Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
What exactly is cold fusion? Isn't the way a nuclear reactor generates energy by generating heat which heats water which turn steam turbines? What good is "cold" fusion going to do?
Current reactors use fission right?
BOb
|
"Cold Fusion" is usually used to describe the mostly-discredited process in which Drs. Pons and Fleishman put a palladium electrode in a ??water?? ??heavy-water?? (I forget which) bath and thought that they got out more energy than they put in -- and also more energy than could be explained by simple chemical reactions.
It was "cold" because the apparent fusion was taking place at temperatures within a few 100 degrees C of room temperature. Traditional hydrogen fusion requires temperatures like those in the Sun (thus "hot").
I wrote "mostly-discredited" above because there's a ton of controversy over the whether the experiments "worked", the "science by press conference" approach whereby the possible breakthrough was announced to the press long before any other labs had the opportunity to attempt duplication, whether P&F measured what they thought they measured, whether or not P&F engaged in outright fraud, or ???
Many attempts at duplication failed completely. A few experiments produced results that were odd enough lead to continued (slow) work. "Physics letters" -- which had dumped the entire topic as bogus -- has been taking papers on similar processes again for the last five or six years.
The last word I got by asking a physicist was that there may or may not be some not-yet-fully-understood effect happening, but that it's not at all easy to pin down, and may never be useful. The same physicist also said that P&F were depending on calorimetry results -- and that calorimetry is one of the experimental techniques where it is easy to make subtle mistakes that destroy all hope of valid results.
Disclaimer for the last two paragraphs: Physics isn't my field. I got an explanation from a physicist that I trust, but I may have misremembered or misunderstood. Your mileage may vary; objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
Xenophon