Curtis Berlinguette, principal investigator of Berlinguette Research, stands inside one of his program’s labs on the UBC campus in Vancouver on Tuesday. Behind him is a reactor part of Project Thunderbird.Kayla Isomura/The Globe and Mail
The Thunderbird reactor sounds like an impressive piece of scientific hardware. Impressive it may be, but not because of size, noise or heat. Rather, it is a tabletop experiment operating at the University of British Columbia. And somehow, it seems to be exhibiting a version of the nuclear reactions that power the sun.
Welcome to the quiet renaissance of cold fusion.
In 1989, a pair of U.S.-based researchers caused a media sensation when they announced they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature. The discovery was greeted at first with excitement over the promise of a new energy source that could change the world. But that quickly turned to skepticism when the results were deemed to be overhyped and ultimately irreproducible.
By 2019, separate teams of scientists were ready to say that while cold fusion had started off as a notorious flop, there were interesting scientific questions at the heart of the story that merited further study.
Now, one of those teams has revealed that they can reliably demonstrate an enhanced version of nuclear fusion at temperatures far below those at which reactors typically operate, which they say opens the door to new advances.
“Now we actually have an experimental result that we can work from, that others can replicate and validate and then go and explore on their own,” said Curtis Berlinguette, a professor of chemistry at UBC who led the work, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
To be clear, Dr. Berlinguette added, there is no immediate “energy miracle” associated with the result. The Thunderbird reactor – named after the UBC mascot, a mythical creature in Indigenous lore – only produces about one-billionth of a watt of power for every 15 watts needed to run it.
But when applied as a tool for examining a curious and elusive electrochemical effect, there remains the possibility that it could lead to something more.
“I think it’s just a really fun, basic science experiment that can have a potentially significant impact,” Dr. Berlinguette said.
In the commentary accompanying the Nature report, Amy McKeown-Green and Jennifer Dionne, both researchers at Stanford University in California, write that the UBC experiment is the “first verified case of electrochemically enhanced nuclear fusion” and therefore “a considerable achievement.”
Florian Metzler, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Industrial Performance Center, was far less enthusiastic about the experiment, noting that the energies involved in the Thunderbird reactor are still high compared with the regime where data are most needed and where the detection of nuclear reactions would mark the discovery of a genuinely new and unexplored phenomenon.
In short, he said, the results obtained at UBC are “not unexpected and are well explained by conventional nuclear theory.”
In their experiment, Dr. Berlinguette and his team bombarded a palladium target with nuclei of deuterium - a form of “heavy hydrogen” in which each nucleus consists of one proton and one neutron.Supplied
To understand what is happening inside the Thunderbird reactor, it’s helpful to recall that nuclear reactions fall into two broad categories.
Fission reactions involve the breakup of heavy atomic nuclei, such as those of uranium, a process that releases energy. Conventional nuclear reactors used for power generation employ fission to make heat.
Nuclear fusion is a different process. Lighter nuclei are brought together to make something heavier. This, too, can liberate energy – even more than fission does, per unit of fuel – but is harder to achieve. The sun and most of the stars in the universe shine by converting hydrogen nuclei into helium.
Fusion faces a significant physical barrier: Atomic nuclei all carry a positive electrical charge and so naturally repel each other. They do not want to join up unless they can be brought so close together that other forces come into play and overcome their electrical repulsion.
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The standard approach to fusion is to subject nuclei to extreme temperatures or pressures so they are momentarily forced together. While it is an active area of research, no one has yet been able to get nuclear fusion to work at a commercial scale.
The premise of cold fusion is that when light nuclei are embedded inside a solid metal of the right composition, the surrounding metal atoms act to reduce the electrical barrier and greatly increase the probability that fusion will occur without the need for extreme conditions.
In their experiment, Dr. Berlinguette and his team bombarded a palladium target with nuclei of deuterium. Deuterium is a form of “heavy hydrogen” in which each nucleus consists of one proton and one neutron. It is readily absorbed by the palladium. The experiment also looped the palladium into an electrochemical cell that drew more deuterium into the metal.
The research group led by Curtis Berlinguette (front left). From left to right, behind Berlinguette: Monika Stolar, Aref E. Vakili, Kuo-Yi Chen, Sergey Issinski, Ryan Oldford and Phil Schauer.Kayla Isomura/The Globe and Mail
It was this additional loading that the team said boosted the rate of fusion by 15 per cent. Inside the palladium, the deuterium nuclei combined, forming helium and releasing neutrons in the process, which the team measured.
“Being able to detect neutrons provides us with a clear indication that we have a nuclear fusion reaction taking place,” Dr. Berlinguette said.
The UBC effort is substantially different from what researchers Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have done at the University of Utah in 1989 when they unveiled their original and far more controversial cold fusion experiment. Dr. Berlinguette said the Thunderbird reactor is not intended to replicate that result, which remains uncorroborated.
He added that the next steps are to continue to use the approach to answer questions about how fusion is occurring inside the metal, to probe the phenomenon at lower energies and to look for ways to further amplify the reactions.
“We have to increase these rates by orders of magnitude to be able to put this type of reactor into practice from an energy perspective,” he said.