Cold fusion has historically received more attention from screenwriters than journalists. Recently, though, the media has started getting into the game. There are the breathless (for Scandinavia anyway) stories about the new research coming out of Norway. There is the pretty epic thinkpiece in Aeon. There is the reaction to that thinkpiece in Popular Mechanics. And there is just a ton of easily dismissed nonsense out of India. The stories all make internal sense, but the broader narrative is hard to follow. What do we talk about when we talk about cold fusion?
The first thing to understand is that cold fusion is more than a MacGuffin; it’s a controversial scientific area of study. Simply put, cold fusion refers to the ability reproduce nuclear reactions that normally occur in extremely hot places — for instance, the sun — at lukewarm, earthly temperatures. In theory, cold fusion could provide endless amounts of clean electricity, liberating us from our dependence on other, smog-creating and Penguin-coating sources. But theory and reality are two different things. Though some scientists say cold fusion has been possible since Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons demonstrated it with palladium deuteride in 1989, most claim that the demonstration wasn’t scaleable and that a truly functional system has never been created. Many scientists are plainly contemptuous of the idea.
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