Oil is now obsolete, maybe.
By PhxG Posted in Technology — Comments (25) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Turns out the world of making cold fusion reaction a reality; if real, this discovery could eliminate a huge demand for fuels that are petroleum based. Maxine Waters now unsure of what to nationalize.
From Physworld.com
"Arata's demonstration...was successfully done. There came about 60 people from universities and companies in Japan and few foreign people. Six major newspapers and two TV [stations] (Asahi, Nikkei, Mainichi, NHK, et al.) were there...Demonstrated live data looked just similar to the data they reported in [the] papers...This showed the method highly reproducible. Arata's lecture and Q&A were also attractive and active."
I also received a detailed account from Jed Rothwell, who is editor of the US site Low Energy Nuclear Reactions and who has long thought that cold-fusion research shows promise. He said that, after Arata had started the injection of gas, the temperature rose to about 70 °C, which according to Arata was due to both chemical and nuclear reactions. When the gas was shut off, the temperature in the centre of the cell remained significantly warmer than the cell wall for 50 hours. This, according to Arata, was due solely to nuclear fusion.
Without a doubt, if this is real and reproduceable it's gonna be a decade before anything of use comes from the discovery.
But this is just what is needed, a new energy discovery to spur more. Oil has, for to long been the only viable portable fuel product. I'd love to see 150-300 years in the future to see what fuels are in use then. My money says nothing that has even been envisioned today.
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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
--Aristotle
I think this is the link you tried to post to Physics World:
Cold-fusion demonstration "a success"
From my perusal, I see this blog piece is discussing a Japanese-language demonstration at Osaka of a cold-fusion experiment by Yoshiaki Arata, a retired (now emeritus) physics professor at Osaka University, Japan.
Since the blog author did not attend (and he implies he speak Japanese) - the article relies instead on accounts from two sources, both of whom are decidedly partial: a colleague of the investigators and a well-known U.S. advocate for cold fusion. Thus this report must be treated most cautiously
I also do not see reference to anyone from a "skeptics" society being present to rule out deception. Such is a requirement for me to take a report like this seriously, as scientists are not trained to detect deception.
Thus until we see a reliable result of replication from a more skeptical investigating group(s), I would not put much stock in these reports. Of course, if these guys are right, cold-fusion would shake up the energy world, though commercial availability would seem to be decades away at the best. Also, I don't know if anyone has seriously looked at the overall environmental impact with commercial cold-fusion power generation.
We would all be speaking with squeaky from the helium ;-)
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Seriously, though, anytime you start talking about industrial scale production, you're going to have environmental impacts. For instance, there's the enriching process, transport of materials to and power/waste products from, the building and maintenance of the power plants themselves. Not to mention the weapons implications of large scale deuterium enrichment.
Now maybe these will turn out to be benign, either in absolute terms or relative to fossil fuels, but the history of other "clean" power (e.g. solar, wind) indicates that they're less clean than they might first appear.
Or more precisely its an issue you can't do anything about. People turn things into weapons. Just about everything that can be gets turned into a weapon.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Weapons are always a winning proposition:
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSN2249853620080523
_____________________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
--Aristotle
Best feel-good story of the week. Whooda thought Barack could single-handedly arm a small town?
these guns could come in very handy to the new car owners to protect their fuel supply from "diversion".
You just try to repeat the experiment yourself. No need for self-appointed arbiters of truth and falsehood.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
In brief, replication is a well established method when all parties are acting in good faith.
However, when you're dealing with fringe areas, the risk of deception is much higher, but scientists are trained to assume that people are acting in good faith. Given the limited time and resources, not to mention the waste of scientists try to replicate a fraud that could be used for productive research, we need to supplement our gatekeeping abilites so that scientists don't unnecessarily travel down dead end alleys.
Thus, it's much better if one can nip dishonesty in the bud - and for that, utilizing the assistance of those training in debunking and detecting deception are invaluable. (This also applies to enlisting experts in detecting self-deception or unintended stacking of the deck.) Not to mention that by rather lengthy time for replication and peer review, etc. leaves the barn door open too long and risks the error gaining wide circulation and perhaps gain unwarranted funding. (This starts to get close to the AGW juggernaut, but that's a topic for another day.)
In today's science jungle, there's a need for preemptive action to limit damage in these fringe areas.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
The problem is that liberals have a different view of what constitutes legitimate science. And if you get enough college professors to give them a centimeter, they'll take a kilometer.
The environmentalists are using "science" to try to push people back into the stone ages. No cars, no running water, no toilet paper, and no electricity.
It is conservatives who would rather see science move us forward with SENSIBLE ethical boundaries. If it weren't so sad, I'd be rolling over laughing at the people who call themselves "progressive." "Regressive" fits them perfectly.
But it's late and I'm not sure it's worth trying to explain more. [Well it looks like I did try agains.]
I'm not talking about enforcing orthodoxy like what's happening with the church of AGW. I'm not talking about ex cathedra pronouncements from science experts. We've seen the impact of left-wing ideology on the pursuit of scientific truth.
What I was referring to specifically here were experimental demonstrations, which might be little more than magic shows in the guise of science using the tricks of the magic trade.
I was thinking about the history of so-called scientific research into paranormal phenomena and the demonstration time and again that when scientists could not see the trickery going on, people with training in magic, etc. were able to uncover deception (either deliberate or unintentional) going on.
I'm also mindful of the dramatic increase in scientific fraud (or perhaps just improved detection).
All I'm arguing is that before scientists go and to chase their tail trying to replicate a demonstration like this (only to risk the proponents moving the goals post with a different demonstration), it would save a lot of time and labor if professionals who know the tricks of the trade were watching: they'd be much better able to identify deception than untrained scientists in the audience.
So I was making a narrow point. Just because someone labels what they're doing to be science doesn't mean that only scientists are qualified to investigate.
When you publish a finding, you don't do a live experiment and wow an audience, so what you're talking about just doesn't apply. It'd be useless in fact, as you suggest.
If it's good science, the authors of the paper will write down exactly what they did, step by step, and write down their results to the proper number of decimal places.
If someone else follows those instructions step by step and gets a different result, then the burden is on the people with the extraordinary finding to explain and correct.
So at no point will there be any tail chasing.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
When scientists keep within the peer-review publication process, then the well-established processes do a good job of weeding out the valid from the fallacious.
The problem is when scientists go outside this process and try to drum up support from the public to create a groundswell to put pressure on appropriators to give them funding.
The article forming the subject of this blog described exactly what you wrote in your first sentence: it was a demonstration before a live audience followed by partisans talking up the results. That's where I would like to hear from someone without a vested interest who could afford a more skeptical perspective, which was lacking in the Physics World account.
But if the researchers didn't publish the details of their work, I don't think it's worth a second look until they do.
That information is the core of review, not some gatekeepers.
HTML Help for Red Staters
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
Professor Nathan Lewis and others were the ones best equipped to debunk the original cold fusion finding. Because they had great experience with what happens when you work with the kinds of chemical processes Pons and Fleischmann were causing, they were able to take the published process and pick it apart, explaining what really happened.
That's how science is supposed to work, and it can continue to work in this case. No need for James Randi here.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
Yes, that was the correct link. My error.
_____________________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
--Aristotle
Late '80's there were headlines about cold-fusion success until it got debunked.
PhxG, just to give some perspective, "cold fusion" claims fly all the time - they're a dime a dozen.
I've seen two in the last six or eight months without even having to look for them (and I don't).
One was some guys who bluffed their way (somehow - someone should be hung for not vetting things properly) onto the program of a serious technology investment conference, and in the middle of the presentation suddenly announced that when they forced water through carbon nanotubes they saw cold fusion. No news since then (no surprise to me), but apparently somewhere inside that story there's also a Congressional earmark.
The second one is crazy even by cold fusion standards. Some goofballs take a couple of graphite rods as electrodes, immerse them in water, and then run "36 volts of current" (sic - that says it all about the knowledge level of this crew) through them. They claim that an ex post facto analysis shows trace quantities of magnesium, silicon, iron, vanadium, etc. - and this has to be coming from cold fusion (they are beyond the hydrogen to helium one and are claiming higher orders of fusion that stars only manage in the later stages of their evolution). They base this on the notion that their starting rods are "pure" graphite. They're obviously not real scientists, since there is no such thing as "pure" anything - and a quick search of suppliers of graphite rods shows lists of trace impurities that are identical to the claimed "reaction products." These guys clearly aren't even swift enough to send in both a "before" and an "after" rod for comparative analysis. But that would also probably spoil the fun....
A core structural social problem with "energy" is that the field is grossly overloaded with cranks and outright frauds. I actually know some respectable people working on some aspects of "energy" and they have my sympathy - since they are always being pelted with e-mails by a whole galaxy of wackos....
Of course they are, that's part of the fun. I'm sure that if YouTube was around when the S-Bend pipe was being invented there'd be hundreds of videos of the back-ups. Pure fun.
_____________________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
--Aristotle
But I would wait for more confirming evidence on the coldfusion angle. At least he has an easily measurable heat signature with his experiment.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777