Questions for Pseudoscience | Cold Fusion

Transcript

this video is voted for by patrons of questions for science unless you're living under a rock you must have heard about the recent breakthrough in cold fusion technology I'm talking about probably one of the greatest achievements in human history this breakthrough will solve all our energy problems and be able to provide power to every person in the world if you're curious about this breakthrough that you haven't heard of I'm talking about this 1989 paper claiming to witness induced nuclear fusion of deuterium sure it's been 30 years and there is still no replicable evidence but I'm sure they're just working out the kinks we should have legitimate cold fusion any day now any day now any day now any [Music] any day now oh and brains before the bunking coldfusion we first have to understand what nuclear fusion is fusion is when two nuclei under the right conditions fuse together causing an immense release of energy if you can create fusion you can use the heat from the reaction to convert water into steam to the internet generator which sends electricity to homes and voila power this all sounds well and good but it's not going to happen at least not for a while because a temperature to permit the conditions for fusion are insanely high hmm no much hotter than this the high heat causes to necessary changes to the atomic nuclei for fusion to occur firstly the high temperature energizes the electrons so much that they're stripped off the orbitals around the nuclei this changes the atoms into a naked nuclei and causes them to freely bounce around in a hot plasma of other nuclei normally when these positively charged nuclei come in within close distance of each other naturally they would repel but this is nuclear fusion so where's that even the temperature has to be so high that the kinetic energy of the nuclei is stronger than the electrostatic forces repelling the two nuclei once these two conditions are met we can achieve nuclear fusion but just how hot do the conditions have to be for this to happen just a little north of 109 degrees Celsius at the moment the only place capable of maintaining this temperature is the Sun's core now this brings us to the hundred million dollar question pun intended if you need 100 million degrees Celsius to achieve nuclear fusion how is cold fusion that is fusion at room temperature possible well here's the thing it's not well it kind of is but technically hmm no but yes all right there is actually two types of cold fusion the first is called muon catalyzed fusion and involves using muons instead of electrons and occurs at room temperature hence it being cold me Ones are similar to electrons in that they're both subatomic particles and are negatively charged but muons are much heavier and therefore orbit closer to the nuclei allowing the nuclei to get within closer proximity to each other without repelling this close proximity allows fusion to occur under the right conditions the only downside is muons have very short life spans of two microseconds and the energy it takes to produce them is more than the energy generated by the fusion reaction so at the moment UN catalyze fusion is kind of useless the other cold fusion is the one that's more widely cited by the pseudoscience crowd and is known as deuterium induced fusion in the late 1980s two scientist by the name of Stanley pons and Martin Fleischmann who worked at the University of Utah believed they had discovered room-temperature fusion by fusing deuterium atoms together to make helium for isotope here's the explanation of their cold fusion experiment in the protocol pons and Fleischmann set up a solution in lithium salts and heavy water which is just a water molecule with deuterium atoms instead of hydrogen next a palladium and platinum rod were immersed in the solution and attached to a battery when a voltage was applied the deuterium atoms separated from the oxygen and heavy water molecule into positively charged deuterium ions these positive deuterium ions navigated to the negatively charged plate 'i'm strip upon reaching the Palladium the ions gain an electron and are either converted into diatomic deuterium or a single deuterium atom the diatomic deuterium floats out of the solution as a gas while the deuterium atoms being so small are able to migrate into the Palladium lattice Y atomic deuterium is migrating into a palladium structure is beyond me and makes no sense but then again so does cold fusion so whatever as a voltage is further increased more deuterium atoms migrate deeper into the palladium lattice eventually so many deuterium atoms enter that it begins to expand and contract this expansion and contraction causes the deuterium atoms to move back and forth in a uniform motion then by some unknown mechanism the deuterium atoms decide to fuse together forming a helium 4 isotope giving off excessive amount of heat which in theory if were to be scaled up could power blah blah blah you get the picture ok I got some questions firstly how do they manage to bring the atoms close to each other without using naked nuclei or muons how were the deuterium atoms able to overcome the electrostatic forces that repel all atoms well that didn't matter because the University of Utah got one of these results and set up a press conference ASAP in order to set a precedent to patent the new technology well in the world of scientific research jumping to a press conference after you've obtained your initial without doing an exhaustive application first is sorta especially when that discovery is held in regard by the community as being highly impossible this led to a whirlwind of negative press from the scientific community who started calling the discovery cold fusion as a backhanded remark it got much worse when other researchers attempted to replicate the experiment including Fleischmann and pons as michael j Schaefer puts it a senior scientist at a major fusion Research Lab who is familiar with the story of cold fusion stated there was an immediate rush to reproduce the pons and Fleischmann experiments a few experimenters reported success many others failure even those who reported success had difficulty reproducing their results furthermore no one was seeing the expected fusion products that last line no one was seeing the expected fusion products was the final nail in the coffin for cold fusion in theory fusion of deuterium nuclei would yield a helium 4 isotope and gamma radiation though helium 4 was measured in extremely small quantities its presence was attributed to the scarce helium found in the atmosphere but more importantly the real necessary fusion product that needed to be present was gamma radiation if it could be measured then the arguments illustrated by the School of Athens painting would be that the helium present wasn't from the atmosphere ie Plato's hand but instead came from the jet fusion according to Aristotle unfortunately no gamma radiation was ever detected indicating fusion never took place pons and Fleischmann continued to attempt to reproduce their results but ultimately failed [Music] in 1992 Toyota's seeing a potential in cold fusion technology hired both scientists to continue their research in their Imber lab in southern France life was good for pons and Fleischmann a state-of-the-art lab in southern France with millions of dollars worth of funding now they could prove the cold fusion heaters wrong surely this would show that room-temperature fusion was possible three years later Fleischman broke off and began his own research in England in 1998 Toyota terminated their contract with pons after spending nearly 40 million dollars on cold fusion research and arriving with no tangible evidence that same year the company stopped all investigative research into cold fusion technology now cold fusion a distant bad memory for the science community occasionally lurks on conspiracy forms and pseudoscience groups on the Internet some believe cold fusion was sabotage by oil corporations or the US government some have claimed there are scientists who've achieved it but aren't getting funding or fair coverage to further their research alas we may never know wait no cold fusion is both on the stupid scale I'm reading cold fusion at a 5 out of 10 because understanding nuclear fusion doesn't come easy to most people for the harmful skill it's at a 1 out of 10 because cold fusion doesn't really harm anyone except maybe investors pocketbooks so 2 out of 10 and click the bell to subscribe you know [Music]