TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Cold Fusion Resurrected from Batteries to Bacteria

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 03-30-10 | Comments

Cold fusion was once touted as the answer to the energy crisis, but was later debunked as poor science. Now 20 years later, nearly 50 chemists aim to resurrect the dream at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting touting nuclear batteries and bacteria that eat nuclear waste.

In 1989, chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons claimed to have a room-temperature demonstration of nuclear fusion with a simple electrolysis apparatus using heavy water with a palladium electrode. Unfortunately, other researchers were unable to duplicate their results, and naysayers discredited the whole enterprise as poor science.

A new "calorimeter," shown immersed in this water bath, provides the first inexpensive means of identifying the hallmark of cold fusion reactions: the production of excess heat. Source: Melvin Miles

Then in 2002, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (San Diego) revealed that it had been doing cold fusion research since 1989, and that its results were promising enough to justify further funding. In 2004, the Department of Energy reviewed cold fusion progress, citing several areas where further research was needed to clarify the debacle. In 2006, the American Physical Society held a "cold fusion" session that hosted 13 papers on progress since 1989. In 2007, the American Chemical Society (ACS) held an "invited symposium" on cold fusion, and at this year's ACS annual meeting a cold fusion session called "New Energy Technology" has attracted almost 50 peer-reviewed papers.

According to the session organizer, founder Jan Marwan of Marwan Chemie (Berlin, Germany), researchers have been quietly but steadily working on cold fusion experiments despite a lack of funding due to the controversy. With the spate of recent experimental evidence in favor of cold fusion, Marwan predicts that cold fusion research will soon spawn working applications that could restart the field.

"Scientists are no longer afraid," says Marwan. "The field is gaining new researchers from universities that had previously not pursued cold fusion research. More and more people are becoming interested in it."

The breakthrough demonstration at the ACS meeting this week is a new "calorimeter" apparatus that has been verified by multiple research groups to detect the energy produced by cold fusion�the main claim by Fleischmann and Pons that others were previously unable to reproduce�according to its inventor, professor Melvin Miles at Dixie State College (St. George, Utah).

Michael McKubre, an electro-chemist at SRI International (Menlo Park, Calif.), gave the overview presentation, citing recent evidence that excess heat production in the calorimeter apparatus does indeed derive from nuclear fusion.

Other researchers backed McKubre's claims with evidence of their own, including professor Tadahiko Mizuno at Hokkaido University (Japan), professor Peter Hagelstein at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge), and professor Xing Zhong Li at Tsinghua University (Beijing).

Professor George Miley, director of the Fusion Studies Lab at the University of Illinois (Urbana), reported on a new type of battery design that harnesses cold fusion to extend its shelf life beyond that of ordinary batteries. The special electrolytic cell operates at very low temperatures using a specially "doped" electrode with intentionally created defects.

One novel research direction was offered by Kiev National Shevchenko University scientist Vladimir Vysotskii, who claims to have found evidence that bacteria can participate in cold fusion reactions, a fact that he hopes to use to transform nuclear waste into stable isotopes.