That is a little different than the explanation that I got.
Maybe a different cold fusion experiment that was being explained.
But they overcame the repulsion by having a clasping bubble that is so violent that heat and light are released. You could visibly see it.
A physicist calculated though, that too much of the energy is being wasted in the form of light and heat for fusion to have occurred. There are still arguments though whether more energy was produced than consumed, didn’t matter though because the energy output was too unfocused to be usable.
But they overcame the repulsion by having a clasping bubble that is so violent that heat and light are released. You could visibly see it.
Hmm, I spent a while wandering around and asking the grad students questions. What I saw was positive and negative electrodes, one of which was palladium, bubbling away in what would be best described as fish tanks.
The Palladium electrodes had been soaking in deuterium or something before being used and then it was just like electrolysis to get the fusion reaction going. What they were doing was measuring the temperature in the tank (uninsulated) and comparing its temp to the electricity they were putting in.
According to one of the grad students, occasionally one of the electrodes would heat up and start bubbling the water like mad. That was when they guessed that they had achieved fusion. Invariably the electrode would be ruined and the process halted after the electrode became pitted.
They were trying all kinds of variations to try and consistently get the reaction to occur, but they never could. I am pretty sure that it was a faulty power supply, as simple and odd as that.
I do remember reading something about the collapsing bubbles, but it would have had to have been the bubbles from the electrodes. Could they have been shorting and emitting light? I don't know.