As I have said before, I am by no means a scientist. But then again, that is the whole reason people post on these boards.
And I do still have many questions, one of which, why is there apparently no such thing as cold fission?
Some time back, someone claimed to have discovered it. This was around 1989 IIRC. But it turned out to just be a hoax.
Cold fission would mean boundless energy, with little work or trouble on the part of the person acquiring this energy form.
Also I have to ask, how are simple batteries much different from cold fission? You use a chemical process to convert matter into energy. How is this different? And as batteries get more efficient, won’t they just provide more energy?
(It’s been a while since I took hs chemistry. But I seem to recall they said a battery is made up of cells. And each cell, regardless of size, is only capable of producing 1.5 volts. Is this true? And could this ever change? And what if the cells were microscopic? Couldn’t they produce infinite energy?)
You’re talking about cold fusion. Cold fission (reactions at room temperature) occurs all the time, and happens spontaneously if you have a sufficient mass of fissionable material. It’s the nuclear reaction that occurs in nuclear power plants.
The reason extremely high temperatures are required for fusion is that you have to force atomic nuclei together against extremely strong forces that cause them to repel one another. This takes a lot of energy.
(As noted, fusion, not fission.) Nuclear power plants are used to heat water to use the resulting hot water or steam to turn turbines to generate electricity. Fusion plants (if they ever happened) would do the same. The “hot” is the whole point of the reactors.
A battery simply converts chemical energy into electrical energy.
Cold fusion is suppose to happen when 2 hydrogen nuclei somehow fuse together releasing energy. A surface of a palladium electrode was supposedly the site where this fusion took place.
The problem with cold fusion is that it takes a lot of energy to squish two atoms together and that normally entails a lot of heat. Fusion, so far, has only taken place in high energy environments like hydrogen bombs, tokamaks and cores of stars.
Fun fact: the cores of most stars are still too cold for fusion through nuclei slamming together to take place–the fusion that happens is through the very rare (compared to the number of nuclei present) fusion of nuclei via quantum tunneling. So the sun runs on cold fusion, it is just that useful cold fusion is still pretty darn hot. Cold cold fusion happens through quantum tunneling, too, just that it is kinda slow.
The basis of the cold fusion claims is the fact that hydrogen and deuterium can diffuse quite readily into platinum and palladium metal. The idea was that by getting a lot of the stuff into an appropriate metal matrix you would overcome the potentials to getting them close together. You’d be doing an end-run around the high temperatures required to get the constituents close enough together for fusion to occur by taking advantage of this bit of alchemy. The idea is certainly attractive, and it had already been tried by Avco Everett Research Labs in the 1950s and 1960s, and something like it was being done by Jones et al. at Brigham Young University just down the road* from the University of Utah, where Pons and Fleischman were making their extravagant claims about achieving Cold Fusion in a flask. Unfortunately, a.) nobody could duplicated the results of Pons and Fleischman, and b.) If the process they were claiming was taking place, there would be a very significant neutron flux, which wasn’t seen (and which didn’t kill anybody). The lure and potential of Cold Fusion was so great, however, that it kept people looking for it for a few years.
As I’ve said before, it was an eerie case of history repeating itself. Just like the case of John G. Kepros’ X-Ray Laser, you had a couple of Professors in the Utah Chemistry department making the claim that they had achieved a result physicists had been trying to attain for years using expensive and complex apparatus, but on a small scale using relatively small and inexpensive materials. They went straight to the media, not using peer-reviewed journals to announce their results. Everyone wanted it to be true, but they couldn’t replicate the results.
*“Down the road” here meaning an hour away down Interstate 15.
Fission is when you break large atoms into smaller atoms, and a small % of the matter is converted into energy (Uranium is broken into barium and krypton).
Fusion is when you combine small atoms into larger atoms, and a small % of the matter is converted into energy (2 hydrogens combined into a helium for example).
The best scientists from all over the world (US, Germany UK, South Korea, China, Japan, etc) are working to figure out how to make fusion work under highly controlled settings. They can barely do it and they are having trouble creating a stable, reliable process that creates more energy than it uses.
In 2016 China set a record for sustaining fusion for 100 seconds.
These are the best scientists in world leaders in science and technology, and they can barely sustain a fusion reaction.
I don’t know much about the chemistry of batteries, but right now they max out at about 1/2 a kwh per liter of battery. I think gasoline gets 10kwh/liter. I have no idea what the potential energy density of batteries is though. But right now it is about 20x less than gasoline.
The fusion stuff has been covered, so I’m just going to respond to these last two paragraphs.
Atoms, you’ll recall, consist of a small, dense nucleus surrounded by electrons. Those electrons can interact with the electrons around other nuclei to form bonds. This allows atoms to stick together in compounds. An example is water, which consists of two hydrogen atoms bonded with an oxygen atom: H[sub]2[/sub]O.
Fission and fusion are processes that involve the nucleus. Fission is the nucleus breaking apart; fusion is two nuclei forming a single larger nucleus. As long as you’re working with the right kind of atoms, both result in a large release of energy.
Chemical reactions (such as you’d see in a battery cell) only involve those bonds created by the electrons. Breaking and forming those bonds can also release energy, but much less than can be released by the nuclear reactions.
Different types of batteries create different potentials; several chemistries do result in about 1.5 volts. But that’s just the potential–to get power you need current. The smaller the cell, the less current it can create. D cells can put out more power than AAA cells do, even though both create 1.5 volts. So microscopic cells wouldn’t help much with energy output, though that sort of thinking can help with some other things we want batteries to do.
Not quite true; with muon catalyzed fusion it’s possible to induce fusion at room temperature. Replacing the electrons with more massive muons gets the atomic nuclei closer together by making the atoms smaller, instead of crushing them together with brute force.
Unfortunately nobody’s been able to make the technique into a practical power source.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong here, but I don’t think that the Pons Fleishman results were ever shown to be a hoax in the sense of deliberate deception, but rather an error caused by sloppy lab work and a rush to publicize what would have been revolutionary results.
If I remember correctly, the critical measurements were taken in the morning and the these two fellas accidentally put the thermometer in their coffee cup … so I can see why they got excited … so not a hoax, per se, but rather the typical human instinct to jump to conclusions without checking if there’s a skunk underneath …
The initial data was just non-malicious sloppiness, but the rush to publicize without first going through careful peer review was certainly a breech of professional ethics.
The real problem with this is that it has turned cold fusion into a woo science.
Cold fusion may be complete woo anyway, but so are many of the paths that physicist go down, knowing that out of the dozens or hundred of approaches to solving any problem, all of them will be wrong, unless they are very lucky, in which case, one works. How many thousands of physicists participate in the “woo*” that is string theory?
Research into that area is completely covered by cranks now, and there are no respectable scientists, that I am aware of, that are willing to touch it, as just being associated with it could end their career.
And, also, the events lowered the public’s trust in science in general. I hear, “Yeah, and they said that about cold fusion, too.” alot when scientists make claims about the universe that are not intuitive (even if they are testable with advanced and complicated equipment that 99.99% of the population does not understand).
*Not saying that string theory is definitely wrong, but it is untestable, and will probably continue to be untestable for any foreseeable future, which makes it just as woo (to the public) as any other pseudoscientific claim.
