On the Same Wavelength

"Cold Fusion" was an awkward subject in academia. The term tended to come with stories that were anything but pleasant.

The concept probably first appeared in the 1920s. In 1926, two German chemists, Paneth and Peters, proposed that nuclear fusion might occur at room temperature. They passed hydrogen through heated palladium asbestos and detected helium in the gas that emerged. Concluding that fusion had taken place, they published their findings in Nature.

The paper caused quite a stir, but Rutherford, then president of the Royal Society, soon criticized it. Paneth and Peters could not reproduce the result in later experiments. The whole affair was eventually deemed a mistake, and Nature retracted the paper.

The late 1980s were probably the peak of Cold Fusion research. At a press conference held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Fleischmann and Pons unveiled their latest findings: using a special heavy-water electrode apparatus, they claimed to have achieved sustained nuclear fusion on a palladium electrode at room temperature.

The claim challenged the conventional belief that nuclear fusion required temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees. It also offered a new glimmer of hope to Controlled Fusion researchers who had yet to deliver on their promises. The excitement quickly swept North America and the rest of the world. Dozens of research institutions, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, PPPL Laboratory in Princeton, and Brookhaven National Laboratory, joined the race for a new energy source. Even IBM's private laboratory got involved. The media dubbed Fleischmann and Pons's achievement "the Sun in a Test Tube."

But the excitement did not last. An American nuclear-power giant signed a joint research agreement with the University of Utah team. Italy's science ministry declared Cold Fusion research a priority, Belgium's science secretary convened a special meeting of experts, and Moscow