Ding, dong, cold fusion is dead. Or at least the last major funding for research into the supposed discovery has dried up.
According to the Associated Press, after five years and $20 million in funding, the Japanese government has pulled the plug on the cold fusion laboratory set up by former University of Utah researchers B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in Nice, France. The Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry will not pay for research next year, says one of its officials."It's d--- well about time they pulled the plug," said University of Utah physics professor Owen W. Johnson. "It's been obvious to anyone who understands anything about physics, it's (cold fusion) a blatant fraud."
U. physicists were among the first to criticize the announcement by then-U. President Chase Peterson in March 1989 that chemists Fleischmann and Pons had discovered cold fusion.
Extremely hot nuclear fusion is the process that powers the sun. If the claims were right - if fusion could be carried out inside a jar at room temperature - then mankind could tap an endless source of energy.
Acting on the U.'s initiative, the Utah Legislature appropriated $5 million to further research and to obtain patents on the process. No patents were awarded, although the university sold its interests in the system in 1993 to ENECO, a company based in Research Park. The price was not disclosed.
Meanwhile, the Cold Fusion Institute set up to refine the research did not validate the claims, and eventually Pons and Fleischmann left the U. Until now they have continued their work in Nice under sponsorship of the Japanese government.
U. Physics professor Haven E. Bergeson, who looked for nuclear byproducts in the Cold Fusion Institute and took careful measurements of heat transfers, is not surprised by the announcement from Tokyo.
"As I understand things, they had some very good elec-tro-chem-ists in Japan working on it and they thought they were seeing excess heat. But as their calorimetry (heat measurements) improved, they quit seeing excess heat. And I think that probably is the reason they pulled the plug," he said.
Soon after Pons and Fleischmann announced their "discovery" in 1989, a team of three experts including Bergeson began searching for the radiation that should have been released by fusion. They found none.
"If they were producing anything like known fusion processes, then people who ran the experiments would be dead if there was the excess heat they thought there was," he said. However, some people created theoretical models of exotic types of cold fusion that would not release such great amounts of radiation.
When the Cold Fusion Institute fired up, Bergeson headed a team of three experts who would wheel portable measurement devices to the fusion cells of any researcher who reported excess heat. "We never saw any of that."
They also thought the heat measurements of those scientists weren't as precise as they could be. Bergeson's group set up its own "cold fusion cells" so they could make painstaking measurements to sort out heat flows.
Other researchers were fooled because heat flows in a dynamic system are exceptionally complex and difficult to measure, he believes. The cells were dynamic, with bubbles floating up and water flowing around.
"We thought if we ever did get a positive result it would be incontestable. But we never did," he said.
If there was no excess heat, then no great energy source was being tapped.