Cold Fusion

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What If Cold Fusion Is Real?

It was the most notorious scientific experiment in recent memory - in 1989, the two men who claimed to have discovered the energy of the future were condemned as imposters and exiled by their peers. Can it possibly make sense to reopen the cold fusion investigation? A surprising number of researchers already have.

By Charles Platt

Almost four stories high, framed in steel beams and tangled in pipes, conduits, cables, and coils, the Joint European Torus (JET) claims to be the largest fusion power experiment in the world. Located near Oxford, England, JET is a monument to big science, its donut-shaped containment vessel dwarfing maintenance workers who enter it in protective suits. Here in this gleaming nuclear cauldron, deuterium gas is energized with 7 million amperes and heated to 300 million degrees Celsius - more than 10 times hotter than the center of the sun. Under these extreme conditions atomic nuclei collide and fuse, liberating energy that could provide virtually limitless power.

Maybe.

High-tension lines run directly to the installation, but they don't take electricity out - they bring it in. For a few magic seconds in 1997, JET managed to return 60 percent of the energy it consumed, but that's the best it's ever done, and is typical of fusion experiments worldwide. The US Department of Energy has predicted that we'll have to wait another five decades, minimum, before fusion power becomes practical. Meanwhile, the United States continues to depend on fossil fuels for 85 percent of its energy.

Many miles away, in the basement of a fine new home in the hills overlooking Santa Fe, New Mexico, a retired scientist named Edmund Storms has built a different kind of fusion reactor. It consists of laboratory glassware, off-the-shelf chemical supplies, two aging Macintosh computers for data acquisition, and an insulated wooden box the size of a kitchen cabinet. While JET's 15 European sponsor-nations have paid about US$1 billion for their hardware, and the US government has spent $14.7 billion on fusion research since 1951 (all figures in 1997 dollars), Storms's apparatus and ancillary gear have cost less than $50,000. Moreover, he claims that his equipment works, generating surplus heat for days at a time.

Storms is not an antiestablishment pseudoscientist pursuing a crackpot theory. For 34 years he was part of the establishment himself, employed at Los Alamos on projects such as a nuclear motor for space vehicles. Subsequently he testified before a congressional subcommittee considering the future of fusion. He believes you don't need millions of degrees or billions of dollars to fuse atomic nuclei and yield energy. "You can stimulate nuclear reactions at room temperature," he says, in his genial, matter-of-fact style. "I am absolutely certain that the phenomenon is real. It is quite extraordinary, and if it can be developed, it will have profound effects on society."

That's an understatement. If low-temperature fusion does exist and can be perfected, power generation could be decentralized. Each home could heat itself and produce its own electricity, probably using a form of water as fuel. Even automobiles might be cold fusion powered. Massive generators and ugly power lines could be eliminated, along with imported oil and our contribution to the greenhouse effect. Moreover, according to some experimental data, low-temperature fusion doesn't create significant hazardous radiation or radioactive waste.

Most scientists laugh at these claims. "It's pathological science," says physicist Douglas Morrison, formerly employed by CERN in Geneva. "The results are impossible."

Yet some highly qualified researchers disagree.

George Miley, who received the Edward Teller medal for innovative research in hot fusion and has edited Fusion Technology magazine for the American Nuclear Society for more than 15 years: "There's very strong evidence that low-energy nuclear reactions do occur. Numerous experiments have shown definitive results - as do my own."

• John Bockris, formerly a distinguished professor in physical chemistry at Texas A&M University and a cofounder of the International Society for Electrochemistry: "Nuclear reactions can occur without high temperatures. Low-energy nuclear transformations can - and do - exist."
• Michael McKubre, director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International: "I am absolutely certain there is unexplained heat, and the most likely explanation is that its origin is nuclear."
• Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction writer, futurist, and funder of Infinite Energy magazine: "It seems very promising to me that nuclear reactions may occur at room temperatures. I'm quite convinced there's something in this."

  Statements like these prompt an obvious question: If nuclear fusion can be demonstrated in anyone's basement workshop for a few thousand dollars, and could revolutionize society - why haven't we heard about it?

  We have. On March 23, 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced their discovery of "cold fusion." It was the most heavily hyped science story of the decade, but the awed excitement quickly evaporated amid accusations of fraud and incompetence. When it was over, Pons and Fleischmann were humiliated by the scientific establishment; their reputations ruined, they fled from their laboratory and dropped out of sight. "Cold fusion" and "hoax" became synonymous in most people's minds, and today, everyone knows that the idea has been discredited.

  Or has it? In fact, despite the scandal, laboratories in at least eight countries are still spending millions on cold fusion research. During the past nine years this work has yielded a huge body of evidence, while remaining virtually unknown - because most academic journals adamantly refuse to publish papers on it. At most, the story of cold fusion represents a colossal conspiracy of denial. At least, it is one of the strangest untold stories in 20th-century science.

  Utah
  
  Martin Fleischmann was 11 years old when his family fled from their native Czechoslovakia in 1939. Shortly before his father died from abuse inflicted by the Nazis, Fleischmann was taken in for a while by foster parents in Britain, where he became a brilliant, creative scientist. At age 40 he was appointed to the professorial chair in electrochemistry at the University of Southampton. About the same time he became president of the International Society of Electrochemistry, and was made a fellow of The Royal Society.

  Stanley Pons was born in 1943 in North Carolina, but chose to do his PhD at Southampton, where Fleischmann had acquired an international reputation. By the time Pons received his doctorate in 1979, he was well acquainted with Fleischmann. Later, when Pons became chair of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah, Fleischmann was a regular visitor. At one point he brought with him a heretical theory which he confided to Pons, during a hike in Utah's Millcreek Canyon. Under certain circumstances, Fleischmann believed, nuclear fusion might occur near room temperature.

  For more than five years the two men worked in secret, spending about $100,000 of their own money. They ended up with something very simple: an insulated glass jar containing deuterium oxide (commonly known as heavy water) in which two electrodes were immersed, one of them a coil of platinum wire, the other a rod of palladium - a precious metal comparable in value to gold. A small voltage between the electrodes decomposed the deuterium oxide into oxygen and deuterium (a form of hydrogen), some of which was absorbed into the palladium.

  This was high school chemistry. But Fleischmann believed that if the process continued long enough, deuterium atoms could become so tightly packed in the palladium, fusion would occur.

  Orthodox science said that this was absurd. Atomic nuclei repel each other; a nuclear explosion or insanely high temperatures (as in a device such as JET) are required to force them together. Moreover, laboratory fusion reactions have never lasted more than a few seconds.

  Consequently, Pons and Fleischmann created a seismic shock in the scientific community when they claimed their simple apparatus had generated low-level fusion reactions yielding heat for hours at a time. In March 1989, the University of Utah promoted the work using hyperbole it would live to regret: "Breakthrough process has potential to provide inexhaustible source of energy" was the headline on the press release. This seemed so implausible that The New York Times at first refused to print the story. But a reporter named Jerry Bishop, of The Wall Street Journal, was less inhibited. Partly catalyzed by Bishop's revelations, cold fusion became a major media event.

  The euphoria was brief. Many physicists were highly skeptical that a couple of chemists could have pulled off such a feat. More damning, they were claiming to validate their far-fetched theory via an experiment that wasn't properly documented. In their defense, Pons and Fleischmann explained that they couldn't reveal all the details because the University of Utah's patent had not yet been approved. They admitted that the press conference had been premature, but claimed the University had urged them to go public when another scientist - a physicist named Steve Jones - turned out to be pursuing similar work.

  These excuses weren't well received. "Conventional science requires you to play by certain rules," comments cold fusionist Edmund Storms. "First, thou shalt not announce thy results via a press conference. Second, thou shalt not exaggerate the results. Third, thou shalt tell other scientists precisely what thou did. They broke all of those rules."

  The Journal's Bishop was accused of compounding the hype. "But the job of reporters is to report news," he said recently. "If some authority, like a scientist in the case of cold fusion, says it's not true, you don't kill the story - you report the controversy."

  By the end of April, academic criticism was causing Pons to lose patience. "They don't have to believe me," he was quoted in a local newspaper. "I will just go back to the lab, do my experiments, and build my power plant."

  But his vilification had barely begun. On May 1, East Coast physicists launched a major debunking offensive. A Boston Herald headline read, "MIT Bombshell Knocks Fusion 'Breakthrough' Cold." Hot fusionists at MIT found apparent inconsistencies in nuclear effects claimed by Pons and Fleischmann. The director of their department, Ronald Parker, dismissed the whole thing as "scientific schlock" and "maybe fraud."

  A few months later, with the full details still not released from Utah, MIT described its own version of the Pons-Fleischmann experiment and reported no excess heat. Soon, other hot fusion institutions, such as Harwell in Great Britain, were complaining that they couldn't make the experiment perform as advertised, either.

  It seemed evident that Pons and Fleischmann had precipitated a media circus before verifying their wild ideas, and now they would be forced to face reality.

  But maybe it wasn't so simple.

  Eugene Mallove, an MIT-trained engineer working as chief science writer in the MIT news office, was a cold fusion skeptic. Then he studied data from the MIT experiment, and the graph looked wrong to him. In a recent interview, he told me, "I realized they had moved the baseline to conceal a small amount of anomalous heat." At the same time, an MIT spokesperson denied it.

  Meanwhile, electrochemist John Bockris announced that one of his graduate students at Texas A&M, Nigel Packham, had collaborated on a successful cold fusion experiment. Packham had even detected small amounts of tritium, a radioactive by-product virtually guaranteeing that fusion had taken place.

  A science writer named Gary Taubes, who has written two books and several articles investigating allegations of fraudulent activity in science, went to Texas A&M on a fact-finding mission.

  "We thought Taubes was genuine at first," Bockris told me recently, speaking in a clipped, precise British accent that he acquired before he moved to the United States in 1953. "We exposed our lab books to him, and told him our results. But then he said to Packham, my grad student, 'I've turned off the tape, now you can tell me - it's a fraud, isn't it? If you confess to me now, I won't be hard on you, you'll be able to pursue your career.'"

  (Taubes has been shown Bockris's statement. He prefers not to comment.)

  According to Bockris, "A postdoctoral student named Kainthla, and a technician named Velev, both detected tritium and heat after we took Packham off the work because of the controversy. Since then, numerous people have obtained comparable results. In 1994, I counted 140 papers reporting tritium in low-temperature fusion experiments. One of them was by Fritz Will, the president of The Electrochemical Society, who has an impeccable reputation."

  Still, Taubes's report in the June 1990 Science magazine clearly suggested that Packham might have added tritium to fake his results. This reassured many people that cold fusion had been bogus all along. Packham received his PhD, but only on condition that all references to cold fusion be removed from the body of his thesis. Today he works for NASA, developing astronaut life-support systems. "I don't know why Gary Taubes wrote what he did," he says. "Certainly I did not add any tritium in my experiment."

  John Bockris sighs as he remembers the impact on his own career. He was investigated by his university, which found no evidence of incompetence or fraud. He was investigated again in 1992, and exonerated again; but his ordeal still wasn't over. As he recalls: "The people in the chemistry department created their own ad hoc committee for the investigation of professor Bockris. For 11 months I was under investigation by them, without ever knowing what the investigation was." He had to appeal to the American Association of University Professors before the harassment stopped.

  Other cold fusion researchers were likewise reviled - especially Pons and Fleischmann, who eventually retreated to the south of France, where Pons adopted French citizenship.

  Financial factors may have played a part in the fierce animosity exhibited toward cold fusion experiments. When a congressional subcommittee suggested that $25 million could be diverted from hot fusion research to cold fusion, naturally the hot fusion scientists were outraged.

  The bottom line, though, was that since most labs couldn't replicate the effect, most physicists sincerely believed that cold fusion didn't exist. They dismissed the few positive results as experimental error.

  As it happens, there was another possible explanation: Palladium is a quixotic metal. "If you chop a rod into three or four sections," says Bockris, "you get the confusing and ridiculous effect that the first section works splendidly, and the second doesn't work at all, probably because of inconsistently distributed impurities." Cold fusion researchers have observed that it is inhibited, also, if the heavy water is excessively contaminated with water vapor from the atmosphere.

  Pons and Fleischmann were not fully aware of these potential factors at the time of their press conference. A year later, the subtleties of cold fusion experimentation were better understood - but by this time, it was too late. The concept had been ridiculed and denounced.

  Vancouver
  
  Still, some researchers refused to quit. An international "cold fusion underground" evolved, trading data and theories which conventional journals refused to publish. In Italy, Giuliano Preparata claimed he had replicated the original experiment successfully. So did a Frenchman named Lonchampt, with support from the French Atomic Energy Commission. Pons and Fleischmann set up a new laboratory in the south of France, funded by Technova, a research group supported by Toyota. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) financed cold fusion research at SRI International, and several other institutions quietly sponsored similar work.

  Some reports claimed unequivocal success: In August 1994, in document TR-104195, regarding project 3170-01, EPRI concluded: "Small but definite evidence of nuclear reactions have been detected at levels some 40 orders of magnitude greater than predicted by conventional nuclear theory." NASA Technical Memorandum 107167, dated February 1996, concluded that "Replication of experiments claiming to demonstrate excess heat production in light water-Ni-K2CO3 electrolytic cells was found to produce an apparent excess heat of 11 W maximum, for 60 W electrical power into the cell."

  In 1993, Pons and Fleischmann described a cell that had reached boiling point, and subsequently they claimed to generate more than 1 kilowatt per cubic centimeter of palladium - about 100 percent excess heat, lasting for more than 50 days. Fleischmann calculated that if this ratio could be upped to 100 kilowatts, "You could satisfy all the world's existing energy requirements with the existing supply of palladium."

  Alas, to skeptics this sounded like an embarrassing attempt by a discredited scientist to salvage his reputation. Few people took Fleischmann seriously, and his research terminated when funding from Toyota was cut off. He moved back to England and retired, while Pons reportedly became embittered and ceased working in the field.

  Today, a handful of laboratories still pursue cold fusion, but their work remains largely ignored. I knew nothing about it myself until Eugene Mallove, the former science writer from MIT, sent me a copy of a book he had written titled Fire from Ice, which provided an excellent factual summary. But Mallove also edits Infinite Energy, a magazine which Arthur C. Clarke had helped to fund; and this turned out to be a wild grab bag of eye-popping assertions and evangelistic rants against the establishment. In the March-June 1997 issue, for instance, an article was headlined:

  Low-Energy Bulk-Process Alchemy
  One-Tenth Gram of Thorium Becomes Titanium and Copper
  Most Sacrosanct Principles of Physics Overturned
  

  At the same time, buried among the far-fetched claims were rigorous reports from credentialed scientists. The result was schizophrenic, like a collision between American Journal of Physics and Weekly World News. When I saw that the Seventh International Conference on Cold Fusion would be held in Vancouver within a few weeks, I decided to go there to find out for myself just how wacky these cold fusionists would turn out to be.

  In a huge, grandiose convention center I found about 200 extremely conventional-looking scientists, almost all of them male and over 50. In fact some seemed over 70, and I realized why: The younger ones had bailed years ago, fearing career damage from the cold fusion stigma.

  "I have tenure, so I don't have to worry about my reputation," commented physicist George Miley, 65. "But if I were an assistant professor, I would think twice about getting involved."

  I sat through four days of highly technical presentations and was amazed by the quantity of the work, its quality, and the credentials of the people pursuing it. A few obvious pseudoscientists, promoting their ideas in an adjoining room used for poster sessions, were politely ignored.

  Stanley Pons, now in his mid-50s, did not attend, but Martin Fleischmann was there, pacing impatiently, as bad-tempered as a snapping turtle - though he could be charming when he felt like it. He looked younger than his 71 years, with a stocky build, a pink complexion, and long hair hanging behind a balding pate. Eyeing me with amusement through gold wire-framed glasses, he entertained himself by avoiding most of my questions.

  I asked why his lab in the south of France had lost its funding. "Minoru Toyoda was a great man," said Fleischmann. "Not the kind of man you find very often, who is willing to say, 'This is what I am going to do, and I don't care if you think I am mad.' After he died -" Fleischmann grimaced. "What you have to ask yourself is, who wants this discovery? Do you imagine the seven sisters [the world's top oil companies] want it? Does it fit into any idea of macroeconomics or microeconomics? I don't think so. And do you really think that the Department of Defense wants electrochemists producing nuclear reactions in test tubes? Eh?"

  I liked his defiant, gadfly style, but his habit of answering questions with questions wasn't very helpful, so I chatted briefly with John Bockris. Sharp-profiled, slightly bent with age, he moved from one exhibit of research results to the next with the fastidious, perfectionist eye of a watchmaker, tut-tutting over tiny discrepancies or unsupported hypotheses. Supposedly, this was the man who had either committed fraud, or allowed his grad student to do so.

  Finally I talked to Dan Cavicchio, a multimillionaire whose New Energy Partners VC fund has raised venture capital for commercial applications of cold fusion. Soft-spoken and low-key, with a neat haircut and a conservative suit, Cavicchio told me that in the late 1980s he made a fortune by buying companies that had good technology but were poorly managed. "We bought a capacitor company from Sprague Electric, doubled the size of it, and made it profitable," he said.

  When his partner left, Cavicchio looked around, found cold fusion, and became convinced that it was real. "I've been gathering money from other investors - high-net-worth individuals - under regulation D of the SEC, with a formal offering document. We're hoping to invest between $15 and $20 million. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get involved with something that's going to change the earth, it's going to be so big."

  Of course, scientists outside the conference would have laughed at these ambitions - if they'd had any way of knowing about them. As far as I could tell, I was the only mainstream journalist who bothered to attend. To the outside world, it didn't exist.

  I found myself faced with an impossible choice: Either 200 chemists and physicists had spent the past nine years doing incompetent experiments and engaging in full-blown self-delusion, or a genuine discovery of great importance had been discredited so thoroughly, some ornery retirees and tenured professors were the only ones who still had the courage even to mention it.

  I had to learn more.

  Silicon Valley
  
  On a quiet backstreet near El Camino Real, a profusion of trees screens a sprawling complex of '60s-style buildings. SRI International is quintessentially Northern California: tasteful, verdant, low-key. Founded in 1946 to tap talent from nearby Stanford University, its innovations include liquid-crystal displays, optical data storage, acoustic modems, pen-input computing, HDTV, artificial heart valves, and speech-recognition software. All its research is sponsored by outside companies or government agencies, mostly seeking practical applications.

  Michael McKubre, the Energy Research Center director, is blue-eyed and brawny in jeans and a black T-shirt as he strides vigorously across the lobby to meet me. His longish hair and beard are gray at the edges, but he seems energized and confident, like a woodsman setting out on a hike.

  He leads me across a courtyard rimmed with eucalyptus trees, into a building of chemistry labs. Although born in New Zealand, McKubre has an almost English accent, and his voice is well modulated, as if he once took acting lessons. He's relaxed, witty, and charming.

  When I ask to see one of the laboratories, he opens a door for me, then pauses. "This was where the accident occurred," he says, sounding suddenly subdued. He's referring to a cold fusion cell that exploded after building up excess gas pressure. "I was hit with fragments in my side, in the vicinity of the liver. I still have pieces of glass in me that work their way up to the surface."

  Still, he was fortunate; the scientist standing next to him was killed.

  "I have nervousness that continues to this day," McKubre says, closing the lab door. "But the funding all came through me, so I had to carry on. Otherwise, the work would have ended."

  He didn't consider a different line of research?

  "No. If we're right, and there's a nuclear-based heat production mechanism, I believe the implications for humanity and science are too great for any individual to say, 'I don't want to do this anymore.' I have an ethical obligation to proceed."

  He gives me safety goggles before opening another heavy steel door, then introduces me to Francis Tanzella, who is energetic, enthusiastic, but has difficulty talking nontechnically. He's going to be my guide.

  This lab is big - perhaps 50 feet long, divided into small cubicles with panels of steel-framed half-inch Lexan providing protection in case another explosion occurs. Inside the cubicles are glass containers, pressure gauges, valves, and tubes where liquids surge and bubble.

  Watching cold fusion is like watching water boil in slow motion. First, sufficient deuterium has to penetrate the palladium electrode. This can take a few weeks. Then, if excess heat is generated during the next month or two, accurate temperature readings require extreme precautions to exclude environmental effects.

  "For years," says Tanzella, "we simply ran Pons-Fleischmann cells, six or eight at once, testing different types of palladium, electrolytes, additives, in order to find the best procedures and materials." He starts rattling off names and functions of the equipment in the manner of someone describing his hometown neighborhood. After nine years of this work, he doesn't just live for it, he seems to live in it.

  I ask him if he regrets the career choice.

  He pauses thoughtfully. "It was definitely a sacrifice. But - look, if you commit yourself in any direction, you always sacrifice the other things you've learned."

  McKubre was summoned by Edward Teller. "He didn't think cold fusion was a reality, but said if it were he could account for it with a very small change in the laws of physics."

  McKubre rejoins us and recounts his own background. He did postdoctoral research at Britain's Southampton University because, like Stanley Pons, he was impressed by Fleischmann's reputation. Unlike Pons, however, McKubre lost touch with Fleischmann after relocating in the United States. When cold fusion was announced, he was program manager in electrochemistry at SRI, funded by EPRI to develop sensors for nuclear reactors. By pure coincidence he was working routinely with deuterium and palladium, so - why not give it a try? He convinced EPRI to contribute $30,000, even though he didn't expect to find anything. "If the claim had come from anyone in the world except Fleischmann, I would have dismissed it as being outrageous," he says.

  McKubre underestimated the complexities of heat measurement. Still, after six months and $100,000, he achieved results. "We had two identical cells, one with a large palladium electrode, the other with a small one. Lo and behold, they both generated heat, and the bigger one generated more heat than the smaller one. This was enough to convince us that the effect probably was real."

  Subsequently one cell at SRI generated 100 times the heat that could be explained by any conceivable chemical reaction. Overall, according to McKubre, "the ratio of power out to power in ranged from 1.05 to 1.3. Our new calorimeter was accurate to better than half a percent, so, without a doubt, the results were statistically significant."

  Significant, and ignored - though some mainstream scientists maintained a discreet interest in the field. Around 1992, McKubre says, he was summoned for an audience with legendary physicist Edward Teller. "He asked probing questions, in better depth, I think, than anyone else on the planet. You could see what a giant intellect he must have been in his time. I was subjected to this interrogation for four hours. At the end of it Teller said that he did not think that cold fusion was a reality, but if it were, he could account for it with a very small change in the laws of physics as he understood them, and it would prove to be an example of nuclear catalysis at an interface. I still don't understand what he meant by that, but I'm quite willing to believe that it's correct."

  Currently, McKubre is overseeing a radically different experiment. We walk down an echoing hallway, into a smaller room crammed with equipment. Amid the steady hum and whine of cooling fans, a large, bearded guy wearing khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt is sitting in front of a video screen. He introduces himself as Russ George, 48, a former ecologist for the Canadian government who switched to cold fusion more than five years ago. He says he acquired his initial interest in science from his father, a nuclear physicist. "When we played hide-and-seek as kids," he tells me, "the children who hid carried radioactive ore, and the seeker carried a Geiger counter."

  George has done some contract work on cold fusion for EPRI and the Navy, but much of his research is unpaid. It's been a proud and lonely struggle. "I've been a voice in the wilderness," he says. "But I've been a visiting scientist at Los Alamos three times, also at a lab in Japan, I've given seminars at Lockheed, Lawrence Livermore, Rockwell -"

  Beside him is a softball-sized steel sphere, submitted to the lab by a lone-wolf experimenter in New Hampshire named Les Case. Inside the sphere are carbon granules coated with palladium, plus some deuterium gas under pressure. Case believes that if a moderate amount of heat is applied to these everyday, off-the-shelf items for a couple of weeks, nuclear fusion occurs - just as in a Pons-Fleischmann cell.

  Intrigued, SRI put the same ingredients into a sealed 50-cc stainless-steel flask and wrapped it in a heating element. A tube from this flask is connected, now, to a mass-spectrometer - an enigmatic steel cabinet standing behind the video screen. "This mass-spec is sensitive enough to detect the difference between helium and deuterium," says Russ George. "And the video display, here, will tell us how much helium is generated."

  Any production of helium would be stunning proof that fusion is occurring, because helium only results from nuclear reactions. No known chemical interaction can create it.

  "The problem is," McKubre puts in, "helium is also the leakiest gas known to man. So, any time it's been detected in other cold fusion experiments, people have said it must be getting in from ambient air, which contains about 5 parts per million."

  "Which is precisely what we have now," says George, pointing to data graphed on the screen. "Although it's been building to this level for the past few weeks, starting at 0.1 parts per million. We do sets of five analyses: First we check for helium in the instrument, then the helium background in ambient air, then the helium being generated by the apparatus. Then we check the air again, and then we check the instrument again."

  I take a closer look at the ultrasimple experiment. "You really think there's fusion going on in there?"

  "Electrochemistry doesn't require much hardware," says McKubre. "So, you may find isolated individuals doing valuable work. The problem is that even if they're very able people, they are not surrounded by a peer group that can challenge them and question them." He pauses. "Consequently, they may make mistakes."

  So, this is why SRI is running its own version of Case's experiment. They won't believe it till they see it themselves.

  "Within another few days," says Russ George, "if the helium level continues to rise, then we'll have the proof."

  Personally, I can't wait here for a few days; but I can visit Les Case.

  New Hampshire
  
  The road is narrow, twisting under a canopy of green. Quaint old houses hide among the trees, along with some quaint newer businesses such as Lumber Liquidators and Used Auto Parts. A yellow diamond sign warns, "Horse Crossing." Past a barn of unpainted rough-sawn planks, over a little stone bridge, I come to a dirt driveway furrowed like a streambed. The car tires spin in the sandy soil as I emerge in a clearing where a large, modern home has been built recently.

  Les Case is a tall, well-rounded figure in a plain white T-shirt, linen pants, and suspenders. At 68 he still has much of his hair, plus some truly amazing black eyebrows, like wild herbs scorched by some industrial accident.

  He leads me down to his basement, lit by fluorescent lights and crammed to the ceiling with cardboard boxes. An old Remington typewriter stands on a '60s-style metal-legged formica table. A workbench fashioned from massive chunks of lumber is cluttered with tools and hardware. An antique laboratory beam-balance stands in a glass cabinet.

  "Haven't finished building the house," Case explains, lowering his bulk into an old wooden office chair. "Haven't finished unpacking, either. I live in a slightly disorganized fashion. See, my wife died in 1987. She was a PhD chemist, her hobby was investing. I inherited her money, and have used a portion to fund my research."

  I ask him how he ended up doing this. He explains that he grew up in Tulsa, obtained a substantial scholarship, and spent five and a half years at MIT, obtaining a doctorate in chemical engineering. His childhood fantasy had been to get rich as a corporate executive, but he found he was better suited to lab work. He spent some years at DuPont, but wasn't a company man. "I was too outspoken. I got irritated, and left."

  He taught classes at colleges such as Purdue and Tufts. Along the way, he acquired 30 patents. Finally, he read about Pons and Fleischmann. "It was interesting, but I didn't like the idea of putting in 100 watts to get a net excess of one-tenth of a watt. I'm a chemical engineer, a practical person, so I wanted to scale it up."

  In 1993 he embarked on a courageous international odyssey that began in Japan, where a scientist named Yamaguchi had done interesting work with palladium. Case found him, inspected a palladium disc from the experiment, and saw gold fused into it. Since this must have happened at around 800 degrees Celsius, a huge amount of heat had been produced, perhaps by a burst of neutrons.

  Back in the United States, Case looked for a lab where he could rent time with a neutron detector. There were no takers, so he obtained a list of colleges in Eastern Europe, and went there. In Prague, he walked into an office unannounced and found himself facing the university's director, who fortunately happened to speak English. When Case explained what he wanted to do, the man agreed. "So I went there six or seven times," Case recalls. "I tried many different metals, all kinds of things. Then I thought, maybe a catalyst is needed. So I started making my own, and all of a sudden I got 1.2 degrees of excess heat from a sample that was palladium on carbon. I don't believe in magic, so it had to be catalytic."

  He was still looking for neutrons, which would confirm a certain type of fusion reaction. "But the neutron counter was very sensitive. Any time anyone in Prague turned on a big machine, the counter counted it. But, aha!" He holds up his finger. "Prague closes down on the weekend! It's socialism, see? So one Sunday I finally got a quiet half hour, and - there were no neutrons."

  He wasn't discouraged, though; he figured he must be looking at a different kind of deuterium fusion. Back in America he paid a lab called Geochron, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to check for tritium. This, too, was negative. "So," he says, "only one other fusion reaction could be occurring. Deuterium plus deuterium, yielding helium 4, plus a gamma ray. This cannot happen in the gas phase, so the hot fusion people never consider it. But when the gas atoms are in a crystal or a solid, it can happen, converting almost 1 percent of mass to energy, which I believe is the most energetic reaction that will ever be done on a macroscopic scale on Earth." He grins happily.

  Case found no gamma radiation, for reasons he didn't understand; but when he sent one of his devices to Lockheed Martin, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, they reported that it appeared to generate an astonishing and inexplicable 90 parts per million of helium.

  Now he had the confirmation he was looking for. "Plus I was generating heat," he continues. "First 5 degrees, then 11 degrees, depending on the catalyst, which has to be unactivated carbon. Once I understood this, I made a prototype out of two stainless-steel gravy ladles."

  I ask if he still has it. "Sure! You're sitting on it!"

  I've been perching on the edge of another old office chair. I stand up, and Case retrieves his apparatus.

  "Later," he says, "I found war-surplus oxygen bottles, which are cheap. I cut them up and paid a welder to join them." This was his equipment that I saw at SRI. I tell him that so far SRI has generated only 5 parts per million of helium.

  "I know that. Russ George faxed me the graph. But it'll go up." He's totally confident. In fact, at this point, he's looking far ahead, contemplating that childhood dream of entrepreneurial wealth.

  "Scaling up will be critically important. First I'll do a 100-watt demonstration unit. If that works, the next step is a water heater. Ultimately I could build a boiler that makes steam and drives a small turbine, creating electricity. That'll require 200 kilograms of catalyst, of which 0.5 percent will be palladium. A few ounces. We can afford that."

  Limited supplies of palladium would still tend to inhibit his grand plan. A mine in Russia is unreliable, and there's only one other reliable source: "Stillwater mine in Montana," says Case. "SWC on Amex. You should consider buying stock! A medium-sized commercial power plant using my process will require 100,000 ounces of palladium, and the total supply is only 6 million ounces per year. I may have to find a substitute. Titanium and nickel are possibilities."

  If his dreams come true, the implications are endless. "With really cheap energy, we can make fuel from water and mountains." He grins. "Heat a limestone mountain to make carbon dioxide, mix it with hydrogen from the electrolysis of water, and you have methanol. How many limestone mountains do you think we have? An indefinite supply. Another application is desalinization of seawater. Los Angeles could get all its water straight out of the Pacific Ocean, with cheap energy for reverse osmosis. Then there's Australia - vast areas of very fertile soil, a good climate, but no rain. I envisage aqueducts bringing water in from the ocean. It could become the breadbasket of Asia!"

  "When I built this house," says Case, "I installed geothermal power. I get 3.4 times the heat of electric, but it cost a fortune. That's all going to change."

  Case is serious about this; he's actually negotiating to buy thousands of acres in Australia. "I have very low cholesterol, and normal blood pressure even at my weight. There's no physical reason why I can't keep going for 10 or 20 more years. I want to supply the world with energy - and not just for my personal benefit. There are areas in the world where deserving people could start making an honest living, if energy was cheap."

  In the meantime, though, he has to deal with the local welder, the patent office, and his unfinished home. We walk upstairs, through the kitchen, which is a bachelor-pad nightmare with dishes heaped in the sink, countertops piled with jars and cans, the floor strewn with boxes and papers, and a bed in the dining area. It looks as if a hurricane struck, and then nothing happened for a year or so.

  He ignores it. It's trivial. "When I built this house," he says, "I installed geothermal power. It uses a 700-foot-deep well, and the water goes through a heat pump. I get 3.4 times as much heat as if I used an electric baseboard. But, the installation cost a fortune." He gives me a hard, serious look. "This is all going to change."

  Sarasota
  

  Les Case isn't the first to hatch plans for commercial exploitation of low-temperature fusion. Clean Energy Technologies Inc. (CETI) is way ahead of him.

  I'm driving down a back street where unpretentious houses have been bleached and crisped by the sun. So far, in this neighborhood, I've passed three goodwill stores, one of them a drive-thru. On the nearby main drag is an AAMCO Transmissions service center, a funky Cuban restaurant, and Le Club Exotic, all done up in purple paint.

  CETI's headquarters is a ribbed-metal building that looks clean, neat, and new by comparison. Inside, it's a typical start-up, minimally equipped with utilitarian office furniture. A receptionist is fielding phone calls. In the adjoining lab, youngish people are debating test results.

  CETI's technology is based on five patents initially filed by James Patterson, now 75 years old, formerly an employee at Dow Chemical and a consultant for Fairchild Semiconductor, Lockheed, and the Atomic Energy Commission. Patterson codeveloped liquid chromatography, a fundamental laboratory measuring technique. He also developed core technology for identifying proteins in DNA. He long since retired, but as a lifelong tinkerer, he was fascinated by the Pons-Fleischmann process and devised a variant using regular water instead of heavy water, with an electrode composed of plastic beads triple-coated with nickel, palladium, and nickel.

  Gabe Collins, a young chemical engineer who dropped out of a master's program at The University of Alabama to work here, shows me a 6-inch glass container with gray beads at the bottom. "This is a classic Patterson cell. We've seen it take .06 watts and give out 10,000 times that. But the trick is in making the beads. They don't work reliably."

  According to Collins, it's the same old story: quixotic palladium.

  "Here's a different cell that I made myself." He's bright and eager, speaking rapidly. "I used bismuth beads and glass beads to create a series of voltage gradients. These cells have been up to the kilowatt range, generating 20 to 30 percent excess. This is the closest we've come to a home hot-water heater."

  Is it reliable?

  "It's ... fairly reliable." He laughs uneasily. "When they don't work, it's mostly due to contamination. If you get any sodium in the system it kills the reaction - and since sodium is one of the more abundant elements, it's hard to keep it out."

  James Patterson's grandson, Jim Reding, serves as CETI's CEO. Formerly an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, Reding is 28, shrewd, and ambitious. He readily admits that efforts to develop a commercial water heater have been frustrated by irreproducibility. "For the first two years," he says, "we had a large batch of beads that produced robust effects consistently. But that batch is pretty much gone, and we've had trouble replacing them. We don't know why, and it's going to cost money to find out."

  CETI has spent about $2 million on cold fusion research since its foundation in 1995, much of it family money, a large fraction paying for additional patents. To raise more cash, Reding has developed an alternate strategy. "We just finished a $2.5 offering about nine months ago. That enabled us to hire a president, Jack St.Genis, who was a very senior manager at Matsushita, NEC, and IBM. And Lou Furlong joined us six months ago as director of research, formerly at Exxon. Altogether we have 10 people here. Now we're going to raise another $5 million for three projects. The first is filtering tritium from waste water out of fission reactors, using a different invention of Dr. Patterson's. The second project is neutralizing other forms of radioactivity. The third is power cells. When the first venture creates revenue, we'll spin that out and use it as liquidity to raise capital for the other two."

  At this point Patterson himself wanders into the office, a big man with wild white hair, wearing a stained T-shirt and rumpled pants. He moved to Florida in 1981. His brother, his sister, and his 100-year-old mother live not far away. "I just play around," he says in a laconic, folksy style.

  "I got involved in 1995," says Reding, "to make a business out of inventions that he had left sitting on the shelf."

  Patterson chuckles. "Jim, here, was too interested in girls to go into science. Before that, he was my fishin' buddy. Used to cut up the bait and put it on the end of my hook."

  Power-Gen '95 conferencegoers were astonished by a cell that seemed to produce more than 1,000 watts of heat - from only 1 watt of input power.

  Patterson shows me his private lab, a tiny backroom in an auto-parts supply warehouse - an entirely separate business next door. "I like to have some peace and quiet," he says, relaxing in a La-Z-Boy recliner alongside an old wooden desk. Patterson's dog is sleeping under a gray steel lab bench. A wooden sign announces, "Hours Subject to Change During Fishing Season."

  I ask if he's working on the problem of the beads. "No, I've gone over that path already," he says. Instead, he's refining techniques to measure the impurities in drinking water. "I've got a meeting coming up at the American Society for Testing Methods. The turbidity [pollution] detector I'm working on now is at such a level, it will detect viruses in water. This'll be extremely valuable for third-world countries. But it's purely an academic venture."

  Back in the CETI offices, Reding agrees that it's "very difficult to keep Dr. Patterson focused." Still, he's determined to fix the problem of the beads, because past demonstrations have been so dramatic. Delegates to the energy industry's Power-Gen '95 conference in Anaheim, California, were astonished by a cell that seemed to produce more than 1,000 watts of heat, drawing only about 1 watt of input power. "By mid-1996," Reding recalls, "we had research relationships with the University of Illinois, the University of Missouri, and Kansas City Power & Light. They were supporting our research. Motorola even made a written offer to buy our company."

  When I challenge him on that, he goes to a file cabinet and pulls out a letter from Gregory E. Korb at Motorola New Enterprises. Conditional on a series of tests, it proposes a buyout totaling $15 million.

  (Subsequently, I track down Korb and ask him if the letter is genuine. "The Patterson cell was demonstrated in a Motorola facility, which was not the best environment to do calorimetry," Korb says, very carefully. "But Motorola did tell CETI that if they could prove the phenomenon, we would be willing to invest in it.")

  So, the letter seems real. "You turned down a conditional offer that could have been worth $15 million," I say to Reding.

  He hesitates - but only for a moment. "We're better off in the long run," he tells me.

  Illinois
  

  CETI has employed several academics as consultants, most notably George Miley, the respected nuclear engineer at the University of Illinois who edits Fusion Technology. While investigating a Patterson cell, Miley claims he found something even more astonishing than excess heat: residues of copper and silver that seemed to have been generated spontaneously inside the cell. Naturally, Miley suspected contamination, so he decided to develop his own beads coated with ultrathin metallic films, taking advantage of reactions that he believed would occur between metals with different Fermi levels. He used the beads as an electrode in a cell full of lithium sulfate and water. Result: many more metal residues.

  "After a run," he says, "I found three dozen or more elements, including iron, silver, copper, magnesium, and chromium." For detection, he used neutron activation analysis, energy dispersive X ray, Auger electron spectrometry, and secondary ion mass spectrometry.

  Miley believes the metals are created by transmutation - fundamental nuclear shifts that turn one element into another, just as ancient alchemists dreamed of turning lead into gold. According to orthodox science, this can occur only under extreme conditions, as in stars or nuclear reactors. To John Bockris, though, Miley's work is plausible. "Transmutation research has been reported in scientific journals since at least 1943," he notes dryly. "The first paper I could quote you is by D. C. Borghi, who concluded that he had produced a nuclear reaction at everyday temperatures."

  To most cold fusionists, though, transmutation remains hard to believe, especially since electrolysis is guaranteed to concentrate any preexisting impurities. "The case for it is not proven at a high level," says Michael McKubre. "Also - heat has practical applications, but what am I supposed to do with the ability to turn expensive elements into cheap ones?"

  "Some of the metals I've found are at such high concentrations, they're very unlikely to be impurities," Miley responds. He adds that his system generates heat, too. Moreover he requires only an hour, rather than days, to load thin metal films with deuterium or hydrogen, and the films don't vary much in structure from one batch to the next. This enables quick experiments that aren't plagued with inconsistent results. "We always get similar results," Miley claims.

  Los Alamos
  

  Can anything be stranger than this? Perhaps the fact that cold fusion research was supported continuously, for about five years, by Los Alamos National Laboratory, not only the birthplace of the atomic bomb but a bastion of the hot fusion fraternity.

  I follow Oppenheimer Road out of the modern town center, which is quintessentially Suburban USA, till I come to Trinity Drive, leading to a steel bridge spanning a canyon between two long, narrow mesas. An ominous notice warns that I'm entering government property, where "All Signs, Security Personnel, and Law Enforcement Officers Must Be Obeyed." Ten-foot chain-link fences topped with barbed wire are ornamented with dozens of yellow No Trespassing signs. Behind the fences, box-shaped concrete buildings dating back to the 1950s have had their windows blocked with sheets of stainless steel. The place looks like a low-budget military prison.

  At the badge office, I'm told that no paperwork has been issued for me, although an official decides that it can be generated if the man I've come to see, Tom Claytor, gives authorization. Then Claytor arrives, and he doesn't want to do it. "I can't show you the lab," he tells me, escorting me to the parking lot. "It could create - some problems."

  Previously, on the phone, he promised I could see everything. Now he seems uneasy, as if a new policy has been implemented. He takes me to a lounge area in a hallway above a library. This is where we will talk.

  Claytor is soft-spoken, amiable in a low-key way, but if he has a sense of humor, he hides it. He's the most conventional cold fusionist I've met: clean shaven, conservative, and neatly dressed.

  Initially, he was a skeptic. "We ran some experiments," he says, "and didn't get any results. Then we got some results three months later, but we didn't believe the results. Then we replicated them, and I realized there was something here. I think we spent about $300,000, mostly on labor - not a lot by Los Alamos standards."

   

  In a bland, easygoing style, Claytor dismisses the idea that he encountered hostility or skepticism. "I had a number of theorists backing me, because they were familiar with the limitations of hot fusion theory. They knew that not everything was known." He shrugs.

  Like Nigel Packham at Texas A&M, Claytor tested for tritium, partly because Los Alamos owns some of the most sensitive tritium detectors in the world. He found tritium sometimes at 100 times background levels. He also found neutrons. "We would see a burst," he recalls, "once in a while."

  Since I'm still wondering if there's a hidden reason why I can't see his lab, I ask if his work is continuing. "To some extent," he says vaguely. "But it's not being funded anymore, because even though our results can't be explained by error, we can't produce them consistently. Therefore, we can't go to the program managers and ask them to give us money."

  Like other researchers, he was plagued by inconsistent palladium samples; so he used facilities at Los Alamos to refine his own, adding various small impurities. "This was our last large experimental thrust. We learned that certain palladium alloys would work part of the time, and the one that worked best was most complicated, with four different constituents. Also, we found that only very small fractions of the palladium seem active. Whenever we see a little dot where palladium evaporates off the sample, we get positive results. These dots are probably about 50 to 70 microns, they evaporate leaving a hole of 120 microns, and that's where it stops." He looks away thoughtfully. "If you could make the whole plate active, it would be very interesting."

  "Very interesting," indeed. The effect might be multiplied by a factor of 10,000 or more.

  "The trouble is," he goes on, "I'm not a theoretician, I'm an experimentalist. Normally I vary the parameters in an experiment, to explore a phenomenon. But with cold fusion, when I change something, usually it stops the phenomenon." He spreads his hands and smiles helplessly.

  Since we're in Los Alamos, I ask if he sees any military applications.

  "No, the energy density isn't high enough. In the first few months, people here tried to implode these things. They had neutron counters and gamma counters, they blew up all their equipment, and then they lost interest." He says it deadpan.

  So, he doesn't agree with Fleischmann's theory that the Department of Defense may have pursued a policy to discredit cold fusion.

  He chooses his words carefully. "From what I've seen," he says, sounding very diplomatic, "there are a number of people who approve of the research in Washington, DC - and a number who disapprove."

  That's the closest Tom Claytor will come to admitting that he's had any opposition at all, pursuing his research into cold fusion.

  Santa Fe
  

  Thirty-five miles southeast of Los Alamos, adobe-style houses hide discreetly among juniper trees in the hills overlooking Santa Fe. I turn up a muddy dirt road that winds around a mountain, through virgin forest. Near the summit I find the home of Edmund Storms, formerly at Los Alamos, now maintaining his own little cold fusion lab in his basement.

  He's tall and fit, gray-bearded, with a friendly, animated manner. He and his wife Carol designed and built this house themselves, and even some of the furniture in it, such as the fine rolltop desk in Storms's office. In manila folders stacked on oak shelves, he has archived more than 2,000 papers and reference works relating to cold fusion. I'm hoping he will provide me with an overview; a definitive summation.

  In 1989 he remembers literally hundreds of people at Los Alamos taking an interest in cold fusion. "Chemists were actually speaking to physicists! Everyone got involved. We met once a week, more than 100 people. There must have been 50 attempts to reproduce the effect."

  Only three succeeded. One was Claytor's, another was by Howard Menlove, a world expert in neutron detection, and the third was by Storms. "That's how I met my wife, Carol. We started working together, trying to detect tritium. We didn't succeed often, and there wasn't very much of it, but we did find some, and it was abnormal."

  They succeeded partly because they were inhumanly persistent. "We tried every conceivable permutation of every variable we could think of. We ran 250 experiments, taking one whole year, and I think 13 made excess tritium. Skeptics, of course, said the palladium must have been contaminated with tritium at the start. So, we did another experiment, contaminating palladium with tritium on purpose, to find out how it would behave; and sure enough, it behaved differently."

  Still, other scientists found Storms's results hard to believe. "After an exhaustive inquiry, no one could say that my work was wrong. But the theoreticians mobilized their negative arguments in an overwhelming onslaught, and the lab administration grew weary of the whole controversy. After a year, they weren't interested in going any further. They wouldn't call you an idiot at Los Alamos. They'd even allow your work to be published. They just pretended it didn't exist."

  So he quit. "About six years ago, we decided to build our house and set up our own lab to do things the way we wanted to."

  He takes me downstairs, through a big woodworking shop, into a back room where the walls are plain gray cinder block. Here he has glass-blowing equipment to create his own labware, a lathe, power supplies, monitoring and analysis gear, and calorimeters in insulated cabinets. "It's fairly crude and homemade," says Storms, although to me it seems more sophisticated than anything I've seen outside of SRI.

  He shows me a box containing 90 little tags of palladium. "I've learned," he says, "how to determine in advance whether a sample will work. I can predict it with about 50-50 accuracy, where it was a 1-in-20 chance before."

  He analyzes various properties of the metal, such as its tendency to crack, which limits its absorption of deuterium. "That's what makes cold fusion so nonreproducible," says Storms. "You have to load the palladium with very high concentrations, and many samples simply won't tolerate it."

  "Heat has practical applications," concedes McKubre, "but what am I supposed to do with the ability to turn expensive elements into cheap ones?"

  This, finally, is his explanation for many negative results. There's still a snag, though. Just because he knows how to select good palladium, doesn't mean he knows how to make it. "Pons and Fleischmann used to test samples from a supplier, Johnson Matthey, and over the years they figured out how to create palladium that worked most of the time. But Johnson Matthey signed a nondisclosure agreement with Technova, the Toyota-supported group that financed the research in France. The Japanese thought cold fusion would be hugely successful, and therefore everyone would want this certain type of palladium, and they'd clean up."

  Of course, it never happened. Technova abandoned cold fusion. But according to Storms the nondisclosure agreement still exists, and Johnson Matthey is still bound by it. (A spokesperson at Johnson Matthey would not confirm that an agreement exists.)

  "Someone should buy it from Technova," I suggest.

  Storms laughs. "Why should they? It's worthless! You can't make any money from cold fusion - at least, not using the Pons-Fleischmann method."

  And so, at this point, Storms is stymied. He shows me a paper he has written, with a grim cover letter: "Ironically, it is now possible to know why we failed but it is too late to follow a more successful path ... Without access to widely circulated journals, this negative attitude within the scientific community obviously cannot be changed. Even overwhelming proof, as demanded by many scientists in the past, can have no effect because no mechanism exists for it to be communicated to the scientific professions."

  I ask Storms if most scientists can be as conservative as he implies. "The majority may be bright and competent," he says, "but they believe what they've been taught to believe. I was like that myself, for a long time, till I began to find things which I couldn't explain. Now I see that we should accept everything, so we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Of course, when we accept everything, we accept a whole lot of crap. But let's talk about it, get people thinking about it and debating it. Then we can decide what to keep and what to throw away."

  Epilogue
  

  It's 10 days since I visited SRI International. I call Russ George and find him bubbling with enthusiasm, because Les Case's mix of carbon, palladium, and deuterium is now generating 10 parts per million of helium - twice the level in ambient air. The only conceivable source of this helium is a nuclear reaction, and George feels that it's the best-ever proof of cold fusion. "It makes all the sacrifices worthwhile," he says.

  But when I speak to Michael McKubre, he's as fatalistic as Ed Storms. "I doubt that any single result is going to change everyone's minds," he says. After all, skeptics have been unimpressed by other evidence of cold fusion. Why should they be convinced now?

  Instead of looking for the ultimate demo to browbeat unbelievers, McKubre wants to pursue a carefully thought-out investigation of the mechanism of cold fusion. "We have the space and facility to mount a large effort," he says. But he doesn't have the personnel. At one time there were 10 people in his lab; now, Francis Tanzella is the only full-time paid employee. EPRI is sustained exclusively by power utility companies, which have turned away from "nuclear" research, forcing McKubre to find funds elsewhere after 1996. He received some help from MITI, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry; but, "From October of this year," he says, "I'm not sure of our future. So, how do we plan long-term experiments? Where do we get the fortitude to tackle big questions, if there is no guarantee that we'll complete them?"

  At Los Alamos, Tom Claytor likewise is thwarted by lack of money. He would like to see a massive trial-and-error program to test every possible palladium alloy, since tiny impurities seem to catalyze dramatic performance gains. "This is how ceramic superconductors were developed," he points out, "by testing 5,000 different compounds." But no laboratory wants to mount such an effort for cold fusion.

  Consequently the field is languishing, while its key scientists grow older, and few newcomers venture in.

  Jed Rothwell, a former software engineer turned journalist who has taken an active interest in cold fusion since 1991, sums up the sad situation: "Very little happens. People putter along doing pretty much the same thing year after year. They are old and work slowly, and they have no funding and no equipment - so jobs that ought to take weeks take years instead."

  And as Ed Storms has pointed out, even when significant discoveries are made - such as detection of helium from Les Case's apparatus - there's no easy way to publish them. According to an estimate by David Nagel at the Naval Research Laboratory, only four of approximately 5,000 academic journals worldwide will consider papers that mention low-temperature fusion.

  There's one obvious way to do an end run around this barrier: Manufacture a marketable product. If a maverick such as Les Case or a start-up such as CETI could put a cold fusion water heater in every home in America, then the phenomenon would be undeniable.

  But these are longshots. If they don't pan out, and the current situation persists, we may be left with the grim scenario described half a century ago by the famous physicist Max Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

  Alas, by the time a new generation displaces the old, the graying community of cold fusion researchers will be long gone. Thus, in a worst-case scenario, the new generation may have to rediscover cold fusion for themselves.

  Meanwhile, the US Department of Energy spends more than $15 billion each year, of which hot fusionists receive almost $500 million, secure in their knowledge that they are following the only valid path. And, to be fair, they may be correct - if every one of the hundreds of successful cold fusion experiments turns out to be based on incompetence, experimental errors, self-delusion, or fraud.

   

  Even if major funding is obtained for cold fusion, conceivably the phenomenon could suffer from problems as intractable as those of hot fusion. It may never work reliably, or generate enough energy to be commercially viable.

  One thing, though, is certain: If it remains the poor stepchild of science, starved into obscurity, we'll never have a chance to learn what we may be missing.

  ---

  Contributing editor Charles Platt (cp@panix.com) wrote "Die, Robot" in Wired 6.08.