Is there a third route to produce nuclear energy?

At a time when there is an intense debate going on in the country on the Indo-US nuclear deal, and the role of nuclear power in meeting our future energy needs, it may be worth taking note of the fact that nuclear fission reactors (and in a longer time frame thermo nuclear fusion) are not the only routes available to tap the immense energy locked in the atomic nucleus.

A third route — cold fusion (CF) — does exist. The cold fusion approach was disclosed in 1989 by two electro-chemists — Fleischmann and Pons in the U.S.
The phenomenon, once known as cold fusion, but now more accurately regarded as low energy nuclear reactions, represents a significant paradigm shift in our understanding of nuclear phenomena. It is unfortunate that CF got embroiled in a worldwide controversy. And that is because according to our current understanding of nuclear physics the kind of low energy nuclear reactions apparently occurring in cold fusion devices cannot and should not happen.

Are we to believe the new experimental findings and change our theories or are we going to cling to our age old concepts and refuse to face facts? This is the dilemma facing nuclear physicists the world over. Immense resistance to accepting a paradigm shift is common to science. History is replete with such instances. During the last two decades, many dedicated groups comprising several hundreds of scientists in about a dozen countries have continued to pursue the subject to unravel the mystery behind what has now come to be re-christened as Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (CMNS).

There is an international professional society dedicated to the study of CMNS ( www.iscmns.org).

Increasingly it has been observed that new ‘transmutation’ elements not present prior to the commencement of the experiments have been detected.

The occurrence of such nuclear reactions at ‘room’ temperatures has been confirmed in diverse experimental conditions and configurations such as electrolysis experiments, glow discharge devices and even simple gas loading configurations.

Most of the scientific papers published to date in this fascinating and emergent area of research are available in the website www.lenr.org.

The Hindu