Some reasons behind Cold Fusion's controversy

[JMBuilder]

That's what the Palladium lattice is for. The mechanical stresses and confined space should fuse the atoms together, neutrons or no neutrons. That may be totally ridiculous. I don't even know.

I have a question that's slightly off-topic: If you were to fire a positron (antimatter electron) into a neutron, would it make a proton?

[Kryten]

That's what the Palladium lattice is for. The mechanical stresses and confined space should fuse the atoms together, neutrons or no neutrons. That may be totally ridiculous. I don't even know.

Two issues;

A) The atoms supposed to be fused together are deuterium atoms, which do have neutrons.

No it shouldn't. F and P decided it should because they calculated the decreased spacing to have the same effect as about 10²⁷ atmospheres of pressure; however, they'd messed up their calculations, badly. The actual figure is about 10,000.

[JMBuilder]

Nickel forms an even tighter lattice. Would it meet those standards?

[Kryten]

No. You would need the kind of figures they thought they had, you're not going to just find a metal that has an extra 23 orders of magnitude of deuterium adsorption capability.

[JMBuilder]

Okay... What about LENR? I haven't read much about it, but apparently it would be as efficient as Cold Fusion.

[Kryten]

LENR is the term cold fusion advocates started using for the process after the phrase 'cold fusion' itself became a joke. There's no difference.

Edited September 25, 2013 by Kryten

[JMBuilder]

There has to be some way to get it to work! I'm too obsessed to give up!

[lajoswinkler]

How much money do you plan to spend on this futile endeavour?

[DaveofDefeat]

Why don't you work on getting a real controllable fusion reaction to work, then work on cold fusion.

[JMBuilder]

Cold Fusion would be so much more efficient.

You guys keep saying "Cold Fusion is impossible because (insert statement here)," but do you guys actually KNOW that it won't work?

[Kryten]

Yes, at least in any way remotely like P and F tried and your average 'LENR' guy continues to advocate for. Fusion simply isn't going to happen at anything remotely resembling room temperature or pressure without some kind of catalyst, and the kind of things that catalyse fusion take more energy to create than you'd ever be able to get out.

[DaveofDefeat]

Who knows maybe your a modern day Galileo, and 300 years from now there will be cold fusion reactors powering everything, and when that happens you can laugh at our ignorance.

[lajoswinkler]

Who knows maybe your a modern day Galileo, and 300 years from now there will be cold fusion reactors powering everything, and when that happens you can laugh at our ignorance.

Galileo never claimed stuff that had been inherently impossible, and never clinged to stuff proven to be failures. Mentioning Galileo and cold fusion in the same sentence is a disgrace to Galileo.

Fusion is "melting together" two nuclei. Two things don't allow that at room temperature: electron clouds of atoms and positive charge of nuclei.

In high temperature/pressure plasma, there aren't any electron clouds, so it's a matter of increasing the system energy to breach the positive charge repulsion. Even the Sun is not very efficient at it. The actual energy production per unit of volume is poor, but the Sun is enormous, so the total output is huge, too.

I don't see any mechanism which would do all that at room temperature which is basically zero Kelvin, compared to the usual temperatures fusion occurs, but that doesn't matter. That's a theory and theory can always be improved.

What matters is the evidence - there's none. Nobody ever showed this works. So if the theory says "no" and you haven't got evidence after ton of people have tried it, you have nothing.

[Pds314]

The byproducts do not actually convert back to water as such, fusion, whether hot or cold, converts hydrogen into either a useless form of hydrogen which makes water dangerous in the long term at above 10% or so concentration, or converts hydrogen into helium, which, while useful, is not water.

Nevertheless, that isn't a concern, fusion, hot or cold, could power the world for 100 years using 70 tonnes of hydrogen. (making harmless Oxygen and Helium as byproducts)

The thing is that fusion is a lot like orbits, but in reverse, with an entry velocity and valley spheres, and you have two real options:

shrink the valley spheres by using immense pressure AND/OR get a larger fraction of the material to be up at entry velocity.

At present, no known material absorbs enough hydrogen (yes, even a pure palladium strip) to get significant fusion at remotely low temperatures, I think I heard that the density needed to be about 6 times that which can be achieved by palladium at room temperature before useful amounts of fusion occurred. Of course, this doesn't mean that we can't have COLDER hybrid fusion, which uses a material to chemically compress hydrogen and uses heat and pressure to assist it.

[Pds314]

Yeah, from what i've heard, the theory makes sense, but only if we had some substance which would absorb hydrogen into something like 10,000 atmospheres or more and hold it in a lattice like palladium does at 1800 atmospheres.

The problem being that palladium is more-or-less the best substance made of non-exotic matter for said purpose.

[JMBuilder]

Maybe the Palladium pulling on the Hydrogen's electrons has something to do with it.