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I think the idea isn't to have a fusion reaction that doesn't generate heat, but to have one that can be maintained at room temperature.

That was my question. Nuclear power plants work by putting heat to work to generate steam to turn a turbine to turn a generator that provides electricity. Generating Helium is good for party balloons but not generating useful power.

A previous responder said cold fusion meant relatively cold as compared with other fusion reactors using heat similar to that of the sun, a heat level difficult to contain and use.

But a room temperature reaction provides no energy that we could easily convert into traditional power. Unless there was an associated flow of electrons that can be contained and directed, I don't understand how a truly cold (room temperature) reaction has any benefit beyond greater understanding of physics that might lead to another more useful discovery.

I am an engineer. I think in terms of application. If it generates hundreds of degrees of temperature rise instead of tens of thousands, that is useful. If it generates ten degrees of temperature rise, that is not, at least not for power generation.

But a room temperature reaction provides no energy that we could easily convert into traditional power.

I don't think the goal is a 'room temperature' reaction. I think the previous comment about it being cold relative to stellar temperatures applies. If the reaction can be made to operate at the sort of temperatures you find in a power plant's boiler, as opposed to the temperatures found in the center of a nuclear detonation, then you have something workable.

Personally, I remain highly skeptical. The last time someone crowed about cold fusion it turned out to be crap. The comments about true cold fusion making oil obsolete may be true in the long term, the thing that annoys me is that we have nuclear fission reactors that already do that. The enviros won't let us use them, however. And if this cold fusion experiment leads to practical applications, I'm sure they'll find a way to regulate it into oblivion like they have everything else that might actually work.

You could use a Stirling engine. There are also semiconductor devices that can convert those types of thermal gradients directly to electricity. Frankly, it would also make a good hot water heater for a building.

Ideally, you would run a turbine with 1000C steam, but many useful systems can live with the low thermal gradient if they only have to refuel every decade.

“I don’t understand how a truly cold (room temperature) reaction has any benefit”

I think that the phrase “cold fusion” is not literal, but meant to distinguish this field from super-hot plasma fusion research.