After spending years researching and experimenting and investing a lot of money in this venture, Google still has no evidence that nuclear fusion can be carried out at room temperature. Nevertheless, the investment of $ 10 million was not in vain, writes the Futurism portal. The company reports on its findings and their results in an article published this week in the journal Nature.
When two atomic nuclei merge, a huge amount of energy is released - it is this process that feeds the Sun and other stars (thermonuclear reaction). If we learn to reproduce it in terrestrial conditions, we will get an inexhaustible source of ecologically clean energy. Work in this direction is underway and there are certain results.
Is cold nuclear fusion possible?
Cold fusion, which is also called low-energy nuclear reactions, is a hypothetical type of nuclear transformations at temperatures close to room temperature, and unlike "hot" fusion, which occurs in the interiors of stars and when a thermonuclear bomb explodes at high pressures and temperatures in the millions of kelvin … Until now, assumptions about the possibility of launching cold nuclear fusion have not been able to find their confirmation, despite earlier statements by some scientists, which were ultimately rejected by science.
For example, back in March 1989, two American chemists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, announced that they had recorded signs of nuclear fusion in an experiment with palladium plates placed in water saturated with deuterium (a heavy isotope of hydrogen), through which a current was applied. In 1991, American physicists Han Uhm and William Lee claimed to have generated abnormal levels of tritium - another heavy isotope of hydrogen - by bombarding palladium with pulses of hot deuterium ions. It was also suggested that excess heat appears in an environment with a high hydrogen content during heating of metal powders.
In 2015, Google got interested in cold fusion. She hired 30 scientists, gave them $ 10 million and set a goal for them to test all three assumptions, conducting their own experiments using modern technology. The project has resulted in about a dozen publications and a recent Google article in Nature. The conclusion of the research was disappointing: there was no evidence that cold fusion was possible.
The scientific article notes that in one case, when palladium plates were loaded with deuterium at high concentrations of atoms, the samples were unstable. In the second, during the bombardment of palladium, the analysis of nuclear signatures showed the absence of tritium. Finally, in the third case, with 420 repetitions of heating the metal powder, no excess heat was detected.
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At the same time, the researchers explain that the palladium experiments warrant further study. Subsequent work may yield stable samples at high deuterium concentrations, and the intended effects of bombardment may be too small to be measured with modern equipment.
Despite the failure of the experiments, Nature notes, Google's investment was not in vain.
Nikolay Khizhnyak