Once Touted Unlimited Energy Source Generates Little Interest Today

Mar 30, 05:10 PM

Current Headlines: By Jon Van, Chicago Tribune

Mar. 30--Unlimited energy brewed in a bottle sparked a worldwide sensation nearly 18 years ago. Promises that cold fusion would power the planet, however, were shot down in little more than a month.

On Thursday, researchers who continue to believe in cold fusion drew fewer than a dozen spectators to Chicago for the national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Still, the dream believers remain undeterred.

"I don't know that my efforts have been dismissed," said George Miley, director of the fusion studies lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "They've just been ignored."

Miley, who does research mostly in mainstream high-temperature fusion, spends his free time doing cold-fusion experiments, and his results have convinced him that limitless power is possible, although he said it will take much more research to obtain.

The first step will require regaining attention from a scientific community and a general populace that dismissed the cold-fusion notion almost as soon as they heard about it. But overcoming its past may be too big a hurdle for cold fusion.

"These are mostly the same guys who jumped on board 18 years ago," said Robert Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland who wrote "Voodoo Science," a book about pseudoscience. "To my knowledge, they haven't convinced a single soul outside their own community.

"These guys aren't bad guys. They're just wrong, as far as I can tell."

Cold fusion started 18 years ago when Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, researchers working at the University of Utah, held a press conference to announce that a new power source was just around the corner to save the Earth from pollution and high energy bills.

The Wall Street Journal's front-page story gave the claims credibility, and within a week cold fusion landed on the covers of Time, Newsweek and BusinessWeek. A standing ovation greeted Pons and Fleischmann when they attended the 1989 American Chemical Society meeting.

But most scientists who tried to replicate the Pons/Fleischmann findings found they couldn't, and the pair soon admitted some mistakes.

They continued to insist that their experiments with deuterium, a form of hydrogen found in seawater, and palladium produced more energy than the electricity fed into the apparatus to make it work. This indicated that some deuterium atoms were fusing with each other at room temperature, releasing tremendous energy, they said.

Widespread criticism caused them to retreat from promises of vast commercially available power. Along with cold fusion, they faded from public view.

But for a hard core of scientists around the world, as well as any number of patent lawyers and hopeful investors, cold fusion remained intriguing.

As he surveyed the mostly empty chairs in a meeting room Thursday at McCormick Place, Melvin Miles, a colleague of Fleischmann's, lamented that "not many people are here today because most people thought this was proven wrong years ago."

Because Fleischmann, who lives in the United Kingdom, is 80 years old and averse to travel, Miles presented Fleischmann's latest results that still attempt to refute criticisms leveled at work done 18 years ago. Other presenters have moved beyond the original Pons/Fleischmann experiments.

Miley provided results from Urbana, where he used detectors to document that charged particles are emitted from cold-fusion experiments, a sign of nuclear activity. Others presented similar evidence.

Miley said his results have been accepted for publication in a mainstream science publication, the Journal of Fusion Energy; he hopes critics will come forward to dispute his results.

"No one argues about it," he said. "They think it's too absurd. I've been convinced for some while that cold fusion is real. I want to find how to do something useful with it."

Difficulties facing cold-fusion advocates illustrate just how messy and human the scientific process can be, said Bernard Beck, a Northwestern University emeritus sociologist.

"Science is very tricky compared to all other ways to figure out the world," said Beck. "It prides itself on being open to being corrected. It's not reactionary or obsessive. That's a wonderful promise, but because science is such a huge institution, it cannot get anywhere unless people are in some agreement.

"That tends to make things conservative by its nature."

So, like anyone else, scientists mostly reject radical new ideas, but don't close the door completely. Hence, the cold-fusion folks got a daylong symposium at the chemical society meeting.

"In other traditions," said Beck, "the people in charge might say go get these guys and burn 'em at the stake. In science, they just get ignored."

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