Hot on the trail of cold fusion as a solution to the climate crisis | Letter

Letters

Thursday, 13 Feb 2020

With well-funded research, cold fusion has the potential to provide us with a sustainable source of energy, writes Prof Brian Josephson

Tim Flannery (The age of the megafire is here, and it’s a call to action, Journal, 7 February) writes: “As far as swift climate action is concerned, all good choices have gone up in smoke”.

That may not be the case, however. There has been abundant support by now for the claim made by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989 to have observed nuclear fusion at ordinary temperatures, but the hope that such a fossil-fuel-free process might contribute usefully to energy production has not been fulfilled because it is very unpredictable, and we do not as yet know the conditions needed to produce large amounts of energy. Suitably funded research on a large scale might lead to a resolution of this issue.
Prof Brian Josephson
Emeritus professor of physics, University of Cambridge

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Letters

Thursday, 13 Feb 2020

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