But it wasn't a hoax. And highly successful cold fusion experiments were being conducted in labs in Japan, California, and Russia, among other places. These labs were reproducing experiments that proved nuclear processes were taking place by observing excess helium production (a telltale sign that nuclear processes are happening). And now, it's "official" that cold fusion is real, since the mainstream press has reported it (funny how that works, huh?). But most of the scientific community still doesn't know about these experiments, and most people continue to believe that Pons and Fleishman were con artists, which is absolutely not the case. They were brilliant pioneers, shunned by a scientific community whose egos and careers were vested in the world of "hot fusion" where billions of dollars, not tabletop jars, are invested in an effort to produce excess energy.
And yet hot fusion, despite all the billions poured into it over the years, has produced absolutely nothing in terms of practical energy. Remember the promises about fusion reactors? They would generate electricity "too cheap to meter," the scientists once promised us. And when real fusion came along in 1989 in the form of tabletop experiments, the best fusion scientists in the country did their best to bury it. That's how politics works in the scientific community. Too many so-called "scientists" aren't really doing good science or looking for a free energy source: they're looking to boost their egos and careers... and possibly position themselves for a Nobel Prize someday.
This approach, called bubble fusion, and the new experimental results
are being published in an extensively peer-reviewed article titled
"Additional Evidence of Nuclear Emissions During Acoustic Cavitation,"
which is scheduled to be posted on Physical Review E's Web site and
published in its journal this month.
The oscillating sound waves caused the bubbles to expand and then
violently collapse, creating strong compression shock waves around and
inside the bubbles.
"These extensive new experiments have replicated and extended our
earlier results and hopefully answer all of the previous questions
surrounding our discovery," said Richard T. Lahey Jr., the Edward E.
Hood Professor of Engineering at Rensselaer and the director of the
analytical part of the joint research project.
Other fusion techniques, such as those that use strong magnetic fields
or lasers to contain the plasma, cannot easily achieve the necessary
compression, Lahey said.
Tritium gas, a radioactive by-product of deuterium-deuterium bubble
fusion, is actually a part of the fuel, which can be consumed in
deuterium-tritium fusion reactions.
Researchers Rusi Taleyarkhan, Colin West, and Jae-Seon Cho conducted
the bubble fusion experiments at ORNL.
Robert Block, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at Rensselaer,
helped to design, set up, and calibrate a state-of-the-art neutron and
gamma ray detection system for the new experiments.
Nigmatulin is a visiting scholar at Rensselaer, a member of the
Russian Duma, and the president of the Bashkortonstan branch of the
Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).