Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [64]
If it was true, muon-catalyzed fusion might really become an energy source. In a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature, Jones waxed enthusiastic about muon fusion, especially when using a mixture of deuterium and tritium as fuel: “each muon may catalyze hundreds of d-t fusion reactions, releasing a great deal of fusion energy,” he wrote, arguing that “muon-catalyzed fusion is an idea whose time has come—again.” (He also noted that muon-catalyzed fusion didn’t work at high temperatures as conventional fusion did: “The term ‘cold fusion’ is therefore quite appropriate for the process,” he wrote.)
Jones trumpeted the potential of muon-catalyzed fusion in seminars, lectures, and papers, and cowrote a Scientific American article about it in 1987. “It is now conceivable that cold fusion may become an economically viable method of generating energy,” the article read, and it even included schematics for a “commercial cold-fusion reactor.”
Unfortunately, Jones was wrong. His results were not only inconsistent with theory but also with what other groups were finding. A Swiss team, for example, performing similar experiments, was not seeing the same density effects that Jones was observing. Their muons got stuck in helium atoms fairly rapidly, as expected. Instead of seeing hundreds of fusions per muon, they were seeing tens. Muon-catalyzed fusion would never lead to breakeven at this rate. And as the Department of Energy’s money for muon-catalyzed fusion began to run out—the Division of Advanced Energy Projects had already spent more than $2 million—prospects for muon-catalyzed fusion began to dim. An outside review by JASON, a secretive group of scientists who advise the government on all matters scientific, put the last nail in the coffin: muon-catalyzed fusion wasn’t worth pursuing, at least as a path to energy. Muon-catalyzed fusion was dead. But cold fusion wasn’t.
Around the time that Jones’s 1986 Nature paper came out, an astronomer and physicist, E. Paul Palmer, attended one of Jones’s muon-catalyzed-fusion seminars. The idea of fusion at low temperatures struck Palmer as the possible answer to a conundrum. Palmer was a rogue physicist; he had apparently come to the conclusion that much of what geophysicists believe about the Earth is “a bunch of baloney,” and was hard at work formulating alternative geological theories. The conventional wisdom that the Earth’s interior is warmed by the decay of heavy elements like uranium struck him as being wrong. And the fact that there is helium-3 in the Earth’s crust seemed to him to be evidence of fusion.54
Most physicists would have dismissed Palmer as a crank, but Jones did not. After all, he himself had seen how fusion can happen at low temperatures; perhaps there was some other substance besides muons that could induce low-temperature fusion. Perhaps metals—nickel? platinum? palladium?—could trap hydrogen atoms and force them to fuse. It was cold fusion of another sort. Jones’s initial experiments didn’t turn up much, despite some halting attempts to capture gamma rays coming from fusion in metal samples. The concept of cold fusion remained on the back burner until the day that Jones received Pons and Fleischmann’s grant application in 1988.
There are many different versions of precisely what happened after Jones read the proposal, but there is little doubt that it sparked a race that grew more frantic as each week passed. Pons and Fleischmann’s work had much in common with Jones’s. Both were hoping to trap deuterium in a hunk of metal—particularly palladium—and force it to fuse somehow. If money was to be made from cold fusion (and if Pons and Fleischmann were correct, cold fusion would be a moneymaker unlike almost any other invention), only the patent holders would see huge benefits. Only the people who discovered cold fusion would be able to patent the process. And only the people to go public with their work first would be hailed as the discoverers. All the money, glory, and power that might come from the discovery of