Cold Panacea
Two researchers proclaimed 20 years ago that they’d achieved cold fusion, the ultimate energy solution. The work went nowhere, but the hope remains.
It was like the cavalry had shown up.
Twenty years ago, newspapers and broadcasters burst with news from the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City delivering what seemed a miracle. Its name was cold fusion. Its lure was simple: inexhaustible, clean and affordable energy.
A news conference is not a very professional way to introduce scientists to a major development in a field they’ve never even heard of. But university officials, spooked by fear that a rival researcher at nearby Brigham Young University might have stolen the idea, unloaded it hurriedly for the TV cameras and reporters scribbling in notebooks. The university didn’t pussyfoot around. The confident opening of the March 23 press release was:
Two scientists have successfully created a sustained nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature in a chemistry laboratory at the University of Utah. The breakthrough means the world may someday rely on fusion for a clean virtually inexhaustible source of energy. Collaborators in the discovery are Dr. Martin Fleischmann, professor of electrochemistry at the University of Southampton, England, and Dr. B. Stanley Pons, professor of chemistry and chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah.
The press release lacked technical detail. A hint to why was toward the bottom. It declared that the university was filing for patents. It included the phone number and name of the university official in charge of arranging business deals.
The announcement came at a time ripe for such possibility. As it is today, energy policy then was an exercise in neurosis. Memories of the oil embargoes and shortages of the 1970s were fresh. Global warming was already a big worry among scientists, if not yet among politicians. Nuclear fission reactors were being canceled fast — scorned as expensive and perhaps dangerous. And to underscore fossil fuels’ pitfalls, the very next day after the announcement, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker plowed into a rocky shoal in Prince William Sound, Alaska, dumping 11 million gallons of Prudhoe Bay crude and fouling a teeming ecosystem.
Hordes of reporters covered both events, and dozens of newspaper articles about the promised new energy source appeared in the first few weeks of cold fusion delirium. Scientists pored over grainy TV video to try to mimic the Utah team’s apparatus.
Cold fusion’s balloon began leaking quickly as the great majority of independent groups found nothing to report, and could poke holes in the claims of others who did.
In November that year a Department of Energy review panel reported finding no evidence that Pons and Fleischmann’s claim had much to it. The DOE report cited experimental error, failure to replicate test results, no success at repeating the occasional episode of apparent anomalous heat and a trillionfold shortfall in the radiation that ought to result from true fusion. Some influential scientists labeled the whole thing as voodoo physics and as self-deluded, pathological science. Pons and Fleischmann slowly sunk out of sight. Pons seems to have left science altogether.
In 2004, a follow-up DOE panel reached the same conclusion: that the science was unconvincing.
Voodoo, or bolt from the blue