Could it be turned commercial? That question is way beyond me. I understand that the energy output is expected to be very small for cold fusion. It isn’t like Mr. Fusion from Back to the future: a can of beer and some water won’t get you 1.5 Gigawatts. But how will cold fusion compare to the net energy output per dollar for wind power, solar…? Could you build a cold fusion generator and use it to charge your battery powered cars overnight? Could a power plant build an array of cold fusion generators and replace a steam turbine? What kinds of nasty waste chemicals or pollution would this produce?

To be honest, I don’t entirely understand the numbers they throw around regarding potential power output. As an ignorant savage, the basic idea I understand is that all matter has outrageous amounts of energy locked up in it. Direct 100% conversion of a few grams of matter produces energy equivalent to megatons of TNT. Fission, like the Hiroshima bomb, gets perhaps 1/10000th of that energy out. “Hot” fusion (like a hydrogen bomb, or perhaps some mystical future fusion power plant) can get maybe 1/100th of that energy out. So even getting a billionth of that much energy from a simple, safe mechanism would be have staggering implications. But apparently the conversion rates are far lower than that: and if it takes a few thousand dollars of fancy chemicals and hardware to warm a cup of water five degrees, we aren’t going to be charging up our cars with this stuff.

It could, as I suggest in my post, end up like some sort of parlor trick: the fusion equivalent of plugging a couple of electrodes into a lemon and powering a tiny lightbulb for a few minutes. Interesting, ultimately revealing something about physics that we didn’t entirely understand before, but serving no practical purpose. Sort of like the large hadron collider 🙂