Cold Fusion in Movies and TV Series.

I have thought of starting this (admittedly frivolous) thread many times but this time I think we could all use some fun and silly entertainment.

Throughout the years I have been making a mental list of movies or TV series where cold fusion or something not exactly called cold fusion but looking like cold fusion has been mentioned or portrayed, in a few cases in a central role or even as a passing remark. Here I will make that list available and, when possible, provide a link to either the entire movie or clip where the cold fusion mention happens.

Feel free to add anything if you think it belongs here. I will start with the movies where cold fusion is directly part of the main argument of the flick:

Chain Reaction (1996): Keanu Reeves portrays the PhD candidate working for a Cold Fusion researcher that gets murdered and then starts a race to save his own life and the female co lead’s life (Rachel Weiss) while attempting to avoid the suppression of the technology by obscure interests.

The Saint (1997): Val Kilmer interprets an international thief tasked with seducing a female researcher (portrayed by Elizabeth Sue)that has perfected cold Fusion and wants to give it free to the world.

Knight and Day: Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are lead roles in this spy romance thriller where an energy device with a nuclear power density technology that can be held in the hands, and the life of its autistic inventor, are threatened and disputed by several parties that wants to either own or or destroy it for avoiding anyone else to have it.

Here we have a short clip from the movie “Iron Man” from 2008, Where Tony Stark builds his “arc reactor” with 1,6 grams of Pd, to produce 3 GigaJoules per second of energy.

Perhaps some of you are familiar with the funny sitcom “The Big Bang Theory”. Cold fusion is mentioned at least in two chapters, I picked the mentions directly from watching the series (of which I grew fond through the years of after initially not liking it much), however is hard to simply retain in which chapters the mention happen in a series with close to 300 episodes.

While browsing to find the exact chapters where it happens, I realized rubycarat had already written an article about one of the mentions of Cold Fusion in the Big Bang Theory almost ten years ago, You can read the article here:

https://coldfusionnow.org/big-bang-theory-and-cold-fusion/

The other mention happens in the chapter called “The Jerusalem Duality” where the main character Dr. Sheldon Cooper, after being eclipsed by a younger and talented North Korean genius, and deciding that String Theory has become stagnant, is going through a personal crisis to find a new field to devote his genius intellect, much to the chagrin and annoyance of his friends.

You can read the chapter and the Cold fusion mention (he says that if all of the characters teamed up they could solve Cold Fusion in 10 years, “12 years top”).

https://bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/The_Jerusalem_Duality

And for today, last but not least, there is also a mention of “cold fusion”, albeit in a completely technically erroneous context, in the movie “Star Trek: Into the Darkness”, in the initial sequence, Mr. Spock uses a “cold fusion device” to freeze the lava of a volcano that was about to blow and end a primitive culture in a planet called “Nibiru”, in a flagrant violation of the famous “prime directive” of the series.

I could not find a clip where the cold fusion device is depicted in English, but found this one in Spanish that you might enjoy, or not.

Quote from Rjzk

In one of the most stupid sci-fi films, Independence day 2, they used a cold fusion bomp against the aliens.

You are right, I missed that one, I saw the movie but found it so utterly bad that I didn’t pay any attention after a while.

Here’s a link of how the “cold fusion” bomb depicted in that movie would work.

https://independenceday.fandom.com/wiki/Cold_Fusion_Weapon