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Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature.
Jul 3, 2023 · Cold fusion, better known by its practitioners as LENR, is the science—or, perhaps, the art—of making atomic nuclei merge and, ideally, harnessing the resultant energy.
Mar 17, 2023 · In the spring of 1989, two electrochemists claimed they’d fused hydrogen atoms into helium under laboratory conditions. If humankind had harnessed this power source, a potent and emissions-free alternative to fossil fuels, it’s possible we wouldn’t now be teetering on the brink of environmental catastrophe.
- Overview
- Sparking a controversy
- Battery of tests
- In store for the future
The first public results from a Google-funded project reveal renewed interest in the long-sought but controversial nuclear energy source.
Thirty years ago, a pair of chemists made headlines around the world with their claim that they had achieved “cold fusion”: the production of energy using the same nuclear reaction that powers the sun, but at room temperature. If confirmed, the discovery could have transformed the global energy landscape overnight—but the chemists' findings weren't readily replicated.
Swiftly labeled a lost cause by mainstream physics, attempts to spark cold fusion are now once again heating up, thanks to a stealth effort by the U.S. tech giant Google.
In a review paper published in Nature on Monday, U.S. and Canadian researchers funded by Google publicly unveiled their efforts to reassess cold fusion. Like many other outside researchers, the Google team hasn't found evidence of the phenomenon as originally described. However, since 2015, their efforts have yielded three preprints and 10 peer-reviewed publications, including the latest review, that are offering new insights into key materials and that have improved measurement techniques at high temperatures and pressures.
With these advances in hand, the team says that there's much more basic science to do—research that likely hasn't gotten done because of its relation to cold fusion.
“That is why we got involved, [and] that’s actually the work we are continuing to do,” says team member Yet-Ming Chiang, a materials scientist at MIT. “This project is by no means over. There’s lots of ongoing work we're interested in doing.”
Nuclear fusion occurs when pairs of light nuclei fuse together to form a nucleus of net lighter mass, releasing huge amounts of energy as described by Einstein's iconic equation E = mc2. Inside the sun, hydrogen atoms fuse to produce helium and energy. If successfully harnessed on Earth, fusion could provide humankind with abundant, emissions-free energy—a huge boon to efforts to combat climate change. (As a byproduct, fusion on Earth might also help to address a global helium shortage.)
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But getting fusion to work on Earth is tricky, since it's hard to get two nuclei close enough to combine; atomic nuclei are positively charged, so they fiercely repel one another, a hurdle known as the Coulomb barrier. Crossing this barrier and realizing fusion power is possible at high densities and temperatures, if the nuclei are confined for a sufficiently long time. But to achieve these conditions, scientists seem to need large, expensive machines and huge amounts of initial power. The interior of ITER, a fusion reactor being built in France, will need to reach 270 million degrees Fahrenheit to ignite fusion—a full ten times hotter than the sun's core.
“What nature does with the enormous force of gravity in the sun's core is what mankind has been trying to do under controlled conditions in the laboratory,” says physicist Amitava Bhattacharjee, the head theorist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, one of the leading fusion research groups in the U.S.
By April 2015, Trevithick had identified candidate researchers for the project and invited them to Google's California campus. None of the researchers knew each other well; it became a day-long guessing game for each to decipher why they had been invited.
“I’m not gonna lie, there were awkward moments,” Trevithick says.
The researchers then had several months to brainstorm experiments, which they collectively whittled down to three priorities. From the beginning, the researchers agreed to rigorously check their work and publish all their results—even when the work came up empty.
The first major experiment aimed to address a key claim within the cold fusion community: If enough deuterium atoms are electrically crammed into a piece of palladium—at least seven for every eight palladium atoms—the device gives off excess heat. But as the researchers soon realized, packing palladium full of deuterium is extremely difficult, and so is measuring it.
In the past, researchers had measured palladium's deuterium content by tracking changes in its electrical resistance. But when the Google team tried the technique, they noticed errors. So they came up with a new measurement technique: shining x-rays through the palladium to directly see how much the loaded metal had swelled.
The team's second agenda tested whether heating hydrogen with various powdered metals triggers fusion, yielding heat and fusion byproducts. Italian cold-fusion proponents have made the claim since the 1990s, including Andrea Rossi, the colorful inventor of the E-Cat, a device that Rossi claims is a LENR reactor.
Now that the team has publicly unveiled its efforts, Chiang says that the team wants to couple his lab's work with Schenkel's device, with the goal of creating a “reference experiment” for other labs to also advance research into lower-energy nuclear physics.
So far, Trevithick says, Google has spent $10 million on the effort since 2015, and funding persists through the end of 2019. Trevithick stresses that cold fusion represents just one sliver of Google's energy research, which includes working with the traditional fusion company TAE Technologies. Regardless of Google's future investments, the researchers it has supported say they're interested in continuing the work on its basic scientific merits.
And if they or others eventually make new, disruptive discoveries in science and engineering by pursuing less conventional avenues, Bhattacharjee would welcome the effort.
“I'm not addressing in particular whether [cold fusion] is one such candidate, but I generally am for trying out different things,” he says. “And that was the really exciting part of the Pons-Fleischmann experiment. It's really interesting that they dared.”
Then again, Bhattacharjee is a veteran of the effort to bring the sun to earth—and he knows how hard it is to play the role of Prometheus.
“A lot of intelligent people have been at it for a while, and the reason why they have made a lot of progress and still haven't solved it is because it is a very, very hard problem,” he adds. “It may very well be the hardest science and engineering problem we have ever undertaken.”
Apr 16, 2024 · The HERMES project in Europe is exploring cold fusion through advanced scientific techniques, focusing on the palladium-hydrogen system to potentially produce anomalous effects.
During their investigation of cold fusion, Pons and Fleischmann tried to pull together scientific knowledge from chemistry and physics to produce something amazing — fusion at room temperature. To learn more about the science that factored into their reasoning, read on …
Oct 21, 1999 · 'Cold fusion,' if true, requires radical changes in our understanding of energy and matter, but even after eight years of intense effort costing tens of millions of dollars, the evidence...
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