Is Cold Fusion impossible?

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25:57And we're back. And we are talking about ways that we do hot fusion because we don't have the benefit of being as hot as the sun here on Earth. And actually, that's probably great because I really like being alive. And so, Daniel, how do we try doing fusion here on the Earth? So one strategy for the hot form of fusion is to try to replicate the sun as much as possible, right? So unfortunately, we don't have the sun's massive gravity, which self-contains the fusion reaction over there in the center of the solar system. So instead, we try to use magnets. Essentially, the strategy is make a little magnetic bottle, try to contain the reaction.

26:32because the reaction would be so hot that like any other device you put it in would melt it. So you need some way to hold it together kind of without touching it. And so a magnetic bottle is very cool. And the magnetic bottle works because the plasma you need for fusion is charged, right? You take a gas, you heat it up, it becomes charged particles. And now you have another way to control those particles because you can push and pull on them with electromagnetic fields. So if you build magnetic fields in such a way that charged particles are always bent, sort of the way they are at a super collider, then they just zoom around in a circle.

27:07And so the magnetic fields of a tokamak create these helical paths that keep the plasma from hitting the walls. Instead, they spiral around. And so you get this donut shaped chamber where the plasma zooms around really high temperature, but it's also contained. And so it maintains its density. I kind of love the idea that like I still I still think about magnets as like a thing that kids play with you know like a toy but it does also end up being the case that like if you can create the most amazing magnets on earth you can probably create the cleanest power source that would like save the planet and I think that's kind of awesome yeah if you could build super powerful magnets not only could you make fusion much easier but particle physics would be much easier we are like limited by the strength of our magnets.

27:54If our magnets were a thousand times stronger, then we wouldn't need huge tunnels, right? And so you would learn so much about the universe if you invented amazing magnets. So yeah, somebody get on that. Remember the most powerful magnets on earth are the explosive kind, the ones where they like blow them up. Yeah, that won't work for regular fusion power. That's not going to help my avocado toast. But the theme here is somehow you got to get your protons to fuse. And the way you do is by getting them close together, which is hard to do. So the strategy for magnetic fusion is squeeze them, get them hot and get them dense.

28:30And that's hard to do here on earth. And so we do by squeezing our plasma with magnetic fields. And the goal here is to get the plasma to last a long time. If you can get it stable and you can get it zooming around, then those protons will bounce into each other because they have lots of opportunities. And then eventually So they will fuse and that will produce energy and you'll reach ignition and then it'll be hot and other protons will fuse and Kelly will get her toast. OK, so you told me that fusion doesn't even happen that often in the sun, that you could have a proton live for like a billion years without fusing.

29:02And so now I'm feeling way more negative about our prospects for fusion here on Earth because that seems crazy. And so our plasma needs to be like hotter and more dense than the sun to have a chance for this to work. Those are long odds. No, it doesn't have to be hotter or denser than the sun, because remember, we're going for an easier kind of fusion. Deterior and tritium fusion can be colder. That's right, that's right. Yeah, exactly. But the challenge here really is keeping the plasma going, because plasma is a bunch of really hot particles, and they're going really, really fast, and it's unstable.

29:34Yes, you have magnetic fields, but these things are a gas with magnetic charges, and gases already have turbulence in them. Now you add electric and magnetic fields internal to them, and the magnetic fields are trying to control the particles. A little instability very rapidly turns into a big instability. And so getting a tokamak to build a plasma and keep it going has been the big challenge. The record I've seen is 22 minutes is the longest I've ever had a stable plasma, which is amazing because I actually did plasma research one of my first experiences back when I was in college. And back then, it was like less than a minute.

30:11So to see that progress is encouraging. Yeah, that's awesome. And this is basically the leading form of fusion research. There's a huge project called ITER, which is being built in France, which plans for its first plasma in the mid-2030s, eventually a power plant in the mid-2050s. It's costing like billions and billions. So the plan is make it work, demonstrate it actually can produce energy, and then somehow figure out how to shrink the costs. But there's also a lot of exciting private companies jumping into this area. There's a company called Commonwealth Fusion, and folks are trying exciting ways to sort of bring the scale down, you know, lasers plus plasma, all sorts of crazy ideas, which are a lot of fun.

30:51So there's a possibility that like a fusion startup might crack this problem before the sort of big government project. I'm rooting for them. Go Commonwealth Fusion. The other approach for getting protons together is not to go for time, but to go for increased density. So this is the laser approach, and it's called inertial confinement. Rather than getting the conditions you need for plasma and having them last long enough that the protons fuse, just go for like really high density very, very briefly. And the idea here is you have like a little pellet of fuel, and you zap it on all sides with a laser, which explodes the outside of it and implodes the inside, right?

31:30So it's like a little compression wave that shoots down towards the core of this little pellet. And then it's dense enough. Remember, fusion really depends on the density and the temperature. So now fusion happens really fast in the core after like 30 nanoseconds of compression. It goes from like the density of water to like 100 times the density of lead. And the fusion happens faster than this pellet can blow itself apart. It's really incredible. Wow. And then that would just happen over and over and over again and you would collect? It happens once. Right. You zap this pellet, you get a little burst of fusion and then it's done.

32:05So in that sense, they've achieved the ignition that like the pellet has used itself up, but then you've got to start all over again with a new pellet. Right. And so this is the real challenge is that like you need like a production chain of all of these pellets. You have to account for the energy you spent building these pellets in your accounting of like, are we getting output? And you've got to start over and over again. So it's like a series of these little mini reactions. Yeah. So like if you were going to have a power plant, you'd have to like over and over again be like pew, pew, pew, pew, pew.

32:32And collecting that sounds like it would be complicated. That's actually what the lasers sound like. Have you been there? It's incredible, Kelly. No, I'm just really smart. So the current leading edge here is the National Ignition Facility has 192 lasers. And it's been doing really, really well. And this year in 2026, they reached a gain of 4.13, which means the energy that came out relative to the energy that they put in. But there's a couple of big asterisks there. Asterisk number one is that's not energy they capture. That's just like theoretically energy produced. Some of which would be hard to capture and some of which easier to capture.

33:10So they're definitely not getting all of it. There's going to be some efficiency factor in front of the energy that comes out. And they don't really account for all the energy they put in. They account for all the energy that landed on the target and was absorbed, right? Not all the energy they spent producing that energy, some of which landed on the target. So it's like you have a tiny pixie cup and you emptied a swimming pool on top of it, and then you only counted the water that landed in the cup. It's like, all right, yeah, but the energy required to run the lasers is like more than a hundred times the energy that's delivered on the target.

33:46So there's some nice accounting here and I'm all for salesmanship in science, but also let's be clear, they're not producing energy. All right. We're not ready to make our toast using this method yet. Exactly. And so both of these are trying to do the same thing, which is squeeze protons together. How do you get protons close enough that they will fuse? So either magnets or initial confinement with lasers, both of those are trying to do the same thing. And both of those require a lot of heat, right? And so naturally people have wondered for a long time, is it possible to do fusion without that heat?

34:21Can we have some other way to squeeze protons together at room temperature? And that's the promise. That's the dream of cold fusion. And cold fusion is not just a silly movie starring Keanu Reeves or a scam from the 80s. It's a real area of research and there are some possibilities here. Oh, man. I imagine if you are studying cold fusion, you probably get a lot of people who are skeptical. Okay. All right. So let's dig into the science here. Okay. So it's true. Cold fusion gets a lot of flack and I've heard it described as confusion instead of cold fusion. Confusion. Yeah, exactly. All right. So I'm guessing we're not talking about deuterium and tritium anymore.

35:05No, we're not. We're just talking about ways to get protons closer together at room temperature. So one idea is to use muons. So the idea is that if you take a hydrogen atom and you take off the electron and you replace it with a muon, then the orbit of the muon is going to be smaller than the electron's orbit. And that means essentially the atom is closer. And so you can get these things closer together. So protons with muons around them are electrically neutral, so they get close to each other, and the muons are close to the protons, and so that can effectively get the protons closer together.

35:40And you'd still get the same amount of power out? You'd still get the same amount of power out. And the reason that muons get closer to the protons than the electrons is that muons are a much higher mass. They're like 200 times the mass of the electron, and the radius of the lowest energy level depends on the mass. Don't think about these things in terms of orbits, because orbits are misleading. You know, this is a quantum object in the lowest stationary state, but still there's a distribution of expected radii there, and it depends on the mass of the particle. So muons get much closer to the protons because they are heavier.

36:14And this is actually something that's pretty well established. Like, you can make muonic hydrogen. You can squeeze these things together. In the 70s and 80s, they did these experiments, and you get fusion, and you get energy out. So why not do that while it's hot? wouldn't that make everything work better? Well, the problem is if you make this hot, then the muons are no longer bound to the protons, right? You get plasma and then you're back to the same situation. So that actually only works at lower temperature when the muons are low energy and they're bound to the protons, right? Okay. So you might be wondering, why aren't we all eating muon toast right now, right?

36:55Why am I not listening to this podcast powered by muonic fusion? Daniel says they've made this work. And the answer is the same as sort of laser fusion. It works, but it doesn't produce energy because it costs a lot of energy to make muons. Muons are not something you can find around the way you can find protons. Protons are just hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most abundant thing in the universe. It's literally all around us. It's not hard to find hydrogen. And so making a hydrogen source is not hard. Although, as we said earlier, for like magnetic fusion, you actually need tritium, which is harder to find.

37:28Anyway, muons are not everywhere. You got to make them. And you've got to build these muonic hydrogens essentially one at a time and put them together. And so nobody's cracked that puzzle. How do we make enough muonic hydrogen cheap enough so we can actually recoup some of this energy and make money? And there are companies, there's a company called Acceleron Fusion that's working on making high-efficiency muon sources and dense fusion cells. And they've claimed like hundreds of hours of continuous fusion in their prototypes, but they still haven't cracked the puzzle of making it produce more energy than it costs to build the fuel.

38:04Wow. Because if you're spending a lot of money and time and energy making the fuel, then, you know, you're not actually producing energy. You're losing it. Okay. So definitely not conspiracy theory, but not making toast efficiently. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And this is like not a huge research effort, but there are definitely people working on this. It's the kind of thing where like one big breakthrough could really change the game for sure. So, you know, ColdFusion is a legitimate area of research, especially in the muonic direction. OK, but this isn't the end of the outline. So I'm guessing that means there's other ways to do ColdFusion.

38:39Oh, yes, there are. So let's take a break. And when we come back, let's talk a little bit more about the history of ColdFusion and how it got its bad name.

39:19We'll see you next time.

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42:56Okay, and we're back. And as we mentioned at the top of the show, Kelly thought cold fusion was like conspiracy level bad science, which now she feels real. Well, and she being me. Now I feel really bad about it because it turns out there are actually people studying cold fusion. And now I feel like a jerk. So, Daniel, how did cold fusion end up getting such a bad name? Well, there's a famous 1989 experiment that claimed to have achieved energy production, and they didn't use muons. They used another approach, which is, again, a legitimate concept, and this is using palladium. So palladium is just an element and it forms a crystal and has this really weird property that it will absorb hydrogen very happily, like a lot of hydrogen.

43:42If you have like a cubic centimeter palladium, it can absorb 900 times that volume of hydrogen into that crystal. It like loves packing in the hydrogen, which is weird. And chemistry nerds would be like, yay, cool. This is fascinating. But from a physics point of view, this is important because this brings protons together, right? It holds them together. The whole goal of fusion is bring protons together in some way. Either make them hot so they overcome the columbic barrier, or compress them with inertial confinement fusion, or make them neutral and bring them close with muons. Palladium says, hey, I can bring protons together, no problem.

44:20So for more than 100 years, people have thought this might be a way to achieve fusion at room temperatures. Just jam a bunch of protons into your palladium crystal and see what happens. And there's actually an experiment in the 1920s. Paneth and Peters claimed to have achieved fusion, cold fusion, using palladium. Later, they had to retract these results because they couldn't be repeated. But there's like a history of overblown cold fusion claims that go back more than a century. But who are Peneth and Peters? Were they like serious physicists or were they just like, do you got to tell me more than that?

44:56Were they just dinguses who didn't like collect their data well or were they trying to like trick everybody? These were real Austrian scientists, and I think they were doing careful work. Later, they retracted their own report because they realized they didn't understand the background of what they were measuring from the air. They were turning hydrogen to helium, right? And they weren't measuring the heat output. They were just measuring the helium. And they mismeasured essentially how much helium there was in the air. And so it turns out the air was just naturally occurring helium they were measuring.

45:26So like pretty big oops, but not scam artists as far as I know. Okay, all right. Good on them for retracting their own paper. We all make mistakes sometimes. Sorry, Paneth and Peters. And then a few years later, a Swedish scientist, John Tranberg, was trying to use palladium also, and he applied for a patent based on his efforts. But because of Paneth and Peters' retraction, nobody was going to believe in cold fusion. And so his patent application was denied. Oh. Yeah. Well, but had he actually made his measurements correctly? Or should his patent application have been denied because there was no good science to back it up?

46:02Well, it turns out he was doing work which is very similar to the work that was done in 1989 where cold fusion became famous. So this is the work of Fleischmann and Pons. And they used a palladium electrode and deuterium. And the idea is to do electrolysis of heavy water. So you have the palladium lattice and deuterium. I mean, deuterium is just that isotope of hydrogen, right? And so you force the hydrogen into the palladium lattice, and then you put it under a current. So that's why it's an electrode. And it makes these very high densities. And maybe that deuterium can overcome that columbic barrier.

46:38That's the idea. So this is what Pons and Fletchman did in 1989. They had this heavy water, which means water with deuterium in it. So the deuterium is there to be absorbed into the lattice. And then they run the current. And what they claimed was to see huge spikes in the heat produced. So unlike Paneth and Peters, they weren't measuring the helium. They were looking for the heat. And they calculated how much heat could potentially be produced by any chemical reaction they're aware of. And this was much more heat than anything they could expect from chemistry. So they were like, wow, look at this.

47:11We have an experiment which is fusing and producing heat. And yet it's running at room temperature. Okay, well, so if it couldn't be explained by chemistry, I guess they're saying that then it's explained by physics? Yeah. But isn't physics and chemistry like, you know, it's kind of the same thing, isn't it? Yeah, I see what you mean. By chemistry, I mean like any non-fusion process, right? Okay, okay. Because you expect you have like heavy water here, you have electricity, you got some stuff that's going to happen and you can get heat produced. But we're talking about heat that could not be produced by anything other than fusion.

47:45Okay. So these guys went out with a story and University of Utah, where they were working, was very excited and they put out a press release and it got a lot of coverage. And for a moment, everybody thought, oh, wow, maybe cold fusion has been achieved. And so other labs in the United States very quickly went to replicate these results because, as we talked about in our episode about how science works, it's not just like peer review where you read the article and say, does this make any sense? But the gold standard for science really is replication. Can other people independently in a different laboratory with slightly different assumptions and different details and different temperatures on the outside and you're in New Jersey instead of in Utah?

48:25If this is real physics, it should happen everywhere. But no replication attempts succeeded. There were a couple where people were like, oh, wait, maybe. No. And so nobody could reproduce these results. But of course, this is still a big deal. Cold fusion is very exciting, and the claims are very strong. So the Department of Energy put together a whole panel to review this in detail, like what is going on? They studied this for a long time, and they found that on one hand, nobody could reproduce these results. like all the experiments that tried to reproduce the setup and the conditions exactly, none of them saw these heat flashes.

49:00And the guys who worked on the theory couldn't get the calculations to support what these guys were claiming. Like even in theory, you shouldn't get enough fusion to produce really any significant heat in this setup. And so the whole thing sort of fell apart. And it was a tragedy because they got a lot of press. And so a lot of the public thought, wow, this is the wave of the future. And then we discovered, oh, it turns out it's not real. So in the earlier case, it sounds like it was a measurement error. They didn't measure something that they should have. But here it sounds like they are measuring something that didn't exist, like heat that nobody else is finding.

49:35But surely they must have expected that people were going to try this and then would also not find the heat. And so what happened? Did they like not account for the lighter that someone was holding underneath the device? Like, what's going on here? It's a good question. The answer comes down to chemistry is really hard. And effectively, they didn't correctly calculate how much heat could be produced by non-fusion chemistry effects. And it turns out there's more heat that can be produced by chemistry in this situation than they expected. And this led to them to underestimate basically the chemistry contribution and to attribute the rest of this to fusion?

50:16Well, if the answer is chemistry is really hard, then they have my sympathy. So I'm, all right, these poor guys. Yeah, exactly. On the other hand, check your work before you make a huge, you release a huge result. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, they never saw like the smoking gun of fusion. They saw heat produced, but they also should have seen like neutrons produced, but they didn't. So it's not like they had a unique setup and it was doing cold fusion and nobody else could replicate it because of some detail of their experiment. It just didn't even coherently make sense. And digging into it later, people discovered the way they calibrated their device and the way they were calculating what they expected from non-fusion sources was just wrong.

51:00And so that's too bad. But there was still a lot of excitement about this. And though Pons and Fleshman didn't have any more support in the United States, there was excitement around the world. And these guys got like$10 million piles of money from the government in France or in Japan to go do their research and follow up, which I think is great. At the time, maybe there was some other way you could do it. Maybe they were on the right track. This definitely is a prospect. But unfortunately, they never achieved any results that were useful at all. Bummer. All right. But there are some people who still had the guts to push forward, even though the field had sort of gotten a bad name at that point.

51:38There are still people working on this stuff. Google recently had a$10 million multi-year project to test some of these things. They're like, let's do this rigorously. Let's really calibrate our calorimeters. Let's really understand the chemistry. And in 2019, they published a paper in Nature saying there was no evidence of cold fusion, but they did improve their experimental techniques and they were able to understand how you would measure it if it was there. And so it showed that you can do careful science here, although there's still a lot of challenges. There's still work happening in Japan and in Italy.

52:12There's private companies working on this kind of stuff, other people exploring. So there are definitely people working on this. And just last year, I saw a call from DARPA for grant proposals about cold fusion. Oh, great. DARPA is famous for being out there and funding crazy things. So there's definitely active interest, and people are working on it. And if you have a good idea, there's money for it. But there's also the dark side of cold fusion, which is the conspiracy theories. There is some segment of folks out there pushing a story that Pons and Fleischman did achieve cold fusion, that it was real.

52:48And it was, for some reasons that never made sense to me, covered up by the government. I think the story is like the hot fusion folks were getting a lot of money, and the cold fusion would threaten that. And so the hot fusion people had a conflict of interest and they were criticizing cold fusion because it challenged the mainstream narrative about hot fusion, et cetera, et cetera. And therefore it was pushed aside. And if you're working on cold fusion, nobody would take you seriously. And the real story is like, no, there was money for cold fusion. There is money for cold fusion. If you have an idea, people are interested.

53:22There's private money. There's government money. There's definitely people looking into it. And Pons and Fleischman's work was analyzed. They tried to replicate it. They tried to understand it. It was given a fair shake. And yet there's still this, you know, conspiracy. There's like whole documentaries out there about like how the results were real and they were ignored by mainstream physics. And it's just this like extension of anti-science conspiracy theory nonsense. But, you know, it's pushed by your usual set of grifters. Okay. Well, that's too bad. It's too bad. And so, you know, mainstream science is skeptical about this.

53:55Like nobody's ever done this in an effective way. But also people are skeptical about magnetic fusion and inertial confinement fusion, right? Like neither of these have shown that they actually will produce energy in any realistic way. And there's money for both directions. There's definitely more money for hot fusion than there is for cold fusion, because I think it's shown more promise. And there's like at least a theory of how it would work. People are still struggling to understand on the cold fusion side, how in principle you even would make this work. Like it's more than just the engineering challenges.

54:24It's like, could you even produce enough energy in theory if you overcame all the engineering challenges? And so there's definitely some obstacles there for Cold Fusion. But I would say it's not impossible, right? It's a dark horse, but it's still possible and there are opportunities there. And people are following up on them and they're getting money for it. Exactly. So hooray. And so if you want to make Keanu Reeves look good and make the premise of that movie sound maybe more realistic, then hey, invest in Cold Fusion or make it work yourself. You could change the world. Daniel, Keanu Reeves is doing a fine job looking good on his own.

54:57He doesn't need anyone's help. Because, you know, the promise of cold fusion is amazing. If we could achieve cold fusion, then it might be possible to have really small, very safe reactors. You know, you wouldn't have to have a bunch of lasers or a bunch of hot gas. You could miniaturize them. You could have like fusion inside your toaster, not just getting electricity from the grid from some massive power plant. You could have like tiny little fusion reactors and everything. Instead of batteries, you could have fusion reactors. That would be awesome. Your phone could have a fusion reactor in it and basically it would burn forever.

55:28That would be incredible. But we're still far from that. Yeah, that's right. This is a serious science show. Yes, that would be amazing. And I am excited that people are working on a lot of this stuff from a lot of different angles because you never know what's going to end up being the angle that works. And so it's good to have a lot of different brains working in a lot of different ways. Yeah, exactly. and we benefit from a diversity of curiosity and a diversity of optimism. And so get out there, people. Solve this problem for us. Kelly needs her toast. I do. I do. And I'd like it to be made in a clean way.

56:01All right. Thanks, everyone, for coming along on this latest journey of curiosity.

56:12Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. right to us. Maintenance fee, overdraft fee, minimum balance fee, maximum balance fee.

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