How Does Cold Fusion Work and What Does It Mean for the Future of Energy?

[Willis666]

So, I was reading something today about an Italian Physicist who supposidly was able to make a cold fusion machine. It recently passed an important test and all that crap, and it will be interesting to see where it goes, but I was wondering how exactly cold fusion works? I get the jist of it, that its basically combining two elements to create a large amount of energy without the need of high temperatures or harmful radiation, but how exactly does it work?

I think it will be interesting to see if this go through. It will feel like a big weight being lifted off my shoulders (The future of energy being in the hands of my generation.)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45153076/ns/technology_and_science-science/"

 

[Pengwuino]

No one knows how it works because no one has ever shown it to work. This article, as with almost every mainstream non-scientific media article, is probably filled with inaccuracies and non-sense.

I'd bet good money on this being garbage.

 

[JeffKoch]

There is no known mechanism for nuclei to fuse in any appreciable numbers without being so ridiculously hot that the material is a plasma being confined by magnetic fields or by inertia in an implosion (or perhaps being blasted by a nuclear bomb, but that's not a very productive approach for producing electricity). Nuclear fusion cross-sections are simply ridiculously small at room-ish temperatures, and typically nuclear fusion explanations for apparent heat output from these schemes would require that the experimenters be dead - it's false that nuclear fusion does not produce dangerous radiation. It's another perpetual motion machine, though that does not say that there aren't some potentially interesting chemical or even nuclear interactions going on.

I see Hagelstein seems not to have lost any of his bitterness towards the DOE.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Cold fusion is a thoroughly discredited topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion as such it is not mainstream science and therefore is banned under PF rules.