The Physics of why the e-Cat’s Cold Fusion Claims Collapse
A cheap, clean, efficient and virtually limitless source of energy would be just what our world needs right about now. The cheap sources — coal, oil, and gas — are dirty, destructive, and limited, while the clean sources — wind and solar — are expensive and inefficient. Nuclear power is abundant and efficient, but with the dangers of radioactivity (and Fukushima still fresh in people’s minds), it clearly isn’t an ideal solution either. What would be ideal, rather than the current nuclear fission power we use, would be nuclear fusion, where lighter elements are fused together into heavier ones. Unlike a nuclear fission reaction, neither the original reactive material nor the products are radioactive in most instances of nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion is responsible for the most powerful release of energy ever generated on our planet: the Tsar Bomba, above. No other known reaction (that doesn’t involve antimatter) is capable of generating as much energy from a given amount of matter as nuclear fusion can, in the entire Universe.
Of course, a reaction like the Tsar Bomba is not what we want when it comes to meeting our energy needs. Perhaps more pointedly, we’d like to have controlled nuclear fusion, where we can control the rate of fusion and harness practically all of the energy generated from the reactions. To accomplish this, all you’d need is two atomic nuclei whose initial states have more total mass than the final fused nucleus will — which is possible thanks to binding energy — and you can, in principle, have nuclear fusion between those two elements.