By Sebastian Anthony – Extreme Tech –
Cold fusion. The moment I type those words, I know that half of you will smile with excitement — while the other half will grab your pitchforks and chase me out of town. No other topic, perhaps with the exception of PS4 vs. Xbox One, has caused as much dissension amongst ExtremeTech readers. On the one hand, we have a technology that, if it works — if it can really produce unlimited amounts of cheap, green electricity — could change society forever. On the other hand, there are a lot of scientists who are adamant that the technology is snake oil — a scam that’s perpetuated by writers such as myself. On the off-chance that cold fusion does turn out to be the savior of civilization, though, I’m going to keep on writing about it. Today, the big news is that a large US investment company has acquired the rights to Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat cold fusion technology. That investment company, Cherokee Investment Partners, appears to be interested in deploying the cold fusion tech commercially in both China and the US.
Cold fusion, also known as low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), is a technology that promises to create huge amounts of green energy from very cheap fuel. In the case of Rossi’s E-Cat (Energy Catalyser), nickel and hydrogen are fused into copper — a process that has 10,000 times the energy density of gasoline, and 1,000 times the power density. For more background information on cold fusion/LENR, and why it’s safer and cleaner than normal nuclear reactors, read our previous E-Cat story. Suffice it to say, the scientific community’s main contention is whether this reaction is actually possible or not. Rossi says he’s found a special catalyst that makes it possible; lots of other scientists, though, claim it’s hogwash. (Read: 500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up.)
