{"id":31902,"date":"2025-01-15T05:00:19","date_gmt":"2025-01-15T10:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=31902"},"modified":"2025-01-14T18:28:17","modified_gmt":"2025-01-14T23:28:17","slug":"cold-fusion-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/15\/cold-fusion-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Cold Fusion, Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/2208.07245v2<\/a><\/p>\n

Cold nuclear fusion is real!\u00a0 But it’s also extremely lame.\u00a0 Apparently when deuterium gas is put in contact with solid palladium metal the gas can find its way into the crystalline metal structure and fill voids in the lattice of palladium atoms and the structure of the metal lattice can somehow shield the deuterium nucleii from each other’s positive charges in order to fuse into a helium atom (\u00b2H + \u00b2H \u2192 \u2074He).<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the rate of fusion is so low that it’s barely detectable.\u00a0 And if energetic means such as lasers are used to enhance the rate then the energy balance is extremely poor with much more energy put in to speed up the reaction than is produced by the fusion reaction.\u00a0 As a practical energy source this would be described by the technical term “lousy.”<\/p>\n

But all is not yet lost.\u00a0 The authors of the paper speculate if three separate accelerating processes are employed simultaneously there is the potential to produce the forty orders of magnitude improvement needed to make cold fusion a useful energy source.<\/p>\n

Forty orders of magnitude.\u00a0 \u00a0Hmm.\u00a0 That’s a lot of orders of magnitude you know.\u00a0 That’s\u00a01040<\/sup>.\u00a0 That’s a really, really big number.\u00a0 If I had\u00a01040 <\/sup>pennies I’m pretty sure it would form a black hole of pennies.\u00a0 It’s a lot.<\/p>\n

So somehow they think they can increase the fusion rate that much?\u00a0 Hmm.<\/p>\n

So I really like the idea of cold fusion.\u00a0 The fact that you can take palladium and heavy hydrogen at ambient temperatures and somehow get a nuclear reaction that produces really clean energy is extremely appealing to me.\u00a0 It sounds like what E. E. “Doc” Smith used as his source of energy for interstellar flight in the “Skylark” series of space operas.\u00a0 It’s amazingly exciting.\u00a0 But\u00a0 1040<\/sup> anything is a lot.\u00a0 So I’ve decided not to hold my breath or invest heavily in the technology or rip the oil burner out of my basement just yet.<\/p>\n

The good thing about cold fusion research is that you don’t need billions or even hundreds of millions of dollars to work on it.\u00a0 You don’t need magnetic containment to avoid your nuclear plasma from eating through the metal walls of your reactor.\u00a0 And you don’t need giga-watt lasers to blast a pellet of boron hydride or anything else that would break the budget of any second world nation.\u00a0 It can all be done in a lab with all the stuff found in MIT or even Brooklyn College for that matter.\u00a0 So I’m all for research into this avenue of science.\u00a0 After all twenty years ago cold fusion was declared a hoax and that turned out to be wrong.\u00a0 Who knows what else they’ll find.\u00a0 Maybe if you use alloys of several of the platinum group elements the geometry of the spaces in the lattice will make the process run at some phenomenally faster rate.\u00a0 Maybe not 1040<\/sup> times faster but something reasonable and that would be enough to throw the whole thing into the range of practical applications.\u00a0 But to reiterate I won’t be holding my breath.<\/p>\n

But it is something cool to think about.\u00a0 Or even write into an sf story!\u00a0 But instead of palladium I’m going to make it tantalum.\u00a0 It’s just cooler.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/2208.07245v2 Cold nuclear fusion is real!\u00a0 But it’s also extremely lame.\u00a0 Apparently when deuterium gas is put in contact with solid palladium metal the gas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1263,3545,4],"tags":[4766,3372,2442,165,265],"class_list":["post-31902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-science","category-sff","tag-cold-fusion","tag-energy-research","tag-physics","tag-science","tag-science-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\nCold Fusion, Again - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/15\/cold-fusion-again\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cold Fusion, Again - 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