Editorial comment

	Vol. 230 No.5
PERRY A. FISCHER, EDITOR

Cold fusion may have been hot after all

Actually, the only place that cold fusion cooled down was in the press, as a result of scientific dogma. Please understand though, I’m not using word “dogma” disparagingly. Dogma is a necessary evil, especially in science, to help root out errors and sometimes outright fraud.

Most would agree that cold fusion suffers from its namesake. It’s an oxymoron at best, and that name helped the orthodoxy declare it to be either a hoax or at the very least, bad science. Fusion is hot, never cold. However, to deflect the wrath of dogma, the new preferred name is Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions, or LENR. But some writers stubbornly still put the old term in their titles!

Cold fusion should not be confused with sonofusion (aka bubblefusion). Although this can also be done on a table top, it relies on a collapsing bubble, and it does reach minimal fusion temperatures (see World Oil, April 2002, pg. 27). While controversy about repeatability also surrounds sonofusion, for my money, there’s been enough repeatability, with the right particles detected, that it’s close to an accepted phenomenon. However, no one envisions it as being more than a research tool. But I digress.

LENR may well herald a new branch of science, one that is difficult to relate to and has no precedence. Normally, experimental science requires the researcher to meticulously document the experiment and send it to a colleague, who can then replicate it and its results with near 100% consistency. But LENR reverses that convention, and that is why the gargoyles of science—the protectors of the faith—adamantly and correctly balk at the notion that real science is occurring in LENR. And they are right. Well, sort of. We just don’t know.

Actor Dean Stockwell narrates a 40-min. movie (available on You Tube) called The War Against Cold Fusion (alternatively, Heavy Watergate). It’s marvelously attractive to leftists—or rightists, I don’t know, maybe goofists—but it clearly implies conspiracies involving Big Oil, Big Government, Big Science—you get the drift. And as weird as that is, it’s not a bad documentary, and it is true that science is highly competitive, and that Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishman (University of Utah) were too quick to announce their discovery in 1989, in part over patent concerns. In doing so, they announced that, in effect, “conventional” fusion now had a competitor; in other words, billions in federal research funds were now at stake.

Ironically, in hindsight, Pons and Fleishman probably did the right thing even though it destroyed their careers and their lives. They could have waited 20 years to make that announcement and, as it turns out, it still would have been too soon. Even more odd is the fact that, despite the terrible effect that the wretched term “cold fusion” had on the researchers (and later, the “movement”), it may well turn out to be the most correct descriptive term. And the dogmatists, who coined the derisive phrase “pathological science” to describe cold fusion research, are starting to look like pathological critics.

The “ridicule factor” cannot be overstated as a dampening agent both for funding and for finding willing researchers to risk their careers. As an analogy, take this conversation between to jet pilots:

[A saucer-shaped UFO flies between two F-22 jets going Mach 1.2. The UFO suddenly takes a position in front of the aircraft, pirouettes, and takes off at 90°.]

First pilot: “Wow! Did you see that?

Second pilot: “Unbelieveable! Yes, I did. Should we report it?”

First pilot: “Report what?”

What if, as time goes on, the experiment stays in the “barely repeatable“ category? Well, it could mean that we are seeing some sort of quantum effect, some probability that occurs at the molecular level that we haven’t seen before. It could also mean that this is a repeatable experiment, but we haven’t yet accounted for all the variables; and there could potentially be hundreds of them, some seemingly trivial. A favorite guess is that it’s something inconsistent in the palladium metal that causes the non repeatability. If there are two interrelated screwy variables (e.g., barometric pressure together with cosmic radiation or muons), it could take many years to unravel.

We now have thousands of experiments, a few percent of which report anomalous heat. Sometimes, the excess heat is small, but, rarely, it becomes very large, the chance of which seems to increase the longer the experiment is run. Recently there emerged evidence that some sort of nuclear reaction was taking place in these LENR experiments, only slightly modified from the original deuterium-palladium one done in 1989.

This March, three papers, one each from the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, Hokkaido University in Japan, and New Technologies Energy and Environment in Italy, were presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), all of which purported to detect evidence of nuclear reactions. Unlike most LENR papers, at least ACS is peer reviewed. It’s too early to tell how well they will hold up to scrutiny.

One thing has become clear: The number of people that would have to be deemed “badly mistaken” (or worse) has grown into the hundreds. By a combination of impeccable credentials, occasional overkill in measurement accuracy, meticulous design and control, the chance that at least one of these experiments produced bona fide results is approaching certainty. And that means there is something worthy of investigating.

On April 19, the American TV show 60 Minutes aired a segment on the resurgence of LENR. Its centerpiece was an internal memo leaked from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. It read, there is “...no doubt that anomalous excess heat is produced in these experiments.”

So does this mean that cold fusion will become more mainstream? Hopefully, yes. Or at least the ridicule of those who investigate it will stop. It’s time to de-UFO-acize this topic. And just maybe, much greater funding could be obtained for this wonderfully strange, poorly understood but potentially planet-changing energy source.

I could have titled this column, “We didn’t see it coming.” The road to a prosperous, abundant energy future is not a highway, rather, it is a white-knuckle, torturous mountain road with twists, dips and narrow spots; in the rear-view mirror you can see the road littered with black swans  

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