In "The Saint," one of this week's biggest grossing films, Russia is saved from a neo-Communist coup when its heating woes are solved by spectacular new technology: cold fusion.
An experimental cold-fusion device flashes to life in front of a mob, blasting a column of heat and light into the dark, frigid air. Then and there, relieved Muscovites reject the evil general they had rallied to support. They start chanting the name of their democratically elected president, who had the wisdom to invest in cold fusion.Today, eight years after the supposed discovery of cold fusion was announced by then-University of Utah researchers B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, the most visible manifestation of it is in a Hollywood epic.
And no wonder. Sunlight released by fusion deep inside our neighboring star sustains Earth's life. In the center of the sun, the searing heat and crushing pressure is so powerful that it fuses hydrogen atoms into helium, releasing energy.That's hot fusion. Scientists understand how it happens, and in some reactors they actually achieved hot fusion for short periods.
Hot fusion is an expensive, time-consuming line of research, and it causes dangerous nuclear contamination. This month, after spending more than $8 billion over 50 years, Congress pulled the plug on hot-fusion research.
But the dream - many would say fantasy - of cold fusion still goes strong. The idea is that through some alchemy of the right materials, energy levels and the carrying medium, fusion might occur at room temperature.
Cold fusion could generate energy in a lab, a home reactor, a power station. It would be a cheap, relatively clean and inexhaustible power source.
In March 1989, at a press conference, the U. publicly announced the cold-fusion research being conducted by Pons and Fleischmann. Pons, who at one time was the chairman of the U. chemistry department, and Fleischmann, a researcher at the University of Southampton in England, who also had a U. research appointment, eventually left the U. during the strain caused by the intense scrunity of their research. They went to work in a Japanese-financed laboratory in France.
The quest for cold fusion goes on in a few research labs and in the basements of a handful of determined believers. Most of the scientific establishment writes off their goals as pipe dreams.
Eugene F. Mallove, editor of "Infinite Energy" magazine and one of the truest of the true-believers, was the cold fusion technical consultant for "The Saint." Reached at his home in Bow, N.H., he said the film got the premise right.
Cold fusion "is being commercialized, much as we have been saying the past number of years . . . Pons and Fleischmann were absolutely correct," he said.
Mallove cited advances by Clean Energy Technology of Sarasota, Fla.; ENECO, a Utah company based at Research Park; and Black Light Power Inc., a Pennsylvania company.
At Research Park, ENECO's chief, Frederick Jaeger, told the Deseret News, "Our target plan is to have a two-kilowatt device within about 12 to 18 months. . . . It's essentially a radiation-free nuclear reaction, and the products are helium and heat."
Two kilowatts is enough to warm a small residence, he said.
ENECO's new method uses gaseous material, instead of Pons and Fleischmann's water-based reaction. Big companies whose names he won't disclose would manufacture the device and ENECO would work on innovation, he said.
The skeptics are unimpressed that research continues.
Cold-fusion fans who remain in academia are "kind of an embarrassment to their colleagues," said Ian Duck, a physics professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
So why is anyone working on cold fusion? "Wishful thinking combined with a certain amount of brutishness," he supposes.
"One thing in their favor - they wasted an infinitesimal amount of money compared with hot fusion."
Another critic of cold fusion, Milton Rothman, Philadelphia, a retired physics professor and former researcher into hot fusion, said he never believed in it. He also has not read any scientific journals recently that report anything new is happening in the field.
Cold fusioneers continue to publish in their own journals, but not in mainstream science journals, he said. Many who pursue cold fusion are cranks, he charged.
Cranks, he said, are "people who get obsessed with an idea and can't let it go. I think these (cold fusion) people have an obsession and the possible rewards of the discovery are so great, they get caught up in it. That's the way I see it."
Bradley Carroll, a physics professor at Weber State University, Ogden, said he personally does not believe there was anything to cold fusion. But experimenters like physics professor Steven Jones of Brigham Young University, Provo, might be on the trail of an unusual natural effect - not cold fusion of the kind that could deliver energy, but something interesting nevertheless.
"It's a very small effect," he said of Jones' work. "It's not an energy source. So there's some legitimate science going on in the back-ground."
Carroll thinks the "overblown claims" about cold fusion's powering the world have put a damper on research in the whole field.
"But again, any hope of using it as a power source, that's not based on reality," Carroll added..
If it's not, why have so many researchers staked so much - their time, labor, money and scientific reputations - on cold fusion? "Science is carried out by scientists who get enthusiastic about what they're doing," he said. "Sometimes they hang onto theories long after experimental evidence has shown that they're false, and sometimes they'll jump to new theories with the very slimmest of observational evidence.
"The main point is, scientists are human beings, and they get passionately involved in their science. But in the end, you have to come up with the goods."
Mallove thinks cold fusion is about to reach the store shelves, and when it does, the "pathological skeptics" who denounce the process will have the comeuppance of their lives.
Will cold fusion ever come up with the goods? That's a question that ENECO may answer, one way or the other, in 18 months.