Cold fusion – one of the most controversial ideas in science – is BACK!

Transcript

That red is a blast from the past. I've forgotten all about confusion. Wow. >> It's the most surprising 80s trend comeback since the mullet. I think >> for those not familiar, there was a brief moment back in 1989 when we thought the world's energy problems might be solved thanks to scientists who claimed to have demonstrated nuclear fusion at room temperature.

But no one could replicate the results and the phrase cold fusion has become somewhat taboo. However, there's a new experiment in the journal Nature this week which looks to have somewhat revived the claim. >> The story this week is that some scientists have they claim finally recreated some of the crucial elements of that experiment and shown that at least some of the experiment had merit with with some caveats that we'll get into, but they show that you can increase nuclear fusion rates by changing the electrochemistry at room temperature, but just nowhere near the rates that Pawns and Fleshman were suggesting. And also, you need a really powerful particle accelerator in the mix. Just throw that in there >> just on the side.

Yeah. >> So I spoke with Anthony Cuchinac at Imperial College London and he did think the work was really interesting but not as a potential future energy source. Instead he thought the way this electrochemistry works could potentially help us build things like room temperature superconductors which really would solve a lot of our energy problems. >> That's a bit of a twist. I wasn't expecting that.

It would be a real vindication for the original research, just not in the way that researchers