Cold-fusion believers work on, even as mainstream science gives them the cold shoulder. by Ted McDonough
Inside his small brick Salt Lake City home, a stone’s throw from an LDS
church building and hidden from the street by an overgrown yard,
Billings Brown prepares the largest cold-fusion experiment ever
attempted—or so he believes. If it works, the experiment will destroy
his living room and dust Billings and his son, Tom, with deadly
radiation.
Brown, a retired rocket scientist in his 80s, thinks he’s figured
out the secret to cold fusion 16 years after University of Utah
professor Stanley Pons and his mentor, Martin Fleischmann, shook the
world by announcing they had harnessed in a test tube the energy-producing engine of the sun.
Eight months after their 1989 announcement, Pons and Fleischmann
were laughed out of polite academic society, dismissed as delusional or
quacks. Two years later, after an embarrassed Utah Legislature spent $5
million on aborted cold-fusion research and the university’s president
had resigned, Pons and Fleischmann rode out of town on a rail, choosing
self-imposed exile in France. After hogging global news headlines for a
few months, Time magazine named cold fusion one of the worst
ideas of the century, along with aerosol cheese. After the ridicule, it
disappeared into obscurity.
But cold fusion never died. In the years since 1989, a few obstinate
scientists soldiered on under the upturned noses of their peers.
Titillated by the possibility of a vast source of new energy,
U.S. government weapons makers and giant Japanese industrial groups
quietly siphoned money into further study of a dismissed idea.
Underground Science
Forced underground, cold fusion has since become a cult, complete
with its own cheerleaders, magazines, hats and coffee mugs, along with
a regular academic conference to which few but the cold fusionists
themselves pay any attention. Some cold-fusion researchers have become
conspiracy buffs, sure that Dick Cheney and big oil are thwarting their
efforts. One current story alleges that fossil-fuel forces killed off
cold fusion’s greatest champion, Infinite Energy magazine editor Eugene Mallove, who was murdered last year during an apparent robbery.
Successors to Pons and Fleischmann have invented all sorts of new
ways to conduct the Utah experiment: balls filled with gas, sound waves
that create mysteriously glowing bubbles in water. They don’t yet have
what Pons predicted was possible more than a decade ago—a cold-fusion
water heater strong enough to make a nice cup of tea—but their halting
and sporadic results continue to suggest the disgraced Utah chemist may
have been on to something.
With oil prices climbing, predictions of an oil shortage mounting
and oil politics anchoring the U.S. military in the mire of the Middle
East, the possibility of cold fusion means this science won’t die
anytime soon.
“We’re nearing the end of the fossil-fuel era. We’ve got to find
something else,” said Brown. “I do think there is energy locked up in
the [cold-fusion] system that can be gotten out. I’m not sure I know
how, but I’ll give it the old college try.”
But is this just wishful thinking? Science requires that experiments
be repeatable; nuclear science requires the release of radiation. Cold
fusion failed both tests 16 years ago. Today’s cold fusionists say
they’ve found radioactivity and can make cold fusion happen at the drop
of a hat but complain the early debacle at the University of Utah so
prejudiced scientific attitudes that no one takes their results
seriously.
The science has succeeded in interesting and dividing a panel of U.S. Department of Energy
experts. Late last year, a DOE panel released a new review of cold
fusion, recommending that “funding agencies should entertain individual
well-designed proposals for experiments.”
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