Cold Fusion- Using Limitless Green Power To Solve The Energy Crisis
What if we could harness a virtually unlimited energy source with no negative drawbacks to the environment from something as simple as a glass of water, all in your backyard?
Sounds too good to be true, but it is surprisingly plausible within the next 10 years. Here’s how.
Wait a second, slow down- why do I even need that? Sure, my electricity isn’t powered by something so extravagant sounding, but it works great.
Well, the fact of the matter is, the energy problem is much bigger than we think.
1.2 billion people have no access to modern energy services. 3 billion people still use simple energy sources like burning coal and animal manure for everything they do. 85% of the world’s current energy is nonrenewable which means demand will eventually exceed supply. Global warming is as real and pressing of an issue as ever. On top of that, a lack of sustainable energy has direct consequences in regards to health, education, and much more. To see a more an in depth overview of the energy landscape, read here.
I think we can conclude that… there’s a problem.
So what is the magic energy I’ve been leaving you in suspense about?
Fusion.
Simply put, fusion is a process where 2 nuclei (commonly hydrogen isotopes named deuterium and tritium) fuse together and release helium, a neutron, and substantial amounts of energy (for more information on fusion, I highly recommend you check out this video).
Scientists have long been working on what many claim is “the energy of the future”, but to no avail. The current problem with fusion is that it requires environments of upwards of 100 million degrees celsius, and replicating that environment on Earth in a way that generates a steady energy surplus, is… difficult to say the least.
Something that has long been of intrigue is the idea of cold fusion- stimulating this reaction, but at room temperature. However, cold fusion has had a long history of frauds claiming they figured out the key to everlasting energy (more on that here if you’re interested), with only one legitimate claim (to my knowledge) showing any real promise in the last century.
Muon Catalyzed Fusion
It turns out that if you stick a particle called a muon (you can think of this simply as an electron that weighs about 200x more) onto a tritium isotope (one proton and two neutrons), it attracts a deuterium isotope (one proton and one neutron) and they fuse to make a whole lot of energy, helium, a neutron, and another muon particle which is then freed to continue this reaction with more deuterium and tritium isotopes until the muon particle decays. Confused a bit? Check out this video to see a nice visualization.
Who would’ve thought?! Apparently not John David Jackson, the guy who came up with this back in 1956 (it was an accident).
Wait a second… you’re telling me we solved cold fusion 62 years ago and haven’t done a thing since? That makes no sense.
Well, Jackson did have a brief stroke of excitement in thinking he solved the world’s energy problems, but then he crunched some numbers.
The percentage above represents the probability that a muon successfully catalyzes a reaction, and with it brings bad news. A muon will only create 100 D-T (deuterium — tritium) reactions and 12 in D-D (deuterium — deuterium) before it decays, and given how much energy is required to create the initial muon, it will actually take more energy to create the muon then there is energy captured in the subsequent reactions.
The energy gained in a muon catalyzed fusion reaction is a net negative.
Well that sucks.
A muon only sticks around for 2.2 microseconds (10^–6 seconds) before decaying, which means we’re putting in all this work to get this particle around but we’re really not getting a bang for our buck.
We want to keep the muon around for longer, so is there a way to slow down time for it?
Think Fast!
Literally.
Lucky for us, there was this guy in the early 1900s who was pretty smart (I think his name was Einstein or something?) who came up with a handy dandy theory called special relativity that works great for our problem.
Time Dilation
Time dilation is a concept in special relativity that says the closer you are to the speed of light the slower time moves for you. A common example given is the twin paradox whose point essentially is that if you want to outlive your twin become an astronaut and travel the universe at the speed of light so that when you come back to Earth you look way better than your twin because you’re way younger than them.
Pretty mind blowing stuff, confuse yourself some more here if you’re interested.
But anyway, this means we could potentially increase the muon’s lifetime by speeding it up, and as a result generate a net energy surplus with cold fusion!
That’s an exciting hypothesis, let’s run some numbers to see if that would work.
Out of the concept of time dilation came the formula below:
Using the above equation and what we already know, we can find the speed required for the muon to generate a net positive energy.
Let’s break down what we know.
We know that t in the equation is 2.2μs, or 2.2 microseconds (the time it takes for a muon that is not sped up to decay).
We know the speed of light is a constant (299 792 458 m/s) but that would be messy to use in calculations so let’s leave it as c.
We’re solving for v (the speed the muon needs to go at), so that means we also need to know t’.
We know that:
We can solve for rate given that we know a muon completes 100 reactions in 2.2μs (for a D-T reaction):
Let’s leave Number of reactions (Nrxns) alone for now, so isolating for time, or t’ from the equation, we are left with:
Using that in our original time dilation formula:
Now we substitute in 2.2μs for time and isolate for v:
The number of reactions it would take for a muon to generate a net positive energy release in D-T fusion is 300 according to this paper, so subbing that number in for Nrxns:
A muon would need to go approximately 94% the speed of light to generate a net positive energy in D-T fusion.
Unfortunately the data for the number of reactions it would take for D-D fusion to generate an energy surplus is not available so I was unable to do the calculations for it.
You might be reading this thinking, great, you got me all excited only to ruin it with math that gives a negative result, but we can actually do this! Accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider can reach up to 0.99999999c!
But I mean, the Large Hadron Collider is also 27km long. That doesn’t exactly sound like the backyard material I promised at the beginning.
So now that we know it is possible, how do we make it plausible?
Well here’s what we envision the initial setup to look like:
Muons will be created by colliding protons (or other subatomic particles) to generate pions which decay into muons (here’s an example of a muon generator).
The muons will then be shot into a vacuum that accelerates the muons to the required speed using a FFAG accelerator, which occurs near instantaneously. However, it is important to note that this means the previous calculations would be slightly inaccurate and the muon would have to go a bit faster based on the time lost it takes for the muon to accelerate up to that speed, but this should be negligible.
Once the muons reach the appropriate speed, the core which is storing deuterium and tritium in the form of gas or plasma will be allowed to seep into the vacuum, and interact with the muons.
Despite travelling near the speed of light the muons will have no issue attaching to the isotopes. This is because the electrostatic attraction of charge (negatively charged muon and the positively charged isotope) is extremely strong and greatly overpowers even the highest energy particles.
Afterwards, fusion would occur until either we run out of deuterium or tritium or the muons decay.
There’s a lot of moving parts here, but with that means a lot of places for monumental improvement. Here’s what needs to be worked on for this to function at scale:
- More energy efficient, affordable, muon generators and particle accelerators. Innovative devices often drop magnitudes of order in price- it once cost 2.7 billion dollars to code human genome, now it’s set to be $100. More relevantly, it has cost 10 of billions of dollars to create, run experiments on, and operate the Large Hadron Collider, but less than a year ago a 90m accelerator costing 93 million dollars was unveiled, now the goal is to make 1m accelerators for a fraction of that price!
- Sustainable methods of tritium creation, the mastery of double deuterium fusion, or the discovery of an alternative. Tritium is currently made using lithium, which would run out in a couple of hundred years if powering the entire world on D-T fusion. Deuterium is practically infinite and could last us billions of years, but double deuterium fusion is far less efficient and would be far harder to master. A third option would be the discovery of a better fusion resource. Interestingly enough, muon catalyzed fusion should theoretically work with many more isotopes than just deuterium and tritium. However, those two are the only that have been experimentally justified so far, and thus what I limited this article to.
The Vision
If we can achieve the commercialization and mastery of cold fusion it will have massive implications on our society.
“That’s an understatement. If low-temperature fusion does exist and can be perfected, power generation could be decentralized. Each home could heat itself and produce its own electricity, probably using a form of water as fuel. Even automobiles might be cold fusion powered. Massive generators and ugly power lines could be eliminated, along with imported oil and our contribution to the greenhouse effect. Moreover, according to some experimental data, low-temperature fusion doesn’t create significant hazardous radiation or radioactive waste.”
- Quoted from this great article
This field is sure to be explosive in the future!
Not literally though, an important thing to note with fusion is that there is no chance of meltdown, and there are no negative environmental implications. The only thing that comes close to this is the fact that tritium is radioactive, but it would exist for such a short period of time it would dissipate before anything could even happen.
All in all, with continuous development of research and key technologies, achieving limitless, environmentally sound energy available to everyone in the world is fully feasible in the near future.
And I mean, the fact that you can say that a glass of water is now going to be able to generate more energy than a barrel of oil at a fraction of the cost is pretty cool too.
Shoutout to Ben Nashman for working on this me!
Additional Resources
Want more resources to read further other than the ones I linked throughout the article? Check out our website for more info, as well as this list of resources:
