Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (78 page)

Despite the experimental difficulties it was not long before confirmations were reported. First were Texas A & M University, who reported excess energy, and Brigham Young University who found both excess heat and measurable neutron flow. Professor Steve Jones of BYU said his team had actually been producing similar results since 1985, but that the power outputs obtained had been microscopically small, too small in fact to be useful as a power source.

One month after the announcement the first support from a major research institute came when professor Robert Huggins of California's Stanford University said that he had duplicated the Fleischmann-Pons cell against a control cell containing ordinary water, and had obtained 50 percent more energy as heat from the fusion cell than was put in as electricity. Huggins gained extra column-inches because he had placed his two reaction vessels in a red plastic picnic cool-box to keep their temperature constant. This kitchen-table flavor to the experiment added even further to the growing discomfort of hot fusion experts, with their billion-dollar research machines.

By the time the American Chemical Association held its annual meeting in Dallas in April 1989, Pons was able to present considerable detail of the experiment to his fellow chemists. The power output from the cell was more than 60 watts per cubic centimeter in the palladium. This is approaching the sort of power output of the fuel rods in a conventional nuclear fission reactor. After the cell had operated from batteries for ten hours producing several watts of power, Pons detected gamma rays with the sort of energy one would expect from gamma radiation produced by fusion. When he turned off the power, the gamma rays stopped too. Pons also told delegates that he had found tritium in the cell, another important sign of fusion taking place.

Pons estimated that the cell gave off 10,000 neutrons per second. This is many times greater than the rate of background level of natural radioactivity, but is still millions or billions of times less than the rate of neutron emission that one would expect from a fusion reaction—a puzzle which Fleischmann and Pons acknowledge as a stumbling block to acceptance of their phenomenon as fusion by any conventional process.

However, despite the reservations, the assembled chemists were ecstatic that two of their number had apparently scooped their traditional rivals from the world of physics, and had, in the words of the American Chemical Society's president, "come to the rescue of fusion physicists."

This was perhaps the high-water mark of cold fusion. Scores of organisations over the world were actively working to replicate cold fusion in their laboratories, and although many reported difficulties a decent number reported success. And by the end of April, Fleishmann and Pons were standing before the U.S. House Science, Space and Technology committee asking for a cool $25 million to fund a centre for cold fusion research at Utah University.

Then things began to go wrong. First, some of the researchers who early on announced confirmation of cold fusion now recanted, citing faulty equipment or measurements. Next, an unnamed spokesman for the Harwell research laboratory—the home of institutional nuclear research in Britain—spoke to the Daily Telegraph saying that:

... we have not yet had the slightest repetition of the results claimed by professors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. Of the other laboratories around the world who have tried to replicate the PonsFleischmnnn result, all but one have recanted, admitting that either their equipment or their measurements were faulty.

We believe our experiments are much more careful than those conducted by others. Perhaps for that reason we have been unable to observe any more energy coming out of the experiment than was put in.

And by the time the American Physical Society had its annual meeting in Baltimore in May, the opponents of cold fusion were gathering strength. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist from the University of California at Santa Barbara, received rapturous applause from the physicists when he declared, "We are suffering from the incompetence and perhaps delusion of doctors Pons and Fleischmann."

It was, however, a chemist, Dr. Nathan Lewis of the California Institute of Technology, who got the loudest applause. Lewis told the delegates that after exhaustive attempts to duplicate cold fusion, they had found no signs of unusually high heat. Nor did they detect neutrons, tritium, gamma rays or helium.

By late May, the headlines in both the popular press and the scientific press were beginning to carry words like "flawed idea" when the biggest blow of all hit supporters of cold fusion. Dr. Richard Petrasso of the Plasma Fusion Center of the ultra-prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented the results of a series of intensive investigations into the Fleischmann-Pons experiment. The fundamental data put forward by the two men, said Petrasso, was probably a "glitch." The entire gamma ray signal in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment, he said, might not have occurred at all.

"We can offer no plausible explanation for the feature other than it is possibly an instrumental artefact with no relation to gamma ray interaction," he told the same reporters who had clustered around Fleischmann and Pons only two months earlier.

Dr. Ronald Parker, director of MIT's Plasma Fusion Center, said: "We're asserting that their neutron emission was below what they thought it was, including the possibility that it could have been none at all."

Thus within two months of its original announcement, cold fusion had been dealt a fatal blow by two of the world's most prestigious nuclear research centres, each receiving millions of pounds a year to fund atomic research. The measure of MIT's success in killing off cold fusion is that still today, the U.S. Department of Energy refuses to fund any research into it while the U.S. Patent Office relies on the MIT report to refuse any patents based on or relating to cold fusion processes even though hundreds have been submitted.

If Dr. Parker had left his statement there, it is likely that the world would never have heard of cold fusion again—or not until a new generation of scientists came along. But having been so successful at discrediting MIT's embryonic rival, he decided to go even further and openly accuse Fleischmann and Pons of possible scientific fraud.

According to Dr. Eugene Mallove, who worked as chief science writer in MIT's press office, Parker arranged to plant a story with the Boston Herald attacking Pons and Fleischmann. The story contained accusations of possible fraud and "scientific schlock" and caused a considerable fuss in the usually sedate east-coast city. When Parker saw his accusations in cold print and the stir they had caused he backtracked and instructed MIT's press office to issue a press release accusing the journalist who wrote the story, Nick Tate, of misreporting him and denying that he had ever suggested fraud. Unfortunately for Parker, Tate was able to produce his transcripts of the interview which showed that Parker had used the word "fraud" on a number of occasions.

It then began to become apparent to those inside MIT that the research report that Parker and Petrasso had disclosed to the press in such detail was not quite what it seemed; that some of those in charge at MIT's Plasma Fusion Center had embarked on a deliberate policy of ridiculing cold fusion and that they had—almost incredibly—fudged the results of their own research.

The MIT study announced by Parker and Petrasso contained two sets of graphs. The first showed the result of a duplicate of the FleischmannPons cell and did, indeed, show inexplicable amounts of heat greater than the electrical energy input. The second set were of a control experiment that used exactly the same type of electrodes, but placed in ordinary "light" water—essentially no different from tap water. The result, for the control cell should have been zero—if cold fusion is possible at all, it is conceivable in a jar full of deuterium, but not in a jar of tap water. Any activity here, according to current theory, would simply indicate some kind of chemical, not nuclear, process.

But the MIT results for the control showed exactly the same curve as that of the fusion cell. It was the identical nature of the two sets of results that depicted so graphically to the press and scientific community the baseless nature of the Fleischmann-Pons claim and that justified MIT's statement that it had "failed to reproduce" those claims. It was these figures that were subsequently used by the Department of Energy to refuse funding for cold fusion and by the U.S. Patent Office to refuse patent applications. And it is these figures that are used around the world to silence supporters of cold fusion.

But MIT insiders, such as Dr. Eugene Mallove, were deeply suspicious of the published results. It is usual for experimental data to be manipulated, usually by computer, to compensate for known factors.

No one would have been surprised to learn that MIT had carried out legitimate "data reduction." But what they had done was selectively to shift the data obtained from the control experiment, the tap water cell, so that it appeared to be identical to the output from the fusion cell.

When this fudging of the figures became public, MIT came under fire from many directions, including members of its own staff. Eugene Mallove announced his resignation at a public meeting and submitted a letter to MIT accusing them of publishing fudged experimental findings simply to condemn cold fusion. A number of critical papers were published in scientific journals culminating in the paper published by Fusion Facts in August 1997 by Dr. Mitchell Swartz in which he concluded,

What constitutes "data reduction" is sometimes but not always open to scientific debate. The application of a low pass filter to an electrical signal or the cutting in half of a hologram properly constitute "data reduction" but the asymmetric shifting of one curve of a paired set is probably not. The removal of the entire steady state signal is also not classical "data reduction."

In the restrained and diplomatic language of scientific publications this is as close as anyone ever gets to accusing a colleague of outright fiddling of the figures to make them prove the desired conclusion.

Beleaguered and under fire from every quarter (except the other big hot fusion laboratories who simply became invisible and inaudible) MIT backed down. It added a carefully worded technical appendix to the original study discussing the finer points of error analysis in calorimetry.* It also amended its earlier finding of "unable to reproduce FleischmannPons" to "too insensitive to confirm"—a rather different kettle of fish.

Although MIT changed its story, it was its original conclusion that stuck, both in the public memory and as far as public policy was concerned. The coup de grace was delivered to cold fusion when the U.S. House committee formed to examine the claims for cold fusion came down on the side of the skeptics. "Evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process termed cold fusion is not persuasive," said its report. "No special programmes to establish cold fusion research centers or to support new efforts to find cold fusion are justified."

Just where does cold fusion stand four years after the original announcement? The position today is that cold fusion has been experimentally reproduced and measured by ninety-two groups in ten countries around the world. Dr. Michael McKubre and his team at Stanford Research Institute say they have confirmed Fleishmann-Pons and indeed say they can now produce excess heat experimentally at will. Many other

*Measurementofthe amountofheatabsorbedorreleasedinachemicalreaction. major universities and commercial organisations have also confirmed the reality of cold fusion. U.S. laboratories reporting positive results include the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (these were the two U.S. research establishments most closely involved in developing the atomic bomb), Naval Research Laboratory, Naval Weapons Center at China Lake, Naval Ocean Systems Center and Texas A & M University. Dr. Robert Bush and his colleagues at California Polytechnic Institute have recorded the highest levels of power density for cold fusion, with almost three kilowatts per cubic centimetre. This is thirty times greater than the power density of fuel rods in a typical nuclear fission reactor. Overseas organisations include Japan's Hokkaido National University, Osaka National University, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, which has announced that its three-year research programme has "undoubtedly" produced direct evidence of cold fusion. Fleishmann and Pons are working for the Japanese-backed Technova Corporation, a commerical cold fusion company based in France. Eugene Mallove left MIT to become editor of Cold Fusion magazine.

The Japanese government, through the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) has announced a five-year plan to invest $25 million in cold fusion research. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in California has spent some $6 million on cold fusion already and budgeted $12 million for 1992. In addition, a consortium of five major US utility companies have committed some $25 million for EPRI research.

Some of these research funds are being spent not only on developing a large-scale reactor vessel for use in public utilities but also, because of the inherent simplicity and relative safety of cold fusion, the development of a cheap miniature version for use in the office and even in the home. Even as Harwell and MIT proclaim their impossibility, prototype ten kilowatt cold fusion heating devices are already under test and are likely to find their way to market in the near future.

It is not only the organizations with a vested interest that come out badly from the story of cold fusion. The press, especially the scientific press, has acquitted itself poorly. Nature magazine showed how reactionary it can be with coverage that ranged from knee-jerk hostile to near hysterical. Its most intemperate piece was an editorial column in March 1990 headlined "Farewell (not fond) to Cold Fusion," which described cold fusion as "discreditable to the scientific community," "a shabby example for the young," and "a serious perversion of the process of science."