Dear Science: We Want Cold Fusion And We Want It Now
Editor's note: The following is the opinion of the author. Some of us don't really want cold fusion at all. We would be very happy with moar windmills.
Cold fusion seems to be its own worst enemy. For every breakthrough, there’s a corresponding story that makes the process appear to be a mythical boondoggle that can’t exist. Which maybe it can’t, but it’s not like it’s the scientific equivalent of searching for Bigfoot (That’s right Animal Planet, we’re lookin’ at you — "Finding Bigfoot"? Really?)
Nuclear fusion is a real thing. That’s how the Sun works. You know this from They Might Be Giants.
Which disproves global warming!
1. Since college (when fusion power was fifty years away for the first time), I've felt that the folks working in this area have always been a little over-optimistic because of the not-so-accurate parallel with fission power. That is, we have fission bombs and controlled fission reactors, and fusion bombs, so how hard can fusion reactors be? The problem, of course, is the "thermo" in thermonuclear. A fission reaction can be moderated by neutron-absorbing materials, and the resultant heat can be confined by physical materials. Neither of these things is true for fusion.
2. As others have mentioned, all actual examples of fusion have been "hot" (thermonuclear) fusion, in the sense that the Coulomb barrier is overcome by increasing the local temperature of the reactant nuclei. Even the kid's Farnsworth fusor increases the nominal temperature of the nuclei by accelerating them (admittedly, the concept of "temperature" for isolated nuclei is a bit abstract). The reasons why the Utah guys were rejected were both irreproducibility, and the fact that no one could come up with any possible explanation for what happened to electrostatic repulsion. As I recall, Pons and Fleischman proposed some mechanism having to do with lattice stress, but the math was pretty quickly debunked.
3. I am in favor of continuing work on fusion power, but I wish we would pay a little more attention to the fusion power source we already have available, courtesy of spherically symmetric gravitational confinement. All we need to do is improve our energy-conversion technology, in this case.