Recent warm support for cold fusion turned frigid Monday as a U.S. Department of Energy advisory panel again openly doubted whether cold fusion exists and whether major research on it should be funded.
That cool reception didn't stop heat from erupting about whether cold-fusion researchers are being too secretive, and doing so to maybe hide shoddy work. And a Texas A&M researcher blasted the DOE panel for being too biased against cold fusion.The bottom line is the panel will likely recommend later this week against funding for major government research on fusion.
B. Stanley Pons, the University of Utah chemist who ignited the controversy, isn't concerned. "Typical and expected" is how he termed the negative reaction of panel members Monday.
"It is just a further attempt to stop people from doing science," Pons told the Deseret News. "It's just a continued attempt to kill this thing. It's a further delay and it means nothing. It doesn't bother us a bit."
The Cold Fusion Panel of the DOE's Energy Research Advisory Board was going page-by-page through a draft report Monday that showed skepticism for recent cold-fusion research, which was first reported March 23 by Pons and his British colleague, Martin Fleischmann.
A vote on the final version is expected Tuesday afternoon.
But the working draft used Monday said, "The panel finds that the experiments reported to date do not present convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from the phenomena attributed to cold fusion.
"Hence no special programs to establish cold-fusion research centers or special programs to support new efforts to find cold fusion are justified."
However, the draft report did say cold-fusion research has led to "unresolved issues and scientifically interesting questions" that might merit further DOE research and funding through existing research-grant competition programs.
Ironically, that generally negative appraisal comes just two weeks after another panel of distinguished scientists - with both cold-fusion supporters and critics - said "something strange" was happening in new, better cold-fusion experiments that could not be accounted for by simple experimental error.
While it may not be fusion, that group sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Electrical Power Research Institute said more research was needed to find what is occurring.
DOE panel co-chairman Norman Ramsey said his group wanted a report on those optimistic findings from the other panel. But its co-chairman, Paul Chu, declined to provide it, saying his group would publish its findings in two months.
Ramsey also complained that results of a new experiment by Pons in conjunction with the Battelle Institute in Columbus, Ohio, to test for helium in palladium rods had not been released by Pons, even though he had promised the data for weeks.
Pons says the data are inconclusive.
"After the helium tests were run, we found out that the U. had made an agreement to provide Battelle with the heat data for the electrodes," Pons said. "I am processing that and expect to have it completed in the next few days. That information will be given to Battelle."
Pons, however, doesn't believe the data will reveal "anything worth discussing."