July 23, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

This is Part 6 of “2001 Oak Ridge Nuclear Cavitation Confirmation Uncovered.”

This is a New Energy Times Special Report. The first part of this series published on July 18, 2013.

Science Accepts Taleyarkhan Group’s Paper (January 2002)
On Jan. 30, 2002, Science accepted the Taleyarkhan group’s paper and scheduled it for publication on Feb. 14.

The acceptance, however, triggered another round of internal conflict. ORNL management asked Science to delay publication to allow time to sort it out.

Around this time, ORNL management asked Taleyarkhan to include Shapira as a co-author of the forthcoming Science paper.

“Something – I don’t know what – happened in January that resulted in ORNL management’s request of me to include Shapira as co-author,” Taleyarkhan wrote. “I had to go along with their instructions. But I could not speak for RPI nor for RAS.”

Approximately Feb. 1, after conferring with his group, Taleyarkhan told ORNL management that his group gave a resounding “no” to the idea of including Shapira as a co-author. Shapira and Saltmarsh protested further.

Oak Ridge Gives Final Clearance (February 2002)
In an attempt to resolve the conflict, ORNL management scheduled a review meeting, which took place on Feb. 19, 2002. Riedinger, Roberto, Taleyarkhan, Block, Lahey, Shapira, Saltmarsh and three or four external advisers from universities attended. The advisers included R. Gil Gilliland, associate director of the Energy and Engineering Sciences Directorate at ORNL, William Bugg, research professor at Stanford University and former head of the Physics Department at the University of Tennessee, and Kirby Kemper, head of the Physics Department at Florida State University.

During the meeting, Shapira and Saltmarsh expressed their objections to the Taleyarkhan group’s pending publication in Science.

“Riedinger led the meeting. He accepted the tritium evidence as compelling and referred to that as the smoking gun. He recommended placing that evidence first in the results section, followed with the findings related to neutrons-gammas, followed by the SL,” Taleyarkhan wrote.

“Nigmatulin was convincing with his theoretical foundations,” Taleyarkhan wrote. “Jack Harvey, an internationally recognized pioneer in nuclear instrumentation at ORNL, in advance of the meeting, had reviewed and confirmed the neutron-gamma pulse-shape discrimination and detection system and protocols. Murray’s testimony on tritium and his independent vetting of the tritium data and itsmode of acquisition and analysis persuaded all the people in the room that, although there was room to improve the neutron-gamma monitoring aspects together with SL coincidences, the crux of the necessary evidence (neutrons, tritium and accompanying theoretical foundation) was sufficient such that ORNL would, as an institution, stand behind us.”

Block recalled the meeting, in an e-mail to New Energy Times.

“I commented on the detector that Shapira and Saltmarsh used and pointed out that it was really much too large for an accurate measurement and that it could have suffered from electronic overload (dead time loss) that led to a reduced signal rate. There were neutral – as far as I know – visitors from universities who listened to our arguments and recommended that ORNL go forward with our Science publication. We were pretty cordial with each other, and I left with the feeling that we achieved our objective: ORNL would not block this publication.”

West recalled the meeting, in an e-mail to New Energy Times.

“Shapira was forced to agree, in response to questions from Block, that the neutron scintillation detector that we used was the optimum size for such measurements, whereas the MUCH larger one Shapira had used was not optimal,” West wrote. “When, it appeared to me, the advisers were leaning in favor of publication of our Science paper, Roberto left his seat, walked around to Riedinger, who was sitting at the head of the table, and said something to him privately and returned to his own chair with no further comment.”

But Shapira and Saltmarsh negotiated a deal with ORNL management and the Taleyarkhan group. Shapira and Saltmarsh would get to include their objections in a document that would be listed as a reference in the Taleyarkhan group’s Science paper. The reference would provide a link to Shapira and Saltmarsh’s document on the ORNL Web site.

Shapira and Saltmarsh Circulate Their Objections (February 2002)
Shapira and Saltmarsh had their draft document ready the next day, and they began distributing it.

With the tritium confirmed by internal peer review, and the neutron singles confirmed by both the ETD detector and the PD detector, Shapira found a new objection to the claim, as Taleyarkhan told New Energy Times.

“After Shapira was forced [by our analysis of his raw data] to recognize the positive neutron data,” Taleyarkhan wrote, “he and Saltmarsh included the positive neutron data in their Feb. 20, 2002, document, but with a second twist. They wrote that their neutron data did not match our measured tritium data.”

“Any excess neutron production,” Shapira and Saltmarsh wrote, “was at least three orders of magnitude less than that required to explain the tritium production rate reported in Ref. 1 as being due to D-D fusion.”

It was a haphazard way of comparing a neutron-to-tritium ratio because Shapira had not taken data for tritium analysis the day he came to measure the Taleyarkhan group’s neutrons.

The Shapira and Saltmarsh paper, which was not peer-reviewed, published only on the ORNL Web site and was listed in the Taleyarkhan group’s Science paper as reference #31. Reference #32 was the Taleyarkhan group’s rebuttal to reference #31. It, too, was not peer-reviewed. Lahey published #32 on the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Web site.

Although Shapira and Saltmarsh’s Feb. 20, 2002, document hadn’t been published on the ORNL Web site or peer-reviewed, it stirred up the physics community.

Two of the most prominent nuclear physicists in the U.S. went out of their way to try to get Science editor Donald Kennedy to block the Taleyarkhan group’s pending paper, as he later wrote. The first was Richard Garwin of IBM, famous for his work in the U.S. nuclear weapons program. The second was William Happer, the head of Princeton University’s fusion laboratory and a former director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Science journalist Charles Seife, on the news side of Science, was covering the developing story. Years later, looking back, here’s how he described the moment.

“I was convinced,” Seife wrote. “Taleyarkhan was wrong: Bubble fusion was a fiction. And because of the spurious result, a scientific drama was playing out before my eyes. The officials at Oak Ridge felt that the Shapira-Saltmarsh [document] was damning, and they were hoping to avoid embarrassment.

“Garwin and Happer were trying to prevent another cold-fusion controversy, and Kennedy was trying to preserve the integrity of the peer-review process. Rumors were flying, and they were getting nastier and more paranoid by the minute. Everybody was getting increasingly annoyed with everyone else.”

Park Reports News of Shapira and Saltmarsh’s Document (March 2002)
On March 1, 2002, a week before the Taleyarkhan group’s paper published (the same date as the final version of the Shapira and Saltmarsh document), Robert Park scooped the science journalists and broke the news. At the time, Park was the director of public information at the Washington office of the American Physical Society, and he published a newsletter that effectively went to the entire U.S. physics community.

Park cited text only from the Shapira-Saltmarsh document. He began by saying that the Taleyarkhan group’s work was wrong because Shapira and Saltmarsh failed to successfully repeat it.

Park’s statement included several inaccuracies and significant omissions.

“The experiment [was] repeated by two experienced nuclear physicists,” Park wrote, “D. Shapira and M.J. Saltmarsh, using the same apparatus, except for superior neutron detection equipment.

“They found no evidence for 2.5 MeV neutron emission correlated with sonoluminescence. Any neutron emission was many orders of magnitude too small to account for the tritium production reported by the first group.”

Next Part: Taleyarkhan Group Responds to Shapira and Saltmarsh

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July 21, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

This is Part 4 of “2001 Oak Ridge Nuclear Cavitation Confirmation Uncovered.”

This is a New Energy Times Special Report. The first part of this series published on July 18, 2013.

The Discovery Team (Spring 2001)
The Taleyarkhan group began its research in 1999, sponsored by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant. The group first observed neutron signals above background in its nuclear cavitation experiment at Oak Ridge in January 2001.

In addition to Taleyarkhan, the group comprised Colin West, a physicist (a pioneer in sonoluminescence and retired from ORNL in September 2001), JaeSeon Cho, a nuclear engineer and at the time a post-doctoral researcher at ORNL (now working with FNCS Technology), Richard T. Lahey Jr., an authority in nuclear reactor safety (professor emeritus and dean of engineering, retired from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in September 2008), Robert I. Nigmatulin, an engineer and mathematician (director of Schirshov Institute of Oceanology), and Robert C. Block, a nuclear physicist and nuclear engineer (professor emeritus of engineering, retired from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1997).

By May 2001, after several months, they had performed about 100 runs with cavitation on and 100 with cavitation off and were confident that they had observed signals of nuclear cavitation.

“The tritium data were preliminary at the time,” Taleyarkhan wrote, “but the time-correlated sonoluminescence flashes and neutron-gamma signals were quite compelling and indicative of bubble fusion. We only saw these data during experiments with chilled deuterated acetone and cavitation and not under any of the control conditions.”

They told their management of their interest in publishing the results. According to Shapira, James Roberto, at the time the associate laboratory director of the Physics Division, asked Shapira and Saltmarsh, as an internal peer review, to check the Taleyarkhan group’s experiment.

Shapira, whose division reported to Roberto, did most of the work and report writing. Saltmarsh, a physicist, had retired in January 1999. He had been the director of the Fusion Energy Division and the fusion program, which was devoted completely to magnetic confinement fusion research. By that time, 50 years had passed since researchers around the world had attempted to make controlled thermonuclear fusion energy practical.

In response to Roberto’s request, the Physics Division (PD) made plans and agreements with the Taleyarkhan group and delivered a neutron detector (NE-213) and data acquisition system to the Taleyarkhan group’s lab in the Engineering Technology Division (ETD). Several weeks and a few false starts later, the NE-213 was working, and they got data during one afternoon.

Preparations for the experiment started in the morning on July 24, 2001, as Cho began cooling the apparatus to 0 degrees C. Around noon, Saltmarsh came to Taleyarkhan’s lab for about half an hour to check that preparations for the test were all in place.

Later that afternoon, Shapira came into the ETD lab, and while Cho, with some assistance from Taleyarkhan, operated the group’s experiment, Shapira took nuclear data with his NE-213 detector and his data acquisition system. Everything else in the configuration was part of the Taleyarkhan group’s apparatus.

Cho ran the experiment for 65 minutes with cavitation on, immediately followed by a 58-minute run with cavitation off. In addition to gathering neutron-gamma data from his detector, Shapira also took sonoluminescence data from the Taleyarkhan group’s photomultiplier detector. Shapira did not take data for normal acetone control experiments because those control experiments were not performed that day.

On July 30 and 31, Shapira and Saltmarsh wrote a pair of reports and submitted them to Roberto and Lee Riedinger, the deputy director for science and technology at ORNL. Their reports focused nearly exclusively on the matter of coincidences and glossed over the neutron singles data. Their reports mentioned nothing about tritium because Shapira did not obtain data related to tritium for the experiments performed on July 24, 2001.

Taleyarkhan Group Submits Paper to Science (Fall 2001)
Three months later, on Oct. 31, 2001, the Taleyarkhan group submitted its paper, “Evidence for Nuclear Emissions During Acoustic Cavitation,” to Science. Shapira and Saltmarsh had already been discussing the experiment — and their July reports — outside of ORNL, as West explained in an e-mail to New Energy Times.

“Shapira and Saltmarsh were telling people in the physics community that our experiment had not produced any neutrons over background,” West wrote. “We were frustrated because they had not reported their neutron singles data and we didn’t have access to the raw data they took with their detector on our experiment yet.”

In Shapira and Saltmarsh’s first internal review documents, dated July 30, 2001, and July 31, 2001, Saltmarsh and Shapira omitted anything about the neutron singles counts from the July 24, 2001, runs. The coincidence demand presented by Saltmarsh and Shapira took center stage in their thesis.

The ORNL administrators were losing confidence and were getting nervous about his group’s paper, Taleyarkhan told New Energy Times.

Michael Murray, a health physicist with the Life Sciences Division at ORNL, analyzed the group’s tritium data and confirmed the tritium data set in his Dec. 12, 2001, report “Technical Review.”

“Murray was an expert, and Oak Ridge relied on his knowledge, experience and abilities to help keep many employees demonstrably safe from potential radiological hazards,” West wrote to New Energy Times.

The tritium analysis passed internal review, but the neutronics were still unresolved. There was still a question about whether excess neutrons had been observed.

 Next Part: Surprise in Shapira-Saltmarsh Raw Data

July 19, 2013 – By Steven B. Krivit –

This is Part 2 of “2001 Oak Ridge Nuclear Cavitation Confirmation Uncovered.”

This is a New Energy Times Special Report. The first part of this series published on July 18, 2013.

Introduction to the Oak Ridge Nuclear Cavitation Experiment

The essential part of the Taleyarkhan group’s nuclear cavitation experiment is a custom-blown glass chamber similar to the one shown below.

The chamber is filled with a test fluid, deuterated acetone, or, in the case of control experiments, normal acetone. Two stimuli react on the chamber. The first is an ultrasonic acoustic wave produced by a piezoelectric driver ring that induces cavitation; the second is a source of energetic nuclear particles that can seed the growth of bubbles. In the Taleyarkhan group’s first experiments, those particles were neutrons from an external device called a pulse neutron generator (PNG), which emitted neutrons in the direction of the chamber in precisely timed intervals.

The acoustic input causes high compression in the chamber, and this leads to a series of rapid bubble growths and collapses. At the collapses, observers see light flashes, a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence.

The Taleyarkhan group summarized the mechanics of the reaction in a 2009 review paper.

“The test liquid is placed in a cylindrical glass test section and driven harmonically with a lead-zirconate-titanate (PZT) piezoelectric driver ring attached around the outside surface of the test section,” the authors wrote. “This induces an acoustic standing wave in the test section.”

“The intense implosive collapse of bubbles, including acoustic cavitation bubbles,” the authors wrote, “can lead to extremely high compression-induced pressures and temperatures from shock heating and to the generation of the light flashes known as sonoluminescence (SL). In addition, the violent implosions of bubble clusters produce audible shock waves.

The Taleyarkhan group’s use of multi-bubble sonoluminescence rather than single-bubble sonoluminescence, which was used by its competitors, is the most significant improvement in its method.

Here is a short video clip of a nuclear cavitation experiment performed at Oak Ridge. Each visible event is not an individual bubble but rather clusters of hundreds of bubbles.

“The video clip is mesmerizing,” Taleyarkhan wrote, “if you contemplate the fact that a mere neutron (of mass ~10^-27 kg, as close to zero mass as you can get) produces such a huge macro-mechanical effect that can be seen and heard and, furthermore, serves as a reminder of why and how thermonuclear bombs work as they do.”

Next Part: The Scientific Evidence

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