Gurdur

Cold fusion again - the return from the grave, but the zombie's well and truly disintergrating, with nary a fusion in sight, but a few helium atoms escaping from beaker walls..

Polywater, anyone ? Why not do polywater too ?

Corwin

Yes and hot fusion's working SO well... I mean we have hot fusion plants all over!!!! (oops.)

Don't wrench your arm out of it's socket patting yourself on the back just yet gurdy.... Hot fusion has yet to prove itself workable for anything but bombs.

Valmorian

And yet, it consistently does so.

I don't see the problem with people saying "Cold Fusion works? Let's see some consistent reproducible experiments."

Friar Bellows

And stars.

Corwin

That's just it. You think hot fusion is so much more reliable...

You ignore, (or don't know) the fact that the only way we've EVER gotten hot fusion to work involves pumping dozens of times more energy INTO the system than we can ever hope to get out of it.

Will it eventually be workable? Probably, at some point. But the only way it will ever be useable is... to put more research into it.

Gee... sound familiar?

Corwin

Yeah... stick a star in the outskirts of a major city and provide power. That'll fly.

Over here... we have an apple.... over HERE on the other hand... we have the same thing.... except it's an orange...

tronvillain

Corwin:
Not really. On one hand we have "hot fusion" which is consistent with the known laws of physics and whose existence has been confirmed by experiment, but has thus far not produced any functioning power plants. On the other hand we have "cold fusion" which is not consistent with the known laws of physics and whose existence has not been confirmed by experiment, and has thus far not produced any functioning power plants.

Corwin

Actually cold fusion is consistent with SOME known laws of physics and has been PARTIALLY confirmed by experiment. Let's bear in mind that cold fusion had about a year of mainstream research interest before it got quashed, and development of cold fusion isn't driven by the same motivation that fission and hot fusion were from the beginning. (Pile atomic reactors had been around for some time before people started to seriously look at power generation... what started the big research push? The Manhattan project. Hot fusion? Again, known and theorized beforehand.... but nobody really paid a whole lot of attention until someone figured out that an uncontrolled reaction was possible...)

If hot fusion had faced the same opposition as early in its development as cold fusion has, we'd be having this discussion about tokamaks. How many millions of dollars have been poured into this technology over the past 30 years? And how much actual hard benefit has come from it? Not one functioning power reactor, and no hope for any in the immediate future. Fusion research has become entrenched. But fission researchers weren't as threatened by fusion as hot fusion researchers are by cold... so fusion research started up mostly without opposition. Even partial results were accepted.

elwoodblues

Yeah, so oil burns. What are you going to do with it? Make some kind of container that can translate burning energy into motion? And then hope it doesn't blow up? Yeah, that'll fly. No one would ever want that kind of explosive danger in their house, much less on their carriage.

Corwin

You wanna pack a supertanker around with you?

The only reason stars are self sustaining is their mass. Getting that kind of mass together in a terrestrial power plant isn't physically possible. Tokamaks work on a much smaller scale, and have a much tighter margin of error. And if you go past that margin? Your reactor stops working. No real problem, in fact it's a wonderful safety feature. If you lose containment, the reactor completely shuts down... there's no chance of a Chernobyl with a fusion reactor. The problem is that keeping to those margins takes a hell of a lot of energy.

The fact that it happens natrually on that scale doesn't mean that we can build a much smaller version and have it be useful.