TechStuff Experiments With Fusion

more technological, not not really less delicious. Yeah, but no, 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 being towed 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 and

every year it seems like we're 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 and reinvent. But um, 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.

You 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. Yeah, that's what you have down. 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 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, all right, generations 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 wanting to be able to understand, Right, how do I how do I create a pictograph that shows exactly do not go in here? We messed 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. And this is this is the kind of of process that we see happening in stars, including the sun, 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 and gigantic nuclear fenness. But they did correct it in a later song and say it was a miasma of incandescent 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. That creates zions, 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 in incredible speaks um and being press 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 these 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, 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 that's naturally driving them apart. Because protons both have a positive charge. And if you've ever taken two magnets and tried to stick the two positive ends together, it resists you. It doesn't want to do that thing.

But when you get them to within one trillionth of a millimeter of each other, 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 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 fuse together to make the helium. Why is that, Jonathan, Some of 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 light, but the speed of light sweared. So speed of light

is a big, big, big big number. Then you square it and it's even bigger, and you multiply, yeah, and multiply that times whatever the mass is, you get your energy output. And so essentially, what this equation tells us is a tiny little bit of mass, once converted into energy, will be an enormous amount of energy the same thing, and also that that mass and energy never really go away, 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 okay, 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 into helium every day. All right, so massive amount of energy that's being that's being emitted. I mean if it weren't being emitted, then there would be no life on this planet. Right. And and we know it works, you know, so we can serve 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 electronic Yeah, this and the and the gravity is the really important part because that gravity is what's allowing this nuclear fusion process to happen at a temperature that would actually be lower

than 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 high yrogen 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 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 that you can um. 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 tritium 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. Yeah, and we're going to talk about how, you know, generating a nuclear fusion reaction here on Earth, what kind of challenges we encounter, and and how we've worked around them in just a moment. But before we do, let's take a quick moment to thank our sponsored 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 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, In fact, that's that's that's the biggest 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 You're 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 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, 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 yeah that just plug 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 them, yes, the stars themselves, to turn water into steam. Yeah, it's still it's still converting water to steam to turn steam well 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 then we're putting into it. Otherwise, just take the reactor out and just direct your energy to water directly, take

out the middleman. But m 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 uh 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 our helium adams and free neutrons. The neutrons fly off and they hit what they call blankets, blankets of lithium. Ye, blankets.

Lithium is in the blanket as well. Yes, and that that means that because remember, if you bombard lithium with a new tron, you create tritium, which means that you can continually create part of the fuel source you need for this reactory 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 has been 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. 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 a 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 decide to 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 tacomac. It's actually a Russian acronym for toroidal 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 piece eyed 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 match 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, gives it a quick jerk, and

everything stays there. Kman failed to do and 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 gotta do. I mean, it's happening super fast. Now, the the fraction and like one millionth of a second, I think, is how fast this happened. It's insane and and uh, it's there are other differences between the initial confinement and magnetic confinement. With magnetic confronment, 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 hydrogen 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 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 in 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, They're they're talking 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 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 it, 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 hear fusion and they think fission and 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 at 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 and 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. But that brings us to an idea called cold fusion. And 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 a sure fusion, but that's less of a fun buzzword, so compared to a hundred million degree reaction, it's um but no. Cold fusion is the idea that you 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 harnessly uh the energy that comes off of it and make free energy for everybody. Proponents of it, I like to call it low energy nuclear reactions. Yeah, because cold fusion definitely

has a stigma against it now and the reason for that. Alright, 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 they observed that gave off more energy than it should have based upon what they did. 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 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 misread something, or it was a poorly calibrated 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

in 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 thousand five, U c l A. Researchers were working without hyro 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 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 consider publishing right,

so they just they dismiss it out of hand. Now that I think people can make a legitimate argument that 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 let's 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 theorist hate the term conspiracy theorist. I'm really sorry about that. Um So anyway, Yeah, we're gonna have Ben and Madden here on he 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 using very very very little actual arch nemesis theory. He's about as lazy a hero as I am lazy as supervillain. So really nothing happens, really is that? Is that how it works out? He's he's the hero, You're the villain.

I mean you're you're 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, 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 that 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. 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, 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 proof, 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, yeah. That's the other thing is that if cold fusion, if these reactions are actually happening, if if there really is something too 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, bring it on. So anyway, that kind of wraps up this full discussion about fusion. If you guys have any suggestions for future articles, If you want to berate me for the use of the term conspiracy theorist, you can write me. That's fine. My well are out

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