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.
See also: History of Cold Fusion – Impossible Fusion.
There are several times when someone noticed something unusual, then wandered away. Multiple people saw the antimicrobial effect of penicillin, but only one went back and checked his notes. These are just the ones we know about.
Remember, though, the micro-plastics panic.
They’re finding them everywhere! Food! Clothes! Seawater! Fish meat! Well water! On the outside of fruit! On the inside of fruit!
Turns out there’s a lot of microplastics on the outside of the disposable gloves researchers wear when collecting or analyzing samples.
I vaguely remember reading something, decades ago, about mesons as fusion catalysts.
Materials don’t come into play in conventional hot fusion; that’s way too hot for material containment. But there are options other than the well known magnetic confinement, options that haven’t gotten much attention. Cynics might say that’s because they don’t lend themselves to gigantic machinery with billion dollar budgets. Look up Robert Bussard for more details. Among other things, that technology might (at scales well above what has been tried so far) enable fusion reactions not possible in magnetic machines, such as as H + 11B, which produces 3 high energy alpha particles and nothing else — no neutrons. So unlike magnetic machine fusion it actually is clean, and since it produces charged particles (at pretty consistent energies) one can capture that particle energy with electrostatic fields, no heat machines needed.
I think you’re thinking of muon catalyzed fusion. It is a thing, and it works.
The problems are two-fold: one, muons have a half-life of around 2.2 microseconds, so each can only catalyze around 100 reactions before they disappear.
Two, as best we know today, muons require GeV-energy proton accelerators to generate, and it is not (to say the least) an efficient conversion process.
Cold fusion is the energy source of the future!
(and always will be)
There are plenty of things that no longer pay attention to until actual demonstration from decades of claims that never come true.
-flying cars for the public
-anything good about socialism
-cold fusion
I’m sure there are more, but you get the idea. Maybe someone actually will get it to work – I hope so! (Well, mostly… it would destabilize a LOT of things in the short term and might have all kinds of weird secondary effects in the medium term…)
But until an actual demonstration, I just assume BS and move on. It has served me well for………………. OK, now I feel old.
I worked for a Government funded research corporation about 35 years ago. One of the researchers had an idea of taking tiny bullets of metal that were highly enriched with isotopes of hydrogen (absorbed as hydrides) and firing them from a gas gun (used for micro meteorite experiments) at about 60,000 f/s into a stationary target. The idea was that shattering the crystals of metal would produce large electic fields that would fuse the hydrogen. I asked him to let me know when he would do the experiment so I could arrange to be out of town. The lab shut down before he could do the experiment.
I worked for a while in a lab developing fire suppression systems trying to get a heat detector made by using metal hydrides to work.
To load the hydrogen into the metals (we got them in the lab in small chunks of alloy) we used a small pressure vessel and pumped it down to a pretty good vacuum. We then pressurized it with pure hydrogen.
What was interesting was that the large chunks of alloy would physically break down (it’s called decrepitation) into small chunks, and after a couple of cycles of vacuum/hydrogen-pressurization you were left with a relatively fine power. You could actually hear them fracturing inside the little pressure vessel. This is due to the stress on the metal crystals (at an atomic level) when the hydrogen atoms go sit in the middle of the interstitial spaces of the crystalline lattice of the alloys. I think the best results we got was from an alloy of lanthanum and nickel.
I wonder if there’s something similar going on in the titanium and palladium foils…I do know that platinum will readily absorb hydrogen in the same way, but without the decrepitation effect.
Heck, even high-strength steel alloys will absorb hydrogen. This is why structural bolts and high-strength steel bolts are not allowed to be electro-plated since that can drive hydrogen into them and cause embrittlement. Those bolts have to be coated with something else, or hot-dip galvanized.
What’s interesting in the lab is often of no real world value. Many phenomenon don’t scale up to a useful level. A few do. It takes a LOT of time and experimentation to find discoveries of actual utility.