TechStuff Classic: TechStuff Experiments With Fusion

We're talking nuclear fusion and to uh kind of give you an idea of what nuclear fusion is, how we are trying to harness nuclear fusion as a source of energy production, really electricity production. Uh, and it's it's being tended as one of the technologies of the feature that is going to give us unlimited energy. And how far away is it? Twenty to thirty to fifty years And every year it seems like we're still at the lead

to fifty years. Yeah, yeah, it's that's one of those things that scientists will often Riley kind of joke about that the technology is always twenty years away. And uh, and you know, it's because the challenges that we need to overcome are quite impressive. Doesn't doesn't mean we won't do it because human beings are amazing, you know, we innovate, we event but but let's let's kind of first of

all talk about the difference between fusion and fission. Fission is the kind of a nuclear process that is used in our nuclear power plants today. So if you are familiar with the nuclear power plants things like you know there, of course they're the famous ones that have suffered catastrophic

failures like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. Uh. But these are the the reactors where they split up larger atoms into smaller atoms and as a result, a great deal of energy is given off really in the form of heat, which is then harnessed to convert water into steam, which turns steam turbines which are connected to electrical generators generating electricity. So really it's just a very very efficient way of heating up a lot of water really quickly and making

it do work. Yes, a very efficient, very radioactive steam generator. Yeah. Yeah, And that's one of the big issues with the fission power plants obviously, is that it uses nuclear radioactive material, not just nuclear material, radioactive material, and that it doesn't the radioactivity is still very much a factor once that reaction is finished four thousands and thousands of years, right. Yeah.

Generally speaking, only about three percent of the uranium in a uranium rod is used up in a fission reactor before the waste has to be disposed of because it will continue to heat up until it reaches a point that's too hot and the reactor itself can suffer a failure.

You have, that's what you have, the meltdown. Yeah. Uh. There are some uh, some approaches that are suggesting that we take another pass at that nuclear waste and use that in a second round by immersing it in a molten salt the waist annihilating molten salt reactor, which I still I just can't I can't get over the the

annihilator part of the waist annihilator. Uh. Yeah. So this this reactor would it's still a fission reactor, but it would immerse the radioactive material the uranium in a molten salt and use that to control the heat in a in a way that would allow you to use that material for longer, so you'd be able to get more use out of the same radioactive material and reduce the life of the actual radioactive elements at the at the final output, I think it would only be radioactive. It

would only be reactive for another years. Yeah, so still well beyond our lifetimes right now. But not something that you would say, alright, generation and generations and generations are going to have to be aware of that. You don't have to start, you know, programming things that people, you know, languages that don't exist yet want to be able to understand. How do I how do I create a pictograph that shows exactly do not go in here? Wessed it up

really hard? Right in ten thousand years, English may not even be a thing anymore. So, um so yeah, I mean that's that's one of those possible solutions. But fusion is very different. Fission all about splitting atoms apart. Fusion is about being buddy buddy and bringing atoms together. This is this is the kind of of process that we see happening in stars, including the sun. Did the sun being a star? Yes, yes, Well I'm just making sure

people know that. And despite what my one of my favorite bands has said in a cover of a song, actually the sun is not really a massive incandescent gas, the gigantic nuclear fulness. But they did correct it in a later song and say it was a miasma of incandesc and plasma. So they did go back and correct it, but they were actually quoting an old song from a science album for kids, which was to explain the process of fusion and how the Sun generates energy and light

and uh. And the way it happens is it takes these hydrogen atoms, and because the Sun is so massive and dense, there's a huge amount of gravity there and it's creating an enormous amount of pressure and heat. So the heat is stripping those hydrogen atoms of their electrons, creating ions. Um that creates ions, and in a pure hydrogen atom is just a proton and an electron, so that electron goes away. Now you've just got a proton there.

And so you have these protons now that are zipping around an incredible um and being pressed together really tightly by the amazing force of gravity. And at the Sun's core where this is the strongest, these atoms are banging up against each other so fast and so close that one of the other fundamental forces in the universe overacts the electromagnetic force. Now, the four forces in the universe include gravity, which is the weakest, but is the it

is the most effective over huge distances. You have electromagnetic force, and then you have the strong and weak nuclear forces. Now, the strong force is what holds nucleic particles together. It's like the glue that keeps a nucleus together, right, right, So if you were able to get two protons close enough to each other, uh, the strong nuclear force would be strong enough to counteract the electromagnetic force. That's it's

naturally driving them apart. Because protons both have a positive charge. And if you've ever taken to magnets and tried to stick the two positive ends together, it resists to you. It doesn't want to do that thing. But when you get them to within one alliant of a millimeter of each other, yeah, then that will that will go away, or it will be overcome by the strong exactly. Yeah, so you have to get them really really close together. Now, at that pomp point, when you have fused to hydrogen

protons together, you have created a different element. Hydrogen has now become helium at a temperature millions of degrees. So yeah, we can't see we might both be that, they might be giants. I'll be seeing them in a week to come into Atlanta. By the time you guys hear this, I've already seen it and the show was awesome, I guess. So anyway, the the protons have fused together to form helium.

But here's the interesting thing. In that process. The mass of that helium atom is slightly less than the combined masses of the two hydrogen atoms that fused together to make the helium. Why is that, Jonathan, Some that mass gets converted into energy. Now, there's a little equation you may have heard of called E equals MC squared. I think I think some some guy named Einstein was talking

about that. I don't know. Listen here Einstein. Yeah, Einstein came up with this idea where he came up with the theory and and turns out that it looks like it's true energy equals mass times this square or the speed of light squared, rather not the square speed of light, but the speed of light squared. So speed of light is a big, big, big, big number. Then you square it and it's even bigger, bigger, and you multiply financially bigger. Yeah,

and multiply that times whatever the mass is. You get your energy output and so essentially, what this equation tells us is that a tiny little bit of mass, once converted into energy, will be an enormous amount of energy the same thing. And also the mass and energy never really go way, and they are simply converted. Exactly. We cannot create or destroy energy, but what we can do is convert energy to mass and mass to energy. At

least in theory. Now, if we were to convert energy to mass, it would take an awful lot of energy to make just a little bit of mass. Which is why I always go crazy when I read the Harry Potter books and people conjure stuff out of thin air, because I think, do you you just destroyed like three solar systems in order to do that, clearly pulling them

from a parallel dimension or something like that. Yes, so there's just a people in a parallel dimension' Like it's so cold, there's a there's a really huge room of requirement somewhere. That's all right, Now you're talking about language. So yeah, a little bit of mass creates a lot of energy. So even though we're talking tiny atomic measurements here where we have the helium atom, which has got a lower mass than the two combined hydrogen atoms that

still puts off quite a bit of energy. And and the Sun is doing this all the time with tons of hydrogen converting to helium every day. All right, so massive amount of energy that's being that's being admitted, I mean, and if it weren't being emitted, then there would be a life on this planet. And we know it works, you know, so we conserve this. This is this is as far as we can tell real science. Yes, so we know it works, we know we can do it. In fact, we have done it. We've reproduced it here

on Earth. We'll get into that in a little bit. But the question was if the Sun does this, if that's how the Sun does this, could we create energy here on Earth using a similar method, Knowing that on Earth the conditions are very different from the core of the Sun. We don't have that gravity or that heat

that is allowing the Sun to overcome the right. Yeah, this and this, and the gravity is the really important part, because that gravity is what's allowing that this nuclear fusion process to happen at a temperature that would actually be lower than it we would need here on Earth because we don't have that gravity. We don't have the ability to compress the atoms as tightly together as we would if if we had the Sun's gravity. We have to we have to overcome that with even more heat. Yeah,

the Sun only needs about fifteen million degrees kelvin. Only am easily fifteen million kelvin. Sorry sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah, my my bad. I always do that. I did it once and one of our great listeners corrected me. And that's the only reason, because our listeners are awesome and they let me know when I've done something silly like that, completely ridiculous, the only reason I know, So, thank you listeners. Um so, so, yeah, the Sun only needs about fifteen

million kelvin. In order to do this here on Earth, it would be something like a hundred million. Yeah, so we're talking massive amounts of energy that we would need here on Earth to compensate for the fact that we don't have that gravity there to help us with this reaction. Um. Now, in the Sun, you're talking about the pure hydrogen encountering other pure hydrogen. So one proton, one electron, the electrons

get stripped away, the protons get fused together. But on Earth, we've discovered that there's a better combination to go with it requires less energy than it would if we were to use pure hydrogen. Right, It's it's relatively difficult to run into pure hydrogen here. Yeah, you would have to you would have to essentially split the hydrogen off of something else. There's lots of hydrogen on Earth. We have no shortage of it. Yeah, it's just connected to lots

of other stuff. So. Um. The two types of the two isotopes of hydrogen and isotope by the way, means that you have more or fewer neutrons than whatever the the atom typically has. But it's or it's it's a different number of neutrons than the base version of that atom, but it's um same number of protons, same number of electrons. So an isotope is one isotope of hydrogen is a deuterium, which is also known as heavy hydrogen, and it has one proton and one neutron, So typically you would not

have a neutron with hydrogen. Deuterium does have a neutron. And then you have tritium, which is called also called heavy heavy hydrogen, so it's extra heavy. He's not heavy, he's my tritium. Uh. And this is a proton that has two neutrons. Uh so the same still the same element, it's just a different isotope. Now deuterium, we've got a lot of that here on Earth. Yeah, it can be extracted from seawater. It's not radioactive or anything. Yeah, it's not dangerous um that but yeah, you can. You can

find deuterium in in ocean water. Um. You cannot find tritium very easily, mostly because it's not completely stable. It does tend to decay and it's just it has a half life of about ten years. But you can. You can get it from lithium. Yeah, you you if you take lithium, the metal lithium, not the medication, the metal lithium, and you bombard it with neutrons, then one of the

things you get out of that is tritium. So that is one way to get the treatium and it we found out that treaty um and deuterium, if you try to fuse those two together, then you get helium and a neutron out of that reaction, and uh, it requires less energy than than other combinations. Do write these are the current forms of fusion that are possible on our planet. Are our deuterium tritium. Hey guys, hope you're enjoying this classic episode of tech stuff. We're going to take a

quick break to thank our sponsors. All right, let's get back to fusion. So we've got the deuterium in the sea water. We can bombard some lithium with some neutrons and get some tritium out of that. We're ready to introduce the deuterium to the tritium and uh and and make a date and have them fused together in a single unit of helium and shoot off an extra neutron and a lot of energy. What do we need to do?

So we know that we're going to be using deuterium and tritium because that's the the most efficient way that we've found so far to be able to do. It's the easiest for for us to use deuterium. Deuterium would actually be more efficient, but it's more difficult to get started. I see, I see so right, So we we might get more energy output with deuterium deuterium, but it would also require more energy to get the whole thing started, right,

which is kind of the entire problem with fusion. Yeah, that's that's that's the bigges, all right, we'll just go ahead and say that one of the biggest challenges we face with fusion is the fact that in order to make a fusion reaction here on Earth, you have to pour in a great deal of energy so that you can create the the the the situation you need to hear, you're replicating what goes on in a star. That's really

a lot of temperature, a lot of pressure. So in order to do that without all that pressure here on Earth, we've got to pour and even more temperature. So that's the big challenge is how do you create a reaction that's going to generate more energy through the output than it required to start it. So if it requires more energy to go in, then you get out. You have an energy sync. You actually you're in the red and that's not really useful. I mean, it's it's pretty it's

still pretty cool, yeah, but just doesn't commercially viable. I guess if you want to make helium, uh, they're probably we are running out. I mean, but still that's a lot of energy you're pouring into making some balloons float or cooling the large Hadron collider. However you want to think about it, all right, but so so we do have we do. There's two main ways that we are experimenting with this on Earth, and one of those it's

called magnetic confinement. Right, So magnetic confinement is what was used in the joint European Torus or jet fusion reactor. And this was sort of a test reactor. It wasn't meant to be, uh like an electrical generator, right right, It wasn't a power plant. It was more science is cool than anything else. But and this is a good point to say that, you know, ultimately the way we would generate electricity with these is not that we have some magical like power. Yeah. They just dug into the

bolts and then it pulls. Yeah. This is still a steam generator. Yeah, which is which is really interesting to me because you know, this is technically this is steam punk. I mean, yeah, we're essentially harnessing the power of the stom the stars themselves to turn water into steam. Yeah, it's still it's still converting water to steam to turn really efficiently and a lot of water because you're talking

about a lot of heat. So then that's the That's the other thing is that if if you could have used the same amount of energy, you used to start the reaction to heat up some water and get a better effect than Obviously, this makes no sense. I mean, that's the whole point is that we have to find a way to do a fusion reaction where we're getting more energy than we're putting into it. Otherwise, just take the reactor out and just direct your energy to water directly,

take out the middleman. But magnetic confinement you mentioned it uses a really powerful magnetic field to hold the ionized gas in place. An Ionized gas is plasma. So plasma is a gas where you've got free roaming electrons. That is what the sun is. That's you know, all that heat has stripped away the electrons, you've poured energy in, You've pushed the electrons away. You've got these free flowing

uh nuclei inside the plasma. And then the magnetic field starts to press all of these nuclei together until you are able to fuse them. And what you get ore helium atoms and free neutrons. The neutrons fly off and they hit what they call blankets, blankets of lithium. Yeah, blankets.

Lithium is in the blanket as well, yes, and that that means that because remember, if you bombard lithium with a neutron, you create tritium, which means that you can continually create part of the fuel source you need for this reactually while you're in the middle of the process. Yeah, it's pretty pretty neat. Yeah, And it's also giving off a lot of energy in the form of heat, which is then heating up the water to turn into steam, etcetera, etcetera.

So that's magnetic confinement. Um, and we use different things to heat up the plasma, like we might use microwaves or lasers or electricity or I think that that accelerator driven neutral particle beams are our our integral in the international through nuclear experimental reactor or either which is the one in France. Yes, it comes from France. That one,

Yes it does. That one is still being built and it's it's projected to be finished and protected, projected to be online by although whether or not that is a true fact or not is you know, remains to be seen. Yeah. Yeah, So if it stays on target, then we'll be able to say by you know, if this is actually a viable means of generating electricity for us. By the way, the Chamber has a special name. It's a it's a how did how do we decided that this tacomac. Yeah,

we've got Tacomax here in Atlantic. Yeah, so it keeps throwing me out. Taco Mac is a is a restaurant chain in Atlanta that has obviously tacos. But this is toomac. It's actually a Russian acronym for heroidal chamber with axial magnetic field, which basically means it's a donut. It's a magnetic it's a magnetic donut, magnetic donut. Yeah. And granted this is this is a you know, the Eider version is a is a hundred foot tall, twenty three thousand ton,

million part donut, enormous magnetic donut. Yeah. And the reason for the donut shape is they've found that that is the most effective way of of containing the plasma in this really tight field so that you can have these

fusion reactions take place. So we've got magnetic confinement. There's another method which has receives some some attention early on, and there's still some labs, like there's some in the United States that are still looking at this approach, and it may even turn out that this ends up generating more energy in the long run than the magnetic confinement. But we're still trying to figure that out. It's called inertial confinement, right, And this is using laser beams or

ion beams to squeeze and heat that hydrogen plasma. Yeah. In this case, really they take a pellet a frozen hydrogen, so you have deuterium and tritium in an actual physical pellet. So you're talking super cold, yeah yeah, and and and peace sized, I mean like little bitty thing. Yeah. And you're using these these lasers or ions to heat that pellet into a plasma almost instantaneously. I mean you're just

you're bombarding it with an enormous amount of energy. And essentially what's happening is that all right, if you've ever seen the magic trick where the magician walks up to the the the dining table with all the beautiful glassware and everything that's perched perfectly on the tablecloth, and then he grabs the table cloth because it a quick jerk and anything stays therein bankmen failed to do and Gus

Fuster exactly. Yeah, it's the same same sort of idea here, and that you are heating it up so fast that because it's because this is a compressed pellet and the lasers are actually compressing it. Our ions are compressing it even further as it's being heated up. Before the electromagnetic force has the opportunity to push the atoms apart, the strong nuclear force fuses them together and so kind of implodes. Yeah,

so you've gotta do. I mean, it's happening super fast now, the fraction and like one millionth of a second, I think, is how fast this happens. It's insane and and uh, it's there are other differences between the initial confinement and magnetic confinement. With magnetic convironment, the goal is to find a way to have ongoing fusion reactions so that you don't have to just generate electricity or generate heat and spurts.

That you could actually have a maintained reaction that goes on for an extended amount of time to generate as much electricity as is needed, whereas inertial confinement you'd have to set up multiple essentially multiple targets right right, because the way that the way that one of them works At the National Ignition Facility of Lawrenceville, Livermore, laboratory in the United States in California, I believe UM it uses a hundred ninety two laser beams to focus on a

single point in a test chamber UM and this single point is where that little piece sized bit of hy hydrogen is sitting. And and so you know, they're they're working on ways to focus the lasers better and essentially have multiple pellets and and also yeah, and and to have to have chambers, multiple chambers with multiple pellets that are going off in succession so that you create a continuous and quoting quotation marks in the air reaction. So

it's it's a challenging thing. And if if they are able to crack it, it has the potential to create quite a bit of electricity, uh so much so that we could start to really take the load off of things like fossil fuel based power plants. Right right Their talk about UM with with inertial confinement a fifty two hundred times more energy UM output than than you would have to put in, whereas the numbers that I've seen

for it or anyway are more like seven times. So you know, either way, you're still getting a lot of energy out and we're not there yet no one has No one has created a fusion reactor here on Earth that has been efficient enough for it to be a meaningful way to create electricity. Uh, because you would be losing energy on the deal. So if these work out, it's going to be fantastic. There are there are a

lot of challenges here. I mean, you can imagine, if we're talking about using these incredible amounts of heat, you have to be able to design a reactor that can withstand handle it. Yeah, and that's tough. It's not an easy thing to do. So that's a big challenge. And then well we've got other ones as well. And again scientists will say like it's about twenty years away. Hopefully

they're right right now. I think one of the challenges is almost a societal challenge because people here fusion and they think fission and they think radioactive and meltdown and not in my backyard and etcetera. Whereas fusion is potentially anyway loads safer than a fission reactor, you don't you're not talking about you know, your output is a neutron and helium. It's not a heavy radioactive material that's going to have a half life of several thousand years. It's

stuff that is harmless once you have harnessed it. Uh So, really the question would be, you know, as long as the reactor is well made and solid, you don't have to worry about this heat escaping or the other kind of of a mechanical failure. Well, like like any other steam turbine generator, it's going to have an impact on the environment and that you know, you're going to be taking in water and and that's an impact, and it's going to be putting off steam, which is an impact.

And there are a lot of there are a lot of designs I've seen where they have built in a system where they condense the steam back down into the water, so it becomes a closed loop. So least then you are I mean, you still probably have a loss. I mean it's it's hard to create a perfectly closed loop. But if you could, then you could just essentially use the same water over and over and over again, because you know, the steam is just going to condense in the water and then the water will go back into

steam once you heat it up. Yeah, and so and again, you know, even if you do have even if you do have a loss, you're not going to be having Blanky the three eyed fish in the river outside, right, So so yeah, there's you know, and and who knows, maybe that'll really generate enough helium for us. I mostly joke about that because I seriously doubt there's any useful way to harness and a huge amount of helium from

these reactions. Guys, I hope you're not fused too closely with this topic because we need to take another quick break, but we'll be right back. Cold fusion is kind of what it sounds like. I mean, the idea is what

it sounds like, and it's it's not actually cold. It's more room temperature room to infusion, but that's less of a fun buzzword, so compared to a hundred million degree reaction, it's comed um, but no. Cold fusion is the idea that view would be able to create these reactions, these fusion reactions at essentially room temperature and still get energy off of them, which, if it were true, would be huge because that would mean that we wouldn't have to

pour in so much energy to start the reaction. You just have to set up the right situation and harnestly the energy that comes off of it and make free energy for everybody, right, proponents of it. I like to call it low energy nuclear reactions. Yeah, because cold fusion definitely has a stigma against it now. And that's the

reason for that, all right. So, so there were a pair of scientists, Pons and Fleishman, who published a paper that was that that became really famous, and it was that this they were talking about a reaction that that they observed that gave off more energy than it should

have based upon what they did. Right. What happened was they put an electrode of pollitium into a thermis of heavy water of tridium oxide um and charged it with an electrical current, and I supposedly the pollitium catalyzed fusion by allowing the du tritium atoms to snuggle up. So, in other words, they were able to create a fusion reaction at a at a very low temperature comparatively speaking, and the temperature and that they observed an excess of

energy being given off by this. So they were like, eureka, we have found a way to create electricity or really

to create energy through this reaction. And then a few labs tried to replicate their results, and early results seemed to replicate it at least in a couple of instances, but upon further study, it seemed like most of those successes were due to either mechanical error like someone someone miss read spread that something, or it was a poorly calibrated sensor, or yeah, exactly like like there was there always seemed to be something wrong with the experiment that

put whatever, the results were within the margin of error, and if it's within the margin of error, you cannot really be sure that you've got an actual positive result. So Ponds and Flashman continued to talk about their studies and continue to be proponents of this idea, but it increasingly became sort of kind of a pathological science, is what other scientists were calling it, you know, which essentially

means joke and science talk. Now they were saying that there was no real proof of it working, that the results were not replicable, which is something that's important in science as it turns out, and that there doesn't doesn't seem to be any support based upon our understanding of the universe that cold fusion could actually be a thing. And this wasn't the only time that it's been attempted. Back in two th five, E. C. L A researchers were working without Hyer electric crystals um to to create

electric fields in in water. Normal normal, old stuff. And in two thousand nine, the U. S. Navy's UH Space in Naval Warfare Systems Department was trying some stuff. Yeah, and just it doesn't seem to have ever panned out. Now there are conspiracy theorists who suggests that perhaps big energy companies are suppressing information about cold fusion and have

compromised the scientific community as such. Uh and therefore cold fusion could be a thing, but we don't know about it because people are actively working against us from learning about it. I would not go so far as to say that. I will say that there is enough of a stigma against cold fusion and low energy nuclear reactions within the literature world that most magazines won't scientific publishing right,

so they just they dismiss it out of hand. Now that I think people can make a legitimate argument that is probably shortsighted, that that they should, they should at least consider them so that other scientists have the opportunity to observe the to to learn about the results, try and replicate it, and then that's how we can at least at least make a consideration about it before, rather than dismissing it out of hand as Yeah, I think I think dismissing it out of hand ends up just

creating more fuel for the conspiracy theorists. Now, personally, I don't think there's anything to it. Counter counter culture. What's the I was I was lectured about the terminology conspiracy theorists. I'm sorry that the conspiracy theorists hate the term conspiracy theorist. I'm really sorry about that. Um So anyway, Yeah, we're gonna have Ben and Madden here, Hunter, bring them on. I will bends my arch nemesis. Everyone knows that, so uh And if you didn't know that, now you do.

I called him my arch nemesis the very first day I met him, six years ago. So and it has held true. We, by the way, share trains to train rights together and chat all the way and talk about music. Very very little actual arch nemesis story. He's about as lazy a hero as I am, lazy as supervillain. So really nothing happens, really is that how it works out?

He's he's the hero, you're the villain. I mean, you're you're You've got that that's that's the problem, right, I mean, I have to be the villain by default by Star Trek rules. We got off on a tangent. So anyway, so anyway, the science does not seem to hold up cold fusion. It just doesn't seem to be There doesn't seem to be any support there. Now, maybe there actually

is a way of doing it. Maybe there is, and it's just that whatever results were found were due to something else and it just hasn't been discovered in the other examples. And maybe it'll turn out that that is the answer, which would be amazing, and I think everyone really wants that world to exist, absolutely, it would. It would mean that our energy problems, we would we would be in an energy surplus to the point where when

you have energy surplus, so many things become possible. Yeah, it's it's one of those things that you know that you kind of start seeing in something like Star Trek, where it's it's just this perfect utopian universe where a lot of people don't have to work anymore because we have we have free energy, so we have free transportation,

so we have free food. So yeah, and so obviously this would be a pretty great world and I think it's pretty cynical, maybe not completely unrealistic to say that corporations would suppress such a world for their own gain, because I actually think they would have more to gain in the utopia version of the world than in the current one. But I don't know. I'm not a I'm not a CEO of a major corporation, so maybe I

would think in a different way if I were. I can I can see how how changing the status quo could be a scary thing. Yeah, and I'm too lazy to try again, super villain lazy, so um yeah, anyway, it'll I'm interested to see how the the fusion reactors like it turn turn out over the next couple of decades um. If anyone does make advances in the cold

fusion field, that would be phenomenal. And you know, while I am a skeptic, and I fully admit that I'm a skeptic, I'm also a person who if you show me evidence that really supports the claim and it's replicable, then I'm going to say, like, Okay, you're right. I mean, that's that's how science works. That's all right. I am willing to say, like, Okay, my my skepticism was was not well founded because here we have proofd right, but

until then, yeah, until then, I'm a skeptic. One of my one of my favorite stories about that, there's a Scottish physicist named Douglas Morrison who would attend these cold fusion conferences every year and and and listen and from what I understand, really genuinely listen to these people who had these brilliant ideas about about how these things might work and how they were supposedly working in their own labs. And he would stand up and say, can you please

make me a cup of tea? And they would go, well, I can't produce that much heat yet, and he would go, oh yeah. That's the other thing is that if cold fusion, if these reactions are actually happening, if if there really is something to it, the problem would be can it be scaled up to something that's useful? And if it can't be scaled up, then it may be that all right, well, we've learned something interesting that we didn't know before, which

is always valuable. But if it's not practical to use this in any way of generating electricity, it doesn't actually meet the problem that we're trying to solve, So that's something else to keep in mind, although personally I'm always like knowledge for knowledge sake. Alright, guys, that wraps up another classic episode of tech Stuff. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. You can send me a message on

Facebook or on Twitter. I'm Text Stuff h s w at both, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Eight