Navy Discovers Cold Fusion (again)
Date: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 @ 20:41:21 UTC
Topic: Science
By Sharon Weinberger
I always was bad at remembering dates, that's probably why I forgot to mention that Friday, March 23rd, was the 18th anniversary of the first claims of cold fusion, the long-disputed idea that nuclear reactions can be generated at room temperature.
The Navy back in 2002 published two volumes (yep, count 'em, two) in support of cold fusion.
Now, the latest news is that Navy researchers from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center have published an article in the respected journal Naturwissenschaften, claiming an experiment that is highly reproducible and demonstrates nuclear reactions.
As the magazine Chemistry World reports:
Pons and Fleischmann suggested that electrolysis could pack deuterium nuclei into a palladium lattice so tightly that they were fusing together; Szpak and Boss now claim to have speeded up this process by co-depositing palladium and deuterium onto a thin wire subjected to an electric field. They have used plastic films - so-called CR-39 detectors - to track charged particles emerging from their reactions, publishing most recently in Naturwissenschaften . And, unlike the original 1989 experiments, the researchers claim their results are easily reproducible, with other groups reportedly detecting products of nuclear reactions such as alpha particles and gamma rays.
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