The power supply is virtually limitless

Mar 24, 2009 09:02 GMT  ·  By

The dream of developing a method of obtaining nuclear fusion has been a long-standing one for physicists, ever since the idea was first proposed. Basically, cold fusion is the opposite process of nuclear fission, the method that is currently used in atomic power plants to produce electricity. These facilities split atomic nuclei, thus releasing energy, and also radiation, which have to be contained. But nuclear fusion relies on combining nuclei, and does not have any of the side-effects.

In addition, it doesn't require enriched plutonium or uranium to operate, but works on deuterium (heavy water), which can be readily obtained from sea water. This means that supplies are virtually limitless, and that the liquid could be used to produce large amounts of totally clean energy.

However, up until now, no physics team has been sure that this is practically possible. Now, a group of researchers have come up with the first pieces of evidence of the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR).

Yesterday, at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the researchers presented the first proof that LENR devices can produce a class of sub-atomic particles known as neutrons, which had been previously associated with cold fusion. “Our finding is very significant. To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from an LENR device,” Pamela Mosier-Boss, who is a chemist at the San Diego, California-based US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR), explained.

“People have always asked 'Where's the neutrons?'. If you have fusion going on, then you have to have neutrons. We now have evidence that there are neutrons present in these LENR reactions,” she added. More than 30 papers will be presented this week at the ACS meeting, to celebrate the two decades that have passed since nuclear fusion entered the main focus of countless physicist groups.

Despite the fact that researchers Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons said in 1989 that they had manged to get a cold fusion-type reaction at room temperatures, other teams were unable to duplicate the results and, so, the entire field of research was somewhat abandoned. Some expert groups continued to search, though, and the SPAWAR team was one of them. Now, they say that they have succeeded in identifying traces of neutrons in their deuterium solution, which is one of the first reports on cold fusion to actually have chances of being confirmed by other sources as well.