Warming towards cold fusion

In Fusion Runs Hot and Cold, Jonah Messinger, the Breakthrough Institute's Senior Energy Analysist, provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the science of low energy nuclear reactions (LENR), a field once known as "Cold Fusion." Although long castigated as a pseudoscience, the field has attracted a growing number of credible experts, recent DOE funding, and has produced a growing body of empirical evidence for a phenomena that is becoming increasingly understood as a third type of nuclear power.

Cold fusion has long been widely misunderstood, beginning with its flawed introduction by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, electrochemists at the University of Utah, as far back as 1989. They claimed to have induced fusion reactions of deuterium nuclei in a palladium foil by applying a current to drive electrolysis. Their electrolysis experiments—inspired by older anomalous reports of cold-fusion-like experiments in the 1920s—caused several sharp, multi-day bursts in thermal power output from their cells well above the electrical power of the input current or the total potential energy stored in the chemical bonds of the electrolyte.

There were multiple problems with Fleishmann and Pons’ work, which were revisited by Jonah Messinger, not least of which was a lack of both reproducibility and a lack of a theoretical explanation. According to this review, not five weeks after the initial claims—the field was proclaimed dead by speakers at the influential American Physical Society (APS), among which was a mocking rebuttal by Steven Koonin, then a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech—now notorious for his dismissal of climate change impacts.

Although at that time, the DOE’s panel to evaluate cold fusion opted against funding cold fusion research (despite evidence of neutron and tritium production that could not be explained), the body of scientific evidence since then has grown such that even the DOE has finally agreed to fund research. Catch up on the current state of scientific understandings about what is now far more widely believed to be a highly complex, multi-body, low energy nuclear reaction with this article from the Breakthrough Institute.

Read more at Breakthrough's Fusion Runs Hot and Cold, by Jonah Messinger, May 18, 2023. Also see the Nature.com article, Revisiting the cold case of cold fusion by Ross Koningstein, David Fork, Matt Trevithick and others, from May 19, 2019.

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March 10, 2021

Examining Anti-Nuclear Bullshit

Ted Nordhaus bravely calls out the deceptive tactics used by anti-nuclear activists—some operating as academics with cover from similarly duplicitious "peer reviewers," to promote what are ideologic viewpoints unsupported by science. This is not an easy area to write about—with the ever increasing threat of lawsuits—but the evidence is mounting that much of what has passed as academic studies falsely showing negative or no benefit from nuclear power, has been "peer reviewed" by people with ideologic aims.

Increasingly, these reports advocating for 100% renewables have been widely debunked by real scientists using the same data. Such academic "fights" have even poured out into the courts, as in the case of the devastating take-down of Mark Jacobson's almost entirely bogus 100% renewable study which was published by the National Academy of Science and received an award as one of the best studies of the year, but whose glaring flaws were broadly debunked by a rather serious and impressive cadre of some thirty other scientists.

Jacobson, hurting from the smack-down, chose to employ the courts in his behalf, having ample funding from renewable and fossil fuel supporters—all of whom benefit from the failed RPS policy approach that he advocates—but found, instead, that the courts sided with those calling "bullshit" on him and he was forced to pay for both his own failed litigation as well as the legal expenses of the scientists he has attempted to intimidate into silence.

While it is tempting and appealing to think that we can address climate change with the aesthetically appealing technologies of just wind and solar, in fact, the data increasingly shows that such a plan isn't even remotely feasible. Yet, there remain many for whom that vision is their brand.

Many of these ideologues continue to rail against the use of nuclear energy, and Nordhaus reports on the most recent publication of a new paper by Harrison Fell, Alex Gilbert, Jesse Jenkins and Matteo Mildenberger with the take-down of the a study published last fall in Nature Energy by Benjamin Sovacool and others at the University of Sussex Energy Group.

Read Ted Nordhaus' exquisite examination of the difference between bullshit and lying in "On Anti-Nuclear Bullshit," published at The Breakthrough Institute.

Published by Nucleation Capital in Anti-nuclear campaign, Brilliant thinkers, Climate change, Climate mayhem, Climate policy, LINKS, Scientific debate, Solving climate

December 13, 2013

Rise of the Nuclear Greens

Robert Bryce, a highly respected author and now film producer, who recently released the film "Juice: How Electricity Explains the World," attempted to tackle the counter-intuitive phenomena that was being noticed at that time—approximately two years after the devastating disaster at Fukushima—wherein prominent environmentalists who were anti-nuclear before the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant became pro-nuclear after the accident.

Bryce reports on the emergence of what he calls "pronuclear Greens," and the bifurcation that they represented in the environmental movement. These leading environmental thinkers, it turns out, realized that despite how horrific the earthquake-induced tsunami was, and its ability to eliminate power to the nuclear plant for enough time to cause the meltdown of three of the four reactors at the Daiichi plant, that nevertheless, the actual loss of life from that accident was so negligible, it was almost something to celebrate.

Of course, the tsunami swept away some 15,000 souls. In the lead-up to the meltdown, the fear created by the threat of what would happen, caused unbelievable panic, that hundreds of people died from accidents, heart attacks, the failure to give proper medical treatment, and many other causes. Estimates put the number of deaths related to the ordered evaculation at about 1,000. But the number of people who died from the meltdowns themselves as well as from the amount of escaping radiation? Zero.

Yes, there was a catastrophic failure at a nuclear power plant but, the more you learn about it, the more you realize that lives would have been saved had there not been the evacuation order in the first place. That the damage done was limited primarily to the physical plant and none spilled out to the surrounding community. What radiation did escape was relatively minor and impacts from that would have been highly treatable with iodine and routine check-ups. In fact, the fear of nuclear was more dangerous than the meltdown.

Read Robert Bryce's prescient article "Rise of the Nuclear Greens," published at The Breakthrough Institute.

Published by Nucleation Capital in Anti-nuclear campaign, Brilliant thinkers, Climate policy, Environmental support for nuclear, Future of Energy, LINKS, Pro-nuclear campaign, Solving climate, Zero emission energy