Breaking News

Breaking News: Sonofusion Claims in Science
by Eugene F. Mallove
As this Infinite Energy went to press on March 5, a major development in sonofusion was announced-not by our laboratory or by Roger Stringham, but on the pages of Science magazine. Physicists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and elsewhere, in what are being widely called "table-top fusion" experiments, published evidence of neutron emissions and tritium production in a deuterated liquid organic material (acetone-C₃D₆O) activated ultrasonically to produce cavitation bubbles. A neutron source was used to help create (i.e. nucleate) the bubbles. The piezoelectric transducer was outside the sonofusion cell, so no metal surfaces were in contact with cavitating bubbles, unlike sonofusion carried out in the cold fusion field. The authors did not attempt to measure excess heat, no surprise, because the entire context was that multi-million degree temperatures were being created in the cavitation bubbles, and thus mini-hot fusion of deuterons was being accomplished. They did not report any helium measurements being performed. We'll have much more coverage of this in the next issue of Infinite Energy, and probably on our website, but this is what we know at this time:

Science magazine will publish an article and a commentary about table-top sonofusion in its March 8, 2002 issue; it is a high-profile cover story. We congratulate Science and the authors for having the courage to publish this. The anomalous elevated ratio of tritium to neutron production reported in the article, which are already being dismissed by critics outright as indicating an experiment flaw, has long been a known characteristic of cold fusion systems. The articles are already being attacked-even before publication!-by the usual anti-cold fusion suspects (Park, Taubes, etc.). Some hot fusioneers who had claimed to have attempted the experiment properly prior to the article's release said that they did not observe the 2.5 MeV hot fusion neutrons.

These are the articles:

"Evidence for Nuclear Emissions During Acoustic Cavitation," R.P. Taleyarkhan, C.D. West, J.S. Cho, R.T. Lahey, Jr., R.I. Nigmatulin, and R.C. Block, Science, Vol. 295, March 2002, pp. 1868-1873.
Commentary: "Evidence for Nuclear Reactions in Imploding Bubbles," F.D. Becchetti, Science, Vol. 295, March 2002, p. 1850.

The New York Times of March 5, 2002 led on page A20 with a skeptical article, but the London Sunday Times (March 4, 2002) was much more upbeat and even quoted Martin Fleischmann. Infinite Energy readers worldwide are sure to find the general media filled with commentary and coverage about this.

Sonofusion (and sonoluminescence) is an area in which Infinite Energy has published since its inception in 1995. In fact, our first issue, March/April 1995, had Roger Stringham (now of First Gate Energies, Inc.) on the cover, cradling his sonofusion reactor. The cover story, "A 'Micro-Fusion' Reactor: Nuclear Reactions 'In the Cold' by Ultrasonic Cavitation," was by Tom Benson, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 33-37. There have been many other pieces, notably:

* "Cavitation in D₂O with Metal Targets Produces Predictable Excess Heat," by Roger Stringham, John Chandler, Russ George, Tom Passell, and Dick Raymond, Infinite Energy, Vol. 4, No. 19, April-May 1998, pp. 41-44.

* "A Progress Report: Energy Transfer in Cold Fusion and Sonoluminescence," by Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger (Reprint of his Nov. 11, 1991 lecture at MIT), Infinite Energy, Vol. 4, No. 24, March-April 1999, pp. 81-83.

In more recent issues of Infinite Energy since November 2000 (Nos. 35-41), NERL's Manager, Kenneth Rauen, and I have chronicled our experience with Roger Stringham's sonofusion reactor, and our smaller modified reactor derived from it. The primary purpose of this work has been to identify the primary and most desirable signature of cold fusion/low energy nuclear reactions: excess heat, but we may now look for tritium too. Dr. McKubre's group at SRI International is now working with us to examine the possible helium production in this sonofusion reactor. Roger Stringham et al. have already found helium and other nuclear evidence in their sonofusion devices, in addition to observing melting under heavy water of normally high melting point metals.

The matter to celebrate the most in these Science articles is the apparent discovery of yet another particular system for producing fusion reactions. And we certainly celebrate that the experiments are, indeed, "table-top"-just like most cold fusion experiments. Of course, the work reported in Science needs to be reproduced in its particular form, just as cold fusion experiments had to be and were reproduced, repeatedly. But on first examination, the work appears to have been done very thoroughly. It is immediately apparent that sonofusion work carried out in the cold fusion/low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) field, although not referenced by these authors, can provide significant support in both experimental and theoretical aspects. We imagine that the authors were not aware of much of this work.