This decade has brought on a serious change in the energy mentality of the United States. After the oil crisis of the ’70s, we settled back into a pattern of unsustainable, guilt-free consumption. But in the last few years, consistently high oil prices have finally created a push to find more sustainable, alternative energy sources. One of the more popular of these alternatives has been biofuel, including ethanol and biodiesel. (more…)
Once considered to be the holy grail of energy solutions, “cold fusion” has turned into more of a mythical Big Foot concept, with claimed leads and developments by some researches but largely dismissed as ridiculous by mainstream science. In theory, cold fusion would allow for the nuclear fusion of atoms at almost room temperature. In the normal process of nuclear fusion, such reactions take place only under the extreme conditions found inside stars. Were the hopes and hard work of cold fusion optimists to come to fruition, our world would be blessed with an unlimited energy supply for the foreseeable future.While preliminary cold fusion work began as early as the 1920′s, cold fusion first became a widely publicized and talked about concept in 1989. In March of that year, highly regarded electro-chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons claimed to have produced fusion through the use of electrolysis (a process requiring an electric current to drive chemical reaction) of heavy water (water with abnormally high proportion of deuterium isotopes) on a palladium electrode. The result was a wildly excessive output of heat, of such relative magnitude it could only be rationalized in terms of nuclear processes. (more…)