Making Energy at Room Temperature
The fusion reactor that doesn’t require the heat greater than the sun
In my last article I discussed fusion and different version of fusion reactors. In this article I will focus on cold fusion or muon-catalyzed fusion. Cold fusion is the only form of fusion that doesn’t require extreme temperatures giving this form of fusion its name.
The name of cold fusion can also be associated with a failed science experiment claiming that they had produced fusion using heavy water mixed with a electrolyte. This experiment were never successfully reproduced and has mainly taken on the name of cold fusion. This is why cold fusion before this experiment is now more commonly know as Muon-catalyzed fusion (μCF).
The are three parts of cold fusion that I will go into are muons, particle accelerators and combining the two to produce μCF. I will also go into pros and cons of using cold fusion in a commercial application.
The important particle
Muons are a lepton which is a subset of particles. Muons carry a negative charge similarly to electrons, which is also a lepton. But unlike electrons muons have a larger mass pulling atoms closer together.
Particle Accelerator
Why we need it
We need a particle accelerator because we without it we could spend a couple of weeks or more before we observed two atoms producing fusion energy. While it makes the job of producing cold fusion hard it stops our atmosphere from turning into a thermonuclear bomb.
How it works
A particle accelerator works by moving subatomic particles at near speed of light and slamming them into solid material.
In order for you to make muons you accelerate photons before colliding them into an element like carbon. Most particle accelerators contain a section that allows for hydrogen to be pumped into and removes the electrons and protons.
In order to achieve the required speed of roughly 416 kilometers per second you place photons in a ring with high powered magnets on the edge. For reference the fastest man made object recorded is either the Helios 2 which hit nearly 70 k/s or a manhole cover which hit over 66 k/s.
A quick tangent to talk about this manhole cover. The manhole cover was placed on top of a nuclear testing facility in Los Alamos. When they tested a 1-kiloton nuke it turned the facility into a cannon with the manhole as the cannonball. The manhole cover either ended up in space or more likely vaporized due to the speed it moved at.
Now back to particle accelerators.
This can be very tricky to achieve these speeds because if magnets are too weak the photon will go off the track in a straight line and if the magnets are too powerful the photons will stay on the track before going off and cutting across the track, stopping it from getting to the required speed.
Reaction phase
Once you have made muons you need to attach them to hydrogen atoms that are missing their electron but still have a proton so the muons are attracted to them.
The hope is that two atoms will share an electron, in our case a muon, and because of the 200% mass increase of the moun, atoms that do share a muon have a much higher chance of colliding and releasing the muon to continue this process.
The speed of this version of fusion is incredibly fast. A muon lasts for 2.2 microsecond, 1 millionth of a second, but with in that time it can complete more than 100 fusion reactions. The average time it takes to blink would allow for fusion to occur around 50,000 times assuming the muon didn’t decay or stick to atoms.
Future implications
Cold fusion could have major implications because in most cases particle accelerators are built under ground because of this we can take this knowledge and apply it to building fusion plants under cities.
Now this may sound like Chernobyl in the waiting but like all fusion energy, μCF has a built in fail safe. If for some reason the containment field for the fusion failed atoms would spread out reducing the chance of fusion happening.
Problems
Ok so this all sounds fun and an easy source of energy but there are three problems that stop this from becoming a reality.
It is going to cost millions of dollars in order to build the particle accelerator and the rest of the fusion reactor. While many companies don’t mind building infrastructure that will net them a profit it will take to long net a profit from building these reactors. CERN costs roughly 1.2 billion dollars to run every three years. This may not be the most accurate because they use the particle accelerator for science experiments and don’t run it constantly.
Without private companies having an incentive to build clean and sustainable energy the government would be most likely have to step in and provide this source of energy. The U.S. government wouldn’t have a problem running it considering 1.2 billion dollars ~1.9% of the Department of Energy’s yearly budget.
The particle accelerator also uses a lot of electricity, 1.3 TWh per year, while fusion produces less then half of that. That isn’t to say that fusion doesn’t produce lots of energy but muons have a 0.3% to 0.5% of sticking with that atoms that have fussed. This means that those muons can’t be used for any more fusion reactions.
If you didn’t have this problem with muons, cold fusion would have already become a main stream energy source. The three ways to solve this problem is find away to unstick muons, lower the chance of the muons sticking or make particle accelerators more energy efficient.
Personal thoughts
My personal opinion to solve this problem is that we should focus on reducing the energy consumption of particle accelerators because it would be hard to mess with the fundamentals of physics. Using Muon-Catalyzed fusion also needs costs of building Particle accelerators to be cheaper.
Now do I honestly believe that μCF is the future of fusion energy?
No. But that doesn’t mean we should stop researching it as it could help us improve other forms of fusion energy. It may even result in a combination of muon-catalyzed fusion and fusion using tokamak.
Sayf Al-Aziz Rashid is a eleventh grader learning about fusion energy. He hopes to be able to work on finding a good source of fuel for fusion energy and the best design for fusion reactors. He has also did a group project and created Fallout Propulsion, a group focused on using nuclear energy in rockets.
