Is Cold Fusion Even Possible?

Has the world’s first cold fusion plant finally been built? Andrea Rossi, an Italian physicist claims that he has built the world’s first working cold fusion plant. He demonstrated his Energy Catalyzer or E-Cat machine at the University of Bologna in Italy on October 28. The machine, which fuses nickel and hydrogen to give off heat in the process, actually produced an average of 470 kilowatts for more than five hours.

The discovery should have been heralded as the breakthrough of the century but Rossi’s device has largely been met with skepticism and even ridicule. Cold fusion is the process by which room-temperature atoms can fuse together to give off massive amounts of heat to generate electricity. Rossi’s E-Cat machine uses a small amount of input energy to trigger the fusion process and generate heat.

It’s that process that has so many physicists railing against the idea. Atoms don’t just fuse together. Between two atoms there’s an electric repulsion called the Coulomb barrier. Huge amounts of energy is needed for atoms to overcome the Coulomb barrier. Physicists say that the only way for atoms to fuse would require temperatures found in the sun.

It’s not hard to see why the process is an attractive energy solution. Cold fusion doesn’t give off the dangerous radiation of nuclear fission and it doesn’t require impractical high temperatures to work. First proposed in the 1920s by Austrian scientists Friedrich Paneth and Kurt Peters who hypothesized a form of nuclear reaction that doesn’t produce radiation, it gained mainstream attention in 1989 when electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced they had successfully generated excess energy from 20 Watts per cubic centimeter of palladium.

Since then attempts to replicate the Fleischmann-Pons experiment had failed. The American Physical Society had declared the field dead and the U.S. Patent office rejects all patents having to do with it. Researchers who pursue “low energy nuclear reactions” or LENR approaches say that their work has been marginalized by the scientific community at large and suffers from a chronic lack of funding.

Despite the opposition to the idea, research still continues in the field. What keeps the scientists going despite the odds stacked against them is enormity of the prize at stake. Cold fusion could transform the world. With the world facing an energy crises and the looming threat of global warming, finding a clean, safe and free energy source is more important than ever.

Rossi has been silent about the inner working of his E-Cat machine but it’s attracted enough notice. He claims he’s already sold 13 E-Cat units since his demo in October and he was in the U.S last week talking with a state senator and several scientists about the possibility of building a cold fusion reactor in Massachusetts.

“Knowing the reputation of cold fusion, I went in with a very healthy level of skepticism,” Robert Tamarin, dean of sciences at University of Massachusetts, Lowell told MSNBC. He added, “If it’s successful, no wants to have to say later that we walked away from it.”

Plenty of questions still remain, but if Rossi’s device can work consistently and reproduce the same amount of energy, we could be seeing the birth of free energy for everybody.

International Business Times