Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works in a love of all things tech
Speaker 1: and just a heads up. If I sound a little
Speaker 1: loopy today, it's because I think of coming down with
Speaker 1: a nasty cold and or sinus infection, and it's got
Speaker 1: me thrown for a bit. But gosh darn it, the
Speaker 1: show she must keep happening, as they say in the business,
Speaker 1: and so we're going to forge ahead in our week
Speaker 1: of nuclear discussions. In my last episode, I talked about
Speaker 1: fusion reactors and how if we could just get them
Speaker 1: to work reliably, if we could find a way to
Speaker 1: make the reactions take place without pouring more energy into
Speaker 1: them than we're getting out of and we can make
Speaker 1: it sustainable, we could produce enough electricity to meet our
Speaker 1: needs for the foreseeable future while also producing very little waste,
Speaker 1: and none of it the high level nuclear waste that
Speaker 1: a traditional fission based nuclear power plant would create. But
Speaker 1: I also mentioned that's devilish lee hard to achieve fusion
Speaker 1: because you first have to overcome some fundamental forces that
Speaker 1: very much do not want to let that happen. And
Speaker 1: by saying want to let that happen, I'm anthropomorphized sizing
Speaker 1: a little bit. They they resist this. So you have
Speaker 1: to force to positively charged nuclei to fuse together. And
Speaker 1: because like charges repel each other, that takes a lot
Speaker 1: of energy and effort. But what if it didn't require
Speaker 1: so much. What if we didn't have to have these enormous,
Speaker 1: expensive facilities that use powerful lasers or magnetic fields to
Speaker 1: have this happen. What if you could find a way
Speaker 1: to fuse hydrogen ice of topes together at room temperature.
Speaker 1: Will that be a phenomenal transformative achievement. It would mean
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have to spend years building and testing facilities
Speaker 1: meant to heat deuterium or tritium into plasma and then
Speaker 1: compress it into a space small enough to force fusion
Speaker 1: to occur. It could potentially reduce the amount of energy
Speaker 1: you would need to initiate a reaction and you would
Speaker 1: end up with the payoff energy and you could just
Speaker 1: harness that to generate electricity. That would be swell. There's
Speaker 1: a common name for this concept. Actually, there are a
Speaker 1: few different common names, But the one that we used
Speaker 1: to use, and you often will hear people use it deristively,
Speaker 1: is called cold fusion. Now these days we tend to
Speaker 1: use other names because cold fusion has a real stigma
Speaker 1: against it. So the new names we might use include
Speaker 1: things like condensed matter, nuclear science, or low energy nuclear reactions.
Speaker 1: No one really agrees exactly how this works. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of different competing hypotheses. No one really agrees
Speaker 1: whether if this works. But some people do argue that
Speaker 1: it does work and it has worked, and a lot
Speaker 1: of other people say, I don't think so. So let's
Speaker 1: dive into the maligned work of two people in particular,
Speaker 1: sort of the pioneers of the cold fusion furer, and
Speaker 1: that would be Martin Fleishman and Stanley Ponds. And Fleishman
Speaker 1: and Ponds or Ponds and Fleishman had conducted an experiment
Speaker 1: involving heavy water and palladium. Now, heavy water refers to
Speaker 1: water that has deuterium isotopes. Uh. Deuterium is an isotope
Speaker 1: of hydrogen, and water is h two O isotopes of
Speaker 1: an element. I'll share the same chemical properties, but they
Speaker 1: have a different atomic mass from each other due to
Speaker 1: the presence of neutrons. So hydrogen and its most plentiful state,
Speaker 1: protium is a prot on and an electron with no neutrons.
Speaker 1: Deuterium is a proton and neutron with one electron. It's
Speaker 1: still hydrogen, but now it has a neutron, so it's heavier.
Speaker 1: That's why we call it heavy water. If you have
Speaker 1: water that is where the molecules are, you have deuterium
Speaker 1: hydrogen atoms as opposed to protium hydrogen atoms, So that's
Speaker 1: the difference there. Now, most hydrogen we encounter is protium.
Speaker 1: That's the vast majority of the stuff that we see
Speaker 1: in our world. But we do have some deuterium in oceans.
Speaker 1: It does occur naturally. Uh So, Ponds and Flishman had
Speaker 1: a high concentration of deuterium in their mixture. So that's
Speaker 1: why it was called heavy water. Because the hydrogen atoms
Speaker 1: in those H two O molecules were more massive than
Speaker 1: you would typically encounter. They were literally heavier. So why
Speaker 1: did they use palladium. Well, that element has the ability
Speaker 1: to absorb hydrogen in great volumes. In fact, it can
Speaker 1: absorb about one hundred times its own volume in hydrogen. Now,
Speaker 1: this is because the surface of palladium can react chemically
Speaker 1: with hydrogen in a way that draws the hydrogen into
Speaker 1: the palladium itself. So the thinking goes that if you
Speaker 1: could absorb deuterium through palladium at a high enough density,
Speaker 1: you might be able to induce fusion to occur because
Speaker 1: you're forcing these hydrogen atoms very close together. You just
Speaker 1: have to get those deuterium atoms close enough, and then
Speaker 1: some as yet unknown process would take you the rest
Speaker 1: of the way. That last bit is a heck of
Speaker 1: a kicker if you cannot explain why it happens. That is,
Speaker 1: that's a huge question mark and a big gap in
Speaker 1: your understanding. But science is also filled with stories in
Speaker 1: which someone was messing around with stuff and something interesting happened,
Speaker 1: and they couldn't explain how the interesting thing happened, and
Speaker 1: so they had to look further into it, and only
Speaker 1: after a lot of X lauration did we then get
Speaker 1: an understanding of what was actually happening. So while a
Speaker 1: lot of discoveries and science come from carefully crafted and
Speaker 1: tested hypotheses that are building upon previous knowledge, sometimes our
Speaker 1: advances and science come from lucky observations that lead to
Speaker 1: more rigorous scientific exploration. So it might start off as
Speaker 1: something where we noticed there's an interesting phenomena occurring, we
Speaker 1: cannot explain why it's happening yet, and then we look
Speaker 1: into it and we gain that understanding. So you've got
Speaker 1: this heavy water, You've got your palladium electrode. How were
Speaker 1: you to absorb the hydrogen? I mean, hydrogen is locked
Speaker 1: in with oxygen when it's water, Right, you've got those
Speaker 1: water molecules H two O. Well, this was through a
Speaker 1: process called electrolysis. And I'm not talking about hair removal here,
Speaker 1: although there is a process called electrolysis for that. Instead,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the chemical decomposition that happens with some
Speaker 1: liquids when you pass an elect current through that liquid.
Speaker 1: So let's say you've got some water inside a container,
Speaker 1: and we'll call the container an electrolyzer. So this container
Speaker 1: is an electrolyzer. It's got water inside of it, and
Speaker 1: inside that electrolyzer you place a pair of electrodes. One
Speaker 1: of those electrodes is a negatively charged electrode, that's the cathode.
Speaker 1: The other one is the positively charged electrode that's the anode,
Speaker 1: opposite charges attract, so the negatively charged cathode will attract
Speaker 1: positively charged ions in the water and the positive anode
Speaker 1: will attract negatively charged ions. And there are several different
Speaker 1: types of electrolyzers, and each type can separate hydrogen atoms
Speaker 1: from oxygen atoms and water in different ways. So, for example,
Speaker 1: there's the fuel cell method in which you have a
Speaker 1: permeable membrane separating the two electrodes, and when you apply
Speaker 1: a potential difference between the two electrodes, it causes water
Speaker 1: to react at the anode to form oxygen, which bubbles off,
Speaker 1: and the oxygen separates from the hydro gen. So you've
Speaker 1: got these positively charged hydrogen ions. Because that you actually
Speaker 1: strip the electrons off the hydrogen and you then use
Speaker 1: those electrons to do work. In a fuel cell, the
Speaker 1: hydrogen ions will move across through the permeable membrane toward
Speaker 1: the cathode because they are attracted to the negatively charged electrode,
Speaker 1: and then the hydrogen would typically bubble up and you
Speaker 1: could capture hydrogen that way and use it for more
Speaker 1: fuel or whatever. If you used a material like palladium
Speaker 1: for your electrode, then you could just absorb the hydrogen
Speaker 1: or deuterium in this case type of hydrogen isotope. The
Speaker 1: important thing is that this process allows you to separate
Speaker 1: hydrogen in the form of deuterium from those water molecules,
Speaker 1: and you should end up with a palladium electrode stuffed
Speaker 1: with hydrogen two and then maybe something magical could happen
Speaker 1: which brings us two Ponds and Fleischman. Fleishman met Ponds
Speaker 1: when Ponds was a student at the University of Southampton,
Speaker 1: where Fleishman was a professor of chemistry. Ponds had graduated
Speaker 1: and become a professor of the University of Utah, but
Speaker 1: while he had left the University of Southampton, he and
Speaker 1: Fleishman remained in touch and they began to collaborate on
Speaker 1: research projects. In the early nineteen eighties, Fleishman wanted to
Speaker 1: explore if there were ways to trigger a nuclear process,
Speaker 1: which would be a process that results in the change
Speaker 1: of nuclei within atoms, and wondered if he could do
Speaker 1: that using a chemical process. Chemical processes are reactions between
Speaker 1: atoms and molecules. So he's saying, I wonder if I
Speaker 1: could take a chemical reaction, which typically would only be
Speaker 1: at the atomic level or larger atoms and molecules and
Speaker 1: force a nuclear reaction, which is at one level down right,
Speaker 1: you're talking about the nucleus of an atom. Then in
Speaker 1: Ponds and Fleishman began to experiment by building what they
Speaker 1: called a fusion cell. This was essentially an electoral lizer
Speaker 1: with an anode made of platinum and a cathode made
Speaker 1: out of palladium, and they use heavy water inside of it,
Speaker 1: and they hypothesized that the palladium would soak up deuterium
Speaker 1: produced through electrolysis, and that the deuterium atoms would be
Speaker 1: forced so close together that they would undergo fusion and
Speaker 1: release energy in the form of heat. So what happened,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you, but first let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. Well, Ponds and Fleishman conducted their
Speaker 1: experiment and they monitored the temperature of the fusion cell
Speaker 1: throughout the process. They actually did this in a kind
Speaker 1: of interesting way with it gets pretty complicated, but they
Speaker 1: did in a way that wasn't as simple as sticking
Speaker 1: a thermometer in the water. And actually their their measurements
Speaker 1: of temperature were based on estimations, not on like hard
Speaker 1: readings at that point. So they analyzed the data at
Speaker 1: the conclusion of their experiment, and they found that the
Speaker 1: cell appeared to be producing about one hundred times more
Speaker 1: heat than it would through the chemical process itself. So
Speaker 1: we understand the chemical process, so based on that, you
Speaker 1: would expect x amount of heat, but instead what we're
Speaker 1: measuring is one hundred times x amount of heat, So
Speaker 1: something else must be happening. This anomaly seemed to support
Speaker 1: that hypothesis that maybe there was some sort of fusion occurring.
Speaker 1: According to their calculations, the chemical process alone would not
Speaker 1: be able to produce that heat, so something else had
Speaker 1: to be doing it. But to be sure, they would
Speaker 1: need to replicate their experiment, which is proper from a
Speaker 1: scientific perspective. You have to make sure that the experiment
Speaker 1: you conducted was an accurate and precise one, and that
Speaker 1: you should be able to repeat the process and get
Speaker 1: the same results. If you don't get the same results
Speaker 1: after repeating the experiment using the exact same process, something
Speaker 1: has gone wrong. There's some other factor that's at play,
Speaker 1: such as unreliable measuring mechanism. Maybe the thermometer you were
Speaker 1: using was not reliable maybe your methodology for estimating the
Speaker 1: temperature was off. So replicating is very important because it
Speaker 1: tells you, yes, I'm consistently getting the same result. And
Speaker 1: if you can't say that, then you don't really have
Speaker 1: any conclusions you can draw. If you perform the same
Speaker 1: action over and over and something different happens every single time,
Speaker 1: it doesn't tell you anything about the cause and effect
Speaker 1: of that action and the consequences. So here was the problem.
Speaker 1: To conduct more experiments would require some funding, and so
Speaker 1: Ponds and Fleishman applied for a government grant to get
Speaker 1: money for their experiments, and the grant process included peer
Speaker 1: of view. Now peer of you means that you would
Speaker 1: have peers, qualified scientists who would look over an application,
Speaker 1: a grant application to determine if the application was had
Speaker 1: merit you, if it was scientifically sound in its approach,
Speaker 1: and it's outlined, and here we get the first kink
Speaker 1: in our story. One of those reviewers was a nuclear
Speaker 1: physicist named Stephen Jones, and Stephen Jones was also exploring
Speaker 1: the possibility of cold fusion. However, Jones was not looking
Speaker 1: for changes in temperature the white Ponds and Flashman were.
Speaker 1: He was looking for evidence of neutrons, because in deuterium
Speaker 1: fusion reactions, you wouldn't just end up with only helium four, however,
Speaker 1: you would actually end up with one of three possible outcomes.
Speaker 1: So you would either have helium four plus a helium
Speaker 1: three ADAM plus some high energy neutron, or you would
Speaker 1: end up with helium for tritium and a high energy proton,
Speaker 1: or you would end up with helium four, another helium
Speaker 1: four ADAM, and uh gamma ray. So those are the
Speaker 1: three potential it comes of the this deuterium deuterium fusion process.
Speaker 1: So you if you were had a way of testing
Speaker 1: for one of those byproducts, then you could look to
Speaker 1: see if there were evidence of fusion reactions happening at
Speaker 1: that point. So if you had a way of just
Speaker 1: detecting helium, then that would be a pretty darn convincing
Speaker 1: argument that fusion had actually happened if you're detecting helium
Speaker 1: being given off by this reaction, because they tell you
Speaker 1: something has to be generating that helium. But Jones's work
Speaker 1: was looking at neutrons specifically, so he had detected some
Speaker 1: neutrons through his experiment, but keep in mind he was
Speaker 1: only looking for neutrons, not for helium, but there were
Speaker 1: so few neutrons detected. The team had concluded that fusion
Speaker 1: might be happening, but at such a low rate that
Speaker 1: it was useless for any practical purpose. You would not
Speaker 1: be able to harness this for energy if in fact
Speaker 1: fusion is happening. Fleishman and Pond's research, however, suggested a
Speaker 1: much higher rate of fusion, much much greater than what
Speaker 1: Jones's research had shown. So Jones gets this article submission
Speaker 1: as part of the peer review process, and he reads it,
Speaker 1: and he reaches out to the Department of Energy and says, Hey,
Speaker 1: these guys over here are doing research that's kind of
Speaker 1: like the research I'm doing, and we're both investigating the
Speaker 1: same thing, but we're looking at it through different evidence.
Speaker 1: How about we collaborate on this. So that offer goes
Speaker 1: to Pons and Fleishman and they decided to turn down
Speaker 1: the offer. Some scientists point at this as one of
Speaker 1: the big mistakes that they made in the whole affair.
Speaker 1: Ponds and Fleishman had deep expertise in chemistry, but they
Speaker 1: did not have deep expertise in nuclear physics, whereas Jones
Speaker 1: was a nuclear physicist, but he did not have a
Speaker 1: background in chemistry, so together they could have combined their
Speaker 1: areas of expertise to search for evidence of this process
Speaker 1: of cold fusion. But it isn't meant to be, so
Speaker 1: Ponds decides he's gonna put together a neutron detection experiment
Speaker 1: of his own. So he's already detected an anomaly in temperature,
Speaker 1: he's like, he says, well, maybe I'll check for these
Speaker 1: neutrons as well, and if I detect those, then that's
Speaker 1: more evidence to support my claim. So his first go
Speaker 1: was a bust. He didn't detect any signs of neutrons
Speaker 1: being released through this method, and based on his earlier work,
Speaker 1: he should have been seeing a lot of neutrons getting
Speaker 1: produced because there was such a a huge anomaly relatively speaking,
Speaker 1: in that temperature. So he redesigns his experiment, and this
Speaker 1: time he did detect neutrons, but nowhere close to the
Speaker 1: number he should have been seeing based upon his earlier work.
Speaker 1: One reference I saw said it was one hundred million
Speaker 1: times fewer neutrons in number, which isn't great news if
Speaker 1: you're trying to support a very out their claim. So
Speaker 1: on the bright side, he did detect more neutrons than
Speaker 1: Jones had in his work. So Jones, you know, he
Speaker 1: had said, yeah, there might be some fusion happening, but
Speaker 1: it's at a very very low rate that's not really
Speaker 1: of any practical purpose. And Ponds found more neutrons than
Speaker 1: Jones had when he ran the experiment, but still wasn't
Speaker 1: at the level that what they would have or what
Speaker 1: they had expected based upon their their earlier work. So
Speaker 1: this presents a huge problem. The first Fleischmann Pond's experiment
Speaker 1: seemed to suggest cold fusion on a pretty large scale
Speaker 1: all things considered, this neutron test was not consistent with
Speaker 1: that conclusion, and Jones's work had produced different results as well.
Speaker 1: So the lack of consistency was troubling, as it could
Speaker 1: mean that the results were the product of error rather
Speaker 1: than a replicable process. So here's where the scientific process
Speaker 1: butts head heads with what it means to be a
Speaker 1: human being. So in the scientific community, the general rule
Speaker 1: of thumb is that whomever publishes their work first on
Speaker 1: a new discovery gets the credit for it, and that
Speaker 1: in is up being important because often you'll have multiple
Speaker 1: people working on the same problem at the same time,
Speaker 1: and at some point you have to decide who gets
Speaker 1: the credit and potentially a future Nobel prize or patents.
Speaker 1: The scientifically responsible thing to do at this point would
Speaker 1: be to design more experiments and make sure the design
Speaker 1: is rigorous and conduct more tests to see what happens.
Speaker 1: That would help researchers make sure that there was a
Speaker 1: real effect there to observe before moving forward. But with Jones, Ponds,
Speaker 1: and Flishman all working on this problem, it created a
Speaker 1: real sense of urgency. It was a race to get credit.
Speaker 1: And then Jones reaches out to Ponds and Flishman and said, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I'm playing on publishing my research. I'm gonna submit my
Speaker 1: work to a scientific journal in eighteen days. I was
Speaker 1: thinking you guys could write up your research and submit
Speaker 1: it to the same journal, and that way everyone gets credit.
Speaker 1: I'm paraphrasing, by the way. So Fleishman and Ponds were
Speaker 1: nowhere near ready to publish any work, but they did
Speaker 1: agree to Jones's proposal, and then they went and did
Speaker 1: something a little sneaky, and I'll explain what they did
Speaker 1: in just a moment, but first let's take another quick
Speaker 1: break to thank our sponsor. So Fleishman and Ponds had
Speaker 1: at least a year's worth of work they really needed
Speaker 1: to do before they were going to be ready to publish.
Speaker 1: But they felt forced into rushing into publication in order
Speaker 1: to get that credit for their work. And this was
Speaker 1: not just a matter of ego. According to their initial results,
Speaker 1: their approach might potentially allow for a new form of
Speaker 1: generating electricity. Right if they were right and Jones was wrong,
Speaker 1: and you were actually seeing fusion on a scale that
Speaker 1: was practical, you could put that to work that would
Speaker 1: transform everything, would be an enormous benefit to all of humanity,
Speaker 1: and it would make you a whole lot of money.
Speaker 1: So you want patents, not just at it. So they
Speaker 1: decided to write up an article on based on their research,
Speaker 1: even though they felt like they needed another year to
Speaker 1: really work on it, and they submitted their article five
Speaker 1: days after Jones had proposed a joint submission, so nearly
Speaker 1: two weeks before Jones's own submission was going in, So
Speaker 1: they kind of broke the agreement. They jumped ahead of Jones,
Speaker 1: which is dirty pool old man. Moreover, they had not
Speaker 1: conducted their tests with enough rigor to really meet scientific standards.
Speaker 1: For example, They did not run a control test in
Speaker 1: which they would use regular old water instead of heavy
Speaker 1: water to see if they got different results. If you
Speaker 1: were running a really rigorous scientific experiment, you want to
Speaker 1: have a control group, right, So you would set up
Speaker 1: one electroalizer with your platinum and palladium electrodes, and you
Speaker 1: would have it in heavy water, and you would set
Speaker 1: up an identical one using regular water that doesn't have
Speaker 1: deuterium in it, or at least not to any measurable degree,
Speaker 1: and you would run the same experiment and see if
Speaker 1: you saw the same sort of anomalies. If you saw
Speaker 1: the same anomalies, that would tell you, okay, it's got
Speaker 1: to be something else, because protium is not going to
Speaker 1: fuse the way deuterium will, so something else must be happening.
Speaker 1: But they didn't do that. They also didn't switch out
Speaker 1: their electrodes for different materials to see if that they
Speaker 1: would get the same anomaly. And again, if your hypothesis
Speaker 1: is based on when you put these materials with heavy
Speaker 1: water and under these conditions you can get fusion, you
Speaker 1: have to be able to say, all right, well we
Speaker 1: also tried it with these other materials and with regular water.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that nothing happened, So that supports
Speaker 1: our argument that these other conditions have to be in place.
Speaker 1: But if you found the same anomally, it would again
Speaker 1: tell you, all right, something else is wrong with this experiment.
Speaker 1: Either we're doing something wrong, or one of the pieces
Speaker 1: of equipment we're using isn't is not performing properly. But
Speaker 1: we know that it's not the effect we thought it
Speaker 1: was going to be, or they could have tried different
Speaker 1: ways to measure the effects that they observed. So, in
Speaker 1: other words, if you think you're seeing an effect because
Speaker 1: of those specific factors in your experiment, you it is.
Speaker 1: You know, something that you should do is change out
Speaker 1: those factors and make sure the effect disappears, because that
Speaker 1: will support your claim. But if you still see that effect,
Speaker 1: that means your hypothesis is wrong because you switched up
Speaker 1: the stuff that you thought was necessary and it turns
Speaker 1: out it's not necessary at all. But they did not
Speaker 1: do that. They did submit their article to the Journal
Speaker 1: of electro Analytical Chemistry, and they that article ended up
Speaker 1: or rather that journal ended up putting the article through
Speaker 1: a very rushed peer review process because it was a
Speaker 1: big deal. It's really you know, there was a lot
Speaker 1: of urgency put behind this report, and as a result,
Speaker 1: the people reviewing the paper didn't have the time they
Speaker 1: would need to really go through it the way they
Speaker 1: would typically, and so the article gets published after going
Speaker 1: rushing through this pure review process. And later on they
Speaker 1: discovered there were a lot of errors in that article,
Speaker 1: but the reviewers had lacked the time to thoroughly analyze
Speaker 1: the paper, so those are those errors went undiscovered until
Speaker 1: the article was published. Meanwhile, before the journal had even
Speaker 1: printed the article, Pons and Fleishman participated in a press
Speaker 1: conference at the University of Utah to announce their results,
Speaker 1: which again is highly irregular. The scientific community had not
Speaker 1: had a chance to read and analyze the research, and
Speaker 1: this press release began to pump up interest and enthusiasm
Speaker 1: in the public before anyone could even attest to the
Speaker 1: validity of the claims, which is always dangerous, right, like
Speaker 1: to go out to the public and say, we definitely
Speaker 1: have a thing that's going to transform our world, and
Speaker 1: no one in the scientific community has yet had the
Speaker 1: chance to test that claim. Then the public is gonna
Speaker 1: sit there and think, oh, well, this person is a scientist.
Speaker 1: Their word is to be trusted, and I can't wait
Speaker 1: to see this magical science fiction world we're about to enter.
Speaker 1: The article was published without really proper review, and the
Speaker 1: scientific community then began to pick the article apart upon publication,
Speaker 1: and about a month later, Ponds and Fleishman would publish
Speaker 1: two pages of corrections to that article to address some
Speaker 1: of those criticisms. In addition, even before the article had
Speaker 1: been published, scientists began to see if they could try
Speaker 1: and replicate the results because there were scientists who had
Speaker 1: a copy of the pre published article, you know, they
Speaker 1: got that early peer review copy that uh was you know,
Speaker 1: a rush through, but they actually had versions of this
Speaker 1: before it was published. So they started to see if
Speaker 1: they can maybe replicate the same experiment. But they ran
Speaker 1: to some issues because Fleishman and Ponds did not include
Speaker 1: all the details about how they actually performed the experiment,
Speaker 1: probably because the Universe of Utah officials told them to
Speaker 1: hold back on some details as a way to apply
Speaker 1: for patents in the future and not have someone else
Speaker 1: just jump ahead of them the results of the experiments
Speaker 1: that scientists were conducting. You know, they were trying to
Speaker 1: produce their own version of Ponds and Fleischmann's work based
Speaker 1: on what little information they had, were incredibly inconsistent. Some
Speaker 1: teams reported that they saw no signs of fusion at all.
Speaker 1: Some teams said no, we're seeing some evidence for fusion.
Speaker 1: But there was no real agreement or even alignment of
Speaker 1: facts among those teams, and some teams that claim that
Speaker 1: they had found something interesting could not replicate their results
Speaker 1: with future runs of experiments. Ultimately, that led to a
Speaker 1: general consensus that cold fusion is not a real thing,
Speaker 1: at least not in this form uh and since then
Speaker 1: there's been a real stigma against the idea of cold
Speaker 1: fusion or spected. Scientific journals are not likely to publish
Speaker 1: articles claiming to have proof of cold fusion, largely because
Speaker 1: of the fallout that happened from the Ponds and Fleishman incident.
Speaker 1: But while that might seem dogmatic, and probably is to
Speaker 1: some extent, it's also true that for cold fusion to work,
Speaker 1: for it to be possible, our understanding of nuclear fusion
Speaker 1: would have to be off somehow. We would have to
Speaker 1: have a pretty sizable gap in our knowledge about nuclear fusion,
Speaker 1: and that is entirely possible. That can be true. But
Speaker 1: if it turns out that cold fusion is possible, our
Speaker 1: scholarship on nuclear fusion would need to be adjusted. It's
Speaker 1: based on a lot of observations and experimentation that support
Speaker 1: our ideas and have proven to hold true after numerous experiments.
Speaker 1: So it would be very extraordinary to have to fit
Speaker 1: in new information into this into this model. Not that
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be possible, but that it means it requires
Speaker 1: an extraordinary amount of proof. Because if you have a
Speaker 1: pretty solid idea of how something works in the universe,
Speaker 1: and your observations and experiments all seem to support that idea,
Speaker 1: someone coming in with a new idea better have really
Speaker 1: convincing evidence to tell you, oh, you need your idea
Speaker 1: is good, but you need to also include this other
Speaker 1: part because if you haven't observed it, then it's hard
Speaker 1: to say that that idea has any validity right that
Speaker 1: new piece of information. So it seems improbable but not
Speaker 1: impossible that cold fusion would work. But there are still
Speaker 1: people working in the field of low energy nuclear reactions today.
Speaker 1: There are some really super smart scientists working on this,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that the larger scientific community remains skeptical
Speaker 1: at best that there's anything there. There many of the
Speaker 1: experiments seem to indicate that various processes are producing more
Speaker 1: heat than you would be able to explain through conventional means,
Speaker 1: But sometimes that amount is small enough to fit within
Speaker 1: the margin of error, or it could be due to
Speaker 1: either faulty measuring tools, faulty measuring processes, or some other
Speaker 1: missed step in the procedure. In other words, there hasn't
Speaker 1: been such a clear demonstration of the working principles of
Speaker 1: low energy nuclear reaction to make the scientific community at
Speaker 1: large re examine their perspective on the subject matter. And
Speaker 1: it may very well be that there is some other
Speaker 1: process going on. Maybe it's not a nuclear reaction. Maybe
Speaker 1: there's something else happening with these experiments that we don't
Speaker 1: yet understand, and if we're lucky, those processes will be
Speaker 1: something we could harness in a practical way. And even
Speaker 1: if we're unlucky, learning more about those processes would give
Speaker 1: us a deeper understanding about how the universe works, assuming
Speaker 1: that there are actual processes happening to understand, and it's
Speaker 1: not just the manifestation of errors or you know, wishful thinking.
Speaker 1: Complicating matters is that practical application is a huge carrot
Speaker 1: dangled in front of us because there is a clear
Speaker 1: demand for a source of clean, attainable energy. Fossil fuels
Speaker 1: cause pollution, They can have a direct effect on our health.
Speaker 1: They can have long lasting environmental impacts. They can cause
Speaker 1: instability in various regions. Renewable energy like wind, solar, and
Speaker 1: hydro power are all more environmentally friendly, at least on
Speaker 1: the production side, but they depend heavily on geography and
Speaker 1: the presence of things that are beyond our control, like
Speaker 1: having sufficient wind or sunlight in order to generate that electricity.
Speaker 1: In the case of solar power, then you have to
Speaker 1: have some other energy storage mechanism because otherwise you are
Speaker 1: not going to be generating electricity whenever the sun is down.
Speaker 1: So the machines we build to harness these energies also
Speaker 1: can sometimes be expensive from an economic standpoint. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: hard to justify building them sometimes. So you could say, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: this energy is much cleaner the solar power or wind power.
Speaker 1: It's much cleaner than cold power. But if at the
Speaker 1: end of the day you figure out how much it's
Speaker 1: going to cost to build a solar farm and it
Speaker 1: ends up being way more expensive than a cold power plant,
Speaker 1: that's a tough sell because people will say, well, we
Speaker 1: need energy, but we don't want to spend ridiculous amounts
Speaker 1: of money for it. We want some balance there. Uh,
Speaker 1: then you end up going with coal or some other
Speaker 1: fossil fuel, And it doesn't matter how strong the argument
Speaker 1: is that that's not the cleanest approach sometimes because sometimes
Speaker 1: money matters more. And that's just the world we live in.
Speaker 1: Um not particularly please with it, but that's how the
Speaker 1: world works. So there's a big demand for something new, right,
Speaker 1: There's a big demand for something that can take the
Speaker 1: place of all that that could provide for our energy
Speaker 1: needs while cutting back drastically on pollution, something that would
Speaker 1: reduce our country's dependence on foreign oil, which in turn
Speaker 1: would boost a country's national security. And if you're the
Speaker 1: one to figure out how to harness low energy nuclear reactions,
Speaker 1: assuming there is such a thing, you would be wealthy
Speaker 1: beyond your wildest dreams. Plus you'd help save the planet,
Speaker 1: or at least you would help provide for the needs
Speaker 1: of millions of people while cutting back on pollution in
Speaker 1: the same process. So even if there's just the smallest
Speaker 1: possibility that it might work, you would expect people to
Speaker 1: try and go after that goal, because it's kind of
Speaker 1: like buying a ticket for the lottery. You know, deep
Speaker 1: down the odds of winning the lottery are next to nothing,
Speaker 1: but they're still the slimmest of chances, and if that
Speaker 1: chance pays off, that's all gravy. Now. I don't want
Speaker 1: to accuse everyone working in the low energy nuclear reaction
Speaker 1: field of being motivated by money or by being foolhardy.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's necessarily the case. I'm sure many
Speaker 1: of them are very sincere in their pursuit of science,
Speaker 1: and they may well be on to something. I just
Speaker 1: point out that money is a factor, and it's a
Speaker 1: really powerful one and it's hard to ignore. So, like
Speaker 1: I said an episode one thousand, it's important to apply
Speaker 1: critical thinking. We don't have to deny something out of hand,
Speaker 1: but we can demand extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims.
Speaker 1: As it stands, I don't think we've seen enough evidence
Speaker 1: for low energy nuclear reactions, but who knows, maybe the
Speaker 1: future that will change. The important thing is that if
Speaker 1: you are a critical thinker and the evidence comes up
Speaker 1: that supports that claim, you you accept it. You say, well,
Speaker 1: this goes against what I thought, but the evidence is there,
Speaker 1: and so now I have to accept that this is
Speaker 1: in fact a reflection of reality. Just so far I
Speaker 1: haven't seen that for cold Fusion. Well, that concludes this sepisode.
Speaker 1: In our next episode, we're going to take a look
Speaker 1: at the dark side of nuclear power. We're going to
Speaker 1: look at three famous nuclear power disasters, three Mile Island,
Speaker 1: Chernobyl and the Fukushima reactor disasters and to talk about
Speaker 1: what happened and how bad were they really, And that's
Speaker 1: our next episode. If you guys have suggestions for future
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