Is Cold Fusion Heating Up Again?

Italian Cold Fusion Machine Passes Another Test

Italian physicist and inventor Andrea Rossi has conducted a public demonstration of his "cold fusion" machine, the E-Cat, at the University of Bologna, showing that a small amount of input energy drives an unexplained reaction between atoms of hydrogen and nickel that leads to a large outpouring of energy, more than 10 times what was put in.

The first successful cold fusion experiment was reported two decades ago, but the process has forever been met with heavy skepticism. It's a seemingly impossible process in which two types of atoms, typically a light element and a heavier metal, seem to fuse together, releasing pure heat that can be converted into electricity. The process is an attractive energy solution for two reasons: Unlike in nuclear fission, the reaction doesn't give off dangerous radiation. Unlike the fusion processes that take place in the sun, cold fusion doesn't require extremely high temperatures.

But the experimentalists who have supposedly demonstrated cold fusion over the years have been unable to explain the underlying mechanism that drives the miraculous reaction they claim to observe, and so the scientific community has largely turned its back on this line of research. Most physicists — as well as the United States Department of Energy (DoE), academic journals, and the U.S. Patent Office — consider cold fusion machines to be hoaxes, because they say physics rules out the possibility of room-temperature nuclear fusion.

I am not a nuclear physicist, but I know of no physical laws which forbid "cold fusion".  The barrier energy between the proton at the core of a hydrogen atom, and the nickel nucleus is very high, but in a quantum world, where a proton can be a wave, lots of odd things happen, and it's very difficult to say anything is impossible, only highly unlikely.

Rossi has not published any details about the inner workings of the E-Cat because the device is not patent-protected, but other cold fusion researchers have theories as to how the process works. Peter Hagelstein, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and one of the most mainstream proponents of cold fusion research, thinks the process may involve vibrational energy in the metal's lattice driving nuclear transitions that lead to fusion.

The experiments showing the systems produce more energy than supplied, and more than can be explained by simple chemistry are thought provoking, but not yet iron clad.  Intelligent or not, fooling scientists isn't the hardest thing in the world; Penn and Teller could pull it off with a few hours to set it up.

But wouldn't it be funny if it worked out, and Italy became the center of a new energy renaissance?