Understanding Cold Fusion

There's no denying, we live in a time where everything is getting harder to come by. Money, food, energy... Yes, even energy. In this day and age, energy is getting harder and harder to obtain. When I say energy, I mean clean energy, of course. Energy that will not harm the environment or the people associated with it. So what is being done to meet our energy needs?

The burning of fossil fuels is getting more and more outdated. It harms the environment. So what are some viable replacements? Nuclear power is one of the more common forms, but it carries a great deal of risk and danger to the environment. Solar power is quite clean, but it is harder to collect because of the expensive costs associated with it. Wind powered turbines is the cleanest energy known to man but it is far too unreliable. You cannot predict the wind. Geothermal energy is still too experimental and hydroelectric plants would harm the environment and still wouldn't meet our energy needs anyway. There is another option, one that is highly theoretical and would fall into the same category as dark energy. It is called cold fusion.

Like I said before, cold fusion is highly theoretical. No one even knows if it really exists. But perhaps you are unfamiliar with this concept. What is cold fusion? It is understandable that not too many people would know about it. It's former popularity has diminished somewhat. So I will shed some light on the tricky subject. The name implies that it has something to do with nuclear power, since nuclear fusion is a method of obtaining nuclear energy. However, cold fusion energy is not acquired the same way that someone would obtain nuclear energy. Let me explain the nuclear process a little bit.

Nuclear energy is obtained through one of two ways: nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Fission involves splitting an atom to release enormous amounts of energy (and radiation, I might add). Fusion is when atoms are fused together. This creates even more energy (and probably more radiation as well) than fission. The idea of cold fusion arose when an anomaly occurred during the nuclear fission/fusion process. It seems this anomaly produced more energy than usual, yet had less waste (radiation, heat, etc.). Scientists began to dream that a process could be used to obtain huge amounts of energy with little to no negative waste. The process was called cold fusion.

However, cold fusion was impossible to achieve after that one isolated incident, and most scientists gave up on the dream of cold fusion. Today, it is given almost no thought, except for the occasional curious stranger (like yourself?).

Sources used include:

www.wikipedia.org and prior knowledge.