Ive done very little reading on it, but it's definitely an interesting topic. Does anyone know about this kind of stuff?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lockheed-claims-breakthrough-on-fusion-energy1/

Thoughts?

i didnt read the article but im sure it is possible. earth has loads of heavy water which could power fusion reactors however i dont think thats the problem. i think its economic impact it would have on the world introducing cheap/clean abundant power. world is addicted to petroleum, it would need to be something introduced slowly over long period of time

Cold fusion is not possible currently.

The issue is not about the world being addicted to fossil fuels. The issue is what is required to make fusion work.

Current nuclear power is generated by fission which is the process of splitting atoms to generate energy. Fusion is a different process which fuses together two light atomic nuclei to form a heaver atom. The issue with this method is that an enormous amount of heat is needed for fusion to occur (I think I remember reading somewhere at least 100 million degrees Celsius - 6 times hotter than the core of the sun).

Aside from generating the massive amount of heat needed to initiate this process the next issue is containment. Good luck finding a material that can contain this temperature for more than a few seconds.

As Belarathon said, currently cold fusion is not possible.

This post was edited by Firewall on May 30 2015 11:19pm

lol cold fusion theories were more prominent in 70's spiderman comics than they ever were in mainstream science, its really not that complicated, breaking it apart makes many energy, therefore it takes many energy to stick them together, many energy makes heat, therefore cold fusion is silly.

agreed



cold fusion is a process that occurs at room temperature and yes is silly. even if we were to have that tech today they just cant introduce it to the world all at once is what im saying. our best bet atm is solar and nuclear seeing as how we can even produce heavy water. nuclear itself is a type of fusion power

So, the main issues are containment of extreme heat? Seems as if we'd be inputting more power/energy to generate the temps required than we would be getting out of it?
/e Can we use magnetism or kinetic energy to keep some heat away from whatever material is used to contain this?

This post was edited by c0nvict on Jun 1 2015 12:46pm

military already has

Yes, they are experimenting with this now although at this time have yet to even out (comparing the energy put into making fusion happen vs the energy output we receive from fusion).

Google tokamak

Cool.. so seems that we need to wait until 2027 to see what happens with ITER.