Cold Fusion Still a Hot Topic

Daily telegraph, Saturday 24th May 1997.

Against the odds, Martin Fleischmann believes the Sun's energy source can be harnessed. Roger Highfield reports

IT IS not every day that you meet a Fellow of the Royal Society who says his Big Idea could be worth $300 trillion - and that is only based on old estimates that cite the first generation of commercial device.

However, this is no common-or-laboratory fellow but Martin Fleischmann, the chemist who electrified the world with the promise of cold fusion, an apparently simple method to harness the energy source that powers the Sun.

On March 23, 1989, Fleischmann and Stan Pons announced in Utah how they had sustained a controlled nuclear fusion reaction in a test-tube that generated up to 100 per cent more energy than they put in. Whatever happened to this potential source of unlimited energy, the greatest miracle - or mistake - this century? To find out, I decided to track down Dr Martin Fleischmann after hearing he had been grilled by the broadcaster John Humphrys (tomorrow, 9.30am, on Radio 4's On the Ropes).

Now 70, Fleischmann lives in a Victorian house near Tisbury. His dream of unlimited energy is still alive: he is working hard on cold fusion, in league with a foreign laboratory he refuses to identify. "My main objective is to reanalyse some of the old results," said Fleischmann, his accent bearing the trace of his Czech upbringing. Still affected by a cancer operation almost a decade ago, Fleischmann sleeps fitfully. At any hour, he can be foundcombing pages of figures to develop new ways to highlight the excess heat produced by cold fusion - when a current is passed through a palladium electrode dipped in heavy water.

He still toys with the idea of doing experiments, perhaps abroad or perhaps he could set up a fusion reactor in the kitchen, if his wife Sheila is happy. "Of course, people would like to know what I am up to in toto but I am not going to tell them."

Unlike most scientists, Fleischmann still believes cold fusion can generate useful energy. But even he admits it is make-or-break time. Although another international cold fusion conference is planned in Vancouver, "I think it may fizzle out".

The numbers who attend the annual cold fusion conference remain around a couple of hundred "true believers", as sceptics call them. The field has also seen tragedy: a British researcher was blown up during one US experiment. As soon as we sat down, he began to recite the history of cold fusion. "I really started to think about the end of 1947." So began the quest for "anomalous nuclear reactions of deuterium in palladium". Other people coined the now-discredited term cold fusion, he said.

I had imagined he would have been shredded by his mauling from the science establishment. But he seemed almost as feisty as when I first met him, in 1980, when I was a doctoral student visiting Southampton University and he was an innovative professor with an international reputation.

His idea is ingenious. Rather than spend billions of dollars on heating hydrogen and tritium to 100 million ¡C and beyond, cold fusion exploits the way palladium metal soaks up deuterium. The rest, he says, is down to quantum field theory, which explains how deuterium nuclei can be squeezed together under the influence of an electric current so as to release energy.

He and former Southampton student Stan Pons decided to work on the idea in the early 1980s. By the spring of 1989, they had spent $100,000 of their own money on the quest, carried out in secret in the basement of a building in Salt Lake City.

The results were encouraging but news began to leak out on campus. Despite misgivings,they were stampeded into announcing their find to beat another researcher into the public domain.

The chemists became Time and Newsweek cover stories. The US President and other world leaders demanded to know what was going on. The Vice-President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences offered to make all the Soviet Union's facilities available to them. A surveillance operation began, one which Fleischmann says continues to this day (he has written to his MP, Robert Key, complaining that the bugging ruins his faxes).

Then followed efforts to replicate the work. Leading scientists failed. Major laboratories also had a go: Caltech, MIT and Harwell in Oxfordshire. There were sporadic sightings of excess heat, which Fleischmann said cannot be accounted for by chemistry alone. Crucially, there were no tell-tale signs of nuclear processes, notably subatomic particles called neutrons. But they should have searched for helium 4 - the "ash" of nuclear fusion. This hunt has been hard but there is now "pretty good evidence" that this has been detected, said Fleischmann.

These heavyweight laboratories also used the wrong palladium. They should have used "Johnson Matthey material A", he said. But I thought that he himself had advised the Harwell team? "I absolutely did not."

I draw his attention to a claim that Pons made in 1993 that there would be household fusion generators by 2000. Yes, agreed Fleischmann, Stan had said it. But a journalist had releasedthe quotation without permission.

By this time, Pons and Fleischmann were working in Sofia Antipolis, a research park near Nice. Their previous venture, the National Cold Fusion Institute in Utah, had collapsed, as Fleischmann put it.

Pons is still working in France. Fleischmann returned to England last year, frustrated by the lack of progress. Their relationship also ended: "We don't talk to each other. I am prepared to talk to him but he is not prepared to talk to me."

To get a true picture of what is happening today, he insisted I scan a pile of papers he had neatly set out for me. "A clear cut picture . . . is still lacking," concluded one Italian team. Another, from the Russian People's Friendship University, said cold fusion is "rather illusive".

The nuclear centre in Grenoble has reproduced his experiments, which he feels is important. Alas, like most of the papers, it is reported in cold fusion conference proceedings. I have not seen anything in the mainstream, peer reviewed, literature for years.

"The New York Times said that you cannot make a heavier-than-air machine fly the day before the Wright brothers took off," said Fleischmann. So why doesn't he stage a knock-out demonstration of cold fusion? That is not technically possible for one man, he countered.

When it comes to shenanigans in the field "you have no idea", he said, convinced there is a cloak-and-dagger effort to discredit cold fusion by "the suppression of research results, incorrect reporting and much else".

He is the first to admit that to resort to conspiracy theories is "dodgy" bordering on desperate, but added: "I have a pretty complete dossier. If you put it all together, there is not much doubt that there are conspiracies."

here is, of course, an explanation for the rejection of cold fusion. No one doubts his suggestion that by exploring the phenomenon we may stumble on new science. But the field now seems unlikely ever to realise that holy grail of unlimited energy.