Cold, but not Fusion [View all]

[n2doc]

by Mark Anderson

In 1989 Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann made a sensational claim that would have changed the world—had it been true. They said they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature using a simple tabletop device, thus creating a revolutionary clean energy source they called “cold fusion.”

Unfortunately for the University of Utah chemists, multiple attempts to replicate their experiment over ensuing months failed. Cold fusion was considered debunked, and it has lived beyond the fringe of mainstream science ever since.

Yet quietly, more than 20 years later, two of the world’s largest mainstream scientific institutions—NASA and the European physics research center CERN—have revisited the controversial energy-generating experiment. A growing cadre of scientists now suspect that Pons and Fleischmann’s observations were the result not of fusion but of more plausible physical processes. Some are even cautiously optimistic that those processes could be exploited to generate abundant amounts of clean energy. “There’s enough evidence that says we need to look at this,” says Joseph Zawodny, a physicist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.

The man most responsible for the change of thinking is a technology and energy consultant with a background in physics named Lewis Larsen. In 1989 he was paying attention when Pons and Fleischmann described how a set of palladium rods, connected to an electric current and immersed in lithium-enriched water, churned out more energy in the form of heat than it received in electricity. He followed along as subsequent experiments achieved mixed results. Some seemed to produce a lot of heat, others little or none. Yet a nagging question persisted: If the contraptions really were putting out more energy than they took in, what could be responsible?

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http://discovermagazine.com/2012/nov/27-big-idea-bring-back-the-cold-fusion-dream/