for research told us that officials of USDOE had verbally threatened to take away the grant funding of any institution that allowed itself to participate in cold fusion research, other than the three institutions that were already involved. Therefore, to do even one test, we had to promise absolute secrecy—the University's name must never be known! Alas, when we ran our one test, we looked for neutrons rather than heat and our results were inconclusive.
After that project, I was subject to an agreement not to compete with Kanza for a period of years. I went to work as a legal assistant and mostly forgot about my experience with cold fusion. However, the agreement not to compete has now expired, and I still believe that the term "cold fusion" describes a group of real phenomena which have a very real potential to solve the world's looming energy crisis. I will therefore now describe an idea quite different from that tested by Kanza which I think may help others in their research.
All of the commonly attempted fusion reactions are strongly favored thermodynamically. However, due to high activation energy barriers caused by electrostatic repulsion between the fusing nuclei, they occur so slowly under normal conditions as to be immeasurable. The standard approaches to fusion accepted by our Department of Energy all attempt to overcome this activation energy barrier by brute force, by creating conditions in which nuclei will collide with sufficient energy to overcome the barrier frequently enough that the resulting fusion events will produce measurable energy and "by-products." Brief but measurable controlled fusion has been achieved by several of these approaches, but sustained reactions or even fleeting energy "break-even" have not.
Pons and Fleischman's original theory of cold fusion, as I understand it, resembled the hot fusion approaches in that they hypothesized that the process involved an increased rate of nuclear "collision" events. The role of the metallic substrate was to permit packing of deuterium with the nuclei closer together than is found even in metallic solid deuterium. When electrolytic loading was continued in an area of metal already substantially saturated, the result would be to force some collisions, resulting in the same fusion reactions seen in hot fusion experiments. However, subsequent observations (such as excess heat without corresponding production of neutrons or helium-3) don't seem to confirm this theory.
Most of the more recent theories of what is happening in a cold fusion device do not depend upon "collision" events. Instead, they postulate that the solid substrate essentially catalyzes "coalescence" events which tunnel through the activation energy barrier rather than overcoming it by force. "Coalescence" rather than "collision" certainly accurately describes the following theories proposed in the literature (which, I note, are not mutually exclusive):
None of these newer theories involve making the fusing nuclei "collide." Therefore, there is no particular reason to believe that cold fusion processes will be aided by high temperatures if any of these theories explains the phenomenon. Indeed, it seems to me that the opposite should be true -- that cold fusion processes will be favored at very LOW temperatures. Lower temperatures will increase the orderliness of the system and reduce the rate of desorption and competing chemical processes. Furthermore, by making the substrate and fusing atoms move more slowly in all modes, lower temperatures will increase the length of time that a local area of the substrate containing a potential fusing pair will remain in a configuration conducive to fusion once it reaches that configuration (whatever that may be). This should increase the rate of coalescence events.
If this is true, the most effective cold fusion processes should occur, not in substrates presently being electrolytically loaded with deuterium from heavy water at room temperature or higher, but quite possibly in substrates loaded from liquid deuterium or in pre-loaded substrates immersed in liquid deuterium for use. If pre-loaded substrates are used, which seems the most likely route, they will probably be the same ones used in room-temperature experimentation. If loading is done directly out of liquid deuterium, the substrates used may or may not be the same as are used in room-temperature experimentation (but see the proposals for variation of substrate materials, below). Moreover, for electrolytic loading to be done out of liquid deuterium, a suitable electrolyte will have to de identified and added to the deuterium. While I confess I know nothing about solubilities of other substances in liquid hydrogen (or deuterium), I suspect that some of the following might be suitable in some systems, depending upon the nature of the substrate: LiD, LiOD, DF, DCl, D2O, D2PtF6, LiAlD4, NaBD4, or NaND2. (1) Even so, I suspect that an electrolytic loading process out of liquid deuterium might take awhile, owing to the presumably quite small equilibrium constant for ionization of diatomic hydrogen. Still, such a process might be worth looking into.
I can also envision several different approaches that could be taken to encouraging fusion events to occur under low temperature conditions. Continued electrolytic loading is only one of these. Two other possibilities are compression and percussion of pre-loaded material. All of these might work no matter which of the several proposed mechanisms of cold fusion is correct. There are, however, several other possibilities that might work if one of the theories gives an accurate account of what happens during a cold fusion event but not if another theory is correct instead. For instance, if the primary effect involved is electrostatic shielding leading to increased quantum tunneling, it might be expected that one or more wavelengths of ultraviolet (or, less likely, visible) light would aid the process in any given substrate by causing electrons to be promoted to excited states having geometric distributions that shield even better than in the ground state. On the other hand, if the primary effect is a sharing or delocalization of nuclear components, there may be particular vibrational or rotational modes of the system or its component atoms which favor this sharing, even though random vibration or rotation in all possible modes (i.e., higher temperature) disfavors it. In this case, exposure to specific wavelengths of infrared or microwave radiation which correspond to the favored vibrational or rotational modes, while maintaining a very low bulk temperature, might be expected to accelerate fusion. (Unfortunately, I do not have either the library or the software, in my present position as a legal assistant, to begin to make calculations to attempt to predict what any of these favorable states might be in any system. Therefore, I will leave that to my readers.)
When my contract removed me from the field nine years ago, everyone was experimenting with pure single-metal systems -- palladium, titanium or nickel -- with no mixtures or alloys. Just from what I've seen on a brief survey of the newer results over the last couple of days, this is still pretty much true, except for the people who are working with metal oxide ceramic systems. I understand the tendency to stay close to things that have already worked and are familiar. But wouldn't it make sense to start trying to vary the materials? For instance, wouldn't alloying the metals that are known to be effective (to a degree) with small amounts of other metals to change the size of the vacancies filled by hydrogen in the loaded system and the electron densities around those vacancies make sense? (These changes can be largely predicted mathematically before they are tried in the laboratory.) There are also other metals which are capable of storing hydrogen, though maybe not at as high a density as Pd, Ni or Ti. But if the effect isn't just an effect of increased packing, but an effect moderated by electrostatic shielding or a direct nuclear interaction with the substrate, the lower hydrogen storage densities of these other metals shouldn't matter as much. They should be tried.
Got zirconium?
In my recent quick survey of the field, I noticed that some groups are now obtaining indications of fusion on metal oxide ceramics, including some (the lanthanum aluminum oxides) rather similar to known superconductors, although they used a surface plasma rather than a deuterium loading process. If, in fact, very low temperature fusion could be achieved on a substrate which is a bulk superconductor at the temperature used, this would open up some rather interesting possibilities for energy conversion. It might well be possible to covert energy from fusion events directly into electricity with a thermodynamic efficiency much better than is possible for the heat engines now proposed (most of which propose using fusion to boil heavy water and drive a turbine).
Ian Johnson, 7 July 2001
Have comments? WRITE!
Response to theobjection that the process would be self-quenching
.Notes on my Bar admission status
My own Systematic Theology, my other major interest.
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