What is “cold fusion”?
Cold fusion was discovered by professors Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann and announced in March 1989. It is a reaction that occurs under certain conditions in supersaturated metal hydrides (metals with lots of hydrogen or heavy hydrogen dissolved in them). It produces excess heat, helium, and a very low level of neutrons. In some experiments the host metal has been transmuted into other elements. Cold fusion has been seen with palladium, titanium, nickel and with some superconducting ceramics.
A fusion reaction occurs when nuclei join together into a single nucleus, releasing large amounts of energy in the process. In most cases the temperatures at which this occurs are extremely high — on the order of millions of degrees Celsius. Cold fusion is a blanket term for any nuclear fusion reaction that occurs substantially below normal temperatures, but is most often used to describe a low-temperature reaction that can be achieved using relatively normal experimental conditions. Deuterium (a hydrogen isotope) is most often looked at as the best potential source of cold-fusion based energy. It is readily available, has little waste, and produces great amounts of energy. For this reason the majority of work done in the area of cold fusion utilizes various catalysts aimed at provoking a low-temperature reaction with deuterium. At this time there is no consistent technique for generating a cold-fusion reaction that yields more energy than is required to sustain the reaction. Current r
The collection of phenomena that has come to be called “cold fusion” was discovered in the mid-1980s by professors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, who used their own money (about $100,000) to perform the electrochemical experiments that led to their announcement at a press conference on March 23, 1989 at the University of Utah. One of the most intense controversies in the history of science erupted almost immediately. The phenomena reported by chemists Fleischmann and Pons defied then current understandings of how nuclear reactions could occur—they were never thought to be able to happen under such mild, modest temperature conditions (with the exception of radioactive decay). In a small, vacuum-insulated glass cell they had electrically split heavy hydrogen (deuterium) from oxygen in the molecules of a heavy-water solution. The heavy hydrogen was compressed into a palladium metal electrode, after which the cold fusion effects emerged after days and weeks of careful measurement. Th
