Cold Fusion Heating Up

Whether outraged or supportive about DOE's planned reevaluation of cold fusion, most scientists remain deeply skeptical that it's real.

Hot air? The cold fusion claims made in 1989 by B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann didn't hold up. But they did spawn a small and devoted coterie of researchers who continue to investigate the alleged effect. Cold fusion die-hards say their data from the intervening 15 years merit a reevaluation-- and a place at the table with mainstream science. Now they have the ear of the US Department of Energy.

"I have committed to doing a review" of cold fusion, says James Decker, deputy director of DOE's Office of Science. Late last year, he says, "some scientists came and talked to me and asked if we would do some kind of review on the research that has been done" since DOE's energy research advisory board (ERAB) looked at cold fusion nearly 15 years ago. "There may be some interesting science here," Decker says. "Whether or not it has applications to the energy business is clearly unknown at this point, but you need to sort out the science before you think about applications."

DOE is still working out the details, Decker says, but a review of cold fusion will begin in the next month or so and "won't take a long time--it's a matter of weeks or months."

Turning up the heat Last summer, after the 10th International Conference on Cold Fusion in Cambridge, Massachusetts, participants came away energized, says the conference's organizer, MIT theorist Peter Hagelstein. About 150 people attended the conference; the number of people working on cold fusion or, as some of them prefer to call it, low- energy nuclear reactions, is perhaps several hundred worldwide, most of them outside the US. Says Hagelstein, "Everyone was convinced things would start changing. The question on the table is, Can we establish to the satisfaction of the scientific community that there is science here?"

"The field has made a huge amount of progress," Hagelstein says. "In 1989, it was not clear if there was an excess heat effect or not. Over the years, it's become clear there is one. It wasn't clear if there was a low-level emission of nuclear products. Over the years it's become clear that, yes, there is. In addition, other new effects have surfaced."

"It's either my good luck or my bad luck, but I discovered there was something worthy of pursuit," says Michael McKubre, an electrochemist at SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, California. McKubre's experiments are along the lines of Pons and Fleischmann's. A typical setup consists of a palladium cathode at the center of a helical platinum anode in a solution of heavy water with lithium salt. An applied current dissociates the deuterium, and deuterons load into the palladium. Experiments take a couple of weeks and "leaving them to sit is where most of the tricks are," says McKubre. Among the tricks, he says, are loading the palladium with sufficient concentrations of deuterons and increasing the signal-to-noise ratio in heat and helium measurements. "The numbers are what you expect for two deuterons fusing to produce helium-4, with about 24 MeV per helium nucleus. There is a nuclear effect that produces useful levels of heat. I know it's true."

"With knowledge comes responsibility," continues McKubre. "We know that this has economic implications and, potentially, security implications. The main application that cold fusion enthusiasts foresee following from their work is a clean source of energy; transmutation of nuclear waste and tritium production to augment weapons are also on their list. But, says McKubre, to solve "the various problems in scaling up the effect to make it more easily studied and potentially useful, we have to involve the scientific community."

A lot of the work that followed the 1989 announcement was sloppy, no argument. However, you seem to have reached a common and simplistic conclusion about what has happened since. The way the announcement occurred was unfortunate, but forced by the U. of Utah administration, who feared being pre-empted by Steve Jones' rumored announcement of his muon catalyzed fusion. Fleischmann and Pons had not initially sought publicity at all. Fleischmann tried to get it classified, because of possible weapons implications. They worked from their own funds for a number of years (5?) before getting manipulated into going public. This the first time I have seen anyone label their work (as distinct from how it was revealed) as sloppy. Fleischmann in his prime was certainly among the world's most accomplished and prestigious electrochemists. Photos of their cells I have seen were beautifully constructed, using some some of Fleischmann's own innovations, and I have seen a lot of cells, and built a few. At the time of the 1989 press conference, there was no article in print, although one was planned for publication in Nature. That was canceled, and it took a long time for an article to finally appear, and it was scant on detail. No doubt, these mistakes contributed a lot to the firestorm of controversy. And most of the immediate attempts at replication showed no excess heat or neutrons (not surprising, most having used faxed transcripts of verbal descriptions or videotapes of news programs descriptions). Keep in mind that most of the attempting replicators were not electrochemists. A number of them, who then became spokesmen, because of their prestige, were physicists. Mallove has an audiotape of an interview conducted by some Boston newspaper reporters of some MIT hot fusion physicists. Their obvious ignorance of the experiments and experimenters in question (which did not inhibit attempted character assassination), and their prejudice were apparently propelled by fear of losing funding for their Tokomak research. They had never tried calorimetry, which is quite an undertaking in itself. Please note that I am not defending Mallove's magazine.

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of those first furtive months is that the experiments look so very simple, and there were many accounts circulating in various amateur media that claimed successes with absurd devices (still are). There was, I agree, plenty of reason to doubt seriously the claims. I was certainly convinced it was some kind of mistake, but I did read in 1989 an article about some theorist stating that a nuclear product of 4He was not outside the realm of possibility to explain the lack of neutrons. I stayed curious. Then I came upon an article written by Los Alamos National Lab's Edmund Storms in Technology Review with the same title as this string, and was introduced to what serious science was doing.

There was TX A&M Chemistry Chairman John O'M Bockris, another accomplished electrochemist. He soon confirmed Fleischmann's and Pons' claims of excess heat, and claimed to have found tritium, which created quite a stir. That attracted a character assassin Gary Taubes, who ginned up some story about how Bockris' assistant had spiked his cells with tritium to improve try and win his girlfriend back by becoming world famous. The story was utterly groundless, but received plenty of front-page newspaper treatment. The fact that the tritium was found in increasing concentration as one penetrated the cathode disproved any kind of spiking hypothesis, but the sophisticated media ignored that inconvenient fact. Taubes continues to be expert on virtually everything.

The point is that you recognize prejudice. We all recognize the potentially extreme value of real discovery, especially something like this. It is easy to see how a rush to judgment could have occurred in 1989. Indeed, the DoE can even see that in view of the accumulated evidence (3000+ peer reviewed papers published on cold fusion since 1989!), which has prompted their reevaluation. So, getting way back to my original point, don't you think that the scientists who are have invested a major portion of their elite careers investigating cold fusion against all kinds of intolerable conditions, and who constitute a number and quality that is said to be on par with the group who formed the core of the Manhattan Project, deserve consideration? Keep in mind that the academic and other political forces in place in 1989 are still active today. Cold fusioneers have some serious enemies. People have staked their serious reputations on their condemnation of cold fusion. You simply cannot go by professional opinions. You must examine the evidence.

The history of science does not tell us that the mainstream accepts radical findings, quite the contrary. Surely, if you are a professor, you are familiar with Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_. The mainstream find acceptable what can be supported by accepted institutions. Drastic changes do not happen easily.

This the first time I have seen anyone label their work (as distinct from how it was revealed) as sloppy. Fleischmann in his prime was certainly among the world's most accomplished and prestigious electrochemists. Photos of their cells I have seen were beautifully constructed, using some some of Fleischmann's own innovations, and I have seen a lot of cells, and built a few. At the time of the 1989 press conference, there was no article in print, although one was planned for publication in Nature. That was canceled, and it took a long time for an article to finally appear, and it was scant on detail.

I find it hard to believe you haven't heard it described as sloppy before. Apart from the neutron measurements, which we've been through, the calorimetry was widely criticized.

There was a preprint of theirs, submitted to J. Electrochemistry or some such, available right away. It may have been the most faxed preprint in history; the one I got looked like it was on its third iteration.

The point is that you recognize prejudice. We all recognize the potentially extreme value of real discovery, especially something like this. It is easy to see how a rush to judgment could have occurred in 1989. Indeed, the DoE can even see that in view of the accumulated evidence (3000+ peer reviewed papers published on cold fusion since 1989!), which has prompted their reevaluation.

Is it prejudice, though, to reject work on account of sloppiness?

So, getting way back to my original point, don't you think that the scientists who are have invested a major portion of their elite careers investigating cold fusion against all kinds of intolerable conditions, and who constitute a number and quality that is said to be on par with the group who formed the core of the Manhattan Project, deserve consideration?

This is the kind of statement that makes it hard for me to take you seriously. We have a J. Robert Oppenheimer, an Enrico Fermi or a Richard Feynman working on CF? Please!

The history of science does not tell us that the mainstream accepts radical findings, quite the contrary. Surely, if you are a professor, you are familiar with Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_. The mainstream find acceptable what can be supported by accepted institutions. Drastic changes do not happen easily.

I disagree with Kuhn. The revolution that was modern quantum mechanics took over the entire field in maybe two years. Einstein's work on relativity became widely accepted in five or ten years. The double helix was immediately and nearly universally accepted. Compare and contrast all of those with CF.

I don't have a dog in this hunt; though I do know a couple of very careful electrochemists who sneer at CF. This isn't a physics establishment vs. outsiders issue, though a lot of people want to pretend it is.

A replication cannot be a valid attempt if the workers do not start by immersing themselves in the context in which the original protocol is established. This just did not occur with CF.

Valid criticisms of Fleischmann and Pons early work existed because they were not ready for prime time. They did not have pre-prints available at the time of the announcement, which was a real violation of scientific ediquette. Initially, there was a lot of optimism from some well known scientific figures. 4/10/89 issue J. of Electrolytic Chemistry carried their first published article, which contained a number of errors. The pre-print of that probably had even more errors. Add a lot of noise from re-faxing, and you had a document that was a formula for frustration. The corrections published in a subsequent issue of the same journal only partially quelled the anger that boiled over at a press conference where it was apparent that many of the critics had not read the corrections. F & P made the mistake of making the experiment seem easy, but to them, immersed in the relevant techniques for so much of their careers, it was not that hard of an experiment.

It is understandable that in the furor over the many immediate failed replication attempts, that the work would be rejected in toto, particularly because of the lack of neutrons. However, an assessment of how the politics and publicity played into the events of 1989 gives pause to consider that such rejection might have been premature, as two Physics Nobelists, Schwinger and DoE Energy Research Advisory Board cochairman Norman Ramsey expressed. Ramsey actually threatened to resign from the board if their condemning conclusions against CF were not softened.

Quoting Mallove, "If scientists increasingly feel threatened by accusations of fraud, when they may have only committed honest error, all science suffers," then Mallove quoting Petsko, "What is needed is a decriminalization of error. Science often advances on the strength of theories that turn out to be incorrect, for a wrong hypothesis can produce many excellent experiments."

In this instance, it is prejudice to fail to reconsider, given what we now know about events of 1989 and the growth of supporting data.

Oppenheimer, Fermi and Feynman gained perhaps the majority of their renown because of the success of the Manhattan project. The comparison to the Manhattan Project is to counter the slander that there exists some tribe of ignorati who haven't gotten it yet that CF is dead. These researchers are highly qualified people making serious sacrifices in their career progress to pursue CF. They are many, and there are many who are sincerely interested, but remain anonymous.

The double helix had plenty of prior genetic underpinning. It fit very well into the existing paradigm. CF seems to shake the foundations of much received wisdom. The QM revolution followed on the heals of general relativity. The dominant physical paradigm had not had time to ankylose.

Look at what Wegener went through with his continental drift theory. Remember Lord Kelvin's opinion that heavier than air flight is impossible? Consider the fate of Semmelweis, correctly identifying surgeons hands as route of spread of puerperal infection. Yet, he could not influence his peers to examine the evidence. They continued to spread disease and death, eventually driving Semmelweis insane, because he knew he was right.

Debunking is a poor substitute for scientific arguments. Science is not defended with ignorance and unwanted knowledge is still knowledge.

So maybe physics is not ready for CF. Too bad. It's too imporant to leave to the physicists.

I respect your opinion, and regret that I cannot provide all the answers desired, but that is why the inquiry is so important.

A replication cannot be a valid attempt if the workers do not start by immersing themselves in the context in which the original protocol is established.

You lost me. This is science, not postmodernism. Experiments should be described so as to be replicable to the average worker in the field. We don't look for 'context'.

Oppenheimer, Fermi and Feynman gained perhaps the majority of their renown because of the success of the Manhattan project.

Nonsense. Feynman was a nobody after the Manhattan project. He won his fame later. Oppenheimer and Fermi are both better known for work done before or after the project.

With 15 years under their belt, the Nobel-quality researchers working on CF must surely have come up with some from of reproducible, optimized protocol by now, surely?....some sort of unambiguous demonstration that anyone can set up in his lab that will reliably and unequivocally show fusion is going on? I await the demonstration.

Even to a pre-modern cave man, all meaning is a matter of content and context. You need the context of alphabetical, grammatical, etc. knowledge to read this sentence. The sentence does not provide that information. While knowledge that can exist without the knower is the ideal of objectivity, it can only be attained when the knowledge is complete. CF is not there yet. Having a protocol on a piece of paper may be enough information for baking a cake, but experimental electrochemistry, like other specialties, has practices and techniques that are known mainly to the better students of the art. Those subtle differences in knowledge can be the difference between failure and success. Honestly, it has been a real frustration to all involved in CF that replication rates have been what they have been. A lot of that has to do with the fact that only rarely are two research teams attempting precisely the same experiment. However, researchers like Storms achieve very high success rates, and overall success rates have steadily improved, and are now quite respectable. Have you ever even tried to witness a working CF cell? Do you realize what is involved to really know that it is working?

Thomas Claytor, among his other fields of research at Los Alamos, has done a series of CF experiments spanning many years that show very high rates of reproducibility. The experiment involves analyzing the gas emitted from a palladium cathode glow discharge. If he uses platinum, he gets no tritium. If he uses palladium, he gets tritium. The trials where he does not get tritium with palladium are linked to contamination in the palladium. These are measured with scintillation and mass spectrometry simultaneously. As far as I know, no one has attempted independent replication. Interestingly, the management at LANL has expressed surprisingly little interest, after failure of the efforts to disprove his claims. The spirit of scientific inquiry is where? In the scientist, not the institution.

Dr. Melvin Miles, at the time, employed as an electrochemist for the US Naval Research Lab, was attempting replication of the Fleischmann Pons electrolytic experiment. His numerous attempts yielded no evidence of nuclear reactions. He wrote a paper and it was published in Physics Letters. Not long after publication, he discovered what he was doing wrong, and proceeded to achieve a long string of successful replications. He wrote another paper, describing his success. He could not get it published in the same journal. They wouldn't even publish his letter to the editor. There is a strong case to be made for institutional bias, based on ignorance, against any evidence to support claims for CF.

So my historical knowledge of the heroes of the Manhattan Project is flawed. If you asked a typical non-scientist what those three had in common, and you got a coherent answer, it would probably be the Manhattan Project. But, we are digressing with this trivia.

experimental electrochemistry, like other specialties, has practices and techniques that are known mainly to the better students of the art.

Thanks. Having working in research in chemistry for nearly 30 years, I always appreciate a nice lecture on the subject. I already have the opinion of my colleague in the lab next door, who's been researching in electrochemistry for maybe 20 years. Now I have the contrary opinion of some guy on the net. Oddly enough, my colleague thinks its a science, not an art, and I see no evidence his work cannot easily be reproduced.

Thomas Claytor, among his other fields of research at Los Alamos, has done a series of CF experiments spanning many years that show very high rates of reproducibility.

These are not electrochemical experiments; he's working with plasmas. If you read Claytor's paper, in fact, he says his experimental results contrast with electrochemical systems, which do not reproducibly generate tritium.

'Art' as I have used it in my string of posts had the meaning as in 'prior art,' mastery, finesse, creativity, etc. It does not have the same exact meaning as science, but lots of other words also do not have the same exact meaning as science, that can be used to accurately describe the subject of electrochemistry. Do those other words therefore indicate that electrochemistry is not a science? Of course not, you argument is absurd. It's purpose has nothing to do with establishing or denying scientific claims.

I have never recommended that anyone take my word for anything in this discussion. Quite the contrary, early on, and repeatedly, I have stated that this is not a forum for deciding on the validity of the claims. I have stated that what is called for is experts honestly debating the validity of the experimental results. Only a fool would believe someone on the web at face value, and I most certainly do not expect, as you insinuate, you to take my words as received wisdom.

What would happen, if the scientific process had not broken down, would be open discussion in major peer viewed journals. What has happened is marginalization of anyone who even shows an interest in the subject, and plenty of fallacious debating tactics in false arguments to attack a proponent for things like his weakness in knowledge concerning unrelated subjects. Where is the open debate on the issues, on the data, on the experiments? Ridicule has taken its place, for the most part. Is that the role you choose?

Perhaps you would like to call it something else, but Thomas Claytor calls his work, which I did initially correctly identify as a glow-discharge, (opposed to electrochemical system) cold fusion. See http://nde.lanl.gov/staff/claytor/claytor.htm

Claytor's work is remarkable in several respects, but particularly in its high rates of reproducibility, in contrast to most of the early electrolytic cold fusion experiments. Of course, this is a question of what one calls high rates of reproducibility. Storms and Talcott's electrolytic cells were producing tritium quite reliably early on. Your statement is irrelevant to the existence of CF. It only points out, as was pointed out on many occasions by many observers, that the work is not easy.

So, do you find Claytor's results credible? Is it not odd that nuclear fusion is occuring in a low-energy system?
Claytor's work can be seen at:
http://www.nde.lanl.gov/cf/tritweb.htm

Perhaps you could provide a reference to a Claytor paper you reference in which he contrasts his high reproducibility rate with that of electrolytic experiments. My guess is that it is an older paper.

With due respect, it looks to me as though you have a mindset that not only looks the gift horse in the mouth, but then proceeds to try and pull out whatever teeth are there. I am not trying to tell anyone to believe anything, except as they reasonably think they should. I am trying to persuade individuals to examine the evidence and see that there is a very good case for not just further investigation, but much more intensive investigation of CF. And it is up concerned individuals to demand a fair hearing. Government officials, left to their own devices, always choose political expedience.

Write CSPAN and demand that the DoE re-evaluation of CF be taped and aired, please. That does not make you a true believer. That makes you a responsible citizen, concerned that the government do the right thing. Capitalism cannot do its work unless the government allows it.

What has happened is marginalization of anyone who even shows an interest in the subject, and plenty of fallacious debating tactics in false arguments to attack a proponent for things like his weakness in knowledge concerning unrelated subjects.

So when you clain CF is a field populated by scientists of a caliber comparable to those in the Manhattan project, and it turns out you know very little about the scientists who worked the Manhattan project, that's irrelevant? How conveeen-ient! Maybe it would just be better if you didn't make outlandish claims in the first place, and then we won't have to argue whether their incorrectness has any relevance?

Your statement is irrelevant to the existence of CF.

Claytor's statement, not mine. In contrast to electrochemical hydrogen or deuterium loading of palladium, this method yields a reproducible tritium generation rate when various electrical and physical conditions are met.

Claytor also participated in a 'junk science' symposium recently, in which participants in other 'persecuted scientific topics', like alien abductions, Benveniste's discredited homeopathic research, creationism, and faith healing had what looks like a 'whine-in'. Miles was there too. This does not give their research legitimacy, in my eyes. If they're going to join their cause with the alien abduction crowd, why should I take them any more seriously than they themselves evidently do?

Once again, you manage to evade the issues and resort to ad hominem attacks. This is very typical for people who find reacting to new information a threatening prospect. Your ridicule disproves nothing.

Here's a quote from a very famous electrical engineer, the man who originated and patented the idea of using space based repeaters. Nowadays, we call them communications satellites. The man's name is Sir Arthur C. Clarke (he also wrote a few popular books).

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, his is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."

By choosing to slander the Society for Scientific Exploration, you merely display your disdain for what you do not wish to consider. That society is not promoting the ideas you ridicule. They investigate in a scientific manner, claims that may seem outlandish (like cold fusion). In my brief exposure to their work, papers are produced by persons with high academic standing that are as dry, methodical and conservative as any I see in traditional journals. The difference is the subject matter. Sometimes they find evidence to support claims, sometimes they do not. If Claytor decides to attend one of their conferences, it may be because he has come to realize that there are certain taboo areas of research, like cold fusion, which the established scientific community is not ready to consider. Perhaps his frustration has turned to curiosity about what else being scientifically investigated is being ignored.

Would you not agree that any subject matter can be studied scientifically, if only as a matter of the psychology of the claimants?

Well, there's a couple of ways to take that. One is that you don't know where to look for information. Try http://www.lenr-canr.org/

Another is that you disbelieve the reports from highly credentialed people (which is not so dumb, there's plenty of highly educated people who voted for Clinton).

Of course, the initial claims were made only 15 years ago, so unless you knew Fleischmann or Pons during their pre-famous days, it only seems like 20 years.

OK, suppose you have read and understood the claims and how credible they appear to be. But anybody can lie, right? The thing about scientists is that getting caught in a lie does not automatically lead to a promotion like in politics. It is a lot more dangerous for a scientist to get caught in an act of fraud. He can't just say it was just all about sex, so quit being such a prude.

I had a lot of serious doubts about the evidence for years, but it was always obvious that either the scientists were lying (which would take a lot of coordinated effort among people competing amongst each other -- possible, but very difficult, and for what kind of gain?), were experiencing synchronous hallucinations (which, by itself would be quite a phenomenon to study), knew what they were doing, but were making honest mistakes (which is a very real possibility, but over time, with improving results, this possibility diminishes), or they were correct. I vascillated a lot before I concluded that the evidence was sufficient to believe that many of the claims exceed my ability to detect falseness, so I accept them.

I repeat again. I don't think this forum can settle the scientific issues. I do think that our soldiers who are facing some pretty bleak hours in Iraq right now would like to know that we are doing whatever we can to end the need for them to be there. One thing that might do a lot toward defusing that volatile part of the world is to eliminate our dependence on oil from that region.

I hope you live long enough and look hard enough and think well enough to challenge enough claims well enough to reach your own solid conclusions. And I hope you'll share your ideas, because that is how meaningful discourse happens.

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