Cold Fusion Gets Chilly Encore

Claims of cold fusion are no more convincing today than they were 15 years ago. That’s the conclusion of the Department of Energy’s fresh look at advances in extracting energy from low-energy nuclear reactions. A report released on 1 December 2004 echoes DOE’s 1989 study that followed the headline-making claims of cold fusion by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.

Since Pons and Fleischmann’s claims, cold fusion has fallen into disrepute among scientists, with only a few soldiering on under professional adversity. Most are funded by industry or various governments.

DOE revisited the topic at the behest of cold fusion researchers (see April 2004, page 27 ). The researchers submitted a 30-page document, “New Physical Effects in Metal Deuterides,” which DOE had peer-reviewed by 18 scientists, 9 of whom also attended a day of oral presentations by 6 cold fusion research groups.

Reviewers were split on whether the experimental evidence for excess power production is compelling. But, the report says, most reviewers, even those who accepted the evidence for excess power production, “stated that the effects are not repeatable, the magnitude of the effect has not increased in over a decade of work, and that many of the reported experiments were not well documented.”

Cold fusion researchers put a rosier spin on the report. “The greatest vindication for the cold fusion community was that, instead of being treated like cripples, lepers, and idiots, we were treated like normal scientists in the handling of this review,” says Michael McKubre, an electrochemist at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. “Just the fact of the review has heightened the level of discussion. There’s been a huge upswing in interest in funding cold fusion research.” Adds MIT theorist Peter Hagelstein, “A door has been opened by the reviewers. Whether anybody actually manages to go through it remains to be seen.”

The DOE report does not recommend setting aside government money for research into cold fusion. Rather, it identifies areas of research that “could be helpful in resolving some of the controversies in the field”—specifically, characterization of deuterated metals and the search for fusion in thin deuterated films—and recommends that agencies consider funding individual proposals in those areas. Considering individual proposals is nothing new, says Jim Decker, principal deputy director of DOE’s Office of Science. “We have always been receptive to research proposals. We make decisions on funding research proposals on the basis of peer review and relevance.”

DOE’s summary of the reviews can be downloaded from the Web at http://www.science.doe.gov/Sub/Newsroom/News_Releases/DOE-SC/2004/low_energy ; the reviewers’ individual reports are available at http://newenergytimes.com/DOE/DOE.htm .