• Question: Do you think that cold fusion is possible?

    Asked by thefreakyfox to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 16 Nov 2011.
    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Hi thefreakyfox

      I’d be incredibly surprised if it was, and let me give you an example of why.

      The problem you have to overcome with fusion, is getting 2 atoms close enough together to fuse, and they really don’t like being together. To achieve this you need to put in some effort. The sun manages to do this at reasonably cold temperature of about 15 million degrees, but what it has is an incredibly high pressure, as the rest of the sun is pressing down on the core. On earth we cannot get such high pressures which means that we have to get even higher temperatures to make fusion possible. JET ( http://www.jet.efda.org/ ) in the UK currently needs to get to temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees to make fusion work at the lower pressures they can achieve.

      So for cold fusion to work the pressure would have to be unbelievable to get the atoms to fuse together.

      Hope this answers the question

      Mark

    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Good answer Mark.
      There were some people in the 80s and 90s who claimed they had achieved cold fusion, but the results couldn’t be repeated by other scientists and flaws were found. Since then I don’t think many scientists have taken cold fusion seriously.

    • Photo: Jony Hudson

      Jony Hudson answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      It’s hard to say. I agree with Mark that it’s pretty unlikely. But then again, there are all sorts of clever things going on in nature, and maybe, just maybe one of them would allow cold fusion. So, I’d say “I don’t know” and keep my options open 🙂

Comments