The Hot Take on Cold Fusion

me thrown for a bit. But gosh darn it, the show she must keep happening, as they say in the business, and so we're going to forge ahead in our week

of nuclear discussions. In my last episode, I talked about fusion reactors and how if we could just get them to work reliably, if we could find a way to make the reactions take place without pouring more energy into them than we're getting out of and we can make it sustainable, we could produce enough electricity to meet our needs for the foreseeable future while also producing very little waste, and none of it the high level nuclear waste that

a traditional fission based nuclear power plant would create. But I also mentioned that's devilish lee hard to achieve fusion because you first have to overcome some fundamental forces that very much do not want to let that happen. And by saying want to let that happen, I'm anthropomorphized sizing a little bit. They they resist this. So you have to force to positively charged nuclei to fuse together. And because like charges repel each other, that takes a lot

of energy and effort. But what if it didn't require so much. What if we didn't have to have these enormous, expensive facilities that use powerful lasers or magnetic fields to have this happen. What if you could find a way to fuse hydrogen ice of topes together at room temperature.

Will that be a phenomenal transformative achievement. It would mean you wouldn't have to spend years building and testing facilities meant to heat deuterium or tritium into plasma and then compress it into a space small enough to force fusion to occur. It could potentially reduce the amount of energy you would need to initiate a reaction and you would end up with the payoff energy and you could just harness that to generate electricity. That would be swell. There's

a common name for this concept. Actually, there are a few different common names, But the one that we used to use, and you often will hear people use it deristively, is called cold fusion. Now these days we tend to use other names because cold fusion has a real stigma against it. So the new names we might use include things like condensed matter, nuclear science, or low energy nuclear reactions. No one really agrees exactly how this works. There are

a lot of different competing hypotheses. No one really agrees whether if this works. But some people do argue that it does work and it has worked, and a lot of other people say, I don't think so. So let's dive into the maligned work of two people in particular, sort of the pioneers of the cold fusion furer, and that would be Martin Fleishman and Stanley Ponds. And Fleishman and Ponds or Ponds and Fleishman had conducted an experiment

involving heavy water and palladium. Now, heavy water refers to water that has deuterium isotopes. Uh. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen, and water is h two O isotopes of an element. I'll share the same chemical properties, but they have a different atomic mass from each other due to the presence of neutrons. So hydrogen and its most plentiful state, protium is a prot on and an electron with no neutrons.

Deuterium is a proton and neutron with one electron. It's still hydrogen, but now it has a neutron, so it's heavier. That's why we call it heavy water. If you have water that is where the molecules are, you have deuterium hydrogen atoms as opposed to protium hydrogen atoms, So that's the difference there. Now, most hydrogen we encounter is protium. That's the vast majority of the stuff that we see in our world. But we do have some deuterium in oceans.

It does occur naturally. Uh So, Ponds and Flishman had a high concentration of deuterium in their mixture. So that's why it was called heavy water. Because the hydrogen atoms in those H two O molecules were more massive than you would typically encounter. They were literally heavier. So why did they use palladium. Well, that element has the ability to absorb hydrogen in great volumes. In fact, it can

absorb about one hundred times its own volume in hydrogen. Now, this is because the surface of palladium can react chemically with hydrogen in a way that draws the hydrogen into the palladium itself. So the thinking goes that if you could absorb deuterium through palladium at a high enough density, you might be able to induce fusion to occur because

you're forcing these hydrogen atoms very close together. You just have to get those deuterium atoms close enough, and then some as yet unknown process would take you the rest of the way. That last bit is a heck of a kicker if you cannot explain why it happens. That is, that's a huge question mark and a big gap in

your understanding. But science is also filled with stories in which someone was messing around with stuff and something interesting happened, and they couldn't explain how the interesting thing happened, and so they had to look further into it, and only after a lot of X lauration did we then get

an understanding of what was actually happening. So while a lot of discoveries and science come from carefully crafted and tested hypotheses that are building upon previous knowledge, sometimes our advances and science come from lucky observations that lead to more rigorous scientific exploration. So it might start off as something where we noticed there's an interesting phenomena occurring, we cannot explain why it's happening yet, and then we look

into it and we gain that understanding. So you've got this heavy water, You've got your palladium electrode. How were you to absorb the hydrogen? I mean, hydrogen is locked in with oxygen when it's water, Right, you've got those water molecules H two O. Well, this was through a process called electrolysis. And I'm not talking about hair removal here,

although there is a process called electrolysis for that. Instead, I'm talking about the chemical decomposition that happens with some liquids when you pass an elect current through that liquid. So let's say you've got some water inside a container, and we'll call the container an electrolyzer. So this container is an electrolyzer. It's got water inside of it, and

inside that electrolyzer you place a pair of electrodes. One of those electrodes is a negatively charged electrode, that's the cathode. The other one is the positively charged electrode that's the anode, opposite charges attract, so the negatively charged cathode will attract positively charged ions in the water and the positive anode will attract negatively charged ions. And there are several different types of electrolyzers, and each type can separate hydrogen atoms

from oxygen atoms and water in different ways. So, for example, there's the fuel cell method in which you have a permeable membrane separating the two electrodes, and when you apply a potential difference between the two electrodes, it causes water to react at the anode to form oxygen, which bubbles off, and the oxygen separates from the hydro gen. So you've got these positively charged hydrogen ions. Because that you actually strip the electrons off the hydrogen and you then use

those electrons to do work. In a fuel cell, the hydrogen ions will move across through the permeable membrane toward the cathode because they are attracted to the negatively charged electrode, and then the hydrogen would typically bubble up and you could capture hydrogen that way and use it for more fuel or whatever. If you used a material like palladium for your electrode, then you could just absorb the hydrogen

or deuterium in this case type of hydrogen isotope. The important thing is that this process allows you to separate hydrogen in the form of deuterium from those water molecules, and you should end up with a palladium electrode stuffed with hydrogen two and then maybe something magical could happen which brings us two Ponds and Fleischman. Fleishman met Ponds when Ponds was a student at the University of Southampton,

where Fleishman was a professor of chemistry. Ponds had graduated and become a professor of the University of Utah, but while he had left the University of Southampton, he and Fleishman remained in touch and they began to collaborate on research projects. In the early nineteen eighties, Fleishman wanted to explore if there were ways to trigger a nuclear process, which would be a process that results in the change of nuclei within atoms, and wondered if he could do

that using a chemical process. Chemical processes are reactions between atoms and molecules. So he's saying, I wonder if I could take a chemical reaction, which typically would only be at the atomic level or larger atoms and molecules and force a nuclear reaction, which is at one level down right, you're talking about the nucleus of an atom. Then in Ponds and Fleishman began to experiment by building what they

called a fusion cell. This was essentially an electoral lizer with an anode made of platinum and a cathode made out of palladium, and they use heavy water inside of it, and they hypothesized that the palladium would soak up deuterium produced through electrolysis, and that the deuterium atoms would be forced so close together that they would undergo fusion and release energy in the form of heat. So what happened, I'll tell you, but first let's take a quick break

to thank our sponsor. Well, Ponds and Fleishman conducted their experiment and they monitored the temperature of the fusion cell throughout the process. They actually did this in a kind of interesting way with it gets pretty complicated, but they did in a way that wasn't as simple as sticking a thermometer in the water. And actually their their measurements of temperature were based on estimations, not on like hard

readings at that point. So they analyzed the data at the conclusion of their experiment, and they found that the cell appeared to be producing about one hundred times more heat than it would through the chemical process itself. So we understand the chemical process, so based on that, you would expect x amount of heat, but instead what we're measuring is one hundred times x amount of heat, So

something else must be happening. This anomaly seemed to support that hypothesis that maybe there was some sort of fusion occurring. According to their calculations, the chemical process alone would not be able to produce that heat, so something else had to be doing it. But to be sure, they would need to replicate their experiment, which is proper from a

scientific perspective. You have to make sure that the experiment you conducted was an accurate and precise one, and that you should be able to repeat the process and get the same results. If you don't get the same results after repeating the experiment using the exact same process, something has gone wrong. There's some other factor that's at play, such as unreliable measuring mechanism. Maybe the thermometer you were using was not reliable maybe your methodology for estimating the

temperature was off. So replicating is very important because it tells you, yes, I'm consistently getting the same result. And if you can't say that, then you don't really have any conclusions you can draw. If you perform the same action over and over and something different happens every single time, it doesn't tell you anything about the cause and effect of that action and the consequences. So here was the problem.

To conduct more experiments would require some funding, and so Ponds and Fleishman applied for a government grant to get money for their experiments, and the grant process included peer of view. Now peer of you means that you would have peers, qualified scientists who would look over an application, a grant application to determine if the application was had merit you, if it was scientifically sound in its approach, and it's outlined, and here we get the first kink

in our story. One of those reviewers was a nuclear physicist named Stephen Jones, and Stephen Jones was also exploring the possibility of cold fusion. However, Jones was not looking for changes in temperature the white Ponds and Flashman were. He was looking for evidence of neutrons, because in deuterium fusion reactions, you wouldn't just end up with only helium four, however, you would actually end up with one of three possible outcomes.

So you would either have helium four plus a helium three ADAM plus some high energy neutron, or you would end up with helium for tritium and a high energy proton, or you would end up with helium four, another helium four ADAM, and uh gamma ray. So those are the three potential it comes of the this deuterium deuterium fusion process. So you if you were had a way of testing for one of those byproducts, then you could look to see if there were evidence of fusion reactions happening at

that point. So if you had a way of just detecting helium, then that would be a pretty darn convincing argument that fusion had actually happened if you're detecting helium being given off by this reaction, because they tell you something has to be generating that helium. But Jones's work was looking at neutrons specifically, so he had detected some neutrons through his experiment, but keep in mind he was only looking for neutrons, not for helium, but there were

so few neutrons detected. The team had concluded that fusion might be happening, but at such a low rate that it was useless for any practical purpose. You would not be able to harness this for energy if in fact fusion is happening. Fleishman and Pond's research, however, suggested a much higher rate of fusion, much much greater than what

Jones's research had shown. So Jones gets this article submission as part of the peer review process, and he reads it, and he reaches out to the Department of Energy and says, Hey, these guys over here are doing research that's kind of like the research I'm doing, and we're both investigating the same thing, but we're looking at it through different evidence. How about we collaborate on this. So that offer goes to Pons and Fleishman and they decided to turn down

the offer. Some scientists point at this as one of the big mistakes that they made in the whole affair. Ponds and Fleishman had deep expertise in chemistry, but they did not have deep expertise in nuclear physics, whereas Jones was a nuclear physicist, but he did not have a background in chemistry, so together they could have combined their areas of expertise to search for evidence of this process

of cold fusion. But it isn't meant to be, so Ponds decides he's gonna put together a neutron detection experiment of his own. So he's already detected an anomaly in temperature, he's like, he says, well, maybe I'll check for these neutrons as well, and if I detect those, then that's more evidence to support my claim. So his first go

was a bust. He didn't detect any signs of neutrons being released through this method, and based on his earlier work, he should have been seeing a lot of neutrons getting produced because there was such a a huge anomaly relatively speaking, in that temperature. So he redesigns his experiment, and this time he did detect neutrons, but nowhere close to the number he should have been seeing based upon his earlier work.

One reference I saw said it was one hundred million times fewer neutrons in number, which isn't great news if you're trying to support a very out their claim. So on the bright side, he did detect more neutrons than Jones had in his work. So Jones, you know, he had said, yeah, there might be some fusion happening, but it's at a very very low rate that's not really

of any practical purpose. And Ponds found more neutrons than Jones had when he ran the experiment, but still wasn't at the level that what they would have or what they had expected based upon their their earlier work. So this presents a huge problem. The first Fleischmann Pond's experiment seemed to suggest cold fusion on a pretty large scale all things considered, this neutron test was not consistent with that conclusion, and Jones's work had produced different results as well.

So the lack of consistency was troubling, as it could mean that the results were the product of error rather than a replicable process. So here's where the scientific process butts head heads with what it means to be a

human being. So in the scientific community, the general rule of thumb is that whomever publishes their work first on a new discovery gets the credit for it, and that in is up being important because often you'll have multiple people working on the same problem at the same time, and at some point you have to decide who gets the credit and potentially a future Nobel prize or patents.

The scientifically responsible thing to do at this point would be to design more experiments and make sure the design is rigorous and conduct more tests to see what happens. That would help researchers make sure that there was a real effect there to observe before moving forward. But with Jones, Ponds, and Flishman all working on this problem, it created a real sense of urgency. It was a race to get credit. And then Jones reaches out to Ponds and Flishman and said, hey, guys,

I'm playing on publishing my research. I'm gonna submit my work to a scientific journal in eighteen days. I was thinking you guys could write up your research and submit it to the same journal, and that way everyone gets credit.

I'm paraphrasing, by the way. So Fleishman and Ponds were nowhere near ready to publish any work, but they did agree to Jones's proposal, and then they went and did something a little sneaky, and I'll explain what they did in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So Fleishman and Ponds had at least a year's worth of work they really needed to do before they were going to be ready to publish. But they felt forced into rushing into publication in order

to get that credit for their work. And this was not just a matter of ego. According to their initial results, their approach might potentially allow for a new form of generating electricity. Right if they were right and Jones was wrong, and you were actually seeing fusion on a scale that was practical, you could put that to work that would transform everything, would be an enormous benefit to all of humanity, and it would make you a whole lot of money.

So you want patents, not just at it. So they decided to write up an article on based on their research, even though they felt like they needed another year to really work on it, and they submitted their article five days after Jones had proposed a joint submission, so nearly two weeks before Jones's own submission was going in, So they kind of broke the agreement. They jumped ahead of Jones,

which is dirty pool old man. Moreover, they had not conducted their tests with enough rigor to really meet scientific standards. For example, They did not run a control test in which they would use regular old water instead of heavy

water to see if they got different results. If you were running a really rigorous scientific experiment, you want to have a control group, right, So you would set up one electroalizer with your platinum and palladium electrodes, and you would have it in heavy water, and you would set up an identical one using regular water that doesn't have deuterium in it, or at least not to any measurable degree, and you would run the same experiment and see if

you saw the same sort of anomalies. If you saw the same anomalies, that would tell you, okay, it's got to be something else, because protium is not going to fuse the way deuterium will, so something else must be happening. But they didn't do that. They also didn't switch out their electrodes for different materials to see if that they

would get the same anomaly. And again, if your hypothesis is based on when you put these materials with heavy water and under these conditions you can get fusion, you have to be able to say, all right, well we also tried it with these other materials and with regular water. And it turns out that nothing happened, So that supports our argument that these other conditions have to be in place.

But if you found the same anomally, it would again tell you, all right, something else is wrong with this experiment. Either we're doing something wrong, or one of the pieces of equipment we're using isn't is not performing properly. But we know that it's not the effect we thought it was going to be, or they could have tried different

ways to measure the effects that they observed. So, in other words, if you think you're seeing an effect because of those specific factors in your experiment, you it is. You know, something that you should do is change out those factors and make sure the effect disappears, because that will support your claim. But if you still see that effect, that means your hypothesis is wrong because you switched up the stuff that you thought was necessary and it turns

out it's not necessary at all. But they did not do that. They did submit their article to the Journal of electro Analytical Chemistry, and they that article ended up or rather that journal ended up putting the article through a very rushed peer review process because it was a

big deal. It's really you know, there was a lot of urgency put behind this report, and as a result, the people reviewing the paper didn't have the time they would need to really go through it the way they would typically, and so the article gets published after going

rushing through this pure review process. And later on they discovered there were a lot of errors in that article, but the reviewers had lacked the time to thoroughly analyze the paper, so those are those errors went undiscovered until the article was published. Meanwhile, before the journal had even printed the article, Pons and Fleishman participated in a press conference at the University of Utah to announce their results,

which again is highly irregular. The scientific community had not had a chance to read and analyze the research, and this press release began to pump up interest and enthusiasm in the public before anyone could even attest to the validity of the claims, which is always dangerous, right, like to go out to the public and say, we definitely have a thing that's going to transform our world, and no one in the scientific community has yet had the

chance to test that claim. Then the public is gonna sit there and think, oh, well, this person is a scientist. Their word is to be trusted, and I can't wait to see this magical science fiction world we're about to enter. The article was published without really proper review, and the scientific community then began to pick the article apart upon publication, and about a month later, Ponds and Fleishman would publish two pages of corrections to that article to address some

of those criticisms. In addition, even before the article had been published, scientists began to see if they could try and replicate the results because there were scientists who had a copy of the pre published article, you know, they got that early peer review copy that uh was you know, a rush through, but they actually had versions of this before it was published. So they started to see if

they can maybe replicate the same experiment. But they ran to some issues because Fleishman and Ponds did not include all the details about how they actually performed the experiment, probably because the Universe of Utah officials told them to hold back on some details as a way to apply for patents in the future and not have someone else just jump ahead of them the results of the experiments

that scientists were conducting. You know, they were trying to produce their own version of Ponds and Fleischmann's work based on what little information they had, were incredibly inconsistent. Some teams reported that they saw no signs of fusion at all. Some teams said no, we're seeing some evidence for fusion. But there was no real agreement or even alignment of facts among those teams, and some teams that claim that they had found something interesting could not replicate their results

with future runs of experiments. Ultimately, that led to a general consensus that cold fusion is not a real thing, at least not in this form uh and since then there's been a real stigma against the idea of cold fusion or spected. Scientific journals are not likely to publish articles claiming to have proof of cold fusion, largely because of the fallout that happened from the Ponds and Fleishman incident.

But while that might seem dogmatic, and probably is to some extent, it's also true that for cold fusion to work, for it to be possible, our understanding of nuclear fusion would have to be off somehow. We would have to have a pretty sizable gap in our knowledge about nuclear fusion, and that is entirely possible. That can be true. But if it turns out that cold fusion is possible, our

scholarship on nuclear fusion would need to be adjusted. It's based on a lot of observations and experimentation that support our ideas and have proven to hold true after numerous experiments. So it would be very extraordinary to have to fit in new information into this into this model. Not that it wouldn't be possible, but that it means it requires

an extraordinary amount of proof. Because if you have a pretty solid idea of how something works in the universe, and your observations and experiments all seem to support that idea, someone coming in with a new idea better have really convincing evidence to tell you, oh, you need your idea is good, but you need to also include this other part because if you haven't observed it, then it's hard to say that that idea has any validity right that

new piece of information. So it seems improbable but not impossible that cold fusion would work. But there are still people working in the field of low energy nuclear reactions today. There are some really super smart scientists working on this, despite the fact that the larger scientific community remains skeptical

at best that there's anything there. There many of the experiments seem to indicate that various processes are producing more heat than you would be able to explain through conventional means, But sometimes that amount is small enough to fit within the margin of error, or it could be due to either faulty measuring tools, faulty measuring processes, or some other

missed step in the procedure. In other words, there hasn't been such a clear demonstration of the working principles of low energy nuclear reaction to make the scientific community at large re examine their perspective on the subject matter. And it may very well be that there is some other process going on. Maybe it's not a nuclear reaction. Maybe there's something else happening with these experiments that we don't yet understand, and if we're lucky, those processes will be

something we could harness in a practical way. And even if we're unlucky, learning more about those processes would give us a deeper understanding about how the universe works, assuming that there are actual processes happening to understand, and it's not just the manifestation of errors or you know, wishful thinking. Complicating matters is that practical application is a huge carrot dangled in front of us because there is a clear

demand for a source of clean, attainable energy. Fossil fuels cause pollution, They can have a direct effect on our health. They can have long lasting environmental impacts. They can cause

instability in various regions. Renewable energy like wind, solar, and hydro power are all more environmentally friendly, at least on the production side, but they depend heavily on geography and the presence of things that are beyond our control, like having sufficient wind or sunlight in order to generate that electricity.

In the case of solar power, then you have to have some other energy storage mechanism because otherwise you are not going to be generating electricity whenever the sun is down. So the machines we build to harness these energies also can sometimes be expensive from an economic standpoint. Uh, it's hard to justify building them sometimes. So you could say, well, yeah, this energy is much cleaner the solar power or wind power.

It's much cleaner than cold power. But if at the end of the day you figure out how much it's going to cost to build a solar farm and it ends up being way more expensive than a cold power plant, that's a tough sell because people will say, well, we need energy, but we don't want to spend ridiculous amounts

of money for it. We want some balance there. Uh, then you end up going with coal or some other fossil fuel, And it doesn't matter how strong the argument is that that's not the cleanest approach sometimes because sometimes money matters more. And that's just the world we live in. Um not particularly please with it, but that's how the

world works. So there's a big demand for something new, right, There's a big demand for something that can take the place of all that that could provide for our energy needs while cutting back drastically on pollution, something that would reduce our country's dependence on foreign oil, which in turn would boost a country's national security. And if you're the one to figure out how to harness low energy nuclear reactions, assuming there is such a thing, you would be wealthy

beyond your wildest dreams. Plus you'd help save the planet, or at least you would help provide for the needs of millions of people while cutting back on pollution in the same process. So even if there's just the smallest possibility that it might work, you would expect people to try and go after that goal, because it's kind of like buying a ticket for the lottery. You know, deep down the odds of winning the lottery are next to nothing, but they're still the slimmest of chances, and if that

chance pays off, that's all gravy. Now. I don't want to accuse everyone working in the low energy nuclear reaction field of being motivated by money or by being foolhardy. I don't think that's necessarily the case. I'm sure many of them are very sincere in their pursuit of science, and they may well be on to something. I just point out that money is a factor, and it's a really powerful one and it's hard to ignore. So, like I said an episode one thousand, it's important to apply

critical thinking. We don't have to deny something out of hand, but we can demand extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims. As it stands, I don't think we've seen enough evidence for low energy nuclear reactions, but who knows, maybe the future that will change. The important thing is that if you are a critical thinker and the evidence comes up

that supports that claim, you you accept it. You say, well, this goes against what I thought, but the evidence is there, and so now I have to accept that this is in fact a reflection of reality. Just so far I haven't seen that for cold Fusion. Well, that concludes this sepisode. In our next episode, we're going to take a look

at the dark side of nuclear power. We're going to look at three famous nuclear power disasters, three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the Fukushima reactor disasters and to talk about what happened and how bad were they really, And that's

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