Unlike the notorious cold fusion of the past by Pons and Fleischman, this looks like a valid form of low-energy fusion. I remember when the cold-fusion stuff took hold, there was this crazed excitement for a few weeks. (one other bit of trivia, I had two Amiga 500’s at the time. I was trying to get UUPC running on one so I could get usenet running on via UUCP. The Amiga was on the floor as I was reading the posting.)
Anyways, here are the links on the new/old discoveries: EV World and ScienceDaily (older). These experiments are not energy generating (they haven’t passed the break even point), but they are being independently verified by other academic institutions.
I said old/new above because the process is based on cavitation. I remember hearing about this back at FSU when I hung out with some of the physics students (early 90’s). So it is definitely not a new new discovery. Essentially, you use some wave energy source (RF or Audio) on a container of pure water to cause these tiny bubbles to form and implode on themselves. In fact, now I remember one of the guys doing this used a quartz container and microwaves to cause the effect. Quartz doesn’t interfere with the microwave rf, and microwave rf is tuned to interfere with water. I’m sure someone will figure out how to do this with the common microwave frequencies out there in their home kitchen. Fortunately, they will need deuterium to do anything dangerous.
This new work is significant process. A low energy neutron emitter would have many novel uses.