the Physics of Fleischmann Pons Fusion

It seems to me, with the vast amount of good data available, it is inconceivable that some academic solid state physicist didn't solve the riddle of cold fusion long ago on a slow weekend. It is, I guess, a good lesson in human behavior. In the days of Neils Bohr and Enrico Fermi, this would have been a weekend distraction. We need to teach more philosophy, history, and perhaps psychology, to our technical students.

It is after reading the biographies of some of the early physics greats (Boltzman, Bohr, Rutherford, Maxwell etc..) that you get a feeling for how discoveries are made and grudgingly accepted by peers. It became obvious ,by 2002, that cold fusion was one of these discoveries. The exciting part for us was that, hey, this could be fairly simple. When you look back to discoveries like the Bohr atom, they look pretty simple. It was a giant leap in its day, but conceptually pretty simple stuff in hindsight.

So what do you see when you look at the list of cold fusion behavior; the data?

The thing that jumped at me was, this is obviously a chain reaction. Next question (this is just like playing CSI Miami) is what could possibly be the chain reacting species. In chemistry we deal with chain reactions all the time. Usually they are like polymerization chain reactions, say free radical chain reactions. A+A^. => AA^. then AA^. +A => AAA^. and so on. This is not the model we want. We want a chain reaction like a uranium fission chain reaction where Ur+neutron=> 2 fission fragments + ~2 neutrons. You need the two neutrons because some of them go astray and are lost. In cold fusion we want to fuse two deuterium (d) nuclei into helium (He⁴) . So we want a reaction equation something like A+d+d=>He⁴+2A. We want at least 2 A's because any physical process is less than 100% efficient, just like the lost neutrons.

Physicists would look at that and say, you can't have a 3 body nuclear reaction and keep the reaction efficiency at 50%. It would be more like 10^-100 %(=1/googol) or some ridiculously small number; and for nuclear reactions that's a pretty good conclusion. Everyone seems to forget that we are talking cold fusion. This means chemical reactions causing the fusion of deuterium. This is where you loose all the physicists, because this is alchemy, with all its sordid history. It is sort of a taboo to even think along those lines, like dating your sister, just doesn't happen (outside of West Virginia).

Chemistry is full of 3 body reactions. Biology is almost all 3 body reactions, read enzymes. Most catalytic reactions have 3 species involved; 1) the catalyst, 2) chemical activated by the catalyst, and 3) the reactant. Very basic stuff to chemists. So were almost half way there.

A bit of an aside about energy levels 

The energy of a chemical bond is around a few electron volts. Room temperature atoms have an energy around 0.027 eV. One electron Volt in temperature terms would be ~11,000 C. (Makes you wonder how any chemical bonds are ever broken at room temperature!) If you allow yourself to think in terms of alchemy, this means that much lower than usual energies can be used to react nuclei. Deuterium fusion becomes more likely at higher energies, but reasonable rates can be achieved between ~1,000 and 100,000 eV. The best known alchemy reaction, muon fusion of deuterium, has a chemical bond of only some 550 eV (6 million degrees C), and the fusion reaction only takes ~micro-seconds (~10^-6 seconds). The nuclear chemistry works because the alchemy chemical is stable, allowing a relatively long time for a low probability fusion event (hot fusion reactions happen in ~10^-21 seconds).

So we have this reaction A+d+d=>He+2A. At first glance this doesn't make a lot of sense, but bear with me. What if A=He. Note that the equation is not an algebraic equation, it is a chemical reaction equation. Thus if A=He we get He+d+d=>2He....perfect. Well, except that helium is pretty much the most chemically inert element known to man. This is where you would loose the chemists, if they bothered to get this far.

But guess what? This is exactly what happens. And don't worry, we are not going to do any hand waving to make this happen. Mother nature does it all for us. You just have to follow the logic; but it is a fairly long story.

Back to the data. So why did I think chain reaction right away? First look at the Navy infra-red video. Little "gone critical" chain reactions all over the place. And if you did your homework, you know that High energy (10's of MeV) particles will travel about 10 to 20 microns in palladium. Guess how big the little hot spots are? That's right, 10's of microns. (Those little bursts are just like Fermi's fist nuclear pile, only the pile had to be 10's of feet across, since the neutrons would travel many feet before reacting.) And Fleischmann and Pons gone critical cube of palladium is folk lore. The instability of the "excess energy" (heat bursts), is also legend in the cold fusion community, a good sign of an uncontrolled chain reaction. On a mysterious note...heat after death is not part of the chain reaction (heat after death is some cold fusion jargon meaning heat after you turn off electrolysis).

The chain reaction scenario also takes care of the energy dissipation problem with the formation of He⁴. There are simply two helium atoms that leave the reaction site in opposite directions, each with ~12Mev of energy, no neutrons, no tritium, no gamma rays. The details of all this will be in the main body of the web site. Bottom line is, it works; you'll see. And it will be fun, I guarantee.