Renewed hope for nuclear fusion powering the grid has been making the headlines over the past few weeks, after researchers at MIT university working with a private company unveiled new plans for a major initiative. Nuclear fusion has long been heralded as the answer to many of our problems in the 21st century – a clean, limitless energy source that doesn’t produce the waste that fission does, but until now has always been on the horizon of viability. However, while fusion finally seems to be within reach, cold fusion looks to be as remote a possibility as ever. 

What is Cold Fusion? 

While nuclear fusion replicates the conditions under which stars are born – using extreme heat and pressure to fuse hydrogen atoms together, cold fusion attempts this at room temperature. A staggering difference of about 100 million degrees Celsius! 

Since the 1920s, there has been debate about whether fusion could occur at low temperatures by catalytically fusing hydrogen absorbed in a metal catalyst. In 1989, electrochemists at the University of Utah, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, claimed they had observed cold fusion to much media attention and fanfare. However, their experiment was found to be flawed, with many scientists attempting to replicate the test and unable to report positive reactions. Within a year Fleischmann, Pons and cold fusion had gone from rock stars to disgraced scientists, and cold fusion has retained a reputation as a pathological science over the past decades.

Could Cold Fusion Ever Happen? 

There has been very little research on the topic since the early 1990s and current research continues only in few specific venues, most notably the United States Navy who released a two-volume book on the subject in 2002. Cold fusion is more often termed Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) these days, as the dwindling community tries to avoid the negative reputation and connotations associated with cold fusion. 

The US Department of Energy reviewed the subject in 2004 and found that there was little evidence of progress in the field since 1989 and didn’t recommended a federal research program. The very small community of scientists, researchers and investors in the community means that it is highly unlikely that there will ever be enough funding, research or scientific scrutiny for it to be a viable field, let alone a power source. 

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Read more about nuclear fusion and fission.