Cold Fusion
Cold fusion is the proposition that nuclear reactions can be made to occur at or near room temperature, without the extreme temperatures and pressures that conventional nuclear physics holds to be necessary. Since the 1990s the field has more often been called LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions) or condensed matter nuclear science, partly to escape the reputation the original term acquired.
It is one of the largest subjects on this wiki: the Cold Fusion category holds over 150 papers, and the field overlaps heavily with New Energy.
The 1989 announcement and its aftermath
On 23 March 1989 Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah announced at a press conference that electrolysis of heavy water with a palladium cathode had produced more heat than the electrical energy supplied, and that the excess was nuclear in origin.
The claim collapsed in public within months. Prominent replication attempts at Caltech, MIT and Harwell reported no excess heat; the neutron and gamma fluxes that deuterium–deuterium fusion at the claimed rate would produce were not observed at anything approaching the required levels; and the announcement-by-press-conference, ahead of peer review, drew heavy criticism. A US Department of Energy review later that year declined to recommend a dedicated programme, and a second review in 2004 reached a similar conclusion while acknowledging that some questions remained open.
The episode became the standard modern textbook example of pathological science, and the term "cold fusion" itself became a byword for the phenomenon.
Continuing work
Research nevertheless continued, and it is that continuing work which this wiki documents. It falls into several strands:
- Excess-heat calorimetry — the original claim, pursued with progressively more careful thermal measurement. Edmund Storms and Michael McKubre are among the most-cited experimenters.
- Transmutation and ash — searches for reaction products (helium-4 in particular, correlated with heat) rather than for the neutron flux whose absence sank the original claim. Yoshiaki Arata's gas-loading work belongs here.
- Gas loading, glow discharge and nanoparticle systems — moving away from electrolysis to other ways of loading hydrogen or deuterium into a metal lattice.
- Theory — attempts to explain how a lattice could screen the Coulomb barrier, or how energy could couple to the lattice rather than appearing as energetic particles. Hideo Kozima's trapped-neutron catalysed fusion model, Peter L Hagelstein's phonon-coupling work, and the lattice-confinement proposals of Talbot A Chubb and Scott R Chubb are represented on this wiki.
- Hydrino and sub-ground-state chemistry — Randell L Mills's claim that hydrogen can occupy states below the conventional ground state is a separate proposition often catalogued alongside cold fusion, and is disputed within this community as well as outside it.
Hal Fox edited Fusion Facts and later New Energy News, and Jed Rothwell has maintained the field's bibliographic archive; Infinite Energy magazine, founded by Eugene Mallove, has been its principal general-readership venue.
Assessment
The scientific objection has not changed since 1989 and should be stated plainly. Deuterium–deuterium fusion at rates sufficient to produce the claimed heat would produce neutrons, tritium and gamma radiation in quantities that are straightforward to detect and that have not been reliably observed. A mechanism that suppresses those branches while permitting the reaction is not merely unknown; it is not obviously consistent with what is known about nuclear reaction kinetics. Positive results have been heavily dependent on specific materials and preparation, and independent replication has remained the field's central unsolved problem — a point made repeatedly from inside the community as well as outside it.
Readers should note that this wiki's own New Energy material contains some of the sharpest criticism available. Jed Rothwell is quoted in New Energy News observing that "none of these devices has ever been independently replicated or verified", and Patrick G Bailey's papers on measurement error in AC power devices — showing apparent over-unity results arising from power-factor artefacts — are directed at claims made within the same community.
The counter-argument advanced here is that the 1989 rejection was premature and institutionally rather than experimentally driven; that the field was abandoned before the material science was understood well enough to make replication reliable; and that the accumulated heat-and-helium correlation deserves examination on its merits. Whether that is right is an empirical question that further careful calorimetry could in principle settle.
See also
- Category:Cold Fusion — over 150 papers on this wiki
- Category:New Energy
- Martin Fleischmann, Stanley Pons, Edmund Storms, Hideo Kozima
- Infinite Energy