Cold Fusion explained - it may have been a nuclear reaction but it wasn't fusion.

It appears we'll have to wait to see if this proves out, and if it does, wait even longer for any possible practical use.

Cold fusion is about the same a hot fusion. 50 years in the future.

In the meantime, we have Molten Salt Reactors. Proven in 1964 and ran at

It was shut down since it could not produce plutonium, which is what the DOD wanted at the time.

Fortunately, there are a number of new developments ongoing. Bill Gates has invested, other programs are in development, the Chinese are investing heavily on the technology, and the regulatory commissions are working on regulations needed for commercial introduction.

When it is introduced, it will wipe out solar, wind, hydro, coal, fusion, and conventional nuclear installations.

And Tesla.

Probably not. Nuclear reactors generate electricity, and Tesla sells electric cars, and batteries.

The current generation of solar cells produce electricity about as cheaply as all the other technologies. At the moment they are responsible for about 1% of the world's electricity generation.

If they get up to 10% the unit price of solar cells will halve again, and they will generate electricity at half the price of anything else.

They only generate during the day, and heavy cloud cover can decrease their daytime output a lot, but enough batteries and pumped storage will cover that.

Nuclear plants are big and can't be decentralised. They may have their place, but they aren't going to wipe out anything that delivers at half the price per kilowatt hour, and can be spread around to service the local market.

And will Molten Salt Reactors be small enough, cheap enough and practical enough to power an off grid home or mountain top repeater sites or for needs in remote areas ?

Would they be portable for backup power ?

An electrically-induced inverted beta decay? With just several volts? And a solar neutrino? How else are they going to explain that p+e->n conversion?

Best regards, Piotr

And has always been like that.

Must take extra care not to end up with a Molten Core Reactor. ;-)

Best regards, Piotr

That's the whole point. The entire reactor is melted salts. It cannot melt down. It is already molten.

Probably not. You need space for the drain tank to provide walk-away safety, space for the high energy turbines to convert the heat into electricity, exhaust stacks to dissipate leftover energy, space for the extractors to remove unwanted fission products, a transformer farm to distribute the energy, control systems to manage the energy, administration buildings to handle visitors, and so on.

If you are on a mountain top, your best bet is probably solar and wind plus batteries.

However, if you are a small town, a molten salt reactor may be just the ticket. You can size the reactor to your demand and avoid the energy loss transferring grid energy hundreds or thousands of miles. You won't have the high energy long-lived fission products to deal with.In fact, some models can burn up the dangerous fission waste from conventional nuclear reactors. No need to dump it in the ground. Burn it up and get useful energy from it.

Kirk Sorensen is one of the most articulate advocates of molten salt reactors. Visit him on YouTube and listen to what he has to say. Very illuminating.

For a brief introduction into molten salt reactors, please see Kirk Sorenson's TED talk in

Hopefully, this will stir your imagination. Next, find many thorium salt videos on youtube. Some are junk, but the good ones will make you rise up in arms demanding why are they not working on this with government support in a maximum effort project.

The answer is simple. Legislators are not informed of the current state of the planet. They do not understand the risks we all face. They are overwhelmed by money from fossil fuel companies to prevent any new energy developments. They would rather we all die than change their energy approach.

It is time to get involved.

neutron conversion

The link I posted had this "explanation".

"The protons will quantum mechanically entangle ? you can think of them as forming one ?heavy? proton. The surface electrons w ill similarly behave as a ?heavy? electron. Injecting energ y ? a laser or an ion beam will do ? gives the heavy proton and heavy electron enough of a boost to force a tiny number of the entangl ed electrons and protons to merge into neutrons."

There might be something real behind that if you dug deep enough, but you'd need a much more expensive education than I've had to make any sense of it .

"Quantum-mechanical tunneling" is another impressive phrase.

The whole reactor is exposed to a high neutron flux. Some of the isotopes produced by this exposure will be dangerously radioactive for long enough to be problem.

We've had the problem for more than fifty years now, and there isn't one permanent repository for radioactive waste (of the kind that is long-lived enough that you can rely on passive thermal management).

Thorium reactors may not be as bad as uranium reactors, but no small town is going to be all that happy about dealing with the waste products.

So your small town is going to have a chemical plant with good enough remote handling to process uranium reactor waste into the elements that can get burned up in a thorium reactor and deal with the rest that can't ...

Not all of it. But you would have take out the elements with high neutron absorption cross-sections - which would poison your reactor - and find some place to dump them.

Separate out the elements you can burn up and get energy out of them. Not a small town industry.

But perhaps a trifle selective about what he talks about, if your advocacy is based on his testimony.

My instinct is that it is a new LNER scam in the making but there is just a faint chance that they are onto something. Time will tell.

Your biggest problem will be the nuclear regulatory commission (NRC). They will require guards and intrusion alarms around the property along with access roads for accident responers.

A big issue will be licensing. They will ask questions such as the thickness of the containment vessel. When you tell them there is no containment vessel, they will freak out.

Electron capture by a proton is the inverse process to neutron beta decay, so it's endothermic to the tune of 782 keV. Not much of that is going to happen in an electrochemical cell. In a tandem van de Graaf, sure, but not in a beaker.

Transient E fields generated by fracturing crystals can get high enough to cause D-D fusion. (It used to be called "bb gun fusion" because it was discovered that way.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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There is no malevolence and it's not really lack of information. It's more like the energy barriers to reactions in chemistry, only this one is econo mic. Thorium molten salt reactors have a lot going for them on paper. How ever, they have not been tested in any meaningful way and will require a lo t of investment to produce a commercially viable product. That's the barri er.

The economics of the current nuclear support industry has more to do with r efueling reactors than with building new ones. With these new reactors the re won't be the large profit center in refueling, so the current industry d oesn't have the incentive to investigate new technology. The people who bu y reactors don't invest in new technology, they just buy what is available. The remaining construction industry doesn't have the funding to develop a new technology.

So unless the government (some government) invests in this area of research we won't be seeing any Thorium reactors in our future unless they have a C hinese flag on them. Maybe we can get the air force to restart work on a n uclear bomber?

Rick C.

Tesla referral code -

You might add "Existing " to the above paragraph. And then google " Lockheed Martin nuclear reactor "

Dan

Good point. So the proposed mechanism fails on the fundamental problem of basic thermodynamics. Isolated neutrons are unstable and deacy spontaneoulsy into protons with a fairly short halflife.

There is still an outside chance that there is something slightly odd going on even if the proposed reaction is total bollocks (TM).

Not come across that one. I got the impression one or two semi plausible fusion claims have been made for cavitation induced D2O plasmas. But by far the most plausible have been by making muon catalysed fusion (the genuine paper eclipsed by Fleischman & Pons false positive claim).

Snag is with present technologies you have to put more energy in than you can possibly get out. I have sometimes wondered if F&P were unlucky in the sense that they basically set up a small metastable bomb waiting for a cosmic ray airburst of the right type to detonate it and happened to "get lucky". No one else has ever been able to make it work. And everybody and their dog had a try after the initial paper was published.

Philo Farnsworth achieved hydrogen fusion in the 1960s, but it didn't have power gain.

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Looking at the energy required to form the neutron ignores the subsequent r eaction where the neutron is absorbed by an adjacent atomic nucleus.

This peaks at 8.8MeV per nucleon at iron-56,but doesn't drop off all that f ast for heavier nuclei, It looks as if it is only down to about 7.5MeV at U

-238.

If the electrolytic surface does set up a situation where a proton is quite close to a heavy atomic nucleus, one could invoke quantum mechanical tunne lling to get the proton and some handy electron through the potential barri er.

It's still going to be an improbable event, but you don't need to find all of that 782keV to make it happen.