Friday, January 13, 2006

News @ Nature.com: Desktop fusion is back on the table

Link to the article: Desktop fusion is back on the table

So, do you know what cold fusion is? Okay, if you don't, I'll give you the concept in a nutshell. Now, as you know, the sun is powered by nuclear fusion. That takes millions of degrees to sustain. That is a little hard to emulate on Earth. Therefore, for a viable fusion based energy source, cold fusion would be wonderful, if it ever became a reality. By cold, it means colder that the million degrees of the sun, to a few thousand or tens of thousands of degrees. Something more manageable. For fusion on Earth, a laser called Shiva is employed. That creates the temperature needed to begin the fusion source. Oh, I almost forgot. Nuclear fusion is self sustaining. That means, once started, it runs itself thereby making more energy than it took to start.

So far, cold fusion has been a scientific myth propogated by movies such as Chain Reaction. There have been several claims to fame but every single one turned out fake. So, could this claim be true?

Here is the method in question in highly simplified language:

Blast a liquid with waves of ultrasound and tiny bubbles of gas are created, which release a burst of heat and light when they implode. The core of the bubble reaches 15,000 �C, hot enough to wrench molecules apart. Physicists have even suggested that the intense conditions of this sonoluminescence could fuse atomic nuclei together, in the same process that keeps our Sun running.


I'm waiting with bated breath for the final review of this project after publication. That means wait to see if their research can be reproduced, or meet a fiery end with the Scientific Method.


Tags: Science

[Listening to: Save Me - Sister Hazel - Fortress (4:02)]

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