Getty Images/Bethesda Studios/Prime Video
As it has always stood and currently stands, cold fusion is not possible. It’s as real as Big Foot and time travel as far as the scientific community is concerned.
But unlike Big Foot — Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough have a new movie coming out in which they literally play sasquatches — and time travel, cold fusion doesn’t often crop up in your favorite movies and TV shows. Shout out to the 1997 Val Kilmer thriller The Saint, though.
That changed with Prime Video’s hit new series Fallout, which has opened to both massive viewership and nearly unanimous praise from fans and critics alike.
Editor’s Note: the rest of this article will contain mild spoilers for the Prime Video series ‘Fallout’
Fallout tells the story of a post-apocalyptic America which, without spoiling, found itself at the end of the world due to some conspiratorial happenings.
One aspect — one of the most famous scientific conspiracies/controversies of all time, in fact — that’s introduced along the way is the concept of cold fusion, which was particularly popular in the 1980s.
Cold fusion — which, again, remains an unproven theory — would, if it were to exist, essentially be a more manageable version of nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion, which you probably remember being mentioned quite a bit in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, can generate four times more energy per kilogram of fuel than fission (used in nuclear power plants) and nearly four million times more energy than burning oil or coal, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Fusion is different than the process of fission (another Oppenheimer favorite) and is the process that’s used in nuclear power plants. Fusion, according to the IAEA, is so thoroughly studied because it could “generate four times more energy per kilogram of fuel than fission and nearly four million times more energy than burning oil or coal.”
The issue with fusion, however, is that is requires massive amounts of energy and extreme circumstances. How much? Once again, the IAEA has us covered:
“While the sun’s massive gravitational force naturally induces fusion, without that force a temperature even higher than in the sun is needed for the reaction to take place.”
“On Earth, we need temperatures of over 100 million degrees Celsius to make deuterium and tritium fuse, while regulating pressure and magnetic forces at the same time, for a stable confinement of the plasma and to maintain the fusion reaction long enough to produce more energy than what was required to start the reaction.”
The concept of cold fusion, however, seeks to achieve the result of fusion without the same extreme conditions as the theory suggests fusion can be achieved at room temperature and normal pressure.
Interest in cold fusion reached its peak in 1989, when scientists Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of England’s University of Southampton announced that they had achieved cold fusion.
The problem, however, is that their claims were made prematurely, were not able to be proven, and is now, according to Axios, “considered a case study of how excitement can cause a breakdown in scientific norms.” In the decades since cold fusion slipped back to the scientific fringes from whence it came.
Quietly, however, the scientific community has rebranded cold fusion as LENR — low-energy nuclear reactions. And in 2023, ARPA-E, a United States government agency dedicated to funding advanced energy research, provided $10 million in grants to further study the concept.
“The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $10 million in funding for eight projects working to determine whether low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) could be the basis for a potentially transformative carbon-free energy source,” the Department of Energy said in its February 17, 2023 statement.
To circle back and close the loop, this is where Fallout — which, again, is a fictional TV show based on a fictional video game — comes in, as it proliferates perhaps the ultimate cold fusion conspiracy, which is that the nefarious and shadowy powers-that-be oppose the achievement of cold fusion because of what it would mean for their bottom line.
Remember what the IAEA said? Nuclear fusion (tons of resources required) can create “four million times more energy than burning oil or coal.” The concept of cold fusion (far fewer resources required) would allow for that to happen on global scale for a fraction of the cost and energy/emission expenditure.
All eight episodes of Fallout are currently streaming on Prime Video.