Cold fusion

I feel unhappy that so many physicists have been so disparaging about cold fusion for so long. Not because the 1989 cold fusion experiment by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons didn’t seem to work. Not because we still don’t have a hot shower that runs off an AA battery. Au contraire, I feel unhappy because the disparaging physicists still don’t understand the neutron¹, and they still don’t² understand the nuclear force³:

Image from History Rundown. Caption: all nucleons, both protons and neutrons, attract one another by the nuclear force

This is important stuff. See the 1998 Wired article by Charles Platt called What If Cold Fusion Is Real? He quoted a lone-wolf experimenter called Les Case saying this: “With really cheap energy, we can make fuel from water and mountains. Heat a limestone mountain to make carbon dioxide, mix it with hydrogen from the electrolysis of water, and you have methanol”. Exactly. That methanol is clean-burning, producing only carbon dioxide and water. With plenty of clean energy you can then afford to capture that carbon dioxide to make more methanol. Then you wouldn’t need a car with a battery that weighs a ton and contains 100lb of highly inflammable lithium. Good luck trying to extinguish a lithium fire. Case also said this: “Another application is desalinization of seawater. Los Angeles could get all its water straight out of the Pacific Ocean, with cheap energy for reverse osmosis”. That would have been useful given the recent LA fires which destroyed 12,000 homes. Case went on to say this: “Then there’s Australia – vast areas of very fertile soil, a good climate, but no rain. I envisage aqueducts bringing water in from the ocean. It could become the breadbasket of Asia!” Ditto for other deserts. There’s 500,000 square miles of desert in North America. The Sahara desert covers 3.6 million square miles. Clean cheap energy would change the world. It would make the world a better place.

The creation of helium from hydrogen using a palladium catalyst

As you already know, the Fleischmann and Pons cold fusion story is all about palladium, which was discovered by William Hyde Wollaston in 1802. Palladium is special in that it can absorb 900 times its own volume of hydrogen at room temperatures and pressures.

CCA3.0 palladium image by Chemical Elements , see Wikipedia

The idea of using palladium to fuse hydrogen into helium can be traced back to 1926. See the 1989 Nature article fusion antecedents written by Steven Dickman. He said Fritz Paneth and Kurt Peters at the University of Berlin wrote a paper in 1926 reporting the creation of helium from hydrogen using a palladium catalyst, but retracted their results eight months later. Dickman also said John Tandberg of the Electrolux Research Laboratory applied for a Swedish patent on a device which produced helium and useful energy. The patent application was rejected. Fast forward sixty years, and take a look at the history section of the Wikipedia cold fusion article. It tells how Fleischmann and Pons at the University of Utah starting experimenting in the mid 1980s, using a palladium cathode in a heavy-water electrolysis setup. The electrolysis forces the deuterium atoms into the palladium, achieving a huge internal pressure. In 1988 they became aware of low-temperature muon-catalyzed fusion work by Steven Jones et al at the nearby Brigham Young University. To avoid problems the two teams agreed to meet at an airport on March 24 1989 to simultaneously submit papers to Nature via FedEx. However administrators at the University of Utah pressured Pons and Fleishman to hold a press conference on March 23 1989 to establish priority.

Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium

That’s when everything kicked off. See the University of Utah press release Simple experiment results in sustained N-fusion at room temperature for first time. It said Fleischmann was “regarded as one of the leading electrochemists in the world”. It also said “He is a fellow of the Royal Society of England. He was awarded a medal for Electrochemistry and Thermodynamics by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1979; the Olin-Palladium Medal of the Electrochemical Society in 1985; and the Bruno Breyer award by the Royal Australian Chemical Society in 1988”. The associated paper is Electrochemically induced nuclear fusion of deuterium. It was published in the Journal of Electro-analytical Chemistry in April 1989. There’s various locations where you can find a non-paywalled version. Note the γ-rays, tritium, neutron flux, and excess enthalpy⁴.

The Pons-Fleischmann Experiment, an attempt to create room-temperature nuclear fusion

Marcia Wendorf gives a potted history in her 2019 Interesting Engineering article. It’s called The Pons-Fleischmann Experiment, An Attempt to Create Room-Temperature Nuclear Fusion. She starts with an introduction to nuclear fusion, saying “the difference in mass between the nuclei you start with and those you end with is converted into energy”. She also tells us that it’s fusion that powers H-bombs and the Sun, “where temparatures reach 15,000,000 degrees C, and pressures are enormous”. She goes on to say that to create fusion here on Earth, you first need to create a plasma, which has to have a very high temperature to provoke high-energy collisions, sufficient density so that collisions occur, and sufficient time to confine the plasma within a defined volume. She adds that “since the plasma is hot enough to melt any containment vessel it touches, it must be corralled by something other than matter”. She’s talking about tokamaks. She tells us that “atoms of deuterium or tritium fuse to form one helium nucleus, one neutron, and a spectacular amount of energy”. This is deuterium–tritium fusion, which is not the only type of hydrogen fusion, but no matter. The aim is to start off with hydrogen and end up with helium, which has a nuclear binding energy of 28.3MeV. That’s over 7 MeV per nucleon:

Binding energy curve image from Rod Nave’s hyperphysics website

Wendorf tells us that an example of a tokamak type of reactor is the ITER reactor in France. She also tells us another type of nuclear fusion reactor is called an inertial confinement reactor, which uses lasers. One example of this is the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Fusion could supply all of mankind’s energy needs without contributing to global warming

She then tells us that “a single glass of sea water could produce the same amount of energy as burning a barrel of oil” and that “fusion could supply all of mankind’s energy needs without contributing to global warming”. She continued by saying this is why Pons and Fleischman’s press release was so appealing. Pons and Fleischmann had filled a Dewar cell with heavy water, and passed an electric current through it using a palladium cathode. The palladium absorbed deuterium atoms, “which according to Pons and Fleischmann, forced them to fuse”.

CCASA cold fusion schematic by pbrks, see Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons

The story goes that scientists around the world tried to replicate the experiment, including a team led by Nathan Lewis at Caltech. They said they found no evidence for fusion, or for the associated neutrons, gamma rays, tritium, or helium. Wendorf then tells us how in May 1989 physicists at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore “unleashed a torrent of attacks on Pons and Fleischmann”. There were 1,800 physicists at the meeting. You can read more in the May 3^rd 1989 New York Times article Physicists Debunk Claim Of a New Kind of Fusion. Something that caught my eye was this: “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 mement before bursting into applause”. Wendorf also says other institutions “piled on”, including MIT, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the University of Rochester, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Yale University and CERN. She says In response, James Brophy, the University of Utah director of research, said this: “It is difficult to believe that after five years of experiments Dr Pons and Dr Fleischmann could have made some of the errors I’ve heard have been alleged at the American Physical Society meeting”.

Cold fusion I: the discovery that never was

Physics professor Frank Close did not agree. See his January 1991 New Scientist article Cold fusion I: the discovery that never was. It’s paywalled, but you can find a version at LENR-CANR.org. Close said this: “The funding of billions of dollars of research into hot fusion was in the balance; if the claims of cold fusion turned out to be true, the DOE would have to reallocate funding”⁵. He also said this: “Scientists, especially theoretical physicists, are all awaiting the next revolutionary breakthrough that overthrows the paradigms”. Oh no they’re not. Close went on to say “We crave new discoveries and the attendant excitement and promise”⁶. Oh really? Is that why Williamson and van der Mark couldn’t get Nature to publish their electron papers? Close made great play of his claim that Fleischmann and Pons altered their gamma peak results between the 23^rd and 31^st March 1989, and gave a figure 1 like so:

Image from the New Scientist article Cold fusion I: the discovery that never was

He referred to “the case of the shifting peak”, as if he was some great detective. He said the shift happened after a meeting with Harwell scientists, who told Fleischmann that gamma rays from neutron capture should have shown up near 2200 keV, not 2500 keV. It sounds like he was saying Fleischmann and Pons were ignorant chemists who retrofitted their results to fit the physics facts.

Cold fusion II: the story continues

New Scientist hedged their bets by also publishing Cold fusion II: the story continues by chemistry professor John Bockris. This is also on LENR-CANR.org. It includes paragraphs like this: “Physicists did not reject cold fusion only because they could not make it work straightaway. There is another less attractive reason: the chemists had undermined the fusion establishment, which had already spent billions of dollars on research”. Quite. I’m suprised Bockris’s article made it to print. Especially since he also said this: “In certain American government laboratories, there was a campaign of suppression reminiscent of religious attitudes and conflicts in the 16th century. One research group described how they had boarded a plane to go to a national meeting and present some positive results when they were told by their boss to cancel their presentation”. That’s the physics I know.

Image from the New Scientist article Cold fusion II: the story continues

So is this: “There has also been a campaign of attacks launched by the two main research journals, Nature in Britain and Science in the US. Nature has published leaders asking other scientists to ridicule work on cold fusion. Science has done more. It accepted a news article by a journalist who claimed that some of the reports of tritium being detected were, indeed, fraudulent”. Bockris was referring to Gary Taubes, who wrote a Science article called Cold Fusion Conundrum at Texas A&M. Taubes was talking about Bockris’s lab. You can find a non-paywalled version at New Energy Times.

A reply to critics

New Scientist also gave Fleischmann a right of reply. See Talking Point: Cold fusion – a reply to critics. Fleischmann referred to the two articles and said this: “The article by Bockris follows the normal conventions of scientific publication. It examines the experimental evidence for cold fusion and its interpretation.The article by Close, on the other hand, is mainly concerned with the background leading to the first announcement of the new phenomena on 23 March 1989 and our first preliminary publication”. He also said “In so far as there is any investigation of the scientific evidence, this is confined to general observations about the lack of success of various research groups in reproducing the observations; few, if any, of the statements can be attributed to specific authors”. Fleischmann went on to rebut Close’s retrofit claim by saying the gamma peak was changed on 22^nd March 1989 before the Harwell meeting, because it was recalibrated using a quadratic interpolation rather than a linear interpolation. He also said he’d prepared a diagram similar to Close’s figure 1, but the scaling of the x and y axes were not the same. He finished up saying “It is unfortunate that Close chose not to consult the subsequent literature in reaching his conclusions”. It looks like Fleischmann was saying Close’s article was a hit piece.

Big Science physicists didn’t want a couple of chemists trumping them with benchtop fusion

It looks like it was a hit piece that worked. As Wendorf said in her potted history, in 1991 Pons left the University of Utah and moved to France, “where he and Fleischmann resumed their research with the backing of the Toyota Motor Corporation’s IMRA lab. The cold fusion experiment was shuttered in 1998 after spending $40 million with no tangible results found”. It’s a sad story. Not just because of the failure, but because Big Science physicists didn’t want a couple of chemists trumping them with benchtop fusion. Now here we are 27 years later, it’s 2025, and ITER hasn’t delivered. In fact a news report last year said ITER won’t be running until 2039. On top of that, there was a recent BBC news article entitled Nuclear fusion: new record brings dream of clean energy closer. It featured the JET tokamak in Oxfordshire, which is being decommissioned after 40 years of operation. So much for bringing the dream closer.

Copyright © EFDA-JET image from their public relations page. Caption: Internal view of the JET tokamak superimposed with an image of a plasma taken with a visible spectrum video camera

The Japanese JT-60 tokamak hasn’t done much in its 40 years of operation either. Nor has the Russian T-15. Meanwhile the Livermore laser-powered National Ignition Facility is said to have achieved breakeven in 2022. Make sure you read Tom Hartsfield’s article on that. It’s called Calm down. There’s no NIF fusion power “breakthrough”. He said “if you gave me \$400 and I gave you \$3.15, would you consider yourself wealthier?” Obviously not. He also said the 3.15 megajoules produced would power a 40-watt light bulb for a day. There was a story in the Daily Mirror last week called Scientists break fusion reactor record with 22-minute plasma reaction. It was about the WEST tokamak in France, which maintained a plasma for 22 minutes. Whoopee doo. WEST started life in 1988 as Tore Supra. There’s also a Chinese tokamak called EAST which is a relative latecomer. It started operations in 2006, and in January 2025 maintained a plasma for 1066 seconds. See the Wikipedia article on tokamaks. I counted 32 in current operation. Not one of them has delivered.

The UK has the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world

Meanwhile we have growing energy problems, especially here in the UK. Pensioners are in a heat or eat situation. In my newspaper on Monday there was a story headed Sir Keir Starmer announces £200m investment in Grangemouth refinery site. It refers to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a major shareholder of Petroineos, who are closing down their Grangemouth oil refinery, the last oil refinery in Scotland. They said “the operation has become unviable because of Britain’s high energy costs and commitment to net zero policies such as electric vehicles”. There was also a story entitled An energy price cap disaster is creeping up on Keir Starmer. It says Alison Wedgwood, of the famous pottery dynasty, is in despair. She was talking about Royal Stafford going bust after 200 years of production. She is quoted as saying “The UK has the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world”. Along with this: “For pottery factories the price of electricity is 28 pence per kwh in the UK, and it’s 9 pence in France, 8p in Spain and just 7p in the USA. How did this happen? How on earth can our pottery manufacturers compete with that?” The answer is they can’t. Nor can aluminium smelters, glass manufacturers, or steel producers. The blast furnaces at Port Talbot have shut down, and the UK government says the plant will produce secondary steel by the electric-arc smelting of scrap metal. Trust me, it isn’t going to happen. The electricity will be way too expensive. That’s all part of the “managed let-down”. That’s where they say sorry, X is going to happen, but don’t worry, Y will happen to make up for it. Only it won’t, and they know it.

Even at room temperature

Anyway, I think the Wikipedia cold fusion article isn’t bad. It’s quite a long read, but I think it’s worth it. For myself I liked the way it mentioned muon-catalyzed fusion, and in the next breath said “There is currently no accepted theoretical model that would allow cold fusion to occur”. Even though muon-catalyzed fusion “is a process allowing nuclear fusion to take place at temperatures significantly lower than the temperatures required for thermonuclear fusion, even at room temperature”. LOL! I also liked the bit that said cold fusion papers are almost never published in refereed scientific journals, and “in these circumstances, crackpots flourish”. Oh the irony! I definitely liked the bit that said “Gary Taubes destroyed the public credibility of the A&M tritium results”. That’s because that’s the Gary Taubes who wrote Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and the Z. He didn’t use the word fraud that time. He just said Rubbia got a standing ovation even though what had actually been observed was a high-energy electron:

CERN image from Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and the Z

I felt the same about the bit where Frank Close said the problems that plagued the original cold fusion announcement were still happening. That’s the Frank Close who wrote Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass, even though the mystery of mass is a myth⁷. The Frank Close who will be grinding his teeth at the reviews of The Higgs Fake by Alexander Unzicker. I felt the same about the bit that said Douglas Morrison of CERN “was the first to call the episode an example of pathological science”. That’s the CERN who still don’t know what an electron⁸ is, or a proton⁹. The CERN who still don’t understand the nuclear force, or gravity or electromagnetism.

Once you’ve got your “star in a jar” going, you’ll be 15 years ahead of ITER

What I didn’t like was that there was no mention of the Farnsworth fusor. The Big Science physicists don’t like to tell you about that. It doesn’t do cold fusion per se, but it is benchtop fusion. See the Wikipedia fusor article. You can do nuclear fusion on your kitchen table. It will cost you two hundred bucks and 16 man hours. See the Make article on how to Build a Nuclear Fusor. Once you’ve got your “star in a jar” going, you’ll be 15 years ahead of ITER. Once you’ve run it for a day, you’ll have caught up with the National Ignition Facility. Then you can maybe take a look at what Schwinger said¹⁰ about the proton-deuteron reaction, and see if you can get to breakeven. If anybody tells you you’re wasting your time because of the Coulomb barrier, tell them from me that electron capture does what it says on the tin, so there is no Coulomb barrier. Darn, I’m not the only one who knows that, but hey ho. Hmmn, maybe I’ll give it a whirl myself. I can buy some palladium off ebay for £18.90, rig up some hydrogen electrolysis in a jam jar, and fix up up an electron gun from an old TV. Maybe I’ll have a word with my old buddy Doug Coulter and talk to the the forum guys. Boy, I am so looking forward to telling them what I’ve found out about in the last few years. The future isn’t what it used to be, but it could be. Oh, and since I could plug the gizmo¹¹ into the wall socket above my garage workbench, the work will most definitely qualify as Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.

 

_{1 The clue to the neutron is electron capture, and of course beta decay. Rutherford was right. The neutron is a close-coupled proton-electron combination, albeit with a neutrino twist. Don’t tell Randall Mills.}

_{2 If you think pions pop in and out of existence, spontaneously, like worms from mud, I’ve got a bridge you might like to buy.}

_{3 The neutron charge distribution matches the profile of the nuclear force, which ought to tell you the nuclear force is electromagnetic. As for the nuclear force acting between all nucleons, there are no nuclei that consists of protons only, and there are no nuclei that consist of neutrons only. Hydrogen doesn’t count.}

_{4 Funnily enough, there’s no mention of helium.}

_{5 If you want to get a feel for the threat of funding cuts, try taking a dog’s bowl away whilst he eating his dinner. Even the cutest of dogs turns psycho when you do this. Grrrrrrr… Ruff! And it’s a trip to A&E for you.}

_{6 No way do people like Frank Close crave new discoveries. They guard their orthodoxy like high priests. See The Standard Model of particle physics is wrong on multiple counts. History will not be kind.}

_{7 The Higgs mechanism contradicts E=mc², wherein the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. Electron mass is just resistance to acceleration for a wave in a closed path. Electron-positron annihilation is just two radiating bodies losing mass. All of it, then they’re not there any more. See Light is Heavy by Martin van der Mark and Gert (not the Nobel) ‘t Hooft.}

_{8 The electron is a 511keV electromagnetic wave in a double-loop chiral closed path. It is what Maxwell would have called a worble embracing itself. Check out TQFT and the first knot in the knot table. It’s called the trivial knot.}

_{9 It’s like the electron, but with a much shorter wavelength and much more complex. It’s also like the second knot in the knot table, the trefoil knot. The g-factor of 5.585 tells you the closed path loops round nearly three times as much as the electron. PS: charge is topological, so color charge is bunk.}    

_{10 Schwinger resigned from the APS over cold fusion. See Wikipedia: “He resigned from the American Physical Society after their refusal to publish his papers.^[11] He felt that cold fusion research was being suppressed and academic freedom violated. He wrote, ‘The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science’”.}

_{11 Addendum 28/02/2028: see the comments, where Steve Powell told me about Lattice Confinement Fusion | Glenn Research Center | NASA dating from April 2020. I was looking to see if it’s an April fool joke, but it looks legit, and it looks like cold fusion. Thanks Steve. The article says this “the method NASA revealed accomplishes fusion reactions with the fuel (deuterium, a widely available non-radioactive hydrogen isotope composed of a proton, neutron, and electron, and denoted “D”) confined in the space between the atoms of a metal solid”. It also says this: “A metal such as erbium is “deuterated” or loaded with deuterium atoms, “deuterons,” packing the fuel a billion times denser than in magnetic confinement (tokamak) fusion reactors. In the new method, a neutron source “heats” or accelerates deuterons sufficiently such that when colliding with a neighboring deuteron it causes D-D fusion reactions. In the current experiments, the neutrons were created through photodissociation of deuterons via exposure to 2.9+MeV gamma (energetic X-ray) beam. Upon irradiation, some of the fuel deuterons dissociate resulting in both the needed energetic neutrons and protons. In addition to measuring fusion reaction neutrons, the Glenn Team also observed the production of even more energetic neutrons which is evidence of boosted fusion reactions or screened Oppenheimer-Phillips (O-P) nuclear stripping reactions with the metal lattice atoms. Either reaction opens a path to process scaling”. Note though that the Wikipedia entry says “The experiments did not produce self-sustaining reactions, and the electron source itself was energetically expensive”. It also says “Lattice confinement fusion requires energetic deuterons and is therefore not cold fusion”. An electron beam us used to create the photon beam.}

_{Lattice confinement fusion image courtesy of NASA}