Cold fusion.

Kojac

how about cold fusion? I know it's got avid supporters as well as those who say it's total B.S. last I heard, it had something to do with the way Palladium acts in hard water... I'm going to go look some of that up. I want input! anyway, i hear it's possible.

edit: thanks...didn't even notice i put in hard instead of heavy. Yadda yadda water with deuterium instead of normal hydrogen. I'm not actually stupid...just verbally retarded.

enigma

The folks who said they had discovered it rushed to get their "findings" out to the public without running it past peer review.

Every attempt to reproduce the experiment by third parties has failed.

Unfortunately, it's not possible (at this time... another method could be discovered in the future).

russ_watters

Actually, it was my understanding that their results have finally been reproduced, the problem at the time was Pons and Fleischman wouldn't tell anyone what they did. The problem is, of course, the effect they witnessed wasn't fusion.

And that's heavy water, Kojac. The hypothesis was that deuterium infused in a palladium matrix (essentially a solid solution) would push the deuterium together enough to cause fusion. It didn't. IIRc, what they ended up with was an expensive but mundane electrolytic cell.

enigma

Ah. I haven't been following up on the topic.

Russ's comments are most likely closer to reality than mine.

kurious

Can cold fusion be encouraged by cancelling the electric charges of protons so they will come together at a low energy input? Presumably one would need to
find a source of negative charges that could be injected between the quarks of a proton.How about trying to trap protons in a C-60 buckyball to squeeze them together.
Apparently buckyballs can be compressed until they are hard as diamonds, so the bonds between the carbon atoms must be hard to break.

Clausius2

I have heard about muonic catalized fusion. When I studied this I was told that it was produced by a bombardment of such particles over H-H molecules. They could get rid of the electrons shared, and put together the two nucleus due to the muon greater mass. But I'm not sure.

NEOclassic

I had heard, over 50 years ago, that "HOT" Palladium metal would fractionally separate hydrogen from other molecules like methane - i.e., it was a sieve that passed only hydrogen isotopes.

There have been "warm" application of DD and DT fusion. As far back as 1951, the US Pu bombs that previously contained an inertially activated "Tom" Po/Be triggering neutron source (that produced nominally 6 neutrons in the 5 or so microsecond Pu burn-time) were altered by replacing the Po/Be with Deuterides or Tritides of Uranium, Hafnium etc that were inertially compressed and that thus yielded as many as a billion fusion neutrons. The "tom" was renamed "Nemo".
Later there was invented a vacuum tube that had a triton "gun" that accelerated with 180 Kilovolts, a relatively continuous stream of tritons into a deuterated target - this latter vacuum tube was used in labs as well as in bombs. Not only is the DT process 50-fold more easy to produce fusion neutrons than the DD process, but the energy of the DT neutrons is 14.5 MeV compared to the 2.5 MeV energy of the DD neutrons.

The secret reason why a fusion "reactor" is so out of reach (without improved technology) is because most of the fusion energy is carried off by the neutrons that flow rather freely through walls of the reactor. Frankly, I believe that a thick water or paraffin jacket could expedite the liberation of ordinary hydrogen (neutron bombardment of water, unlike electrolysis that produces both oxygen and hydrogen gases, produces only hydrogen gas). The hydrogen fuel cell energy would then be available to sustain an electronically induced continuous fusion. Cheers, Jim