Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons created enormous excitement on March 23, 1989 when they held a news conference in Salt Lake City, Utah to announce they had created a new energy source.
The two electrochemists said they had observed cold nuclear fusion in a glass jar. If their claim was borne out by other experimenters the two men would have become fabulously rich, won Nobel Prizes, and been turned into the superstars of science.
At physicsworld.com physics writer David Voss tells the story of how others tried to copy what Fleischmann and Pons claimed to have done.
“In the rush to duplicate the cold-fusion results, chemists began attempting nuclear physics, and physicists tried to be electrochemists. In the months that followed many labs rushed into experiments, and hastily announced confirmation of cold fusion before they had carried out adequate controls.”
Alas, when serious investigation took place the Fleischmann and Pons experiment could not be reproduced.
Fusion Happens in Stars and Hydrogen Bombs
Fusion is what happens in the Sun. It involves the colliding of small atomic nuclei together to form larger ones. In the process huge amounts of energy are created. But, when positively charged nuclei meet up their natural inclination is to repel one another. To make them fuse, temperatures measured in millions of degrees are needed.
If the fusion process could be achieved without the need for heat, a virtually limitless energy source would be created. However, as The Economist reported on the 20th anniversary of the Fleischmann and Pons announcement, cold fusion, “has been cold-shouldered by most scientists. Funding has dried up. What research there is, is conducted outside mainstream laboratories.”
Low-energy Nuclear Reactions
The people still tinkering with cold fusion have buried the original description of it. “Cold fusion” became so associated with junk science that the process is now referred to as “low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR).”
Most physicists say cold fusion is impossible; Dr. Pamela Boss begs to disagree with majority opinion. She joined other LENR researchers in presenting their latest findings at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in March 2009.
Dr. Boss works for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Centre in San Diego, California. She says she has produced cold fusion by placing electrodes in an electrolyte made up of heavy water, which contains deuterium.
The Economist (March 28, 2009) explained her work further: “Dr. Boss and her colleagues reported that one of the electrodes in their experiment got hot, an effect they attribute to fusion.
Most researchers in the field, though, do not accept that heat is sufficient evidence of fusion (if only because it was the basis of the Pons/Fleischmann claim).”
Dr. Boss says her team has proven that fusion has taken place by tracking neutrons coming off the experiment in a plastic called CR-39.
No Proof of Cold Fusion
Frank Close remains unimpressed by the research. He is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oxford, and he says the experiments have not been independently verified.
According to a BBC News (March 23, 2009) story, “Cold Fusion Debate Heats up Again,” Professor Close said “that many inexplicable phenomena have arisen in the 20 years since Pons and Fleischmann’s announcement that have been tagged with the ‘cold fusion’ moniker.
‘If I come up with a weird phenomenon and call it cold fusion, I know that reporters will be interested. Convincing the scientific community is another matter entirely.’ ”
