What's Behind the War Against Cold
Fusion?
[This text by Silicon Valley writer and broadcaster Hal
Plotkin (hplotkin@sfgate.com) is reproduced with permission. Plotkin
invites all readers to print out this text and send it to your
Congressional representatives. A longer version is posted at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/technology/archive/199
9/05/17/coldfusion2.dtl. GSReport thanks Dan Drasin for bringing this
story to our attention.]
Dr. Michael McKubre, an electrochemist at Menlo Park,
California-based SRI, was generating unaccounted-for heat in a
carefully-controlled cold fusion experiment. McKubre presented his
findings at the centennial meeting of the American Physical Society,
the nation's premier gathering of physicists. Close to 100 scientists
attended McKubre's talk, a sizable audience for a technical session.
Despite the crowd, and the importance of the subject, no major news
stories have been published about the event. According to McKubre,
there was only one journalist present.
In his talk, McKubre detailed the results of SRI's
nearly 10-year effort to replicate the work of Utah chemists Stanley
Pons and Martin Fleischmann. McKubre confirmed that, under the right,
difficult-to-achieve conditions, sustained reactions are taking place
in SRI's cold fusion cells. McKubre
says the reaction appears to be nuclear in origin.
In addition to carefully measuring the excess heat being
produced, McKubre has also detected elevated quantities of Helium-4, a
known fusion by-product. McKubre's findings turn what is currently
known about nuclear science on its head.
But that is only half the story.
Since writing my first report on McKubre's work two
months ago, I've become convinced that the federal Department of
Energy is responsible for a massive failure to serve the public
interest. Rather than budget the funds needed to explore this new,
emerging science, our top national energy science officials
have adopted what might be called, at best, a policy of benign
neglect. At worst, it's a policy of fraud and deceit.
How could this be happening?
The stakes in the debate about cold fusion are enormous.
In this case, an unholy alliance seems to have come together. The
principle players are the fossil fuel industry, which has no interest
in seeing itself eclipsed by a new, non-polluting source of energy,
and the mainstream physics community, which wants to protect,
seemingly at all costs, the federal funding it relies on to continue
its massively expensive hot fusion experiments.
I've seen how squirrelly even good people can get when a
few of their bucks are in jeopardy. So it's not surprising that when
several trillion dollars are on the table, there are signs of
skullduggery.
Take, for starters, the Energy Resources Advisory Board
(ERAB) panel appointed during the Bush administration to look into the
cold fusion claims made by Pons and Fleischmann. That panel leaned
heavily on an experiment done at MIT that found the field unworthy of
financial support. Since then, however, Dr. Eugene Mallove, the chief
science writer at MIT at the time, has
come forward to denounce the MIT study, citing irregularities in the
way MIT's results were presented.
Mallove contends MIT's researchers did generate excess
heat in their cold fusion experiment, and then fudged that finding in
their final report. As evidence, Mallove has produced a copy of the
original heat-measurement graph used in the MIT experiment, which
showed slight heat production above the expected level. That graph did
not appear in the final MIT report. In its place, the MIT team
published an "adjusted" graph that showed no production of excess
heat.
Mallove resigned in protest and demanded an
investigation.
In addressing Mallove's complaint, MIT did not dispute
that the original graph had been altered. Instead, one of the 15
authors of the MIT report was permitted to take the unusual step of
changing the description of the experiment's purpose, AFTER the paper
describing it was published.
According to an appendix added to the report as a result
of the investigation into Mallove's charges, the experiment was
redefined to have been a search for a sudden onset of released energy,
rather than to determine if unaccounted-for heat was being generated
in cold fusion cells. Mallove contends MIT's handling of the matter
was fatally flawed. "In science, we
don't usually allow anyone to redefine the purpose of an experiment to
match the results," he says.
Since then, with funding from futurist Arthur C. Clarke,
Mallove has been publishing "Infinite Energy" magazine, a publication
devoted to spreading news about cold fusion experiments. Last month,
Mallove released "Fire From Water," a video documentary about cold
fusion. Mallove is currently negotiating with several national
networks interested in broadcasting the newly released video.
There are several incredible moments in "Fire From
Water." It contains, for example, the first video footage I've seen of
sustained energy releases in cold fusion cells. It's easy to see why
the scientists involved immediately assumed some kind of nuclear
reaction was taking place. The cells bubble with energy, emitting
steam in amounts far greater than can be explained by the energy put
into them. In some cases, the reactions go on for days, even weeks.
But there's more.
In a telling interview, former Electric Power Research
Institute (EPRI) executive Tom Passell says that at least some of
those involved in the campaign to debunk cold fusion intentionally
misled congressional investigators and the public.
EPRI is the Palo Alto, California-based consortium of
utility companies that conducts research into power generation and
distribution technologies. Besides his professional credentials,
Passell has an excellent reputation as a longtime, well-known, Palo
Alto civic volunteer.
Passell says that shortly after the ERAB panel
persuasively denounced cold fusion as junk science in congressional
testimony, some of the members of that panel quietly came to EPRI
seeking money so they could study the phenomena themselves.
Apparently, cold fusion research was only worthless if someone else
was getting the money to do it.
If Passell's charge is true, it means some members of
the ERAB panel intentionally lied to Congress, offering scientific
testimony that cold fusion was unworthy of further study, testimony
which they knew to be false. In non-scientific language, that's called
perjury. "The search for money, for research funds, is a big thing,"
Passell says, "and sometimes takes precedence over the search for what
we call truth."
Despite the federal government's ongoing obstruction,
scientists around the world are continuing to investigate cold fusion.
Several recent advances are worth noting.
Les Case, an MIT-trained chemical engineer with more
than 20 patents under his belt, discovered that cold fusion reactions
could be made more reliable by the addition of a carbon catalyst. Case
used his own funds to support his work; his technique is the one now
being replicated by SRI's McKubre.
Others have made similar observations, most notably Tom
Claytor at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Interestingly, the
current firestorm of controversy about the alleged leaking of nuclear
secrets to the Chinese at Los Alamos may make it harder, in the
future, to obtain information about
the successful Los Alamos cold fusion experiments).
The biggest slam against cold fusion researchers
involves their inability to replicate the same results each time they
conduct the experiment. But, as McKubre points out, the same could
have been said about the first transistors.
Due to problems with material impurities, only one in a
hundred or so of the first transistors worked. By studying those that
did work, however, scientists were able to perfect the invention. The
same thing happened with integrated circuits, which led to the clean
rooms that carefully control the manufacturing environment now used to
produce computer chips.
When it comes to cold fusion, however, the detractors in
the Department of Energy say further scientific inquiry should be
abandoned because, in as many as seven out of ten tries, cold fusion
does not work. (Les Case is claiming he's got the failure rate down to
just 10-20 percent. Recently, he visited McKubre's SRI lab to
demonstrate his latest techniques).
It may be hard to believe that people with vested
interests could have been responsible for dampening, and nearly
killing, this field for the last 10 years. Until you realize how much
money is involved.
We're not just talking about the $15 billion the U.S.
has spent in the last few decades to support the work of hot fusion
scientists, such as those who dominated the ERAB panel. Those
scientists and their institutions would, of course, be forced to find
a new paradigm, and new funds, to support themselves if cold fusion
theories proved valid.
But that is just the tip of the financial iceberg. The
foundation of the fossil fuel dependent international economy is also
on the line, down to the last nuclear power plant, coal mine, and
neighborhood gas station. It's no wonder some people are worried. It
would be remarkable if they were not taking steps to stop advancements
in this field.
Clearly, though, stepped up cold fusion research efforts
are called for. Even if cold fusion claims are bogus, we'll
undoubtedly learn a lot we don't know about material sciences and
electrochemistry, two fields vital to future scientific progress.
It is not enough, though, to encourage the handful of
scientists who, against all the obstacles, have secured funding to
continue work on cold fusion.
We need a full-scale investigation into the Department
of Energy's ongoing campaign to discredit scientists working on
understanding the unusual, and potentially useful, cold fusion effect.
And the first person we should call on the carpet is the Secretary of
Energy, Bill Richardson.
If Secretary Richardson could find time to visit Monica
Lewinsky's apartment to offer her a job, he can surely find time to
answer a few questions about his department's continuing role in
retarding the progress of cold fusion investigations.
by Hal Plotkin
Special to SF Gate
May 17, 1999