Scientists have across evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the process once called “cold fusion” that may promise a new source of energy. Low-energy nuclear reactions could potentially provide 21st Century society a limitless and environmentally clean energy source for generating electricity, according to researchers.
“Our finding is very significant,” said study co-author and analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss, of the US Navy’s Space and Naval
Warfare Systems Centre (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.
Fusion is the energy source of the sun and the stars. Scientists had been striving for years to tap that power on Earth to produce electricity from an abundant fuel called deuterium that can be extracted from seawater. Everyone thought that it would require a sophisticated new genre of nuclear reactors able to withstand temperatures of tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.
Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons, however, claimed achieving nuclear fusion at comparatively “cold” room temperatures in 1989 - in a simple tabletop laboratory device termed an electrolytic cell. But, other scientists could not reproduce their results, and the whole field of research declined.
One of their problems involved extreme difficulty in using conventional electronic instruments to detect the small number of neutrons produced in the process.
In the new study, Mosier-Boss and colleagues inserted an electrode composed of nickel or gold wire into a solution of palladium chloride mixed with deuterium or “heavy water” in a process called co-deposition. A single atom of deuterium contains one neutron and one proton in its nucleus.
“People have always asked ‘Where’s the neutrons?’” Mosier-Boss said. “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.
