Power To The People - The Return of
Cold Fusion
March 15, 1999
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/technology/
archive/1999/03/15/coldfusion.dtl
On Friday, March 26, 1999, the director of Menlo
Park-based SRI International's Energy Research Center, Dr. Michael
McKubre, will present the results of SRI's 10-year, $6 million-dollar
effort to replicate the cold-fusion experiments of chemists Stanley
Pons and Martin Fleischmann.
McKubre's startling conclusion: Pons and Fleischmann
were on to something.
It might not be nuclear fusion, McKubre says. But a new,
clean source of power may, in fact, be on the horizon. The SRI
findings will be delivered at the centennial meeting of the American
Physical Society in Atlanta.
In an interview last week, McKubre said he is absolutely
convinced excess heat is being produced in the SRI version of the
Pons-Fleischmann cold-fusion cells. "Somewhere between 5% to 30%," he
says. What's more, McKubre says he and other researchers working on
cold fusion now have a better understanding of why different
cold-fusion experiments yielded different results.
McKubre is careful not to claim, for certain, that
nuclear fusion is occurring. "All we can say for sure," he says, "is
that we are getting out more energy than we put in." McKubre is
working with theorists at MIT to fashion an understanding of exactly
what is going on at the atomic level.
In 1989, you might recall, Pons and Fleischmann,
professors of chemistry at the University of Utah and the University
of Southampton, respectively, shocked the world with the claim they
had created nuclear fusion in a beaker at room temperature.
Pons and Fleischmann said they generated unaccounted-for
bursts of energy after submerging an electrode made of platinum wire,
and another made of palladium, into a beaker containing an inexpensive
solution of deuterium oxide, commonly known as heavy water.
A reaction took place within the palladium rod after
they passed a charge between the two electrodes. Pons and Fleischmann
claimed a previously unknown form of nuclear fusion was the best
explanation for why the beaker started to glow, eventually throwing
off more energy than it had consumed.
The consequences of this discovery for society, if
proven, are enormous. If it's real, cold fusion could change
everything. Goodbye, fossil fuels. Instead, humanity would get a clean
new source of unlimited energy with no greenhouse gases. At least in
theory, we could all own our own little cold-fusion power plants one
day. Energy production would be decentralized. No more PG&E
substations. No more gas stations. No more utility bills.
At the time Pons and Fleischmann made their
announcement, the practitioners of more mainstream hot nuclear-fusion
science laughed off their modest little $100,000 experiment. After
spending billions of dollars trying to create controlled nuclear
fusion at extremely high temperatures, the hot-fusion crowd scoffed at
the idea they'd been going about it all wrong.
There is a lot at stake in this debate. A decade ago,
the federal government was spending upward of half a billion dollars a
year on hot fusion research, an annual investment that has since
dwindled to a still-considerable $225 million a year. Hot-fusion
experiments are costly and cumbersome, many consuming enough energy to
run several small cities. To date, none of them have had much success.
Nonetheless, then -- as now -- almost everyone working
in fusion research gets paid to explore one part or another of the
dominant theory about how fusion works; which is that nuclear fusion
is possible only at very high temperatures. Funding work on this one
theory, and this one theory alone, is a classic recipe for the
creation of scientific group-think. When everyone "knows" the world is
flat, no one risks sailing toward the horizon.
The conventional theorists say that since they think
that what Pons and Fleischmann claimed happened is physically
impossible, it simply could not have happened. Pons and Fleischmann
were chemists, after all. What could they possibly know about physics?
Forget about the fact, of course, that even the most omniscient
physicists among us don't understand many of the most basic facts
about how our universe
works.
The attacks on Pons and Fleischmann were incredibly
vicious, perhaps because they were seen as heretics operating outside
their field of expertise. I remember, for example, covering one
scientific gathering in Los Angeles as an editor for the public radio
program, "Marketplace." It was shortly after Pons and Fleischmann had
made their initial announcement.
At the meeting, Pons and Fleischmann were vilified. They
were lambasted, for example, for not revealing key details about their
experiment. The beleaguered scientists responded, a bit lamely, by
contending they were vague on some points only because Pons' employer,
the University of Utah, had applied for a patent that they had to
protect.
It was a plausible, although unsettling, explanation.
Certainly not the first time academic patent considerations obstructed
scientific progress. But it left a bad taste in the mouths of many. In
addition, some claimed Pons and Fleischmann made errors in their
measurements of the energy that went into and came out of their
cold-fusion cells.
One prominent physicist at Cal Tech derided Pons and
Fleischmann with invectives I had never before witnessed at a
scientific gathering. I later likened it, in my nationally broadcast
report, to the kind of trash talk one hears in the build up to a
heavyweight title fight.
But there were other voices. There was, for example, the
soft-spoken John Bockris. At the time, Bockris was a distinguished
professor of physical chemistry at Texas A&M University, and a
cofounder of the International Society for Electrochemistry. His name
was revered in the field.
By late 1989, Bockris had replicated the
Pons-Fleischmann cold-fusion work. So had another scientist I spoke
with, professor Bob Huggins, at Stanford University. "The reaction is
real," Huggins told me at the time. "It won't go away."
I filed three, maybe four, cold-fusion stories. Then the
counter-avalanche began. In a report in "Science" magazine in June
1990, writer Gary Taubes cast doubt on the accuracy of experiments
done in Bockris' lab and raised questions about the honesty of one of
Bockris' key associates. Others stepped forward to debunk the work
being done at Stanford and elsewhere. Taubes later wrote a book, "Bad
Science, The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion."
One by one, influential scientists, most of them
physicists on the federal dole, denounced cold fusion as being either
scientific idiocy or outright fraud. Ronald Parker, then director of
the physics department at MIT, called cold fusion "scientific
schlock." Another prominent scientist, Dr. John Maddox, then editor of
the prestigious journal "Nature," wrote an influential editorial
calling for a halt to funding for cold-fusion research.
Stung by criticism and the loss of support for their
work, Pons and Fleischmann drifted off into obscurity, eventually
immigrating to the south of France.
Despite the onslaught of negative reports, I wanted to
do more stories about cold fusion. It struck me even then that many of
the researchers I had interviewed seemed quite credible. Within one
year of the first announcement, there were already at least a dozen
well-respected scientists at major academic institutions who said they
too were observing what has since come to be called "anomalous heat"
in Pons-Fleischmann cells. These scientists wanted to know where that
heat was coming from. So did I.
Unfortunately, my colleagues on our public-radio
program's editorial staff had other ideas. By then, a consensus had
already emerged: cold fusion was junk science. I was too close to the
story, I was told. Find something else to report on. Don't make a damn
fool of yourself.
My experience wasn't unique. The big chill set in at
most major media outlets, and stories about cold fusion were frozen
out. Within a few short months, the very words "cold fusion" would
come to be synonymous with hoax. I kept my cold-fusion file tucked
away all these years, but never reported on the subject again.
Until now.
I know this sounds a little like the 1996 movie, "Chain
Reaction," where Keanu Reeves plays a brilliant scientist who nearly
gets killed by big oil operatives after he stumbles on a new energy
source. But Fleischmann, in a recent interview, one of very few
published lately, claims the primary reason cold fusion was nearly
killed in its crib was that its discovery didn't serve the interests
of major existing power structures -- be they Big Oil, Big Science, or
just Big Money.
Fortunately, those forces didn't stop the research team
at SRI who, with help from an informal network of more than 100 other
scientists in Europe and Asia, quietly pressed on with cold-fusion
experiments. One researcher, Andy Riley, even lost his life in a
hydrogen explosion in SRI's cold-fusion research lab. His colleague,
Dr. McKubre, was also injured in the blast. Cold-fusion experiments
were also helped along by the advent of the Internet, which
strengthened collaborations and information sharing between
cold-fusion researchers.
The work now being done on cold fusion is made even more
exciting by related findings confirming the presence of fusion
by-products in cold-fusion cells. It was the initial report of such
findings, incidentally, that led to the nearly decade long fraud
investigation of Professor Bockris and his colleagues at Texas A&M.
Bockris was eventually cleared, but only after considerable damage had
been done to his reputation.
As a result of the personal attacks on Pons,
Fleischmann, Bockris, and others, the atmosphere of free and open
inquiry that science requires was almost completely destroyed. Fearing
similar assaults, many scientists were afraid to study the phenomena
or discuss it publicly.
Even SRI's Dr. McKubre, whose experiments are supported
by taxpayer dollars, is reluctant to say exactly which agency is
sponsoring his work. "I don't want to jeopardize our funding," he
says. It's more than remarkable that a scientist, particularly one
associated with as venerable an institution as SRI, is unwilling to
talk about where he gets his money for fear nefarious forces will cut
him off at the pockets. There's something very wrong with that
picture.
Hot-fusion theorists, meanwhile, still don't take
cold-fusion claims seriously. The Department of Energy's website
offers up only a short, derisive dismissal of cold fusion.
Ten years ago, I concluded my last public-radio report
on cold fusion with an acknowledgment that nuclear fusion might not be
the only explanation for the excess heat observed in the
Pons-Fleischmann cells. "If it is not nuclear fusion," I closed, "then
the question remains: Exactly where is the excess heat coming from?"
Ten years later, we still don't know. Maybe this time
around, we might finally get some answers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Silicon Valley writer and broadcaster Hal Plotkin's
columns will continue to be published by SF Gate despite his
fascination with cold fusion.
by Hal Plotkin
Special to SF Gate
www.sfgate.com