Nuclear energy has been used to generate electricity since the 1950s. Nuclear power plants use what’s called fission to harness energy. That's when atoms (most commonly uranium atoms) are split, releasing heat, which is used to boil water, which creates steam, which is used to spin turbines, which power generators that make electricity.
On the flip side there’s nuclear fusion. That’s how stars like our Sun generate energy — by essentially squeezing hydrogen atoms together so tightly that they combine into helium atoms, and that process releases energy.
While using nuclear fission has been well established and used commercially for decades to generate electricity, nuclear fusion has remained out of reach.
While far from being commercially viable, advances have been made within the past few years using techniques that involve either magnets or lasers to create fusion reactions — but they can only be sustained for a very short period of time, and these efforts require massive operations and extremely complicated engineering with extraordinary power and resource needs.
There’s another branch of fusion research known as 'cold fusion’ which takes a different approach to fuse atoms together that does not require huge amounts of energy and resources. The most commonly known approach is called 'bubble fusion'. The idea is to deliver energy to bubbles suspended in a liquid which induces their collapse which creates conditions where nuclear fusion might occur on what you can consider a micro-level.
The entire branch of cold fusion is controversial because some early researchers published results which claimed they had solved this problem, but that turned out to not be true — or at least verifiable.
But controversy aside, our guest is working on his own approach to cold fusion with a variation on the bubble fusion technique, and he has achieved interesting, early results that have now been published in the May, 2024 edition of the journal Nature Scientific Reports. The paper is titled "Observation of neutron emission during acoustic cavitation of deuterated titanium powder."
Dr. Max Fomitchev-Zamilov is a physicist and entrepreneur who has PhDs in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology and University of Tulsa.
He taught software engineering and computer science at Penn State for eight years before leaving academia to found Maximus Energy Corporation. It's a company that refurbishes and manufactures nuclear instruments including neutron and gamma detectors.
Dr. Fomitchev-Zamilov lives and works in Naples, so we brought him into the studio to get a big picture lesson in nuclear power generation, and an overview of his novel fusion research.
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