I Looked at the New Cold Fusion Breakthroughs. It's Complicated.

[00:00] It sounds unbelievable, but there's more money going into cold fusion right now than at any point in history. The US government is funding it, the EU spent millions on it, Japan is throwing money at it,

[00:15] and startups from Italy and India are claiming they're about to commercialize it. Let's have a look. This episode of our science news was made possible by MelScience. That's a subscription service for science experiments that I personally enjoy a lot.

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[01:28] And now, back to the science news. Cold fusion is the idea that you can generate energy from nuclear fusion at low temperatures. We're not talking about room temperature, but typically these are devices which work at several hundred or maybe a thousand degrees Celsius.

[01:44] Cold compared to big nuclear fusion devices which need temperatures of some millions of degrees Cold fusion is also known as low nuclear reactions LENA for short

[01:57] The idea is that you can somehow use materials to increase the probability for atomic nuclei to fuse even at low temperatures. There's no proof that this is strictly speaking impossible, because the quantum properties

[02:11] of materials are extremely difficult to calculate. If you remember, it's one of the unsolved problems that they want to put on a quantum computer. Much like room temperature superconductivity, cold fusion is basically a god of the gaps.

[02:26] It sits in the incalculable region of electron orbitals and lattices with defects. One of the most remarkable recent cold fusion efforts comes from the Japanese company Clean Planet.

[02:38] Last year, they received a grant of more than $6 million from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. In January, they reportedly raised another $3 million and are now building a 600-kilowatt pilot device.

[02:52] In Italy, we have a startup called Prometheus, which claims to have a technology that creates energy based on low-energy nuclear reactions that uses only water and electricity and has the potential to redefine the future of energy generation.

[03:09] They don't have a theoretical explanation, but their CEO says they don't need one. ENA, Italy's national energy agency, has signed an agreement to investigate further.

[03:21] In Ireland, the startup ENG8 raised £3 million, claiming their energy cell produces three times more energy out than in. Andrea Rossi who promised a working cold fusion device since 2011 now says delivery started in December 2025 In India a startup called HighLena raised million for their cold fusion device claiming unprecedented energy gain ratios There are too many of these for me to debunk

[03:53] every single one. So instead, I want to tell you the two major issues with the supposed cold fusion devices that will help you to evaluate these claims yourself. As an example, let's look

[04:05] at this Japanese company. According to their papers, they put thin layers of nickel and copper on top of each other, pump hydrogen gas into that, and then heat them to over 1000 degrees while

[04:17] pumping down to hard vacuum. That way, they say, they get some watts of excess heat. They calculate that the energy released per hydrogen atom is so large that it can't be chemical reactions,

[04:31] so it must be nuclear fusion. By the same logic, I don't know where my money went, therefore billionaires are evil. Well, the first problem is that they don't detect any nuclear fusion products such as neutrons, so they have no evidence that fusion is actually taking place.

[04:48] This is a problem with many of the supposed cold fusion claims. The second problem most of them have is that they all work in one way or another by pushing hydrogen atoms into materials.

[05:02] Hydrogen is the smallest chemical element and it likes to embed itself into any sort of lattice structure. This changes the energetic properties of the lattice. Sometimes you must exert energy

[05:16] to push the hydrogen in, then you get the energy back out if you reduce the pressure. Sometimes it's the other way around. The energy decreases if hydrogen embeds in the material and that will

[05:28] generate heat So there probably is really heat being generated but it nothing to do with nuclear reactions And of course you can generate net energy with it because it doesn cycle

[05:40] This effect, however, can make it very difficult to measure the energy balance. The Japanese company says they use a material with a complicated layer structure, but they report themselves that this just melts away if they heat the thing.

[05:56] And then the heating and applying over pressure and under pressure makes it basically impossible to measure whether they did get a watt more out than in. This is what's going on with like 95% of the supposed cold fusion machines.

[06:12] It's chemical energy release plus imprecise measurements. The Italian startup is actually somewhat of a different thing. they're basically doing electrolysis in water, which, yes, is a real thing, but no, you can't

[06:26] get net energy out of it. I don't even know why they think it's something to do with cold fusion. The one recent result that actually survived peer review is from the University of British

[06:38] Columbia. They fired a beam of deuterium ions at a palladium target that had been loaded with extra deuterium. They got 15% more fusion events done without the prior loading. That was widely

[06:51] celebrated in Lenna circles as a sort of vindication. And yes, that really works, but 15% more is still like 15 orders of magnitude below producing net energy. The brief summary is that

[07:03] cold fusion still doesn't work. It's a solid 10 out of 10 on the bullshit meter. But if you have money to invest into it, why not waste it on my Patreon insert? Personally, I think if you don't

[07:15] know why your device is heating, the answer is obviously aliens. Thanks for watching. See you tomorrow.