Cold fusion

For the computer programming language, see ColdFusion.

Cold fusion cell at the US Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, CA (2005)

By definition, Cold fusion is a nuclear fusion reaction that takes place at or near room temperature and normal pressure instead of the millions of degrees required for plasma fusion reactions.

Cold fusion is generally used to refer to "condensed matter nuclear science" (CMNS) or "low energy nuclear reactions" (LENR). Such cold fusion was initially reported by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the University of Utah in March of 1989. Because it was presented as a new practical source of energy, this announcement was front-page news for some time, and generated a strong controversy, but the debate abated quickly and CMNS was rejected by the mainstream scientific community. Some CMNS researchers say that they have been shunned by the scientific establishment.

Many scientists with a variety of credentials have contributed to the field or participated to the International Conferences on Cold Fusion. Many have reported the generation of excess heat or the detection of nuclear transmutations at low temperature with a variety of methods. Articles have been published in specialized peer reviewed journals such as Physical Review A, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, and Journal of Fusion Energy. After the initial interest, the only prominent general science journal to publish a cold fusion paper was Naturwissenschaften, in 2005.

The latest mainstream review of research in CMNS occurred in 2004 when the US Department of Energy set up a panel of eighteen scientists. When asked "Is there compelling evidence for power that cannot be attributed to ordinary chemical or solid state sources", two thirds of the panel did not feel that there was any conclusive evidence for low energy nuclear reactions, five found the evidence "somewhat convincing" and one was entirely convinced. The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for experiments in this field.

The popular press sometimes use the term "cold fusion" to describe "globally cold, locally hot" plasma fusion that occurs in table-top apparatus such as pyroelectric fusion. Another form of cold fusion is muon-catalyzed fusion; unfortunately, the muons it uses require too much energy to create and have too short of a half-life to make the process practical for energy generation. Neither pyroelectric fusion nor muon-catalyzed fusion are presented further in this article.

Original Fleischmann and Pons claim

A cold fusion calorimeter of the open type, used at the New Hydrogen Energy Institute in Japan. Source: SPAWAR/US Navy TR1862

On March 23, 1989, the chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the University of Utah spoke at a press conference held by the University of Utah and reported the production of excess heat that they say could only be explained by a nuclear process. The report was particularly astounding given the simplicity of the equipment: essentially an electrolysis cell containing heavy water (deuterium oxide) and a palladium cathode which rapidly absorbed the deuterium produced during electrolysis.

In their original set-up, Fleischmann and Pons used a Dewar flask (a double-walled vacuum flask) for the electrolysis, so that heat conduction would be minimal on the side and the bottom of the cell (only 5 % of heat lost in this experiment). The cell flask was then submerged in a bath maintained at constant temperature to eliminate the effect of external heat sources. They used an open cell, thus allowing the gaseous deuterium and oxygen resulting from the electrolysis reaction to leave the cell (with some heat too). It was necessary to replenish the cell with heavy water at regular intervals. The cell was tall and narrow, so that the bubbling action of the gas kept the electrolyte well mixed and of a uniform temperature. Special attention was paid to the purity of the palladium cathode and electrolyte to prevent the build-up of material on its surface, especially after long periods of operation.

The cell was also instrumented with a thermistor to measure the temperature of the electrolyte, and an electrical heater to generate pulses of heat and calibrate the heat loss due to the gas outlet. After calibration, it was possible to compute the heat generated by the reaction.

A constant current was applied to the cell continuously for many weeks, and heavy water was added as necessary. For most of the time, the power input to the cell was equal to the power that went out of the cell within measuring accuracy, and the cell temperature was stable at around 30 °C. But then, at some point (and in some of the experiments), the temperature rose suddenly to about 50 °C without changes in the input power, for durations of 2 days or more. The generated power was calculated to be about 20 times the input power during the power bursts. Eventually the power bursts in any one cell would no longer occur and the cell was turned off.

History of cold fusion by electrolysis

See also: Timeline of cold fusion

Early work

The idea that palladium or titanium might catalyze fusion stems from the special ability of these metals to absorb large quantities of hydrogen (including its deuterium isotope). The hydrogen or deuterium disassociate with the respective positive ions but remain in an anomalously mobile state inside the metal lattice, exhibiting rapid diffusion and high electrical conductivity. The special ability of palladium to absorb hydrogen was recognized in the nineteenth century.

In 1926, two German scientists, F. Paneth and K. Peters, reported the transformation of hydrogen into helium by spontaneous nuclear catalysis when hydrogen is absorbed by finely divided palladium at room temperature. These authors later retracted their report, acknowledging that the helium they measured was due to background from the air.

A year later, Swedish scientist J. Tandberg said that he had fused hydrogen into helium in an electrolytic cell with palladium electrodes. On the basis of his work he applied for a Swedish patent for "a method to produce helium and useful reaction energy". After deuterium was discovered in 1932, Tandberg continued his experiments with heavy water. Due to Paneth and Peters' retraction, Tandberg's patent application was eventually denied.

Events leading to the announcement

The press conference of March 23, 1989 followed about a year of work of increasing tempo by Fleischmann and Pons, who had been working on their basic experiments since 1984. In 1988 they applied to the US Department of Energy for funding for a larger series of experiments: up to this point they had been running their experiments "out of pocket".

The grant proposal was turned over to several people for peer review, including Steven E. Jones of Brigham Young University. Jones had worked on muon-catalyzed fusion for some time, and had written an article on the topic entitled Cold Nuclear Fusion that had been published in Scientific American in July 1987. He had since turned his attention to the problem of fusion in high-pressure environments, believing it could explain the fact that the interior temperature of the Earth was hotter than could be explained without nuclear reactions, and by unusually high concentrations of helium-3 around volcanoes that implied some sort of nuclear reaction within. At first he worked with diamond anvils on what he referred to as piezonuclear fusion, but then moved to electrolytic cells similar to those being worked on by Fleischmann and Pons. In order to characterize the reactions, Jones had spent considerable time designing and building a neutron counter, one able to accurately measure the tiny numbers of neutrons being produced in his experiments. His team got 'tantalizingly positive' results early January 1989, and they decided in early February to publish their results.

Both teams were in Utah, and met on several occasions to discuss sharing work and techniques. During this time Fleischmann and Pons described their experiments as generating considerable "excess energy", excess in that it could not be explained by chemical reactions alone. If this were true, their device would have considerable commercial value, and should be protected by patents. Jones was measuring neutron flux instead, and seems to have considered it primarily of scientific interest, not commercial. In order to avoid problems in the future, the teams apparently agreed to simultaneously publish their results, although their accounts of their March 6 meeting differ.

In mid-March both teams were ready to publish, and Fleischmann and Jones had agreed to meet at the airport on the 24th to send their papers at the exact same time to Nature by FedEx. However Fleischmann and Pons broke that apparent agreement - they had submitted a paper to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry on the 11th, and they disclosed their work in the press conference the day before. Jones, apparently furious at being "scooped", faxed in his paper to Nature as soon as he saw the press announcements.

Sequel of the announcement

The press reported on the experiments widely, and it was one of the front-page items on most newspapers around the world. The immense beneficial implications of the Utah experiments, if they were correct, and the ready availability of the required equipment, led scientists around the world to attempt to repeat the experiments within hours of the announcement.

On April 10, Fleischmann and Pons published their 8-page "preliminary note" in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. The paper was rushed, very incomplete and contained a clear error with regard to the gamma spectra.

On April 10 a team at Texas A&M University published results of excess heat, and later that day a team at the Georgia Institute of Technology announced neutron production. Both results were widely reported on in the press. However, both teams soon withdrew their results for lack of evidence. For the next six weeks additional competing claims, counterclaims, and suggested explanations kept the topic on the front pages, and led to what some journalists have referred to as "fusion confusion."

On April 12 Pons received a standing ovation from about 7000 chemists at the semi-annual meeting of the American Chemical Society. The University of Utah asked Congress to provide $25 million to pursue the research, and Dr. Pons was scheduled to meet with representatives of President Bush early May.

On May 1 the American Physical Society held a session on cold fusion that ran past midnight; a string of failed experiments were reported. A second session started the next day with other negative reports, and 8 of the 9 leading speakers said that they ruled the Utah claim as dead. Dr. Steven E. Koonin of Caltech called the Utah report a result of "the incompetence and delusion of Pons and Fleischmann". The audience of scientists sat in stunned silence for a moment before bursting into applause. Dr. Douglas R. O. Morrison, a physicist representing CERN, called the entire episode an example of pathological science.

By the end of May much of the media attention had faded. This was due not only to the competing results and counterclaims, but also to the limited attention span of modern media. However, while the research effort also cooled to some degree, projects continued around the world.

In July and November 1989, Nature published papers critical of cold fusion which cast the idea of cold fusion out of mainstream science.

In November, a special panel formed by the Energy Research Advisory Board (under a charge of the US Department of Energy) reported the result of their investigation into cold fusion. The scientists in the panel found the evidence for cold fusion to be unconvincing. Nevertheless, the panel was "sympathetic toward modest support for carefully focused and cooperative experiments within the present funding system". As 1989 wore on, cold fusion was considered by mainstream scientists to be self-deception, experimental error and even fraud, and was held out as a prime example of pseudoscience. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected most patent applications related to cold fusion since then.

A year later, in July 1990, Fleischmann and Pons corrected the errors from their earlier "preliminary note," and published their detailed 58-page seminal paper "Calorimetry of the Palladium-Deuterium-Heavy Water System," in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry.

Also in 1990, Richard Oriani, professor of physical chemistry emeritus of the University of Minnesota published the first replication of the excess heat effect in his paper, "Calorimetric Measurements of Excess Power Output During the Cathodic Charging of Deuterium Into Palladium," in Fusion Technology. This paper has never been challenged in the scientific literature.

In 1992, the Wilson group from General Electric challenged the Fleischmann-Pons 1990 paper in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. The Wilson group asserted that the claims of excess heat had been overstated, but they were unable to "prove that no excess heat" was generated. Wilson concluded that the Fleischmann and Pons cell generated approximately 40% excess heat and amounted to 736 mw, more than ten times larger than the error levels associated with the data.

Despite the apparent confirmation by Wilson, Fleischmann and Pons still responded to the Wilson critique and published a rebuttal, also in the same issue of Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. To this day, Fleischmann and Pons' seminal paper has never been refuted in the scientific literature.

Moving beyond the initial controversy

The 1990s saw little cold fusion research in the United States, and much of the research during this time period occurred in Europe and Asia. Fleischmann and Pons moved their research laboratory to France, under a grant from the founder of Toyota Motor Corporation.

By 1991, 92 groups of researchers from 10 different countries had reported excess heat, tritium, neutrons or other nuclear effects. Over 3,000 cold fusion papers have been published including about 1,000 in peer-reviewed journals. In March 1995, Dr. Edmund Storms compiled a list of 21 published papers reporting excess heat. [47]

File:ColdFusion.jpg

Charles Bennett examines three "cold fusion" test cells at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA

The generation of excess heat has been reported by

• Michael McKubre, director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International,
• Richard A. Oriani (University of Minnesota, in December 1990),
• Robert A. Huggins (at Stanford University in March 1990),
• Y. Arata (Osaka University, Japan),
• T. Mizuno (Hokkaido University, Japan),
• T. Ohmori (Japan),

among many others.

The most common experimental set-ups are the electrolytic (electrolysis) cell and the gas (glow) discharge cell, but many other set-ups have been used. Electrolysis is popular because it was the original experiment and more commonly known way of conducting the cold fusion experiment; gas discharge is often used because it is believed to be the set-up that provides an experimenter a better chance at replication of the excess heat results. The excess heat experimental results reported by T. Ohmori and T. Mizuno (see Mizuno experiment) have come under particular interest by amateur researchers in recent years.

Researchers share their results at the International Conference on Cold Fusion, recently renamed International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. The conference is held every 12 to 18 months in various countries around the world, and is hosted by The International Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, a scientific organization that was founded as a professional society to support research efforts and to communicate experimental results. A few periodicals emerged in the 1990s that covered developments in cold fusion and related new energy sciences. Researchers have contributed hundreds of papers to an on-line cold fusion library.

Between 1993 and 1998, Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry sponsored a "New Hydrogen Energy Program" of $20 million to research the promise of tapping new hydrogen-based energy sources such as cold fusion. They obtained no significant results. Critics say that the program was poorly run.

In 1994, Dr. David Goodstein described the field as follows:

"Cold Fusion is a pariah field, cast out by the scientific establishment. Between Cold Fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. Cold fusion papers are almost never published in refereed scientific journals, with the result that those works don't receive the normal critical scrutiny that science requires. On the other hand, because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here."

In February 2002, a laboratory within the United States Navy released a report that came to the conclusion that the cold fusion phenomenon was in fact real and deserved an official funding source for research. Navy researchers have published more than 40 papers on cold fusion.

In 2004, the United States Department of Energy (USDOE) decided to take another look at cold fusion to determine if their policies towards cold fusion should be altered due to new experimental evidence. They set up a panel on cold fusion. Its 18 reviewers were split approximately evenly on the issue "Is there compelling evidence for power that cannot be attributed to ordinary chemical or solid states sources", a significant change compared to the 1989 DoE panel. However, several of those who judged that there was unexplained power did not believe that a nuclear reaction had been shown to be the source: two-thirds of the reviewers did not feel that the evidence was conclusive for low energy nuclear reaction, one found the evidence convincing, and the remainder indicated that they were somewhat convinced. Many reviewers noted that poor experiment design, documentation, background control and other similar issues hampered the understanding and interpretation of the results presented. The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for experiments in this field.

Possible commercial developments

Cold fusion researchers say that it could have a substantial economic impact, with advantages over plasma fusion (which has also not yet been developed for practical application) because it produces little ionizing radiation and can be scaled to small devices.

Cold fusion's commercial viability is unknown. The evidences of the excess heat effect are not accepted by a majority of scientists. If it exists, the effect would have to be thoroughly controlled before it could be safely scaled up to larger size for commercialization. Cells are orders-of-magnitude too small to be commercially viable (with typically less than a gram of material). Researchers have not yet discovered methods to prevent cathodes from deteriorating, cracking, and melting during the experiments. Additionally, all cold fusion experiments have produced power in bursts lasting for days or weeks, not for months as is needed for many commercial applications.

In 1995, Clean Energy Technology, Inc (CETI) demonstrated a 1-kilowatt cold fusion reactor at the Power-Gen '95 Americas power industry trade show in Anaheim, CA. They obtained several patents from the USPTO. As of 2006, no cold fusion reactor has been commercialized by CETI or the patent holders.

Companies publicly claiming to be developing cold fusion devices, include: Energetics Technologies Ltd. (Israel), D2Fusion, JET Thermal Products, Clean Energy Technologies, Inc. of Sarasota Florida (CETI), BlackLight Power, Inc. of Malvern, Pennsylvania, and ENECO of Salt Lake City. Ongoing developments concerning cold fusion commercialization efforts are tracked at peswiki. There are also some private cold fusion commercialization efforts that are rumored to be ongoing.

Arguments in the controversy

See also: 2004 DoE panel on cold fusion, cold fusion controversy

Theoretical possibility of fusion at low temperature

Main article: Condensed matter nuclear science

Cold fusion's most significant problem in the eyes of many scientists is that theories describing nuclear fusion can not explain how a cold fusion reaction could occur at relatively low temperatures, and that there is currently no accepted theory to explain cold fusion.

In order for fusion to occur, the electrostatic force (Coulomb repulsion) between the positively charged nuclei must be overcome. Once the distance between the nuclei becomes comparable to one femtometre, the attractive strong interaction takes over and the fusion may occur. However, the repulsive Coulomb interaction between the nuclei separated by several femtometres is greater than interactions between nuclei and electrons by approximately six orders of magnitude. Overcoming that requires an energy on the order of 10 MeV per nucleus, whereas the energies of chemical reactions are on the order of several electron-volts; it is hard to explain where the required energy would come from in room-temperature matter.

Huizenga, who was the head of the DoE ERAB panel that dismissed cold fusion in 1989, concluded:

"If the claimed excess heat exceeds that possible by other conventional processes (chemical, mechanical, etc.), one must conclude that an error has been made in measuring the excess heat."

Nobel laureate Schwinger believes that "If a proven track record can be established... you have to believe it". He also believes that cold fusion does not violate conventional theory. As he puts it, "The defense [of cold fusion] is simply stated: The circumstances of cold fusion are not those of hot fusion". However, skeptics say that nuclei are so far apart in a metal lattice that it is hard to believe that the distant atoms could facilitate the fusion reaction.

Cold fusion researchers have proposed several theoretical hypothesis to explain the effect (see low energy nuclear reaction), but none has been confirmed by experiment.

Nuclear Transmutations

Nuclear transmutations are nuclear reactions that cause new chemical elements to appear. They can be a nuclear fusion or nuclear fission reaction. If these elements are unstable, they can decay into still other elements. Nuclear transmutations have been reported in many cold fusion experiments since 1992. They have been reviewed by Miley.

Miley reports that several dozen laboratories are studying these transmutations. Some experiments result in the creation of only a few elements, while others result in a wide variety of elements from the periodic table. Calcium, copper, zinc, and iron were the most commonly reported elements. Lanthanides were also found: this is significant since they are unlikely to enter as impurities. In addition, the isotopic ratio of the observed elements differ from their natural isotopic ratio or natural abundance, making contamination an implausible explanation. Some experiments reported both transmutations and excess heat, but the correlation between the 2 effects has not been established. Radiations have also been reported. Miley also reviews possible theories to explain these observations.

So far the clearest evidence for transmutation has come from an experiment made by Iwamura and associates, and published in 2002 in the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics (one of the top physics journals in Japan). Instead of using electrolysis, they forced deuterium gas to permeate through a thin layer of caesium deposited on calcium oxide and palladium, while periodically analyzing the nature of the surface through X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. As the deuterium gas permeated over a period of a week, the amount of caesium progressively decreased while the amount of praseodymium increased, so that caesium appeared to be transmuted into praseodymium. When caesium was replaced by strontium, it was transmuted into molybdenum. In both cases this represents an addition of 4 deuterium nuclei to the original element. They have produced these results 6 times, and reproducibility was good. The energy released by these transmutations was too low to be observed. When the calcium oxide was removed or when the deuterium gas was replaced by hydrogen, no transmutation was observed. The authors analyzed, and then rejected, the possibility to explain these various observations by contaminations. The experiment was replicated by researchers from Osaka University using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry to analyze the nature of the surface (the Pd complex samples were provided by Iwamura).

Tadahiko Mizuno is another prominent transmutation experimenter. Attempts to find at least partial theoretical explanations are being made by Takahashi and others. One proposal by Takahashi to explain the wide range of elements generated is that fission of palladium is initiated by photons.

One of the claims against cold fusion is that there no nuclear ash to prove a nuclear reaction occurred. Nuclear transmutations are by definition nuclear reactions and the nuclear ash remains after the experiment for a long time. If the experiments are valid nuclear transmutations prove that nuclear reactions are taking place in cold fusion experiments.

Another claim against cold fusion is that the apparent Coulomb barrier of a deuterium reaction cannot be overcome. The Iwamura experiment gives the appearance at least that an enormous Coulomb barrier can be overcome.

Measurement of excess heat

File:SzpakIRcameraviews.jpg

A infrared picture showing the brief hot spots appearing randomly on the cathode. Presented by Szpak at ICCF10

Excess heat production is an important characteristic of the effect that has created much criticism. Some claim that the results may be in error because the levels of excess heat reported are often small, 50 to 200 milliwatts (one thousandth of a watt).

The CMNS researchers presenting their review document to the 2004 DoE panel on cold fusion said that the possibility of calorimetric errors has been carefully considered, studied, tested and ultimately rejected by cold fusion researchers. They explain that, in 1989, Fleischann and Pons used an open cell from which energy was lost in a variety of ways: the differential equation used to determine excess energy was awkward and subject to misunderstanding, and has an accuracy of 1% or less. Recognizing these issues, SRI International and other research teams used a flow calorimeter around a close cells: the governing equations become trivial, and have accuracy of 0.5 % or better. Over 50 experiments conducted by SRI International showed excess power well above the accuracy of measurement. Arata and Zhang have observed excess heat power averaging 80 watts over 12 days. Control experiments using light water never showed excess heat.

However, many reviewers in the panel noted that poor experiment design, documentation, background control and other similar issues hampered the understanding and interpretation of the results presented to the DoE panel. The reviewers who did not find the production of excess power convincing said that all possible chemical and solid state causes of excess heat have not been investigated and eliminated as an explanation, that the magnitude of the effect has not increased in over a decade of work, or that production over a period of time is a few percent of the external power applied and hence calibration and systematic effects could account for the purported effect.

In 2005, Shanahan raised questions about the consequences of imperfect stirring of the electrolyte on the calibration of calorimeters before and during cold fusion experiments, and hence on the measurement of excess heat. They were addressed by Storms in a paper published in Thermochim. Acta, but a rebuttal was published.

Energy source versus power store

It has been suggested that the observed excess power output which begins after a cell is operated for a long time may be due to energy accumulated in the cell during operation. This would require a systematic error in calorimetry (in other words that the cell is drawing more power than goes out, but calorimetry incorrectly shows the two to be equal), or a very slow accumulation of energy below the heat measurement accuracy during prolonged loading of the cell.

The CMNS researchers presenting their review document to the 2004 DoE panel on cold fusion said that the amount of energy reported in some of the experiments appears to be too great compared to the small mass of material in the cell, for it to be stored by any known chemical process.

Relation between excess heat and nuclear products

File:Autoradiograph200dpi.jpg

An autoradiograph showing X-rays from tritium in a cold fusion experiment at the Neutron Physics Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Bombay, India

For a nuclear reaction to be proposed as the source of energy, it is necessary to show that the amount of energy is related to the amount of nuclear products.

If the excess heat were generated by the hot fusion of two deuterium atoms, the most probable outcome, according to current theory, would be the generation of either a tritium and a proton, or a ³He and a neutron. The level of protons, tritium, neutrons and ³He actually observed in Fleischmann-Pons experiment have been higher than current theory asserts, but well below the level expected in view of the heat generated, implying that these reactions cannot explain it.

If the excess heat were generated by the hot fusion of two deuterium atoms into ⁴He, a reaction which is normally extremely rare, helium and gamma rays would be generated. Miles et al. showed that helium was indeed generated in quantity consistent with the excess heat, but no studies have shown levels of gamma rays consistent with the excess heat. Current nuclear theory cannot explain these results, and the statement "the heat comes from a nuclear source" remains a hypothesis.

Although there appears to be evidence of transmutations and isotope shifts near the cathode surface in some experiments, CMNS researchers generally consider that these anomalies are not the ash associated with the primary excess heat effect.

Reproducibility of the result

While some scientists have reported to have reproduced the excess heat with similar or different set-ups, they could not do so with predictable results, and many others failed. Some see this as a proof that the cold fusion is pseudoscience, or more precisely, pathological science.

Yet, the 1989 DOE panel said: "Even a single short but valid cold fusion period would be revolutionary. As a result, it is difficult convincingly to resolve all cold fusion claims since, for example, any good experiment that fails to find cold fusion can be discounted as merely not working for unknown reasons.".

Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger says that it is not uncommon to have difficulty in reproducing a new phenomenon that involves an ill-understood macroscopic control of a microscopic mechanism. As examples, he gave the onset of microchip studies, and the discovery of high temperature superconductivity.

The CMNS researchers presenting their review document to the 2004 DoE panel on cold fusion said that the observation of excess heat has been reproduced, that it can be reproduced at will when the proper conditions are reproduced, and that many of the reasons for failure to reproduce it have been discovered.

Suppression of cold fusion research

In 1991, Dr. Eugene Mallove said that the negative report issued by MIT's Plasma Fusion Center in 1989 was highly influential in the controversy, but was fraudulent: a chart was purposely modified to hide the fact that excess heat was actually observed at MIT. In protest of this alleged scientific misconduct, he resigned from his post of chief science writer at the MIT News office on June 7, 1991. He hypothesizes that the mainstream physics community had no interest in accepting the possibility of cold fusion, because it would take away funding from plasma research.

Cold fusion researchers claim that cold fusion is suppressed, and that skeptics suffer from pathological disbelief. They say that there is virtually no possibility for funding in cold fusion in the United States, and no possibility of getting published. They say that people in universities refuse to work on it because they would be ridiculed by their colleagues.

Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger says that he has experienced "the pressure for conformity in editor's rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous reviewers. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science". He resigned as Member and Fellow of the American Physical Society, in protest of its peer review practice on cold fusion.

See also

• 2004 DoE panel on cold fusion
• Timeline of cold fusion
• Martin Fleischmann
• Stanley Pons
• Mizuno experiment
• Cold fusion controversy
• Low energy nuclear reaction
• Pathological science
• Huemul Project

Further reading

Reports and reviews

• "Cold Fusion Research" - Energy Research Advisory Board report (November 1989)
  • Conclusions and recommendations section of the report
• U.S. Navy Report Detailing a Decade of Cold Fusion Research "Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D2O System", U.S. Navy TECHNICAL REPORT 1862, February 2002
• U.S. DoE 2004 Cold Fusion Review - U.S. Department of Energy review of 15 years of cold fusion experiments
  • Additional information on the DoE 2004 Cold Fusion Review. This page includes the full text of the reviewer's comments, which is not available on the DoE pages, plus links to the full text of 42 of the papers submitted by cold fusion researchers to the review panel. (The list of all 130 submitted papers can be found here.)
  • Response to the DoE/2004 Review of Cold-Fusion Research - C. Beaudette's critique of the DoE 2004 Cold Fusion Review
• Cold Fusion - An Objective Assessment - by Dr. Edmund Storms, a review of the experimental results (December 2001; 233 references, including 34 studies reporting anomalous energy using the Pons-Fleischmann method)
• A Student's Guide to Cold Fusion - by Edmund Storms. A 55-page introduction to the subject.
• Overview of BARC Studies in Cold Fusion. - P.K. Iyengar (Atomic Energy Commission, India) and M. Srinivasan (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre) review some of the major research in India.
• Review Of Transmutation Reactions In Solids. Miley, G. H. and P. Shrestha in Tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion. 2003. Cambridge, MA.

Journals and publications

• Infinite Energy - one of the original periodicals dedicated to cold fusion and new energy
• New Energy Times - site that focuses on the latest advances in the field of cold fusion
• Cold Fusion Times - quarterly journal about cold fusion

Websites and repositories

• LENR-CANR Low Energy Nuclear Reactions — Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions - information and links on cold fusion research (mainly pro-cold fusion), and an online library of over 500 full-text papers from the peer-reviewed literature and conference proceedings
• Britz's cold nuclear fusion bibliography - an overview and review of almost all available publications about cold nuclear fusion
• Cold Fusion — 17 Years and Heating Up - directory of cold fusion resources compiled by FreeEnergyNews.com
• L. Kowalski's web site - a collection of commentaries on cold fusion research from a physics teacher
• International Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science - website of the ISCMNS
• JL Naudin's web site - the CFR project, a High Temperature Plasma Electrolysis based on the Tadahiko Mizuno work from the Hokkaido University (Japan)
• Cold Fusion overview - John Coviello provides an introductory synopsis for new encyclopedic entry at PESWiki.com.
• A Cold Fusion primer, in English and Italian

News

1980s

• Elation Should Be Tempered Until Jury Has Examined Experiments The Financial Post (May 1, 1989)
• "Physicists Debunk Claim Of a New Kind of Fusion" - The New York Times (May 3, 1989)
• "PFC results said to deal blow to fusion claims" - MIT Tech (May 9, 1989) - Early cold fusion claims set straight by work in their Plasma Fusion Center

1990s

• Whatever Happened to Cold Fusion? The American Scholar (Late 1994)
• What If Cold Fusion Is Real? Wired, (November 1998)
• Whatever happened to cold fusion? Physics World, (March 1999)
• The War Against Cold Fusion - What's really behind it? SF Gate - (May 1999)

2000s

• Arthur C Clarke demands cold fusion rethink BBC News (September 2000) See also: [48]
• Warming up to Cold Fusion Washington Post Magazine (November 2004)
• ICCF-11 Overview With Links to Presentations International Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (November 2004)
• U.S. review rekindles cold fusion debate Nature - (December 2004)
• The 2005 Cold Fusion Colloquium Cold Fusion Times (May 2005) - Public gathering of cold fusion researchers at MIT
• Cold-Fusion Believers Work On, Even as Mainstream Science Gives Them the Cold Shoulder Salt Lake City Weekly (October 2005)
• ICCF-12 Overview With Links to Presentations International Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (December 2005)
• Does fusion scientist 'hold the secret'? Deseret Morning News (March 2006)
• Fleischmann Joins D2Fusion to Develop Cold Fusion Heaters Pure Energy Systems News (March 2006)

Bibliography

• Krivit, Steven ; Winocur, Nadine. The Rebirth of Cold Fusion: Real Science, Real Hope, Real Energy. Los Angeles, CA, Pacific Oaks Press, 2004 ISBN 0976054582.
• Beaudette, Charles. Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed, 2nd. Ed. South Bristol, ME, Oak Grove Press, 2002. ISBN 0967854830.
• Park, Robert L. Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0195135156.
• Mizuno, Tadahiko. Nuclear Transmutation: The Reality of Cold Fusion. Concord, N.H.: Infinite Energy Press, 1998. ISBN 1892925001.
• Taubes, Gary. Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion. New York, N.Y. : Random House, 1993. ISBN 0394584562.
• Huizenga, John R. Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1992. ISBN 1878822071; ISBN 0198558171.
• Close, Frank E..Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1991. ISBN 0691085919; ISBN 0140159266.
• Mallove, Eugene. Fire from Ice: Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor. Concord, N.H.: Infinite Energy Press, 1991. ISBN 1892925028.