[extropy-chat] cold fusion redux

[Damien Broderick]

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1444046,00.html>

In From the Cold
DAVID ADAM - The Guardian (U.K.)

In the late afternoon of January 24, the academic calm of Japan's Hokkaido 
University was shattered by an explosion in one of its laboratories. 
Physicist Tadahiko Mizuno was taking a guest through experiments into a 
phenomenon called cold fusion. The pair were showered in flying glass, 
suffering wounds to their face, neck, arms and chest. Mizuno needed a large 
chunk of detonated scientific apparatus removed from next to his carotid 
artery and both were deaf for a week.

The blast raises several questions: What went wrong? Have sufficient 
lessons been learned from a similar explosion in California that killed the 
British researcher Andrew Riley more than a decade ago? And perhaps most 
commonly, what on earth are scientists doing still flogging the dead horse 
that is cold fusion?

The Japanese accident is not the first time that cold fusion has blown up 
in the faces of its progenitors. Just ask Stanley Pons and Martin 
Fleischmann, two previously well respected chemists who found themselves at 
a University of Utah press conference 16 years ago yesterday, where they 
heralded cold fusion as an astonishing scientific breakthrough and a 
limitless source of future energy. The two announced that, with little more 
than some special water and two metal electrodes, they could harness the 
power of the sun in a laboratory flask - a star in a jar.

While Pons and Fleischmann went onto the front pages of newspapers 
worldwide, legions of curious, enthusiastic and sceptical scientists went 
into their labs to try the simple experiments themselves. As failed 
attempts to replicate the results piled up, scepticism turned to hostility.

A few months later, a report from the US Department of Energy found no 
evidence for the effect and put the nascent field out of its misery. That, 
as far as mainstream science was concerned, was that.

Cold fusion may now be about to get a second chance. In a landmark decision 
in December, the same US Department of Energy gave a cautious green light 
to funding cold fusion research. It follows a decade-long investigation by 
the US Naval Research Laboratory, which concluded that there might be 
something in the phenomenon after all.

And if, as some predict, cold fusion is due a comeback, then it could start 
today in Los Angeles, where the American Physical Society has scheduled a 
session on the subject at its annual meeting.

A handful of scientists have always believed that Pons and Fleischmann were 
right and - using cash and equipment scraped together from wealthy 
individuals, private companies and, in at least one case, the US military - 
have been trying to keep the dream alive. Shunned by the scientific 
establishment, this hardy band of cold fusion researchers carry out 
experiments, organise an annual meeting and publish their results in 
whatever journal will have them. Today, they will get a chance to tell the 
rest of the world what it is missing.

One speaker is George Miley, a cold fusion believer at the University of 
Illinois. He says: "Much of the criticism has come from people who haven't 
worked in the field and much of it stems from the rather sad beginning. The 
ability to have nuclear reactions take place in solids is remarkable and it 
opens up a whole new field of physics."

This is where both the promise and the problems begin. Fusion of atoms 
releases energy, and that process drives the nuclear furnaces at the heart 
of stars. For decades, scientists have talked about mimicking this stellar 
fusion on Earth in a reactor; arguments continue about where to build the 
first prototype, called ITER.

But, just as forcing the north poles of two magnets together takes effort, 
the driving of two atoms together for them to fuse takes huge amounts of 
energy. The massive temperatures and pressures inside stars manage it, but 
scientists are not yet convinced that it could be done efficiently in an 
artificial way.

So when Pons and Fleischmann said they could do it at near room temperature 
and pressure, using kit not out of place in a chemistry set, the fusion 
world stood still. When they switched on their experiment, they said, a 
palladium electrode absorbed atoms of deuterium (hydrogen with an extra 
neutron) from the water and crammed them so close together they fused. As 
evidence, they said the setup churned out more heat than they put in.

"There's not an accepted theory for how this can happen," Miley admits. 
Worse, even those conducting the experiments concede that the observed 
effects are sporadic - what works in one laboratory fails in another. To 
mainstream science, built on the importance of theory, experiment and 
reproducibility, this puts cold fusion on the wrong side of the tracks.

Miley says: "Mainstream people have no motivation to look at this. They 
hear it's witchcraft, and people are frightened away. Certainly people in 
universities don't want to work on it because they would be ridiculed by 
their colleagues."

So does today's American Physical Society session signal that mainstream 
science is softening its scepticism? Absolutely not, says Bob Park of the 
society and one of cold fusion's biggest critics over the past decade. In 
fact, Park says, there is a cold fusion session every year. "Anyone can 
deliver a paper. We defend the openness of science. Anyone can get up to 
speak and if they can convince people, then OK. Early on, we used to have a 
session in which we collected all the crackpot papers together. It was very 
popular."

If the American Physical Society has not yet changed its approach to cold 
fusion, those working in the field can draw some comfort from a more 
unlikely source. Some 15 years after effectively killing it off, late last 
year the US Department of Energy performed a remarkable U-turn, at least as 
far as some cold fusion supporters are concerned. After reviewing the 
available evidence, it concluded that: "Funding agencies should entertain 
individual, well-designed proposals for experiments that address specific 
scientific issues relevant to the question of whether or not there is 
anomalous energy production in palladium-deuterium systems."

It is far from a ringing endorsement, but it was enough for Peter 
Hagelstein, a former rising star of physics who now devotes his time to 
developing cold fusion theories at MIT.

He says: "We've faced some of our harshest critics and we've come away with 
many of them recommending that funding be made available. If you took a hot 
fusion or string theory initiative and gathered together their worst 
critics and presented them with a 15-page document and allowed for one 
day's worth of presentations, I'm not sure you would get as many people 
proposing public money be spent on these projects." Hagelstein and other 
cold fusion advocates insist that there is just too much evidence of 
unusual effects in the thousands of experiments since Pons and Fleischmann 
to be ignored.

David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC, 
says: "Of the 3,000-plus papers in the field, 10% are very hard to make go 
away. One per cent are, in my view, essentially bulletproof, as good as key 
papers in other fields of science."

Little has changed over the past 16 years in both the experimental setup 
and the results produced: modern cold fusion researchers still look for 
evidence of the cherished "excess heat" alongside the fusion products 
neutrons and helium-4.

"There have been many experimental studies that report significant effects. 
They have been performed by credentialed scientists with adequate 
materials, good protocols - including calibrations and controls - and data 
analysis using known methods," Nagel says. "I have been deeply involved in 
this adventure from the outset and know most of the players. I am certain 
they are not all liars or fools."

Park, at the American Physical Society, sees it differently: "They're 
running the same old experiments over and over and getting the same kind of 
screwy results. Each year there's a new saviour who finally has the proof 
and a year later we don't hear from them any more."

Both sides say what's needed to break the impasse is the production of a 
working, cold fusion device. According to Scott Chubb at the Naval Research 
Laboratory, Roger Stringham of First Gate Energies in Hawaii described just 
that at a cold fusion conference in France last year. "He puts 200W in and 
400W comes out. That's a device, it's a heater. It's probably the first 
cold fusion device."

Chubb is equally excited about rumours of a breakthrough at a Las Vegas 
company called Innovative Energy Solutions. In November, it issued a press 
release heralding "clean energy technology" to "generate six times (12MW) 
more electricity than it consumes (2MW)". Rod Foster of the company says 
the technology is based on cold fusion, but could offer no more information 
about how it works.

"You're getting out enough heat that you can turn the supply off so you've 
got what looks like some kind of perpetual motion machine," Chubb says.

Extraordinary claims, as the old saying goes, demand extraordinary proof. 
It may yet be provided, but sceptical mainstream scientists require more 
than promises and rumours, especially when a miracle energy supply of the 
future is at stake.

As Park says: "Science is contingent and if somebody comes along with a 
convincing experiment then we'll have to rewrite the textbooks. But I don't 
think that's going to happen."

Mike McKubre, a long standing cold fusion researcher at SRI International 
in California who was injured in the explosion that killed Andrew Riley, 
disagrees, not surprisingly. "The ability to wield the power of nuclear 
physics on a tabletop has enormous technological importance," he says. 
"When the smoke clears it will be obvious to all, and our current critics 
will claim it was obvious to them all along."

Further reading

Too hot to handle - the race for cold fusion
Frank Close, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0691085919

Nuclear transmutation - the reality of cold fusion
Tadahiko Mizuno, Infinite Energy Press, ISBN 1892925001