Credibility for cold fusion?

It looks like some influential people think cold fusion may have some
credibility.

U.S. Will Give Cold Fusion Second Look, After 15 Years
By KENNETH CHANG

Published: March 25, 2004

Cold fusion, briefly hailed as the silver-bullet solution to the
world's energy problems and since discarded to the same bin of
quackery as paranormal phenomena and perpetual motion machines, will
soon get a new hearing from Washington.

Despite being pushed to the fringes of physics, cold fusion has
continued to be worked on by a small group of scientists, and they
say their figures unambiguously verify the original report, that
energy can be generated simply by running an electrical current
through a jar of water.

Last fall, cold fusion scientists asked the Energy Department to
take a second look at the process, and last week, the department
agreed.

No public announcement was made. A British magazine, New Scientist,
first reported the news this week, and Dr. James F. Decker, deputy
director of the science office in the Energy Department, confirmed
it in an e-mail interview.

"It was my personal judgment that their request for a review was
reasonable," Dr. Decker said.

For advocates of cold fusion, the new review brings them to the cusp
of vindication after years of dismissive ridicule.

"I am absolutely delighted that the D.O.E. is finally going to do
the right thing," Dr. Eugene F. Mallove, editor of Infinite Energy
magazine, said. "There can be no other conclusion than a major new
window has opened on physics."

The research is too preliminary to determine whether cold fusion,
even if real, will live up to its initial billing as a cheap,
bountiful source of energy, said Dr. Peter Hagelstein, a professor
of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology who has been working on a theory to explain
how the process works. Experiments have generated small amounts of
energy, from a fraction of a watt to a few watts.

Still, Dr. Hagelstein added, "I definitely think it has potential
for commercial energy production."

Dr. Decker said the scientists, not yet chosen, would probably spend
a few days listening to presentations and then offer their thoughts
individually. The review panel will not conduct experiments, he said.

"What's on the table is a fairly straightforward question, is there
science here or not?" Dr. Hagelstein said. "Most fundamental to this
is to get the taint associated with the field hopefully removed."

Fusion, the process that powers the Sun, combines hydrogen atoms,
releasing energy as a byproduct. In March 1989, Drs. B. Stanley Pons
and Martin Fleischmann, two chemists at the University of Utah, said
they had generated fusion in a tabletop experiment using a jar of
heavy water, where the water molecules contain a heavier version of
hydrogen, deuterium, and two palladium electrodes. A current running
through the electrodes pulled deuterium atoms into the electrodes,
which somehow generated heat, the scientists said. Dr. Fleischmann
speculated that the heat was coming from fusion of the deuterium
atoms.

Other scientists trying to reproduce the seemingly simple experiment
found the effects fickle and inconsistent. Because cold fusion, if
real, cannot be explained by current theories, the inconsistent
results convinced most scientists that it had not occurred. The
signs of extra heat, critics said, were experimental mistakes or
generated by the current or, perhaps, chemical reactions in the
water, but not fusion.

Critics also pointed out that to produce the amount of heat
reported, conventional fusion reactions would throw out lethal
amounts of radiation, and they argued that the continued health of
Drs. Pons and Fleischmann, as well as other experimenters, was proof
that no fusion occurred.

Some cold fusion scientists now say they can produce as much as two
to three times more energy than in the electric current. The results
are also more reproducible, they say. They add that they have
definitely seen fusion byproducts, particularly helium in quantities
proportional to the heat generated.

After a conference in August, Dr. Hagelstein wrote to Energy
Secretary Spencer Abraham, asking for a meeting. Dr. Hagelstein; Dr.
Michael McKubre of SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif.; and Dr.
David J. Nagel of George Washington University met Dr. Decker on
Nov. 6.

"They presented some data and asked for a review of the scientific
research that has been conducted," Dr. Decker said. "The scientists
who came to see me are from excellent scientific institutions and
have excellent credentials."

Scientists working on conventional fusion said cold fusion research
had fallen off their radar screens.

"I'm surprised," Dr. Stewart C. Prager, a professor of physics at
the University of Wisconsin, said. "I thought most of the cold
fusion effort had phased out. I'm just not aware of any physics
results that motivated this."
Received on Fri Mar 26 10:38:52 2004