Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [60]
Held in September 2006 on the outskirts of Washington, DC, the Conference on Future Energy was a celebration of sorts. Its convener, Thomas Valone, had recently won a long legal battle with his employer, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Valone was a patent examiner who had, in his view, been fired for his belief in cold fusion. A year after being reinstated in his job (with back pay), Valone called a gathering of researchers together to, once again, explore the future of energy: a future that includes cold fusion.
Cold fusion had burst upon the world nearly two decades earlier and had long since been discredited by the mainstream scientific community. Yet today it still has a strong following, a core of true believers who think it will help humanity unleash unlimited power from fusing atoms. Plenty of reporters, government officials, and even scientists remain under its spell. The dream of unlimited energy through cold fusion is so powerful that for almost twenty years the faithful have been willing to risk ridicule and isolation to follow it.
The biggest scientific scandal of the twentieth century began on March 23, 1989. Two chemists at the University of Utah, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, told the world that they had tamed the power of fusion energy at room temperature, bottling up a miniature star in a little hunk of metal. The university’s press release was full of enthusiasm:
SALT LAKE CITY—Two scientists have successfully created a sustained nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature in a chemistry laboratory at the University of Utah. The breakthrough means the world may someday rely on fusion for a clean, virtually inexhaustible source of energy.
At the press conference, the president of the university, Chase Peterson, pronounced that the scientists’ discovery “ranks right up there with fire, with cultivation of plants, and with electricity.” Yet such a monumental achievement came in a small and homely package. When Pons and Fleischmann displayed slides of their “reactor,” goggle-eyed reporters were stunned. The apparatus was little more than a small glass beaker mounted in a dishpan. The claim rattled around the globe in a matter of hours, astonishing physicists and igniting a tremendous controversy. Over the next few weeks, skeptics expressed graver and graver doubts about the Utah chemists’ claims, but other laboratories seemed to confirm their findings: in Utah, Georgia, Texas, Italy, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and India. The story of cold fusion quickly became a knotty mess that, decades later, has yet to be untangled.
Most physicists were immediately skeptical of the chemists’ claim, and it is easy to understand why. Pons and Fleischmann were stating that they had caused deuterium nuclei to fuse in a little jar at room temperature. This seemed to contradict everything that physicists knew about nuclear fusion. Because the positively charged deuterium nuclei must slam into each other at very high speeds to fuse, it means that fusion tends to occur only when the deuterium is at a very high temperature and high pressure. This, of course, was why fusion scientists were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lasers and magnets to heat and confine deuterium plasmas.
Pons and Fleischmann’s setup was supposedly making an end run around physics’ requirements for fusion. There was no attempt to heat the deuterium to millions of degrees or to compress it to high densities. The chemists merely took a little rod of palladium metal, plopped it in a jar full of deuterium-enriched water, and ran an electric current through it. Somehow, without the benefit of high temperature and high pressure, the deuterium atoms were fusing inside that metal.
Though cold fusion seemed ridiculous, physicists could not dismiss the idea out of hand. It was possible, if unlikely, that palladium metal could somehow force the deuterium nuclei into contact. Pons and Fleischmann could possibly have found a new and fortuitous physical effect that nobody