Sunday, August 28, 2011

What is Cold Fusion?

Imagine you have two balls. These balls really don't want to touch each other but if you put a lot of energy into forcing them to, they explode releasing tons of energy.

This is called nuclear fusion. The balls are certain atoms and the energy is usually extremely high temperatures(millions of degrees). Instead of making the two atoms touch you are combining them into one larger atom. This process is what the sun is doing to create all of its energy.

Cold fusion is the term for a Nuclear Fusion reaction that can be done at a relatively cooler temperature and other conditions that we can create on earth. Although currently there is no cold fusion technique that produces more energy than what is required to sustain the reaction, Emc2 is currently working on a Polywell fusor that seems to produce more energy than it consumes. It is currently being funded by the Navy.

I'm pretty sure, though, that they wouldn't want to be associated with the term cold fusion, owing to its pseudoscientific stigma.

1 comment:

George said...

Beware of scientists who refuse to acknowledge a phenomenon simply because they can not explain it. That is the problem with "cold fusion". It is probably incorrectly named, since we don't know what the cause of the generation of the energy is. However, there can be no doubt by this time (over 20 years since the Fleischmann and Pons announcement) that there is an unexplained nuclear reaction taking place which generates heat which cannot be explained by chemical reactions. Hundreds of scientist around the world have observed and documented this. See http://www.lenr-canr.org/ for details. If you are not willing to investigate then please don't comment as if you have. History is strewn with examples of "experts" who were wrong.