Pen Truth Contributor
The promise of fusion has been long coming. Billions of dollars have been spent worldwide in the hot pursuit of the process that burns inside our Sun and the rest of the stars in our galaxy. The projects and the science behind this quest have been as large as the hopes of mankind. Governments and Universities have designed gigantic, expensive, energy hungry devices to bring the dream of fusion into existence using brute force.
But what if less really is more? What if science is thinking too big? March 23, 1989 Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they discovered a way to produce fusion thru a chemical process. Their experiment used a liquid, deuterium oxide (Heavy Water), an anode and a cathode of Palladium with a current running thru them. They called their discovery “Cold Fusion.” Then the circus began. Debunkers and detractors all came out of the wood work claiming that “Cold Fusion” was impossible.
Cold Fusion has been considered so impossible that exploding labs were blamed on unlikely forces. Impossibly small amounts of hydrogen gas creating improbably large and lethal explosions:
1985 the Fleischmann and Pons lab experiences an explosion.
1989 an explosion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is reported by an anonymous source.
In January 2, 1992 a lab explosion kills an SRI International researcher.
January 24, 2005, The Cold Fusion laboratory at Hokkaido University, Japan experiences an explosion, explanation unknown.
Now, March 23, 2009 Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, in a press release, say that Cold Fusion may be real. Twenty years later, will Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons get their just recognition? Will they get their long deserved Nobel?
Interest in Cold Fusion has been steadily increasing over the last few years. There have been claims of other types of fusion processes being reported by researchers within collapsing bubbles. This type of fusion is being called sonofusion creating sonoluminescence. These collapsing bubbles were collapsing at the speed of sound and creating microbursts of heat in the range of 10 MegaKelvin, the same temperature as the center of the Sun. The DoE even began looking into Cold Fusion a few years ago as a source of a much needed gas for our Nuclear Stock pile.
Technologies build upon earlier technologies and though we have nifty electronic devices, our technology has been stagnate. 99.999 percent of everything we have today is based on discoveries made 50 or more years ago. Even the transistor which is the foundation of every microchip, in your MP3 device and cell phone was invented 60 years ago, it only got smaller.
The hope is once fusion is achieved; our technology base will get a new boost. The promise of fusion is literally out of this world. Curbing Global Warming and Human interplanetary exploration are only a few of the realities promised by fusion power.