Reply #14: Warming Up to Cold Fusion (WP Nov 04)

[struggle4progress]

Peter Hagelstein is trying to revive hope for a future of clean, inexhaustible, inexpensive energy. Fifteen years after the scientific embarrassment of the century, is this the beginning of something?

By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page W22

<snip> If it worked, cold fusion could supply the country's energy needs, with no more smog, no more nuclear waste, no more depending on other countries for oil. For a brief moment, an energy revolution seemed on the horizon.

But when many laboratories tried and failed to reproduce the Utah results, scientists began to line up against cold fusion. Less than a year after the announcement, a DOE review found that none of the experiments had demonstrated convincing evidence of cold fusion. <snip>

Normally, nuclear fusion occurs in the sun or in thermonuclear weapons, where intense heat and pressure allow the nuclei of atoms to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse, producing an astounding amount of energy. But fusion takes place at temperatures equivalent to those of the sun -- millions of degrees. So imagine the staggering advance cold fusion would represent, if real. It would mean that fusion could occur at room temperature, potentially making energy production cheap and easy. But even among cold fusion proponents, there is no accepted theory of how this could happen -- one reason why mainstream science has never taken cold fusion seriously. <snip>

Most nuclear physicists are even more pessimistic about cold fusion. Richard Garwin, 76, is a fellow emeritus at IBM's Watson Research Center and a member of the Jasons. He was on the original DOE review panel, and as a young man did critical design work for Teller's hydrogen bomb. His annoyance with cold fusion is based on visits to various labs. What he finds, in some, are basic mistakes, and in others, the potential for mistakes. "People who can't do a good sophomore experiment are suddenly free to suggest that the discrepancies in their results come from unexplained, basic, earth-shaking, heat-producing phenomena," Garwin gripes in an e-mail about one French lab he visited in 2002. <snip>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54964-2004Nov16.html


If there were any credible experimental evidence, you can bet labs would be racing each other for the Nobel Prize. And if any theoreticians could imagine a mechanism for "cold fusion," they'd be knocking each other down to produce estimates for cosmological signatures that the astrophysicists could use. But there's not much evidence and there's no real theory.

If there's really a session on cold fusion at the March APS meeting, perhaps an informed DUer could eventually report back.