Interview: Fusion in a cold climate

Martin Fleischmann: … ‘if we cannot get fusion of some sort to work on a large scale soon, we’re doomed’

Martin Fleischmann can still remember the morning he entered his lab and saw the terrific hole in the workbench. It was about the size of a dinner plate. Beneath, nestled in a shallow crater in the concrete floor, were the remains of a chemistry experiment that had been fizzing idly for several months without incident. “It had obliterated itself!” he recalls.

…During the years following 1989, a number of researchers shrugged off scepticism about cold fusion and persevered with the field. As the numbers of reports of excess heat ran into the hundreds, scientists uncovered possible reasons why the major labs failed to get positive results, such as insufficient “loading” of deuterium in the electrodes. Patchy evidence also accumulated for several different by-products such as tritium, neutrons, helium-4, gamma rays and X-rays, which hint at a fusion reaction.

Sceptics say such measurements have been badly executed, and any positive results are probably artefacts. However, this year, on the 20th anniversary of Pons and Fleischmann’s press conference, a group at US military company SPAWAR in San Diego, California, announced persuasive evidence for high-energy neutrons ejected during the fusion of a deuterium and tritium atom in an electrode, using the same detectors developed for hot fusion (New Scientist, 28 March, p 10). Then in April, Robert Duncan, an expert in instrumentation and measurement at the University of Missouri in Columbia, appeared on US news programme 60 Minutes, having spent months visiting cold-fusion labs and crunching data for himself. Duncan, who had previously felt cold fusion was “junk science”, concluded that the excess heat is “quite real”.

New Scientist