The Patterson power cell is an electrolysis device invented by chemist James A. Patterson, [1] which he said created 200 times more energy than it used, [2] and neutralize radioactivity without emitting any harmful radiation. [1] It is one of several cells that some observers classified as cold fusion; cells which were the subject of an intense scientific controversy in 1989, before being discredited in the eyes of mainstream science. [3] [4]
The Patterson power cell is given little credence by scientists. [3] [5] Physicist Robert L. Park describes the device as fringe science in his book Voodoo Science . [1]
The cell has a non-conductive housing. The cathode is composed of thousands of sub-millimeter microspheres (co-polymer beads), with a flash coat of copper and multiple layers of electrolytically deposited thin film (650 Angstrom) nickel and palladium. The beads are submerged in water with a lithium sulfate [2] (Li2SO4) electrolyte solution.
In 1995, Clean Energy Technologies Inc. was formed to produce and promote the power cell. [7]
Patterson variously said it produced a hundred or two hundred times more power than it used. [2] [8] Clean Energy Technologies, Inc. (CETI) representatives promoting the device at the Power-Gen '95 Conference said that an input of 1 watt would generate more than 1,000 watts of excess heat. [9] This supposedly happens as hydrogen or deuterium nuclei fuse together to produce heat through a form of low energy nuclear reaction. [1] The byproducts of nuclear fusion, e.g. a tritium nucleus and a proton or an 3He nucleus and a neutron, have not been detected in a reliable way, leading a vast majority of experts to think that no such fusion is taking place. [3]
It is further claimed that if radioactive isotopes such as uranium are present, the cell enables the hydrogen nuclei to fuse with these isotopes, transforming them into stable elements and thus neutralizing the radioactivity; and this would be achieved without releasing any radiation to the environment and without expending any energy. [1] A televised demonstration on June 11, 1997, on Good Morning America was not conclusive because there was no measurement of the radioactivity of the beads after the test, thus it cannot be discarded that the beads had simply absorbed the uranium ions and become radioactive themselves. [1] In 2002, the neutralization of radioactive isotopes has only been achieved through intense neutron bombardment in a nuclear reactor or large scale high energy particle accelerator, and at a large expense of energy. [1]
When asked about reliability in 1998, Gabe Collins, a chemical engineer at CETI, stated: "When they don't work, it's mostly due to contamination. If you get any sodium in the system it kills the reaction – and since sodium is one of the more abundant elements, it's hard to keep it out." [9]
Patterson has carefully distanced himself from the work of Fleischmann and Pons and from the label of "cold fusion", due to the negative connotations associated to them since 1989. [3] [10] Ultimately, this effort was unsuccessful, and not only did it inherit the label of pathological science, but it managed to make cold fusion look a little more pathological in the public eye. [11] Some cold fusion proponents view the cell as a confirmation of their work, while critics see it as "the fringe of the fringe of cold fusion research", since it attempts to commercialize cold fusion on top of making bad science. [12]
In 2002, John R. Huizenga, professor of nuclear chemistry at the University of Rochester, who was head of a government panel convened in 1989 to investigate the cold fusion claims of Fleischmann and Pons, and who wrote a book about the controversy, said "I would be willing to bet there's nothing to it", when asked about the Patterson Power Cell. [1]
In 2006, Hideo Kozima, professor emeritus of physics at Shizuoka University, has suggested that the byproducts are consistent with cold fusion. [13]
George H. Miley is a professor of nuclear engineering and a cold fusion researcher who claims to have replicated the Patterson power cell. During the 2011 World Green Energy Symposium, Miley stated that his device continuously produces several hundred watts of power. [14] Earlier results by Miley have not convinced mainstream researchers, who believe that they can be explained by contamination or by misinterpretation of data. [3]
On the television show Good Morning America , Quintin Bowles, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, claimed in 1996 to have successfully replicated the Patterson power cell. [15] In the book Voodoo Science , Bowles is quoted as having stated: "It works, we just don't know how it works". [1]
A replication has been attempted at Earthtech, using a CETI supplied kit. They were not able to replicate the excess heat. They looked for cold fusion products, but only found traces of contamination in the electrolyte. [16]
Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature. It would contrast starkly with the "hot" fusion that is known to take place naturally within stars and artificially in hydrogen bombs and prototype fusion reactors under immense pressure and at temperatures of millions of degrees, and be distinguished from muon-catalyzed fusion. There is currently no accepted theoretical model that would allow cold fusion to occur.
Pathological science is an area of research where "people are tricked into false results ... by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions." The term was first used by Irving Langmuir, Nobel Prize-winning chemist, during a 1953 colloquium at the Knolls Research Laboratory. Langmuir said a pathological science is an area of research that simply will not "go away"—long after it was given up on as "false" by the majority of scientists in the field. He called pathological science "the science of things that aren't so."
Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactive waste is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, nuclear decommissioning, rare-earth mining, and nuclear weapons reprocessing. The storage and disposal of radioactive waste is regulated by government agencies in order to protect human health and the environment.
A cobalt bomb is a type of "salted bomb": a nuclear weapon designed to produce enhanced amounts of radioactive fallout, intended to contaminate a large area with radioactive material, potentially for the purpose of radiological warfare, mutual assured destruction or as doomsday devices.
Nuclear technology is technology that involves the nuclear reactions of atomic nuclei. Among the notable nuclear technologies are nuclear reactors, nuclear medicine and nuclear weapons. It is also used, among other things, in smoke detectors and gun sights.
A radioisotope thermoelectric generator, sometimes referred to as a radioisotope power system (RPS), is a type of nuclear battery that uses an array of thermocouples to convert the heat released by the decay of a suitable radioactive material into electricity by the Seebeck effect. This type of generator has no moving parts.
Nuclear chemistry is the sub-field of chemistry dealing with radioactivity, nuclear processes, and transformations in the nuclei of atoms, such as nuclear transmutation and nuclear properties.
Radiological warfare is any form of warfare involving deliberate radiation poisoning or contamination of an area with radiological sources.
Contamination is the presence of a constituent, impurity, or some other undesirable element that spoils, corrupts, infects, makes unfit, or makes inferior a material, physical body, natural environment, workplace, etc.
A nuclear and radiation accident is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as "an event that has led to significant consequences to people, the environment or the facility. Examples include lethal effects to individuals, large radioactivity release to the environment, reactor core melt." The prime example of a "major nuclear accident" is one in which a reactor core is damaged and significant amounts of radioactive isotopes are released, such as in the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.
Radioactive contamination, also called radiological pollution, is the deposition of, or presence of radioactive substances on surfaces or within solids, liquids, or gases, where their presence is unintended or undesirable.
Nuclear fission products are the atomic fragments left after a large atomic nucleus undergoes nuclear fission. Typically, a large nucleus like that of uranium fissions by splitting into two smaller nuclei, along with a few neutrons, the release of heat energy, and gamma rays. The two smaller nuclei are the fission products..
Neutron activation is the process in which neutron radiation induces radioactivity in materials, and occurs when atomic nuclei capture free neutrons, becoming heavier and entering excited states. The excited nucleus decays immediately by emitting gamma rays, or particles such as beta particles, alpha particles, fission products, and neutrons. Thus, the process of neutron capture, even after any intermediate decay, often results in the formation of an unstable activation product. Such radioactive nuclei can exhibit half-lives ranging from small fractions of a second to many years.
Radiochemistry is the chemistry of radioactive materials, where radioactive isotopes of elements are used to study the properties and chemical reactions of non-radioactive isotopes. Much of radiochemistry deals with the use of radioactivity to study ordinary chemical reactions. This is very different from radiation chemistry where the radiation levels are kept too low to influence the chemistry.
Induced radioactivity, also called artificial radioactivity or man-made radioactivity, is the process of using radiation to make a previously stable material radioactive. The husband and wife team of Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot-Curie discovered induced radioactivity in 1934, and they shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery.
Since the mid-20th century, plutonium in the environment has been primarily produced by human activity. The first plants to produce plutonium for use in cold war atomic bombs were at the Hanford nuclear site, in Washington, and Mayak nuclear plant, in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. Over a period of four decades, "both released more than 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment – twice the amount expelled in the Chernobyl disaster in each instance".
Martin Fleischmann FRS was a British chemist who worked in electrochemistry. Premature announcement of his cold fusion research with Stanley Pons, regarding excess heat in heavy water, caused a media sensation and elicited skepticism and criticism from many in the scientific community.
The Energy Catalyzer is a claimed cold fusion reactor devised by inventor Andrea Rossi with support from the late physicist Sergio Focardi. An Italian patent, which received a formal but not a technical examination, describes the apparatus as a "process and equipment to obtain exothermal reactions, in particular from nickel and hydrogen". Rossi and Focardi said the device worked by infusing heated hydrogen into nickel powder, transmuting it into copper and producing excess heat. An international patent application received an unfavorable international preliminary report on patentability in 2011 because it was adjudged to "offend against the generally accepted laws of physics and established theories".
George H. Miley is a professor emeritus of physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Miley is a Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He was Senior NATO Fellow from 1994 to 1995, received the Edward Teller Medal in 1995, the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Science Award in Fusion Technology in 2003 and the Radiation Science and Technology Award in 2004. He holds several patents.
Lattice confinement fusion (LCF) is a type of nuclear fusion in which deuteron-saturated metals are exposed to gamma radiation or ion beams, such as in an IEC fusor, avoiding the confined high-temperature gasses used in other methods of fusion.