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This smells of pseudoscience, somewhere between LK99 and cold fusion. For example, they reference an experiment so bad that I as a layperson could find a dozen

This smells of pseudoscience, somewhere between LK99 and cold fusion. For example, they reference an experiment so bad that I as a layperson could find a dozen glaring flaws in the associated published paper. The referenced "result" was about changes in a Johnson-Matthey purifier when deuterium and/or hydrogen was cycled through it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360319920333462?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603... This experiment is destructive, so the team compared two different palladium-silver hydrogen gas purification tubes with months worth of gas cycled applied to them. They then assumed that the tubes started out "the same", and hence they wrote up any differences as changes that occurred because of the gases they used. This blithely ignores the differences in the tubes due to manufacturing variations! That's shockingly bad science, and I very much doubt that sincerity and honesty of anyone who chooses that specific "result" as something worthy of referencing in a journal article.

perihelions 3y ago
- "somewhere between LK99 and cold fusion" It's cold fusion. Lattice-confinement fusion was an attempted re-branding of the cold fusion field. - "There are also upcoming conferences: the American Nuclear Society’s Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space conference in Cleveland in May and the International Conference on Cold Fusion 24, focused on solid-state energy, in Mountain View, Calif., in July."
- DennisP 3y ago
  The difference from cold fusion is that NASA is blasting the lattice with gamma rays, which is what gives deuterons the energy to fuse. Whether there's a chance of getting net power that way, I have no idea, but at least it's not depending on previously unknown nuclear reactions.
  - perihelions 3y ago
    But in another place (the paper the grandparent comment linked) they're claiming a classic Pons-Fleischmann experiment, where they're just pumping in cold deuterium gas–no heat, no radiation–and say they observed spontaneous nuclear reactions. Party like it's 1989. I agree with the grandparent commenter: zero credibility here, this group is doing nothing but trolling people.

perihelions 3y ago

- "somewhere between LK99 and cold fusion" It's cold fusion. Lattice-confinement fusion was an attempted re-branding of the cold fusion field. - "There are also upcoming conferences: the American Nuclear Society’s Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space conference in Cleveland in May and the International Conference on Cold Fusion 24, focused on solid-state energy, in Mountain View, Calif., in July."

DennisP 3y ago
The difference from cold fusion is that NASA is blasting the lattice with gamma rays, which is what gives deuterons the energy to fuse. Whether there's a chance of getting net power that way, I have no idea, but at least it's not depending on previously unknown nuclear reactions.
- perihelions 3y ago
  But in another place (the paper the grandparent comment linked) they're claiming a classic Pons-Fleischmann experiment, where they're just pumping in cold deuterium gas–no heat, no radiation–and say they observed spontaneous nuclear reactions. Party like it's 1989. I agree with the grandparent commenter: zero credibility here, this group is doing nothing but trolling people.