Mar 22 2010

Cold Fusion: Back From the Dead

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Cold fusion, once a subject avoided at all costs by serious scientists, has staged an amazing resurrection from the graveyard of discredited theories. At this week’s national meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco, the controversial topic is the subject of nearly 50 presentations.

Now the big question is whether cold fusion will become the source of limitless power as once hoped, or simply a source of limitless speculation.

Cold fusion rocked the scientific world in 1989 when two University of Utah scientists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, claimed they had fused hydrogen (deuterium) nuclei while electrolysing heavy water on their desktop with a palladium electrode. Electrolysis uses an electric current to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

The implications were staggering. Fusion, the source of the sun’s energy and the awesome destructive power of the hydrogen bomb, could meet most of the world’s energy needs if it could be tamed. As currently understood, however, it requires extremely high temperatures and pressures, making it as yet impractical for commercial use.

Within months, skeptical scientists pronounced cold fusion dead. Few mainstream researchers were able to reproduce their results or confirm their extraordinary claims. Reviews by the Department of Energy buried the corpse. Cold fusion was as cold as the grave.

No scientist who wanted to be taken seriously—or to get research funding—even uttered the words “cold” and “fusion” in the same breath. The few intrepid researchers who continued dabbling called their new field “low energy nuclear reaction” physics or “condensed matter nuclear science.”

Still, a growing number of papers on the topic have been presented since 2006 at the American Physical Society and American Chemical Society conferences. At last year’s ACS conference, researchers with the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego reported an electrolysis experiment that left tracks from high-energy neutrons. Though the researchers claimed them as evidence of fusion, other scientists remained skeptical as to the cause. 

And over at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a memo obtained by 60 Minutes concluded of the ongoing research being conducted at labs around the world, there is "no doubt that anomalous excess heat is produced in these experiments." 

One MIT professor, Peter Hagelstein, claims to have made great theoretical strides in understanding the inner workings of the cold fusion process. 

The organizer of this week’s symposium at the American Chemical Society, Dr. Jan Marwan, summed up the changing attitude reflected by his event:

Years ago, many scientists were afraid to speak about ‘cold fusion’ to a mainstream audience. Now most of the scientists are no longer afraid and most of the cold fusion researchers are attracted to the ACS meeting. I’ve also noticed that the field is gaining new researchers from universities that had previously not pursued cold fusion research. More and more people are becoming interested in it. There’s still some resistance to this field. But we just have to keep on as we have done so far, exploring cold fusion step by step, and that will make it a successful alternative energy source. With time and patience, I’m really optimistic we can do this.

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