Uuhh, Yeah - I'd Take A Closer Look At Cold Fusion.

UPDATE 1/10/2022: NASA Detects Lattice Confinement Fusion – Lol. In this century you call UFOs “UAVs” and cold fusion “lattice confinement fusion”. If something ever gets a bad name, just rebrand!

I was twelve in 1989.

Somehow I had heard about cold fusion way back then. It was in the news a lot that year and considering I only had access to a handful of television channels, I probably absorbed some of the noise going on with the cold fusion hoopla. I also surrounded myself with a decently sized crew of nerdy kids, so that probably helped.

And over the years as I learned what regular old fusion was, I had also picked up on the notion that cold fusion was bunk science or just didn’t work for whatever reason.

Years later I had learned about Andrea Rossi and his Energy Catalyzer (Ecat) and as I read up on him and what he was working on, eventually I dismissed cold fusion even more. The story that you’ll find online paints Andrea Rossi as a sketchy individual with a fraudulent past – so it’s easy for his checkered past to sway your bias on an area of science that already has been dealt a ton of backlash.

However, I started coming upon more information about cold fusion recently and there’s a lot of data out there that’s showing that something is creating excess heat. This means we could have a new way to create electrical power for daily usage that doesn’t require burning fossil fuels, or erecting enormous fields of wind turbines and solar panels.

And what people who haven’t followed cold fusion lately may not know: A lot of this data that shows excess heat is more recent than the data unveiled during that 1989 Fleischmann and Pons episode.

But Don’t Take My Word For It, Listen to MIT Professor Peter Hagelstein!

He’s still working on it and has a ton of data that will definitely make you take a closer look. I’m of the opinion that research and experiments should continue in this field. Even if it turns out to be a dead end (which Peter Hagelstein will tell you it is not).

Cold fusion research is in this unfortunate state where it may just need a decade or two more of continued research so that many of the unanswered questions can get hammered out. But we’re at this tipping point where enough information has come out to keep a few important researchers working on it, but the past negativity and bad press is keeping it from getting funded further.

And..so what if something gets researched to death?

I’ll bet you we’ll find out more new scientific discoveries through continued cold fusion research. If you watch the video below, there are plenty of instances where they’re discovering interesting chemistry and physics thanks to cold fusion experimentation. I say it’s a win-win.

If you’re of the thinking that money and energy can be better directed toward other fields of research, all I got to say is this world wastes a TON of money on things that really don’t matter.

Like sports and war for instance :).

Wouldn’t it be nice if the University of California sacrificed one basketball coach for continued cold fusion research? I think a one-year salary of the top UC basketball coach would give one cold fusion lab a good chunk of runway.

But seriously. Think of the risk vs. reward. Say ten more years was allocated for cold fusion research at 1 million dollars a year per lab. Do you know how many bs startups I know that each received a few million in funding? These were B2B tech startups – products that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. But if we – meaning the human race – hit the cold fusion lotto – that’s a huge win.