The Speculist

Cold Fusion, written off for more than a decade as junk science, is struggling to work its way back to respectability:

Later this month, the U.S. Department of Energy will receive a report from a panel of experts on the prospects for cold fusion—the supposed generation of thermonuclear energy using tabletop apparatus. It's an extraordinary reversal of fortune: more than a few heads turned earlier this year when James Decker, the deputy director of the DOE's Office of Science, announced that he was initiating the review of cold fusion science. Back in November 1989, it had been the department's own investigation that determined the evidence behind cold fusion was unconvincing. Clearly, something important has changed to grab the department's attention now.

Behind the scenes, scientists in many countries, but particularly in the United States, Japan, and Italy, have been working quietly for more than a decade to understand the science behind cold fusion. (Today they call it low-energy nuclear reactions, or sometimes chemically assisted nuclear reactions.) For them, the department's change of heart is simply a recognition of what they have said all along—whatever cold fusion may be, it needs explaining by the proper process of science.

It's this sort of thing that makes predictions about future energy capacity and capabilities so difficult to predict. (For that matter, it's this sort of thing that makes the future in general so difficult to predict.) Cold Fusion may yet be a long way off, but the fact that it could be back on the table only goes to show the risks involved in assessing the future based on present capabilities.

We've seen a lot of discussion in the blogosphere recently about the viability of changing to a "hydrogen economy." The big problem with hydrogen is extracting it from water (or some other source, although water is probably the most likely.) A lot has been written about the impracticality of solar power, wind power, nuclear power, etc.

Personally, I'm quite partial to this model of using wind to extract hydrogen from water. It answers many of the objections which have been raised to wind.

But I haven't seen much written about cold fusion, either as a direct energy source or as a means of enabling hydrogen as an energy source. A while back, Steven Den Beste had this to say on fusion:

Wake me when it actually works.

Well, we won't nudge him just yet.

(Via Geekpress.)