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Cold fusion is back ?

Interesting indeed, I wonder what the scalability would be, could they really put one in every house. Next question, would that be considered to "disruptive" of a technology to be allowed to market.
 
I'm a bit sceptical of the charge-shielding explanation though, as the electron screening will begin to drop in effectiveness at distances below 10^-10m (typical atomic dimension), while you need to get them within about 10^-15m (approximate range of the strong nuclear force) before they can fuse. As the repulsive Coulomb force increases as 1/separation^2, it's going to get very strong before the nuclear force takes over. Now I've not tried to do the sums (to do this properly would be a rather involved numerical calculation), but it doesn't sound like Dr Miley has either, and my instinct is that electron shielding won't be enough to give an appreciable rate of fusion.

There is a well-established way of doing this, which is to replace the electron with a muon (a more massive version of the electron). The muon will typically "orbit" (a word you should treat with suspicion in quantum mechanics!) about 200 times closer to the nucleus than an electron, which makes the screening much more effective, and if the muon is shared between 2 nuclei (as in a muonic hydrogen molecule) will bind them much closer together. Google "muon catalyzed fusion" for more information.

This process definitely does happen, but you have to create the muon (which takes energy) and it has a lifetime of 0.1 microseconds (which limits the number of fusions it can catalyze), so it's not really a practical power source.
 
Hadron said:
I'm a bit sceptical of the charge-shielding explanation though, as the electron screening will begin to drop in effectiveness at distances below 10^-10m (typical atomic dimension), while you need to get them within about 10^-15m (approximate range of the strong nuclear force) before they can fuse. As the repulsive Coulomb force increases as 1/separation^2, it's going to get very strong before the nuclear force takes over. Now I've not tried to do the sums (to do this properly would be a rather involved numerical calculation), but it doesn't sound like Dr Miley has either, and my instinct is that electron shielding won't be enough to give an appreciable rate of fusion.

There is a well-established way of doing this, which is to replace the electron with a muon (a more massive version of the electron). The muon will typically "orbit" (a word you should treat with suspicion in quantum mechanics!) about 200 times closer to the nucleus than an electron, which makes the screening much more effective, and if the muon is shared between 2 nuclei (as in a muonic hydrogen molecule) will bind them much closer together. Google "muon catalyzed fusion" for more information.

This process definitely does happen, but you have to create the muon (which takes energy) and it has a lifetime of 0.1 microseconds (which limits the number of fusions it can catalyze), so it's not really a practical power source.
Click to expand...

Took the words right out of my mouth....:alberteinstein:
 
Interesting discussions going on. Cold Fusion not the right term, maybe cascading fusion ?

"The theory states that once some energy is added to surfaces loaded with hydrogen/protons, if the surface morphology enables high localized voltage gradients, then heavy electrons leading to ultra low energy neutrons will form-- neutrons that never leave the surface. The neutrons set up isotope cascades which result in beta decay, heat and transmutations with the heavy electrons converting the beta decay gamma into heat."

"However, several labs have blown up studying LENR and windows have melted, indicating when the conditions are "right" prodigious amounts of energy can be produced and released." Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center

Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, the Realism and the Outlook by Dennis Bushnell
 
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