Lattice Confinement Fusion

[svetz]

Remember how the announcement of cold fusion ruined the lives of the scientists that discovered it because no one believed it and it couldn't be definitely duplicated? (Supposedly the researchers didn't even break the news...they didn't want it getting out... it was the college dean who was looking for more funding).

Much quieter was that a few years later the Navy finally proved it did happen... the problem with the original experimenters was that they were based on temperature readings and that just wasn't sensitive enough. A Navy researcher came up with the idea of capturing the fusion radiation release using photographic plates, which was more sensitive. Don't feel bad if you never heard of it, it was such a small amount of power to be totally impractical. Also, Wikipedia doesn't even report this or indicate cold fusion is real, so possibly an old wive's tale. But, there's also this.

How does cold fusion theoretically work? The voltage potential within the palladium electrode structure allowed the protons to get close enough they'd occasionally fuse.

Now, fast forward a few decades.... NASA may have found a way to make it work with usable power: https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/science/lattice-confinement-fusion/

A metal such as erbium is “deuterated” or loaded with deuterium atoms, “deuterons,” packing the fuel a billion times denser than in magnetic confinement (tokamak) fusion reactors. In the new method, a neutron source “heats” or accelerates deuterons sufficiently such that when colliding with a neighboring deuteron it causes D-D fusion reactions. In the current experiments, the neutrons were created through photodissociation of deuterons via exposure to 2.9+MeV gamma (energetic X-ray) beam. Upon irradiation, some of the fuel deuterons dissociate resulting in both the needed energetic neutrons and protons. In addition to measuring fusion reaction neutrons, the Glenn Team also observed the production of even more energetic neutrons which is evidence of boosted fusion reactions or screened Oppenheimer-Phillips (O-P) nuclear stripping reactions with the metal lattice atoms. Either reaction opens a path to process scaling.