Sun in a Bottle (22 page)

Even though Pons and Fleischmann’s own work had been thoroughly debunked, a handful of experimenters still thought they had seen heat or tritium coming from palladium cells. Texas A&M’s John Bockris and Stanford’s Robert Huggins, for example, became staunch supporters of cold fusion based on their labs’ results. And, of course, there was Jones. The scientific community found flaws in all these studies. Jones’s own cells were shown not to be producing neutrons by a team of physicists led by Moshe Gai, a Yale professor. Huggins was criticized at the APS meeting by a fellow Stanford professor, Walter Meyerhof. Bockris’s lab was soon surrounded by intimations of academic fraud, which included spiking cells with tritium from a little bottle. Though the researchers were cleared by a Texas A&M panel, doubts lingered about the quality of their work. This was enough to convince most scientists that cold fusion was not worth any expense of time or effort.

Nevertheless, positive reports from increasingly sketchy research kept dribbling in. These persuaded some scientists, as well as a number of mainstream organizations, including the Electric Power Research Institute and the Stanford Research Institute, that there had to be something to cold fusion. (As late as October 1989, Edward Teller apparently was in favor of funding cold-fusion experiments.) Despite the scorn of most scientists, the research continued to receive money, although it was getting harder to find. University of Utah president Chase Peterson tried to keep the Cold Fusion Institute alive with a $500,000 infusion from his university’s research fund.
⁵⁸
And so the corpse of cold fusion continued to twitch. Part of what kept the cold-fusion dream alive was the sense of outrage over how Pons and Fleischmann had been treated by the physics community. The smackdown in May had had the air of a public lynching. In its wake, the climate in the physics community had turned from skepticism to scorn. Soon, any cold-fusion believer was ridiculed. It was unseemly, if understandable. A number of people leapt into the fray on the side of the underdogs. The Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger became a cold-fusion supporter and resigned from the American Physical Society in protest over the scientists’ poor treatment. Eugene Mallove, MIT’s chief science writer, quit his post after alleging that some of the anti-cold-fusion physicists at MIT were engaging in fraud. Mallove then started publishing
Infinite Energy
magazine, which boosted cold-fusion research even as it was getting pushed ever further to the fringes of science.

When Pons and Fleischmann quietly packed their bags and left for France, where a Japanese consortium had set up a cold-fusion research facility, they left behind a small community of true believers. These cold-fusion aficionados supported and encouraged each other, secure in the belief that a revolutionary idea was being crushed by the scientific establishment. There had been a miscarriage of science, they thought. Pons and Fleischmann had been run out of town by the very hot-fusion physicists who were going to lose their funding because of the chemists’ discovery.

Pons and Fleischmann continued their research long after the mainstream of science had dismissed cold fusion entirely and had come to consider the whole affair a tremendous embarrassment. The two went their separate ways in the mid-1990s, still insisting they were right, that they had seen excess energy in their palladium cells. The Japanese gave up on cold fusion in 1997, after having spent tens of millions of dollars without any concrete results. The following year, nearly a decade after the scientific community turned its back on the idea, the University of Utah stopped fighting for cold-fusion patents. They were more than $1 million in the hole for lawyer’s fees.

Steven Jones, too, was driven to the fringe. Though he kept his post at Brigham Young University, his research got increasingly bizarre. A devout Mormon, he tried to prove that Jesus Christ had visited Mesoamerica (he thought that marks on the hands of Mayan gods were evidence that Christ, with his stigmata, was their inspiration). Then, in 2006, he came out with a study that purported to prove that the World Trade Center had been demolished by explosives inside the building, not by the jets that struck from the outside. BYU initiated a review of the research, and Jones retired from the university shortly thereafter.

If Pons, Fleischmann, and Jones had been the only ones who supported cold fusion, the idea would have long since passed out of the public consciousness. But some serious-sounding scientists at some serious-sounding institutions were convinced that there had to be something to the cold-fusion claims. (Some modern-day cold-fusion work is being done by researchers at the Stanford Research Institute, at a few navy laboratories, and even at MIT.) Some mysterious events also lent credence to the cold-fusion conspiracy theories. In 1992, a researcher was killed in an explosion while performing a cold-fusion experiment, and in 2004, Mallove, the most outspoken proponent of the idea, was found on his driveway, beaten to death.

The cold-fusion movement also drew strength from the press. Reporters seem genetically predisposed to take the side of the underdog, and the cold-fusion-versus-big-science story certainly had one. Some journalists were true believers, and others just were offended by mainstream science’s treatment of the cold-fusion researchers. Their gripes came out as a slow and steady drumbeat. “These folks need a fair hearing,” said ABC News science correspondent Michael Guillen in 1994. In 1998,
Wired
’s Charles Platt suggested that ignoring new cold-fusion research might be “a colossal conspiracy of denial.” The
Wall Street Journal
returned to its cold-fusion roots in 2003 with a column by the esteemed science journalist Sharon Begley: “Cold fusion today is a prime example of pathological science, but not because its adherents are delusional.... The real pathology,” she wrote, “is the breakdown of the normal channels of scientific communication, with no scientists outside the tight-knit cold-fusion tribe bothering to scrutinize its claims.”

Mainstream physicists saw it differently, of course. Despite the fact that Pons and Fleischmann were claiming something extraordinary—ridiculous, even—the scientific community
had
scrutinized their claims. They found the Utah group’s work sloppy at best, and systematically demolished the chemists’ claims. Cold-fusion advocates had spent millions of dollars researching the phenomenon and still did not have a device that could reliably heat a cup of water for tea. The burden of proof, as always in science, is on the people who claim extraordinary things. It is their responsibility to perform an experiment so good that it forces the scientific community to abandon its prior beliefs.

This may be the scientific attitude, but it comes across as terribly arrogant, and that served to increase the power of the cold-fusion lobby. By 2004, the pressure had grown to the point that the Department of Energy felt it necessary to review whether cold fusion merited renewed funding. (The term
cold fusion
had been dropped in favor of the less-pejorative
low-energy nuclear reactions.
) The conclusions were much the same as they had been a decade and a half earlier. Yet the mere existence of the review was an indication of the power of the cold-fusion lobby. And the more that people tried to stomp on cold-fusion enthusiasts, the stronger the movement became.

 

 

The lure of cold fusion and the promise of unlimited, free energy is, itself, a source of power to be reckoned with. Patent examiner Thomas Valone has been under its spell for more than a decade. In 1998, after having worked at the patent office for a few years, he broadcast a plea for cold-fusion aficionados to join him in his line of work, according to
Science
magazine. “Valone called for ‘all able-bodied free energy technologists’ to ‘infiltrate’ the Patent Office”—presumably to benefit like-minded cold-fusion and free-energy enthusiasts seeking patents. Valone then attempted to organize what was to be called the First International Conference on Free Energy, which was to be held at the State Department. Mainstream physicists were appalled, including the American Physical Society’s Robert Park, who featured the conference in his acerbic weekly
What’s New
newsletter. “The speakers list for CoFE is certainly open minded; topics include: assisted nuclear reactions (a.k.a. cold fusion), sonoluminesence (a.k.a. cold fusion), hydrogen technologies (a.k.a. cold fusion), tabletop nuclear transformations (a.k.a. cold fusion),” Park wrote, noting that the conference was to be held under the “auspices of the U.S. State Department in the Dean Acheson Auditorium.” An embarrassed State Department booted the conference, but the meeting survived. Within a few weeks it was renamed the First International Conference on Future Energy, and it had apparently found another home. Valone billed the event as being held “In cooperation with the U.S. Department of Commerce”—the department that runs the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Commerce kicked the conference to the curb. Valone, too.

In May 1999, a week after Valone’s conference took place in a Bethesda hotel, his supervisors started a process to remove him from his job, alleging, among other things, that he had misrepresented the Commerce Department’s role in the conference. By the end of August, he was fired—but Valone filed a grievance. He felt he was being unfairly persecuted for his beliefs.

When the case was heard, the arbitrator had harsh words for the patent office and its reliance on hearsay, and failure to follow proper procedure. But the harshest criticism went to the physicists who had attacked Valone. It is easy to understand why Park and his American Physical Society colleagues went after cold fusion, he wrote:

 

The arbitrator’s words echo those of the cold-fusion community. Small-minded physicists are trying to suppress research that would take money away from their own endeavors. Valone got his job back along with back pay.

The second Conference on Future Energy, with its lightning-bolt BioCharger, its talk about antigravity stealth bombers, and its whole-hearted embrace of cold fusion, was Valone’s victory celebration. It represented the defeat of the forces trying to suppress his views and the comeuppance for the physicists who had hounded Pons and Fleischmann abroad and driven cold fusion to the fringe. It was 2006, nearly two decades after the two chemists had been ridiculed by mainstream scientists, but the gathering proved cold fusion was still alive. The dream of unlimited fusion energy in a room-temperature test tube was too powerful for mere science to destroy.

Everything secret degenerates, . . . nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

 

 

T
he cold-fusion affair captured the imagination of the public. Two chemists, two outsiders, claimed to have succeeded with a cheap, tabletop experiment where legions of physicists with hundreds of millions of dollars had failed.

Fusion energy is hard. Even if you manage to get a fusion reaction going in a small device—and a number of people have succeeded in doing just that
⁵⁹
—“tabletop” devices all consume more energy than they produce. The more researchers experiment with fusion, the more most of them are convinced that the best—if not the only—way to create a fusion reactor is with a hot plasma, confined and compressed by some powerful force. Nowadays, that leaves only two realistic options: big, expensive magnets or big, expensive lasers.

Both approaches require billions of dollars and thousands of scientists. And both have secrets. Laser fusion’s secret is a matter of national security; magnetic fusion’s secret is a matter of some embarrassment. Both secrets threaten the future of fusion energy.

 

 

In the late 1970s, before Shiva came on line, laser scientists at Livermore were extremely confident that they were on the fast track to fusion energy. They believed that Shiva, with its twenty beams, would likely achieve breakeven: the machine would produce as much energy in fusion as was poured into the system by its lasers. They were sure that they would produce a fusion reactor by the century’s end, and they were not ashamed to tell the press about it. In 1978, shortly before all the Shiva experiment’s lasers were all turned on, Livermore’s physicists were talking to the press about having a fusion power plant working in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Despite the numerous problems that the physicists were encountering with laser fusion—the loss of energy to electrons, the Rayleigh-Taylor instability, and numerous other effects that made it harder than expected to compress and heat a deuterium pellet—they felt that they had good reason for optimism. It was called LASNEX.

LASNEX is a very intricate computer program meant to simulate what happens in the heart of a laser fusion experiment, and though the computer program is still classified, a few details are available outside the fusion community. Scientists apparently began working on it in the late 1960s or early 1970s. When Livermore’s John Nuckolls wrote about laser fusion in
Nature
in 1972, he referred to an early version of the code, and even then it was relatively advanced. LASNEX described every possible interaction of light, electrons, and nuclei that the designers could imagine. It told them how a cold pellet of matter begins to compress under laser light or x-ray emissions, how hot electrons bleed off energy, how fusion in the belly of the pellet causes it to expand. Physicists could tinker with various conditions, changing the size or contents of the pellet, the color and intensity of the light that shines upon it, the number and location of laser spots hitting a target or a hohlraum. They could, in short, run lots and lots of laser experiments before ever building a real-life laser device. To laser fusion scientists, LASNEX was a secret weapon. Nuckolls likened LASNEX to “the breaking of an enemy code. It tells you how many divisions to bring to bear on a problem.”