• @[email protected]
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    28 months ago

    If we can successfully get cold fusion working

    the viability of all your opinions are now immediately called into question

    • @[email protected]
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      8 months ago

      Why? It’s an active area of research with several companies and universities trying to solve the problem. There’s also a chance hot fusion succeeds although to my knowledge nobody has actually gotten close to solving that particular problem either. Tokamaks and such are still energy negative when taken as a whole (a couple have claimed energy positive status, but only by excluding the power requirements of certain parts of their operation). I guess maybe I should have just said fusion instead of cold fusion, but either way there are no working energy positive fusion systems currently.

      Edit: To be clear, I’m not claiming that anyone has a working cold fusion device, quite the opposite. Nobody has been able to demonstrate a working cold fusion device to date. Anybody claiming they have is either lying or mistaken. But by the same token nobody has been able to show an energy positive hot fusion device either. There’s a couple that have come close but only by doing things like hand waving away the cost to produce the fuel, or part of the energy cost of operating the containment vessel, to say nothing of the significant long term maintenance costs. I’ve not seen evidence of anybody getting even remotely close to a financially viable fusion reactor of any kind.

      • @[email protected]
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        38 months ago

        Yeah the difference is hot fusion works, see: the sun. Cold fusion would require a fundamental change in how we understand physics works. It’s junk science.

        • @[email protected]
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          18 months ago

          Hmm, it’s true that cold fusion would need some kind of physics breakthrough, although I think it might be going too far to call it junk science. To be entirely fair energy positive hot fusion also requires some kind of physics breakthrough though, although potentially a far less extreme one.

          The Sun works because of its mass which generates the necessary temperature and pressures to trigger the fusion. Replicating those pressures and temperatures here though is incredibly energy intensive. In theory, on paper the energy released by the fusion reaction should exceed those energy requirements, but when you factor in that doing so requires exceedingly rare and expensive to create fuel most if not all of that energy surplus vanishes. Nobody has been able to prove that they can get more energy out of the reaction than the energy cost of creating the fuel and triggering the reaction, so until that happens hot fusion is far from proved either. There’s a few research projects that look promising, but it’s far from guaranteed that they’ll pan out.

      • @[email protected]
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        18 months ago

        Cold fusion doesn’t work. It’s self contradicting once you learn the very basics of fusion. It was billed as a solution to dealing with the difficulties of material science and the heat generated by hot fusion.

        Also, the simplest solution dealing with energy demands is to reduce our demand, but the people in the media demand perpetual growth.