The resurrection of cold fusion.

• Author: Marcus, Mary
• Position: Research continues despite 1989 scandal

ADEFENSE CONTRACTOR based in Lancaster, Pa., is developing a prototype home heating unit that will utilize what some researchers consider to be a revolutionary new energy source. Thermacore Inc. expects to have the heating units ready for marketing in five years. The inexpensive device, which would be about the size of a thermos container, conceivably could provide power in a home for thousands of years.

Thermacore engineer Robert Shaubach, manager of development operations, is so confident of the success of this product that he and six employees have invested their own money in developing it. The 22-year-old company also has received $75,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Defense.

Meanwhile, Toyota Motor Corp. has spent at least $10,000,000 on research expected to lead to the manufacture of automobiles that do not run on gasoline or electricity. The energy source, if it can be perfected, will be cheap and plentiful and will not pollute the environment.

Scientists and engineers engaged in research on the so-called new energy source say it will mean the end of the fossil fuel age, eliminating air pollution, global warming, and Western dependence on the politically volatile Middle East. They consider its "discovery" in 1989 to be one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the century--if not the last millennium. They believe it will place the world--especially the country that develops it first--on the brink of a new technological era.

Until recently, many scientists, particularly those in the U.S., scoffed at these extraordinary claims. Their skepticism is easy to explain. The new energy source being developed by Thermacore, Toyota, Ontario Hydro in Canada, Shell Oil Co., and other private and public business enterprises commonly is known as cold fusion. In the minds of many American scientists and the press-informed general populace, cold fusion has become almost synonymous with alchemy as an example of delusional science. The scientific community still is divided strongly on the process, with supporters maintaining that evidence for it is growing as an increasing number of positive experiments are being reported in scientific journals and at annual cold fusion conferences.

Meanwhile, skeptics maintain that supporters are deluding themselves. There are other scientists like Shaubach, former skeptics who converted to the cold fusion cause after having been persuaded by what they claim is growing, inconvertible evidence.

What has changed in the debate is that a Congressional committee, after declining to fund the research for four years, has opened the door to testing a demonstration experiment of cold fusion in a national laboratory. The change may have been prompted by the fact that scientists in other countries, notably Japan, ardently are pursuing the cold fusion dream in a climate that is free of the taunts of skeptical scientists and of derision from news media, as in the U.S.

The cold fusion story began when electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced in a press conference at the University of Utah that they had discovered a way to achieve nuclear fusion in a flask at room temperature. They stated that the discovery would be relatively easy to make into a usable technology for generating heat and power, but declined to be specific about their experiments, citing patent concerns.

Since their discovery would mean a cheap, pollution-free, limitless supply of energy, scientists all over the world interrupted other research and set up hurried experiments to try to duplicate the results. Few were able to, according to press reports.

Some "big name" researchers at prominent institutions such as MIT and California Institute of Technology vented frustrations over negative experiments, contributing to a rising tide of skepticism. The prevailing negativism was exacerbated by a report released in the fall of 1989 by the Department of Energy that dismissed the cold fusion claim as worthless.

The media, basing their assessments of cold fusion on the DOE report and on views from scientists, many of whom were funded to research hot fusion--a rival technology on which $500,000,000 per year is spent in the U.S.--gave the phenomenon derisive and dwindling coverage. Charges of fraud and "pathological science" were leveled against the two scientists and their followers. Pons left the University of Utah and the country, apparently in disgrace. In fact, the team accepted generous funding from Toyota to continue their work.

Since that time, little has been written in...