Quote of the Day

Instead of designing materials just to survive the harsh conditions of fusion, researchers might be able to design materials that boost the reaction in specific conditions, similar to the way catalysts speed up chemical processes.

Lauren Biron
July 23, 2026
When It Comes to Fusion, Materials Matter – Berkeley Lab – Berkeley Lab News Center

That is kind of wild. A nuclear reaction catalyst.

This is a hint of the “cold fusion” reports from 1989.

I may not have mentioned it before, but I attended a Bay area engineering conference late in 1989. I attended a panel discussion with speakers who had tried to reproduce the original cold fusion claims. One was a physicist. His team was not able to reproduce the results, but he did report some things they could not explain.

As I recall it, they put hydrogen (or some isotope of hydrogen) in a metal bottle with a radiation detector. They had control bottles with other contents such as (perhaps) a vacuum, oxygen, helium, or nitrogen. The hydrogen bottle would emit a single radiation particle every few hours. The other bottles would not or at a much lower rate. They tried swapping bottles (or new bottles) and the increased radiation always came the hydrogen bottle.

Physics, as known to the world at that time, did not have an explanation for it. They had no idea what was causing it. The radiation rate was so low that it was tempting to believe it was an error in the experimental setup, cosmic rays, or just statistical noise. But in the few weeks they spent they were unable to eliminate the error, and it was significant enough they were not comfortable writing if off as noise. I was a little surprised, but he reported they probably were not going to pursue that line of research. It certainly was not something particularly useful. It could not be a source of power. What else could you do with it? I was not able to think of anything. I decided it would just be a curious thing that we might not ever understand.

But now, we might have some clues to understanding it. The Berkeley Lab research team is doing something a little different:

To test how host materials affect fusion, the team packed deuterium—a heavy form of hydrogen—into thin metal foils made of titanium and palladium. They used two different techniques to load the deuterium into the metals. Next, they fired a beam of deuterium ions directly at the loaded foils across a range of energy levels and measured how often fusion happened compared to reactions in open space without any surrounding metal.

Standard physics theory predicts that fusion rates drop off sharply when collision energies fall below 2.5 kiloelectronvolts (keV). However, the team’s measurements showed an unexpected result: at these lower energies, the fusion rate leveled off into a plateau instead. In certain metal samples, fusion occurred about a quintillion times—a 1 followed by 18 zeroes—more often than in reactions without a host material.

Hmmm… That is not noise. That is a hint of useful applications.

The team has a potential explanation for it:

This big jump in reaction rates comes down to the subatomic structure of the host metals. Electrons inside the metal, along with tiny defects in the foil structure, act like a shield around the positively charged deuterium nuclei.

The electrons and defects within the material might partially shield repulsive electrostatic forces between deuterium nuclei, making it easier for them to get close together and fuse.

Interesting. Very interesting.

I love living in the future.

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See also: History of Cold Fusion – Impossible Fusion.