[ExI] Cold fusion: some new results.

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 02:12:31PM -0700, A B wrote:
> 
> Wouldn't cold fusion be a direct and obvious violation
> of conservation of energy? You could just keep fusing

It's turning mass defect directly into energy, via E=mc^2.
Fusing lighter elements gives you more mass defect.

Heavier elements fission, releasing energy. There
is an island of stability, around iron:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_energy

> the lighter elements and then eventually recover the
> input energy by fissioning (fissing?) the
> heavy-element end products. I know that it requires
> more input energy the heavier the element gets, but

You can't make energy from iron & Co via nuclear processes.
About the only way to turn iron mass into energy is by
matter-energy conversion via Hawking radiation (which has
not yet been observed, and might not exist).

> fat stars manage to do it. That seems more like an
> engineering difficulty rather than an immutable
> fundamental barrier. I don't know enough about it one
> way or another, but I'm really hoping that it can be
> validated. That'd be sweeeet.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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