A nuclear fusion experiment boosted by chemistry

Attention, the return of a highly controversial subject in physics and chemistry: cold fusion. The term refers to a detailed experiment in 1989 that claimed to have reproduced, in the less extreme conditions of a modest chemistry laboratory, a nuclear physics phenomenon: the fusion of two atomic nuclei and the associated energy production. This phenomenon makes stars shine; it is also the key to the power of thermonuclear bombs, and engineers are trying to control it for energy production by several machines to generate electricity, such as ITER in the south of France. But Martin Fleischmann (1927-2012) and Stanley Pons, the American authors of the 1989 feat, explained that they had produced this fusion under quasi-normal conditions, without the enormous pressure of stars, nor the use of a nuclear priming bomb or powerful magnetic fields. Hence the term "cold fusion." But the article fizzled out, as no one was able to reproduce the observed heat release or attribute it to fusion reactions.

However, on August 20, in Nature , a Canadian team from the University of British Columbia announced that they had achieved fusion in the laboratory ... while being careful not to describe it with the controversial term "cold." However, the recall of the 1989 experiment is not accidental because part of the team comes from a group which, from 2015, wanted to "revisit" the Fleischmann tests and de Pons. And, while this group admitted in 2019 that it had found no effect, it specified that it had identified interesting avenues, including one of the key links from 1989, electrochemistry, or the art, as in batteries, of circulating electrons or ions between two electrodes. Finally, in their latest article, this principle is not used to make the fusion itself, but to boost it.

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