The Revenge of Cold Fusion

“The field has made a huge amount of progress,” says MIT theorist Peter Hagelstein. “In 1989, it was not clear if there was an excess heat effect or not. Over the years, it’s become clear there is one. It wasn’t clear if there was a low-level emission of nuclear products. Over the years it’s become clear that, yes, there is. In addition, other new effects have surfaced.”

“It’s either my good luck or my bad luck, but I discovered there was something worthy of pursuit,” says electrochemist Michael McKubre of SRI International. McKubre’s experiments are along the lines of Pons and Fleischmann’s–a palladium cathode at the center of a helical platinum anode in a solution of heavy water with lithium salt. An applied current dissociates the deuterium, and deuterons load into the palladium. The experiments take a couple of weeks and are tricky. You must load the palladium with sufficient concentrations of deuterons and increase the signal-to-noise ratio in heat and helium measurements. Then leave it alone. “The numbers are what you expect for two deuterons fusing to produce helium-4, with about 24 MeV per helium nucleus. There is a nuclear effect that produces useful levels of heat. I know it’s true.”

“With knowledge comes responsibility,” continues McKubre. “We know that this has economic implications and, potentially, security implications. The main application that cold fusion enthusiasts foresee following from their work is a clean source of energy; transmutation of nuclear waste and tritium production to augment weapons are also on their list. But, says McKubre, to solve “the various problems in scaling up the effect to make it more easily studied and potentially useful, we have to involve the scientific community.”

But while the DOE may be willing to review their work, most scientists remain very skeptical. “I look over the stuff that has come out, and it looks like the same old thing,” said physicist Bob Park of the University of Maryland at College Park. “Some people say they see extra energy, some say they don’t. I’m not optimistic they’re going to come up with more discoveries,” he told United Press International.

It has been said many times that, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Since 1989, cold fusion researchers claim that enough experimental evidence has accumulated to satisfy that burden of proof. Charles Beaudette, an MIT-trained engineer, wrote that, by 1996, there were multiple corroborations of excess heat being generated by means of electrochemical stimulation. Twenty researchers from seven countries had successfully replicated the original Fleischmann-Pons experiment. As detailed in the New Energy Times’ recent report on the state of cold fusion research, since 1989 almost 15,000 cold fusion experiments have been performed, and within the last several years, the effects claimed by Fleischmann and Pons have been reproduced at rates ranging between 83 and 100 percent. One well-known website on cold fusion, LENR-CANR.org, contains an on-line library of more than 280 original scientific papers, linked to a bibliography of nearly 3000 journal papers, news articles and books about cold fusion.

In 1991, Professor Wilford Hansen of Utah State University duplicated the results of the original Fleischmann Pons experiment.One cell had an excess heat output of 45 electron volts per palladium atom, another 1700, and a third 6,000 (the amount of energy released from the conventional electrochemical reaction is 4 eV). In 1990 and 1991, Michael McKubre observed anomalous power in three out of four cells. At Osaka University in Japan between 1991 and 1994, Professors Yoshiaki Arata and Yue-Chang Zhang achieved an excess heat output of 250 watts for 125 watts of input, a generation rate of 100 percent. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has also had success, as have Amoco Oil Corporation and Shell Research.

There are currently two working models by which anomalous power could be predicted. The first hypothesis identifies loading as the significant variable. In deuterium-palladium systems, excess heat will be observed if enough deuterium is loaded into the palladium lattice through the electrochemical process. In 51 percent of the experiments where maximum loading was achieved, excess heat was present. That percentage drops significantly when loading is reduced even slightly. The second hypothesis correlates excess heat with presence of nuclear residues. Excess heat originates in a nuclear effect exhibited by crystalline metals heavily loaded with deuterium. Repeated experiments show a correlation between heat and the presence of helium 4, a bi-product of nuclear fusion. This hypothesis predicts that where there is a strong output of helium-4, excess heat will be present in amounts up to 24 megavolts per palladium atom. What was actually observed was the presence of excess heat in amounts ranging from 19 and 45 megavolts per atom of palladium. Cold fusion seems to have finally achieved a hallmark of a true science–predictability.

As Technology Review reports, the growing body of evidence has convinced fusion physicist George Miley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that “there are important physical phenomena occurring.” Skeptics aren’t changing their minds, but he thinks that previously neutral observers are becoming more receptive to the possibility that a real phenomenon is occurring in these experiments.

For theorists like Hagelstein, the challenge is to fill the gap between traditional nuclear theory and cold fusion experiments. He suspects the difficulty lies with “a very powerful approximation” at the root of 70 years of nuclear physics–that all nuclear interactions occur between two particles in a vacuum. He thinks that assumption breaks down in cold fusion, where the interacting particles are tightly packed in a metal lattice. His idea is that the deuterium nuclei exchange vibrational energy, or “phonons,” with the surrounding palladium atoms. That exchange could enhance nuclear interactions that would otherwise be vanishingly small, so that the reactions can occur at the rates implied by cold fusion experiments. Hagelstein’s theory is still in development, but is reaching a point where he can start making testable predictions. “In time, hopefully, we’ll get more of the puzzle figured out,” he says.

So will cold fusion researchers finally be accepted into the wide open arms of the scientific community? Time will tell, but a positive review by the U.S. Department of Energy will no doubt provide significant validation to their work, as well as increasing some badly needed funding.