WHERE IS COLD FUSION TODAY?

A long time colleague John Bockris yesterday sent me a copy of a 55-page paper describing his early adventures in cold fusion. My Chapter 2 of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth touches on the frenzy over this monumental announcement almost exactly twenty years ago (March 23, 1989) by Martin Fleishman and Stanley Pons in Salt Lake City, Utah. Bockris and Fleishman were both at Imperial College in John’s student days, so he was able to get a jump on other researchers through this personal friendship, then went through hell in the years that followed, before being somewhat vindicated when he left Texas A&M. Recent developments could well serve to yet make him a hero.

About the general field of fusion, there is, of course, thermonuclear fusion, the hot kind: 15,700,000 degrees Kelvin at the core of the Sun, but only 5780 K at the surface, whereas an exploded Hydrogen Bomb goes up to 45 million K, or three times hotter than the Sun. I actually worked under Edward Teller at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the inertial confinement version of fusion in the '70's. The ITER Project in France is the latest incarnation of an effort to control this energy using magnetic confinement (torus or donut). No one will be surprised if the eventual cost approaches $20 billion a decade from now when a 500 MW burst of net-positive power will hopefully be produced.  Commercialization, though, will remain long in the future.

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An old, but recently reactivated hot concept, heavy ion fusion, is being massaged by two colleagues, Robert Burke and Chuck Helsley, and their partners. They hope to attain net-positive in a decade, if not sooner.  Now, if they only can get some real funding.

But let's go back to 1989, for in comparison to all that expense and complexity hot fusion brings, when room temperature fusion was announced--in a beaker, no less--this became the equivalent of exploding an H-Bomb within the scientific community. Interestingly, chemists originally seemed supportive, physicists were almost unanimously aghast at the notion and a few engineers tried to test the concept to improve upon it. Well, the skeptics won, and by the end of 1989 the field was given up for dead. Time magazine in their millennium poll ranked this as among the worst ideas of the century.

But a few did not give up. Michael McKubre of SRI continues the quest with Peter Hagelstein of MIT. Scott Chub of the Naval Research Laboratory and Irving Dardik of Energetics Technology (Israel) have persevered. Japan formed a national project (something the USA never has done) from 1992 to 1997 with $20 million, but also gave up, although Tadahiko Mizuno of Hokkaido National University toiled on, and wrote a book on his sufferings: Transmutation: The Reality of Cold Fusion. Perhaps he is the John Bockris of Japan.

Then, a small chink in 2001, as the U.S. Patent Office approved an actual patent. Fleishman and Pons never gained this recognition.

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In 2004, the U.S. Department of Energy relented and undertook another review (their Energy Research Advisory Board in 1989 in virtual secrecy was largely responsible for serving as the executor, some say, as advised by fossil fuel companies, the Electric Power Research Institute, hot fusion scientists and the like). The USDOE still did not think anything was convincing at this gathering, but, wow, a concession: “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 Pd/D systems, or whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at energies on the order of a few eV.” In a backhanded way, the potential for funding was approved.

Well, on May 22, 2008, Yoshiaki Arata of Osaka National University and Yue-Chang Zhang of China presented their experiment to 60 onlookers, including all the media, and demonstrated the concept.  All follow-up indicators appeared to show that reproducibility would not be a problem. Amazingly enough, Professor Arata is a physicist.  Remember?  Physicists historically have tended to only believe in hot fusion.  The worrisome factor is that nearly a year later, very little confirming evidence has surfaced.  Maybe tomorrow?  Literally.

I chose to report on this hope today, for tomorrow at the American Chemical Society gathering in Salt Lake City, many of the cold fusion notables (then click on Division of Environmental Chemistry, then on New Energy Technologies, etc.) indicated above will be giving talks at the Salt Palace Convention Center.  Yes, even Rusi Taleyarkhan of bubble fusion fame.  You want to know the reality about where cold fusion is today? Find your way to Salt Lake City, where 20 years ago, Fleishman and Pons made their historic announcement.
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