The Strange Birth of the Water Fuel Age

Source: https://bibliotecapleyades.net/Ciencia/secret_projects/project100.htm

Cold Fusion

The Cold Fusion "Miracle"

...Was No Mistake

The Strange Birth of the Water Fuel
Age
by Eugene F. Mallove, Sc.D.

Source: Infinite Energy Magazine
P.O. Box 2816
Concord, NH 03302-2816
http://www.infinite-energy.com
Phone: 603-228-4516
Fax: 603-224-5975

ŠInfinite Energy Magazine, 2000
All Rights Reserved.

Cold Fusion Memo to the White House

The following Memorandum, prepared by Dr. Eugene F.
Mallove for President Clinton, was requested in a phone call to
Infinite Energy Magazine in February 2000 by the White House Office of
Communications. The request for this memorandum was made by the White
House following the gracious personal recommendation by our friend Sir
Arthur C. Clarke that the President receive this briefing material.
This is the first time that this Memorandum, "The Strange Birth of the
Water Fuel Age," has been made available for electronic distribution.
Readers may distribute this COMPLETE memorandum to whomever they wish,
provided that this introductory note and address-phone-fax-electronic
information is attached up front. Dr. Mallove isstill waiting for a
reply of some kind from the President, as was promised by the official
in charge of compiling the several dozen essays (of which this is one)
from futurists, technologists, and others such as Sir Arthur C.
Clarke. This Memorandum is very timely in view of increasing concerns
about energy, the environment, and adequate electrical power for our
computer-intensive economy.

SUMMARY for President Clinton




Beginning in 1989, a class of new energy technologies
has been developed that has the potential to provide pollution-free
energy of a magnitude far greater than fossil fuel, using forms of
hydrogen from water as the fuel in novel catalytic conditions. The
technologies challenge the understanding of physics which has been
used to justify continued investment in fossil fuels, nuclear power
plants, and the so-called "hot fusion" energy research programs. The
U.S. government has spent at least $15 billion on hot fusion without
achieving the "breakeven" point already achieved by the new energy
technologies.




Hydrogen as a fuel in engines and fuel cells has been
discussed and demonstrated for several decades. Fuel cells are
emerging into the commercial market, using hydrogen-rich chemical
compounds. These systems are based on chemical reactions whose energy
density (energy per unit of fuel) is very low. There are serious
problems in making, storing, and transporting hydrogen. The new energy
technologies use hydrogen in a far different way that extracts
thousands to millions of times the ordinary chemical combustion energy
of hydrogen. Thus, water is fuel!




In 1989, after five years of work and investment of
$100,000 of their own money, Professors Stanley Pons and Martin
Fleischmann announced the release of nuclear-scale energy from an
electrochemical cell using palladium as the cathode metal. In the
cell, heavy hydrogen is forced into the palladium until a new class of
nuclear reactions occurs, in which energy of great intensity is
released without the deadly radiation or radioactive by-products
produced by other nuclear energy processes. The Pons-Fleischmann
announcement ignited a controversy that is documented in the body and
references of this memorandum.




The DOE Energy Research Advisory Board "Cold Fusion
Panel" was convened at the direction of President Bush to review the
"cold fusion" controversy in its early days. The panel relied heavily
on misleading reports from the California Institute of Technology,
Harwell (England), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Reports from all three sources were negative, and ERAB recommended
against any government investment in "cold fusion." This had
far-reaching consequences, which seriously impeded but did not stop
advances in the field.




After over a decade of work, hundreds of peer-reviewed
scientific papers from laboratories around the world confirm the
Pons-Fleischmann discovery. It was just the tip of an iceberg of a
whole class of nuclear reactions--and other new hydrogen
reactions--which occur in metals that are heavily loaded with heavy or
normal hydrogen by any of several means. These are often called
Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), or Chemically-Assisted Nuclear
Reactions (CANR). There is also a process, pioneered by BlackLight
Power, Inc., that produces catalytically altered hydrogen atoms. What
these processes have in common is the release of intense,
nuclear-scale energies without damaging radiation or radioactive
by-products. Reactors are small scale, requiring simple apparatus and
common materials with hydrogen as the fuel. Transmutations of the
metal cathode materials are commonly produced. In some cases, where
radioactive materials such as uranium and thorium are used in the
cells, these are rapidly transmuted into harmless by-products without
production of harmful radiation or explosions. In principle,
radioactive waste from nuclear reactors can similarly be deactivated
without the political and economic costs of burial.




Collectively, these emerging technologies point to a
much brighter future for mankind. They do not require resources
controlled by any small group of countries. They are concentrated,
portable, and democratic. Low cost realization and distribution of
devices and systems based on these technologies will require the
resources of a market economy and the removal of internal opposition
from vested interests in the U.S. government and industries, including
arbitrary blocking of "cold fusion" patent applications by the U.S.
Patent Office. Originators of these technologies may make fortunes,
but in the end mankind will be the beneficiary. Mr. President, you
need do only one thing now: Publicly state that you are going to
investigate this matter and then do it.




"Anything that is theoretically possible will be
achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it
is desired greatly enough." Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future,
1963




It was 1870, just five years after the carnage of the
American Civil War. Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island challenged
readers with an audacious prediction: "I believe that water will one
day be employed as a fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute
it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of
heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable...I
believe then that when the deposits of coal are exhausted, we shall
heat and warm ourselves with water. Water will be the coal of the
future." Though Verne predicted advanced submarines and flights to the
Moon--even the competition between the United States and Russia in a
lunar race, he was more prescient than anyone could have imagined, at
least not until the last decade of the 20th Century. He turned out to
be more than right about the power of water. Water will begin to be
the fuel of the future, in all probability this decade.




There is an incontrovertible fact well known to
scientists working to control thermonuclear fusion energy for peaceful
power production: Within only one cubic kilometer of water, there
exists enough heavy hydrogen isotope, deuterium (heavy hydrogen), such
that if it is fused to the element helium at multi-million-degree
temperatures, enough energy is released to equal the combustion energy
of all the world's known oil. This planet has at least one billion
cubic kilometers of water; there is no danger of running out of this
fuel. Or, look at it this way: In only one gallon of ordinary water,
there is enough heavy hydrogen to produce the energy equivalent of 300
gallons of gasoline. For worry warts: The heavy hydrogen comprises
only 0.015 percent of all the hydrogen in the ordinary water, ergo
there is no danger of a water depletion crisis from fusion energy!
Heavy hydrogen or deuterium, by the way, is simply hydrogen that bears
an extra neutron in its nucleus. It is non-radioactive and easy to
extract from water very cheaply.




If we only had a way to tap this fusion energy safely
and cheaply, the world's energy problems would be over; most if not
all environmental problems would be well on their way to solution. If
we could find a way to release this fusion energy benignly without
deadly radiation, and on a small scale, rather than in the
stadium-like tokamak thermonuclear fusion reactors--smaller,
dysfunctional prototypes of which are being tested at fantastic cost
at Princeton, MIT, and elsewhere--a millennial revolution in energy
technology would break out. It would mean an age in which the
recurring cost of energy production would approach zero, since the
heavy hydrogen is virtually free. The scope of that revolution would
dwarf today's Internet-World Wide Web upheaval. The age of "free
information" would have a partner: the age of virtually free energy!
It may surprise you to learn that the energy discovery described above
was made in the United States in the early 1980s, announced in 1989,
and subsequently confirmed by solid published scientific
research--some of that by Federal laboratories.1-7




So why have you not heard about it? This new energy
revolution is, indeed, in progress around the world. It is called
"cold fusion" energy, but, like many other scientific revolutions of
great import, the infant discovery and technology is having a very
difficult birth. One hopes that the influential readers of this essay
will stay the hands of the paradigm-paralyzed critics in the
scientific community who have maliciously and in some cases illegally
obstructed the field at every turn. Whether from ill will, jealousy,
or sheer misinformation, the antagonists "know not what they do" to
one of the the brightest promises of our age. Now for the rest of the
story...




The Stage is Set




After Verne's astonishing suggestion of 1870, oil from
the bowels of the Earth, not water, emerged as the "coal of the
future." We entered the 20th Century and wars were fought over this
black gold. Even World War II had its roots, in part, over the control
of oil by Japan or the United States. That war was ended by fission
nuclear weapons, the sequel to a controversial discovery made in
Europe in 1938--a discovery, incidentally, that was itself almost
missed, but for some open-minded, concentrated thinking. Fission was
the "cold fusion" of the 1930s, sans critics!




In 1988, physicist Emilio Segre' reflected on the 1930s
discovery of fission by Hahn, Strassman, and Meitner: "Their early
papers are a mixture of error and truth as complicated as the mixture
of fission products resulting from the [neutron] bombardments. Such
confusion was to remain for a long time a characteristic of much of
the work on uranium." In their remarkable paper of December 22, 1938
in Naturwissenschaften announcing the fission discovery, Hahn and
Strassman wrote, "As nuclear chemists working very close to the field
of physics, we cannot yet bring ourselves to such a drastic step,
which goes against all previous experience in nuclear physics." Yet
nuclear fission was real. It became a world-changing discovery,
relatively easy to reproduce, but a bit harder to make into bombs
(fortunately!). It ended a terrible war and it preserved the peace
among superpowers long enough for Communism to collapse in Europe.




Yet as the 20th Century merges into the 21st, oil, coal,
and natural gas have remained kings. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986
dealt a devastating political blow to plans for expanding the fission
economy, which might have given some respite from the tyranny of
fossil fuels. Even in peacetime, oil and other fossil fuels take their
tolls in death and destruction--from burnings and explosions in
transportation, to slow deaths from atmospheric pollution. Late in the
20th Century, a greater consciousness about the environment arose, yet
still the world remained in the grip of fossil fuels. Ordinary
renewable energy technologies, for all their good, remained much too
limited and problematic to be the solution to the world's energy
problems. Millions of people continue to die every year from a variety
of ills attributable directly or indirectly to the global dependence
on fossil fuel combustion. The threat of global warming hangs in the
air. Whether real or misjudged, the threat has to be considered. As
you will increasingly see, cold fusion energy is the perfect
preventative.




The exemplar of all that was wrong with the Age of Oil
struck on March 24, 1989 at 12:04 a.m. In the pristine waters of
Prince William Sound off the coast of Alaska, the Exxon Valdez ran
aground and spilled eleven million gallons of crude oil. The horrific,
foolish disaster symbolized the ultimate futility of our dangerous
dependence on the planet's subterranean fossil fuels. In what may
eventually be considered one of the most profound coincidences in
history, less than twelve hours before the Exxon-Valdez grounding, the
difficult opening stages of a modern-day "miracle" was taking place
beneath the snow-covered Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Thursday, March
23, 1989, brought a glimmer of hope from a city that had grown up near
the barren flatlands of the Great Salt Lake. At 1:00 p.m. in Salt Lake
City, chemistry professors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons burned
their names into the history of the quest for energy from water.
Essentially unknown to the thermonuclear, hot fusion community, they
claimed to have achieved what seemed to be impossible: power-producing
fusion-like reactions at or near room temperature--without deadly
radiation that the hot fusioneers had planned to use to make
electricity from their reactors! Fleischmann and Pons, and those who
would later confirm their work, posed an immediate threat to the hot
fusion and physics establishments. The heretics were dealt with as one
might expect. The argument became, "Since you are not dead from the
radiation our theory expects from your process, you must be
incompetents or frauds."




The massive Exxon-Valdez oil spill drew deserved
national attention and outcry, but it did not eclipse the
extraordinary news from Utah about cold fusion--a concept that seemed
to drop from the sky like an alien intruder straight into the public
psyche. At the press conference held at the University of Utah,
American Stanley Pons, professor of chemistry and chairman of the
Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah, and British
colleague Martin Fleischmann, professor of electrochemistry at the
University of Southampton, England and Fellow of the Royal Society,
really did disclose an amazingly simple method to create
power-producing nuclear reactions--possibly fusion--not at hundreds of
millions of degrees in imitation of the stars, but at room temperature
from a solid-state reaction.




The Genie of fusion shrugged in his ancient vessel that
year and amazed the world. The spring of 1989 will long be remembered
as a time of unexpected shaking, when extraordinary claims by groups
of researchers in Utah and subsequently around the world led some
scientists, even open-minded ones in hot fusion (especially in Japan),
to reexamine a decades-long, multi-billion dollar quest to tame
nuclear fusion. The struggle is to bring this power of the stars down
to Earth, much as fabled Prometheus snatched fire from the gods. The
interest of the scientific community and the public at large in 1989
was temporarily galvanized by the idea that a new kind of fusion
process might soon lead to a way to get the fusion Genie to stop
shrugging and come completely out of his bottle. He's half out now and
will soon be out completely.




Paradigm Paralysis and Confirmation




Startling events occasionally make us step back to get a
better view of our pursuits and to examine cherished assumptions. This
often leads to rededication, to unforeseen possibilities, and to new
directions. The shaking of complacency now and then in a positive way
is healthy, no more so than in the fields of science and technology,
where intense concentration on an established course sometimes
promotes a too narrow focus. Sadly, there arose an unusual brutality
about the way the cold fusion claims and confirmations were treated.




Confirmation of the remarkable cold fusion claims of
1989 was not to come easily. Unusual doubt and confusion (inevitably
termed "fusion confusion") beset a baffled, bemused, and even outraged
scientific community. A long quest ensued to confirm or disprove the
claims that nuclear fusion reactions can occur in apparatus no more
complex than a laboratory electrochemical cell, in pieces of metal
infused under pressure with heavy hydrogen gas, or in other systems.
Many more variants of the cold fusion process have been discovered and
even patented since 1989. Some of these employ the ordinary (light)
hydrogen in water; others operate at high temperatures in the gas
phase--having nothing to do with electrochemistry; still others employ
thin, layered metallic films that seem destined to draw from the
advanced materials science and manufacturing infrastructure of the
semiconductor industry. And, strange but true, there may even be
significant implications for the biotechnology industry. It now seems
that what Fleischmann and Pons discovered in the early 1980s was but
the tip of the iceberg of a much larger class of fantastically
important phenomena connected with the catalysis of hydrogen and its
isotopes. There will likely be found multiple, interlocking physical
mechanisms necessary to encompass it all. The implications transcend
energy science, but energy alone would be enough reason to make it one
of the highest national priorities: All obstacles must be removed from
this science and technology--from obstruction at the U.S. Patent
Office to official interference by DOE officials. The subject must be
discussed openly by officials.




A small fraction of the compendious scientific findings
that support the phenomena of cold fusion energy are referenced at
these web sites:  and
. Anyone who pontificates against
this science ought to perform a step-by-step critique of this
evidence. The opinion of anyone who argues against the experimental
scientific evidence solely on theoretical grounds should be
immediately dismissed. Science does not move forward only by gauging
new discoveries against past theories. This seems to have been
forgotten by some of the elite purveyors of nonsense against cold
fusion. Not that there are not large numbers of theories in support of
cold fusion; there are. The late Julian Schwinger (physics Nobel prize
co-winner with Feynman) was a noted cold fusion theorist. He was so
outraged by the treatment of cold fusion by the American Physical
Society (APS) that he resigned from the organization.




Dr. Michael McKubre at SRI International, prime author
of the 1994 Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) study,8,9 which
concluded that the Fleischmann and Pons discovery had been confirmed
by their work, had this to say: "Fortuitous or not, in the first
experiment that we ran, some three or four months after the initial
announcement, we saw some evidence of excess heat, which has really
sustained me ever since. Having seen the effect with my own eyes, the
claims from a few that this is impossible, or inconsistent with all
known laws of nuclear physics, these suggestions are in fact
irrelevant. There is no theoretical objection to cold fusion, it's
just unlikely given our experience with hot fusion."




The uninitiated might gauge the "religious belief"
against cold fusion in the almost humorous utterance by physics Nobel
laureate, theorist Steven Weinberg, who in an aside attacked cold
fusion in a recent New York Review of Books article,10 even though he
gives no evidence of having considered experimental data: "There do
not seem to be any exceptions to this natural order, any
miracles....The evidence for all these [biblical] miracles seems to be
considerably weaker than the evidence for cold fusion, and I don't
believe in cold fusion."




To give another example of egregious misconduct against
science by the critics, here are the foolish words of Dr. Robert L.
Park, who claims to speak for the American Physical Society. In his
book,Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, Park
dismisses cold fusion at its very first mention, referring to it as
"the discredited 'cold fusion' claim made several years earlier by
Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann." He says that a "dwindling band
of believers" continue to gather each year "at some swank
international resort" in an attempt to "resuscitate" cold fusion. He
asks, "Why does this little band so fervently believe in something the
rest of the scientific community rejected as fantasy years earlier?"
He speculates later, "Perhaps many scientists found in cold fusion
relief from boredom." He complains that no helium nuclear ash results
were forthcoming from Fleischmann and Pons by June 1989, ergo, cold
fusion is fraud. Since at least 1991, Park has been informed by fellow
APS scientists, such as Dr. Scott Chubb of the Naval Research
Laboratory (NRL), about helium detection in cathodes and in the gas
streams of cold fusion experiments. These independent experiments have
been published in the U.S. and Japan in peer-reviewed journals. There
is absolutely no doubt that Park knows this, yet Voodoo contains no
mention of this data, an egregious fraud by Park on journalists,
government leaders, and the general public. Mr. President, this is the
level of inappropriate discourse that you must see through.




The Politics of Cold Fusion




Cold fusion energy offers the prospect of energy
abundance over times comparable to geological ages, in contrast to the
microscopic blip in human history of reliance on fossil fuel. If we
expect our descendants to live virtually indefinitely on this
planet--until perhaps our Sun, our hot fusion reactor in the sky,
"dies" some five billion years hence--we had better plan now to
possess a source of inexhaustible power. Cold fusion is one energy
resource that is virtually infinite, but how to bring it about sooner
rather than later? To understand how to move forward, we need to back
up and examine what happened and what has been discovered this past
decade.




When as an MIT undergraduate I read George Gamow's book,
Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory (1966) it
was impossible to imagine that in less than 25 years another
revolution, such as has been brought about by cold fusion, would shake
physics in ways every bit as dramatic as what happened from 1900 to
1930.




For just over a decade, the Cold Fusion and Low-Energy
Nuclear Reactions revolution has been underway, whether or not the
mainstream physics/chemistry establishment and the general science
media wish to agree. The barrier that separated conventionally
understood chemistry and nuclear physics has come crashing down like
the infamous Berlin Wall. The barrier does not exist, at least not
within special microphysical domains of palladium, nickel, and other
metals in contact with hydrogen. Exotic new physics is at work. The
myth of the "End of Science" again disproved.




The revolution does not even have a name on which all
the revolutionaries can agree. "Cold Fusion" is likely to stick, if
for no other reason than that is where it all began. The terms LENR
(Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions) and CANR (Chemically Assisted Nuclear
Reactions) have been tried. Dr. Randell Mills of BlackLight Power,
Inc., has a radically different theoretical approach and an apparently
robust commercial activity. Recent reports suggest that Morgan
Stanley-Dean Witter is about to take his company public in 2000. (In
February 2000 his company belatedly received U.S. Patent 6,024,935 on
its process.) This may be the first of many other private ventures in
cold fusion/new energy. Another company, Lattice Energy, LLC, has just
been formed to further the LENR work of nuclear engineering Professor
George Miley at the University of Illinois. Several Fortune 100
companies are becoming involved in all this work, though they are not
quite ready to declare themselves--in a few more months, perhaps.




The revolution began inauspiciously, with Drs. Martin
Fleischmann and Stanley Pons working for five years and spending some
$100,000 of their own funds before they announced their findings.
Circumstances forced disclosure at a press conference some eighteen
months before the scientists had wanted to publish. These complex
matters, of historical importance only, are chronicled in Fire from
Ice: Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor (Mallove,
John Wiley & Sons, 1991). The scientific documentary video, Cold
Fusion: Fire from Water (1999) updates that story and provides insight
into the political dynamics of the controversy. (The White House was
sent these items in February 2000 and earlier.)




On that fateful day in 1989, Fleischmann and Pons made
their central claim, which has been abundantly proved and never
retracted, that in a heavy water electrochemical cell near room
temperature they had produced excess energy orders of magnitude beyond
explanation by chemistry. This was like discovering a new kind of
match that would not "burn out" for weeks or months, yet would leave
no initially obvious signs of a reaction product. Certainly there was
no chemical ash. They said that they had detected neutrons and tritium
in addition to the excess heat. These were all signatures of nuclear
reactions.




Unfortunately, they did not emphasize the difficulty of
producing the effects. At the time, because their hands were tied by
lawyers focussed on patent issues and conflicts with nearby Brigham
Young University, they were not even able to provide at their news
conference a preprint of their forthcoming Journal of
Electroanalytical Chemistry paper. Their neutron measurements were
flawed, as they later admitted. This was a failing, yet others would
later confirm in cold fusion experiments both low-level neutron
radiation as well as tritium evolution. The latter astonishing
evidence has been irrefutably proved by the work of Dr. Thomas
Claytor's group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.1 For national
security reasons alone, the President of the United States should
cause heads to roll about this matter! This is at least as important
as the security breach of computer files at LANL. Radioactive tritium,
the irrefutable evidence of a nuclear reaction--proof of the reality
of cold fusion, and a key material ingredient in thermonuclear
weapons-can now be produced in small quantities by means far easier
than with several multi-billion-dollar proposals. However, this work
cannot and should not be classified. It is already in the public
domain. (Significant improvement of the process to practical
tritium-production level might well need to be classified.)




Most important to an understanding of the heated debate
of the past decade: The Fleischmann-Pons announcement threatened an
entrenched Federal research program. Over $15 billion had been
invested by the U.S. government in its decades- long hot fusion
program, which sought to emulate the thermonuclear conditions in the
cores of stars. Hot fusion had promised a distant era of safe, clean,
infinite energy--variously estimated by funding seekers to begin by
2050 to 2100. These programs may have resulted in useful plasma
physics research, but no net energy release in fusion energy beyond
the magnitude of the electric power put in--ever. Thermonuclear bombs
were at "breakeven," but controlled thermonuclear fusion reactors at
Princeton and at MIT are not. The magnetic hot fusion energy program
should be terminated quickly to prevent any more waste of research
funding.




Fleischmann and Pons said in 1989 that they had achieved
breakeven already and, unlike hot fusion, there were no deadly
emissions. The claim of a chemically-assisted nuclear fusion reaction
with net energy release threatened to divert Congressional funding
from the hot fusion program. With private zeal, and later public
scorn, scientists supported by the hot fusion program--particularly at
MIT, my alma mater--sought errors in the Fleischmann-Pons work.




When the exact radiation signatures and end-products of
hot fusion reactions in a vacuum were not found in the
Fleischmann-Pons results or in quickly-done tests at other
laboratories, scientists at the MIT Plasma Fusion Center yelled
"possible fraud," "scam," and "scientific schlock." On May 1, 1989,
the story planted in the Boston Herald by the then MIT hot fusion
director unleashed a torrent of anti-scientific bigotry. It did not
occur to most scientists that a new class of nuclear reactions might
have been discovered. As Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger would say in
a lecture at MIT in November 1991, "The circumstances of cold fusion
are not those of hot fusion." He was ignored.




The furor over cold fusion in the spring of 1989
prompted President George Bush, through Energy Secretary Admiral James
Watkins, to convene a "Cold Fusion Panel" of the U.S. Department of
Energy's Energy Research Advisory Board (ERAB). The late Nobel
laureate Glenn Seaborg had told President Bush in the Oval Office on
April 14, 1989 that the Utah discovery was "not fusion," thus
poisoning the well and precluding an honest investigation. One of the
22 ERAB panelists had thought at the time: "Just by looking at
Fleischmann and Pons on television you could tell they were
incompetent boobs." (Professor William Happer of Princeton, quoted by
G. Taubes in the book Bad Science.) So much for the claim that the
ERAB panel was "unbiased." The head of the panel, Professor John
Huizenga, was initially opposed to having any investigation at all,
yet he was allowed to lead it!




This panel, convened by the Department of Energy, was
assigned to assess reports from various laboratories and to make
recommendations to the U.S. government. Three major laboratories
submitted negative reports. These were MIT, Caltech, and Harwell
(England). The ERAB report was negative, and quickly so. A preliminary
negative conclusion came in July 1989 and the final report November 1,
1989, with the following consequences: 1) No special funding by the
U.S. government for further research; 2) Flat denial by the U.S.
Patent Office of any application mentioning cold fusion directly; 3)
Suppression of research on the phenomenon in government laboratories;
4) Citation of cold fusion as "pathological science" or "fraud" in
numerous books and articles critical of cold fusion in general, and of
Fleischmann and Pons in particular. Drs. Fleischmann and Pons would
leave the United States to work on cold fusion in France for a
subsidiary of the Toyota Corporation (IMRA Europe). Stanley Pons
became a citizen of France, in legitimate disgust with his treatment
in the United States. Mr. President, you simply must have the courage
to redress this outrage and have our government apologize to these
extraordinary scientists. The probably illegal killing of their patent
application must be redressed too.




The 1989 reports of MIT, Caltech, and Harwell have each
been analyzed by competent scientists and these analyses have been
published.11-16 Each of the widely cited 1989 "null" experiments has
been found to be deeply flawed in experimental protocols, data
evaluation, and presentation. Each, in fact, contained some evidence
of excess heat as claimed by Fleischmann and Pons. In the case of the
MIT data, there is evidence of deliberate alteration of laboratory
measurements by a lower-echelon worker to erase an indication of
excess heat in official MIT publications and reports to a government
agency under the official seal of MIT. Certainly this report had a
dramatic impact on the perception of numerous scientists and most
journalists. (Mr. President, this very unfortunate matter has now been
referred to the Inspector General's Office at two Federal agencies.)




A great irony: Each of these negative results were
themselves the product of the kind of low quality work of which
Fleischmann and Pons were accused. The difference was that the reports
said what the hot fusion community wanted to hear. This was the legacy
of the 1989 ERAB report, but that legacy must now be reversed--and it
will be, however long that takes. One method of ending the charade
would be for the President of the United States to issue an executive
order to the Secretary of Energy to conduct a thorough, unbiased
investigation of the entire cold fusion, low-energy nuclear reactions
question and to explore how the DOE came to play such a negative,
obstructionist role. DOE laboratories should be compelled to work
under the direction of those who have achieved significant positive
results, such that there can be no doubt in anyone's mind about these
phenomena.




Almost two years after they were concocted, Professor
Ronald Parker of MIT's Plasma Fusion Center publicly stated that the
MIT PFC cold fusion calorimetry data were "worthless" (June 7, 1991).
In the same period (August 30, 1991) after his data had been
challenged, Parker stated that "MIT scientists stand by their
conclusions." Which is it? The full story is given in detail in a
"Special Report: MIT and Cold Fusion" in the 10th Anniversary issue of
Infinite Energy, which The White House has been provided. You will
find the names of former Federal officials in this document: CIA
Director John Deutch and Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall.




Fleischmann and Pons have been vindicated--if not by the
media and by the establishment, certainly by mountains of high quality
published results. The literature on the Fleischmann-Pons effect is
now voluminous. These are not fantasies. This is solid work, the kind
of pioneering, exhaustive experimentation that could have been done at
places such as MIT, Caltech, and Harwell, but wasn't. We must now go
beyond this sorry past.




The production of excess heat in the range of hundreds
of megajoules per mole of metal has been confirmed, as well as the
production of helium, tritium, and other elements. Power densities of
kilowatts per cubic centimeter of electrode have been achieved by some
researchers. The field of Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions has been
established, if not yet widely recognized. Low-energy neutrons or weak
gamma radiation are seen in some experiments, but most produce excess
heat with no radiation or radioactive by-products. Rapid remediation
of radioactive materials has been demonstrated. What a fantastic
opportunity for universities such as MIT and private industry to
become involved in one of the most exciting scientific and
technological revolutions of all time. No massive Federal expenditures
are required. This is a process that private industry can run with, as
long as it is unhampered by bureaucratic interference.




Certainly the replication and commercial application of
the Fleischmann-Pons effect and similar effects has been inhibited by
a lack of understanding of the exact nature of the reactions, which
are not those known to plasma physicists. There is a severe and
widespread materials and theory problem related to materials that
produce the effects. Criteria are available to test materials for
potential activity, but knowledge of how to produce such material at
will is not yet available.




Sad to say, solving the materials problem may be beyond
the financial resources of the scattered researchers who have worked
to validate the Fleischmann and Pons effect, but it is heartening that
private corporations are taking the lead in correcting the problem
caused by some in government and the academic establishment.
Unfortunately, the negative reports by key hot fusion laboratories to
ERAB prevented diversion of government funding from the failed hot
fusion program to the promising field of cold fusion. The
patent-crushing ERAB report also became a severe deterrent to private
investment in the new energy field.




We return to George Gamow's musings of 1966. Gamow
thought that the next major physics revolution would be in
understanding the very existence of elementary particles. He wrote,
"There is hardly any doubt that when such a breakthrough is achieved,
it will involve concepts that will be as different from those of today
as today's concepts are different from those of classical physics." He
was both wrong and right. He could not have suspected that the next
physics revolution would begin not with high energy particle physics
but with fundamental electrochemistry--and that it would end with the
birth of what might be called "modern alchemy." The revolution will be
the end of the world that we have known, this time for the better.




Snatching Victory from Defeat




Recent events: Senator John McCain, running in the New
Hampshire primary for the Republican presidential nomination, agreed
to be briefed on cold fusion. He kept his word. Within a week of his
promise, he sent a top aide to our offices at the Bow Technologies
Center. He received briefing materials that were to be handed to the
Senator. Thus, Senator McCain became the very first major party
presidential candidate in history to receive a high-level briefing
about cold fusion. This briefing occurred before he won the February 1
New Hampshire Republican primary by a large margin over Governor Bush
of Texas and others.




I later sought to ask Vice President Al Gore, while he
was campaigning in Concord, New Hampshire for the Democratic
Presidential nomination, whether he too would agree to a cold fusion
briefing. On January 13, I attended a Gore question-and-answer meeting
at Temple Beth Jacob in Concord, but was unable to ask him the
question--the Vice President was very long in responding to so many of
the other questions that time simply ran out. This was the same venue
in which eight years earlier, almost to the day, I had asked you about
cold fusion when you were a candidate, Mr. President! You seemed to
know something about it, because you said that some Arkansas
scientists had been "stonewalled" on cold fusion by the DOE. In all
probability they were.




As has been reported in Infinite Energy, it is our
understanding that in the early 1990s Vice President Gore shied away
from a cold fusion briefing by qualified scientists, after being urged
to do so by a colleague at Apple Computer Corporation. The Vice
President then reportedly stated that the topic was "too
controversial, too complex--give it to the science advisor." With your
encouragement, we hope that the Vice President will now be more open
to discussions.




For the record, the question that was handed to Mr.
Gore's representative on January 13, 2000:






Question for Al Gore from Dr. Eugene Mallove, Bow, NH




Mr. Vice President:




I'm Dr. Eugene Mallove, a member of this Temple and
editor of the scientific journal Infinite Energy magazine. I would
like to ask you two critical questions about energy and the
environment, because I know those topics are dear to you--it may even
help you win over Bradley because of the boondoggle going on in his
state at Princeton! [The Princeton tokamak fusion reactor.] I hope
that you will be very forthcoming in your response -- as Senator John
McCain was when I asked him last week in Bow, at a Town Hall Meeting.
You can be instrumental in ending a scientific scandal over energy
that has been going on since the Exxon-Valdez ran aground on March 24,
1989-- the day after Drs. Fleischmann and Pons made their cold fusion
announcement at the University of Utah. Candidate Bill Clinton, right
here in this room on January 12, 1992, told those assembled that he
knew something about the scandal--he said Department of Energy
scientists had "stonewalled Arkansas scientists." Despite that, I
regret to tell you he has done nothing about it except [by inaction
due to being misinformed] make the scandal grow worse. Here are the
two questions:




1. Will you agree to help end the Cold Fusion
controversy by agreeing to a scientific briefing here in New
Hampshire, by representatives of the hundreds of American scientists
working in the cold fusion and low-energy nuclear reactions
field-including my colleague Dr. Edmund Storms of Los Alamos National
Laboratory?




2. After this, would you consider proposing a National
Academy of Sciences review of the cold fusion and low energy nuclear
reactions issue based on the large body of scientific evidence that
has built up since what we regard as the indefensible,
rush-to-judgment, even fraudulent report by the Department of Energy
in 1989?




Mr. President, the rest may be up to you. You have heard
the story. It is true. Every word. Nothing will hold back the cold
fusion/new energy revolution from happening in due course, but with
the stroke of your pen, a few taps on your computer, or perhaps a few
telephone calls, you have it in the power to help accelerate the Cold
Fusion/New Energy Age. Just as Secretary of War William Howard Taft in
the Roosevelt Administration cut through bureaucratic opposition and
forced the Army to call the Wright brothers in 1908 to demonstrate
their "flyer" to a crowd of thousands at Ft. Meyer, Virginia--and
thereby ended years of doubt about their 1903 accomplishment,
launching the Aerospace Age--you can break the opposition of the
perpetrators of the "HeavyWatergate" scandal. That act of courage and
imagination will never be forgotten. Thank you.




Let me end as I began with a few remarks by Sir Arthur
C. Clarke, who recommended that your staff request this essay from me:




"Like everyone else, I was very excited when the
so-called 'cold fusion' announcement was made. And then, again like
everybody else, I became disappointed and forgot about the whole thing
when it seemed to be a mistake, though I was rather puzzled why two
world-class scientists could have made such fools of themselves. Well,
during the years that followed, slowly, from time to time, there came
news of other laboratories repeating the experiment and getting
positive results. And there has been a sort of groundswell, all over
the whole world, of new information. And during the course of the last
five years or so, I've slowly become convinced, from my original
skepticism, to 99% certainty that it is for real. The evidence now is
really overwhelming."
Cold Fusion: Fire from Water, 1999




"If these new sources of energy do turn out to be real -
and as I say there are several totally different varieties - the
question is: What effect will this have on our society? On the future?
Well, it's just possible they may be no more than laboratory
curiosities, and can't be scaled up to commercial levels. I think
that's rather unlikely. Nuclear energy was once a laboratory
curiosity. So let's assume that these devices can be developed. The
future is then almost unlimited. It could be the end of the fossil
fuel age: the end of oil and coal. And the end, incidentally, of many
of our worries about global pollution and global warming."




Cold Fusion: Fire from Water, 1999




References:




Los Alamos National Laboratory 



1) "Tritium Production from a Low Voltage Deuterium
Discharge on Palladium and Other Metals," T.N. Claytor, D.D. Jackson,
and D.G. Tuggle, published on WWW and reprinted in Infinite Energy,
No. 7, March-April 1996, pp. 39-42,




Over the past year we have been able to demonstrate that
a plasma loading method produces an exciting and unexpected amount of
tritium from small palladium wires. In contrast to electrochemical
hydrogen or deuterium loading of palladium, this method yields a
reproducible tritium generation rate when various electrical and
physical conditions are met. . . We will show tritium generation rates
for deuterium-palladium foreground runs that are up to 25 times larger
than hydrogen-palladium control experiments using materials from the
same batch. [See also, "Tritium Evolution from Various Morphologies of
Deuterated Palladium," Proceedings of the Fourth International
Conference on Cold Fusion, December 6-9, 1993, Maui, Hawaii, Edited by
Y.O. Passell, EPRI TR-104188, July 1994.]




2) "Electrolytic Tritium Production," by Edmund Storms
and Carol Talcott, Fusion Technology, Vol. 17, July 1990, pp. 680-695.




Fifty-three electrolytic cells of various configurations
and electrode compositions were examined for tritium production.
Significant tritium was found in 11 cells at levels between 1.5 and 80
times the starting concentration after enrichment corrections are
made.




3) "Review of Experimental Observations About the Cold
Fusion Effect," by Edmund Storms, Fusion Technology, Vol.20, December
1991, pp. 433-477.




The experimental literature describing the cold fusion
phenomenon is reviewed. The number and variety of careful experimental
measurements of heat, tritium, neutron, and helium production strongly
support the occurrence of nuclear reactions in a metal lattice near
room temperature, as proposed by Pons and Fleischmann, and
independently by Jones.




Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, Research
Department, Chemistry Division and University of Texas, Department of
Chemistry

4) "Anomalous Effects Involving Excess Power, Radiation, and Helium
Production During D2O Electrolysis Using Palladium Cathodes," by
Melvin H. Miles, Benjamin F. Bush, and Joseph J. Lagowski, Fusion
Technology, Vol. 25, July 1994, pp. 478-486.




Previous experiments showed that eight electrolysis gas
samples collected during episodes of excess power production in two
identical cells contained measurable amounts of 4He while six control
samples gave no evidence for helium... This places the 4He production
rate at 1011 to 1012 atom/s per watt of excess power, which is the
correct magnitude for typical fusion reactions that yield helium as a
product... Simultaneous evidence for excess power, helium production,
and anomalous radiation was present in these experiments. Completely
new experiments with more precise helium measurements are reported
that again show simultaneous evidence for excess power, helium
production, and anomalous radiation.

5) "Anomalous Effects in Deuterated Systems," by Melvin H. Miles,
Benjamin F. Bush, and Kendall B. Johnson, NAWCWPNS Technical
Publication 8302, September 1996, 99 pages.




Excess power was measured in 28 out of 94
electrochemical experiments conducted using palladium or
palladium-alloy cathodes in heavy water. . .Results from our
laboratory indicate that helium-4 is the missing nuclear product
accompanying the excess heat. Thirty out of 33 experiments showed a
correlation between either excess power and helium production or no
excess power and no excess helium. The collection of the electrolysis
gases in both glass and metal flasks place the helium-4 production
rate at 1011 to 1012 atoms per second per watt of excess power. This
is the correct magnitude for typical deuteron fusion reactions that
yield helium-4 as a product. Anomalous radiation was detected in some
experiments by the use of X-ray films, Geiger-Mueller counters, and by
the use of sodium iodide detectors. There was never any significant
production of tritium in any of our experiments. . . Our results
provide compelling evidence that the anomalous effects in deuterated
systems are real...It is highly unlikely that our heat and helium
correlations could be due to random errors. . . Our best experiments
produced up to 30% excess heat, 0.52 watts of excess power, and 1400
kilojoules (kJ) of excess enthalpy. This amount of excess enthalpy is
difficult to explain by any chemical reaction. . . Anomalous radiation
was detected in some experiments by the use of X-ray films, several
different types of Geiger-Mueller (GM) counters, and sodium iodide
(NaI) detectors. Normal radiation counts were always observed when no
electrolysis experiments were running. . .




Naval Ocean Systems Center and U.S. Department of
Energy (Washington) 


6) "On the Behavior of Pd Deposited in the Presence of
Evolving Deuterium," S. Szpak (Navy), J.J. Smith (DOE), J.
Electroanalytical Chemistry, 302 (March 11, 1991), pp. 255-260.




. . .Three sets of preliminary experimental results are
presented here, i.e., the production of excess enthalpy, the
production of tritium, and the presence of some form of radiation.




NASA Lewis (Glenn) Research Center



7) "Replication of the Apparent Excess Heat Effect in a
Light Water-Potassium Carbonate-Nickel Electrolytic Cell," by Janis M.
Niedra, Ira T. Meyers, Gustave C. Fralick, and Richard S. Baldwin,
NASA Technical Memorandum 107167, February 1996.




Replication of experiments claiming to demonstrate
excess heat production in light water-Ni-K2CO3 electrolytic cells was
found to produce an apparent excess heat of 11 watts maximum for 60 W
electrical power into the cell. Power gains ranged from 1.06 to 1.68.
. .




SRI International and Electric Power Research
Institute 


8) "Development of Advanced Concepts for Nuclear
Processes in Deuterated Metals," M.C.H. McKubre, et al., EPRI
TR-104195, Research Project 3170-01, Final Report, August 1994, 128
pages, plus 342 pages on microfiche.




This work confirms the claims of Fleischmann, Pons, and
Hawkins of the production of excess heat in deuterium-loaded palladium
cathodes at levels too large for chemical transformation... Although
nuclear reaction products commensurate with the excess heat have not
yet been observed, small but definite evidence of nuclear reactions
have been detected at levels some 40 orders of magnitude greater than
predicted by conventional nuclear theory.




9) "Isothermal Flow Calorimetric Investigations of the
D/Pd and H/Pd Systems," M.C.H. McKubre, S. Crouch-Baker, R.C.
Rocha-Filho, S.I. Smedley, F.L. Tanzella, T.O. Passell, and J.
Santucci, Journal of Electroanaytical Chemistry, 368, 1994, pp.55-66.




. . .the generation of "excess power" was observed in a
series of deuterium-based experiments, but not in a hydrogen-based
experiment. The results of these experiments enable several
(tentative) conclusions to be reached concerning the conditions
necessary for the reproducible observation of this anomalous thermal
effect.




10) Steven Weinberg, New York Review of Books, Oct. 21,
1999.




11) Swartz, Dr. Mitchell R., "Re-Examination of a Key
Cold Fusion Experiment: 'Phase-II' Calorimetry by the MIT Plasma
Fusion Center," Fusion Facts, August 1992, pp. 27-40.




12) Swartz, Dr. Mitchell R., "A Method to Improve
Algorithms Used to Detect Steady State Excess Enthalpy,"Proceedings:
Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion (December 6-9, 1993,
Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii), and in Transactions of Fusion Technology, Vol.
26, December 1994, pp. 369-372.




13) Swartz, Dr. Mitchell R., "Some Lessons from Optical
Examination of the PFC Phase-II Calorimetric Curves, Proceedings:
Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion (December 6-9, 1993,
Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii).




14) Noninski, Drs. V.C. and C.I. "Comments on
'Measurement and Analysis of Neutron and Gamma Ray Emission Rates,
Other Fusion Products, and Power, in Electrochemical Cells Having
Palladium Cathodes," Fusion Technology, Vol. 19, May 1991, pp.
579-580.




15) Miles, Melvin H., B.F. Bush, and D. Stillwell,
"Calorimetric Principles and Problems in Measurements of Excess Power
During Pd-D2O Electrolysis," J. Physical Chemistry, Feb. 17, 1994, pp.
1948-1952.




16) Hansen, Wilford N. and M.E. Melich, "Pd/D
Calorimetry-The Key to the F/P Effect and a Challenge to
Science,"Proceedings: Fourth International Conference on Cold Fusion
(December 6-9, 1993, Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii), and in Transactions of
Fusion Technology, Vol. 26, December 1994, pp. 355-368.




Biographical Note for Dr. Eugene F. Mallove  


Since 1995, Dr. Mallove has been the Editor-in-Chief and
Publisher of the bi-monthly Infinite Energy Magazine, based in
Concord, New Hampshire. Now in its fifth year of publication, Infinite
Energy covers advances in the field of cold fusion and new energy
technology and has subscribers in 38 countries, with an average print
run of 5,000.




The magazine's New Hampshire-based parent company, Cold
Fusion Technology, Inc., operates the New Energy Research Laboratory
(NERL) and the magazine publishing facility at the Bow Technologies
Center in Bow, New Hampshire. 


Dr. Mallove holds a Master of Science Degree (SM, 1970)
and Bachelor of Science Degree (SB, 1969) in Aeronautical and
Astronautical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and a Science Doctorate in Environmental Health Sciences
(Air Pollution Control Engineering) from Harvard University (1975).
With broad experience in high technology engineering at companies
including Hughes Research Laboratories, TASC (The Analytic Science
Corporation), and MIT Lincoln Laboratory, he has also had extensive
hands-on experience in laboratory settingsSince 1991 he has worked as a consultant to U.S.
corporations and investment firms doing R&D in cold fusion. He is the
author of three science books for the general public, including the
Pulitzer-nominated book on cold fusion, Fire from Ice: Searching for
the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor (John Wiley & Sons, 1991). He
has taught science journalism at MIT and at Boston University; he was
Chief Science Writer at the MIT News Office when cold fusion erupted.
Prior to that he was a top science writer and broadcaster with the
Voice of America in Washington, DC and also wrote science and
technology articles for magazines and newspapers, including MIT
Technology Review and The Washington Post.




Articles about Dr. Mallove's cold fusion work have
appeared in TWA Ambassador Magazine (September 1997) and in Wired
(November 1998). Dr. Mallove's review article, "Cold Fusion: The
Miracle Was No Mistake," appeared in the July/August 1997 Analog. Dr.
Mallove is often called upon for radio interviews as an expert in the
field of cold fusion and new energy. 


Eugene Mallove was the Technical Advisor to the 1997
Paramount Pictures techno-thriller, "The Saint," starring Val Kilmer
and Elisabeth Shue, and is credited in the film. The central theme of
the movie is cold fusion. In April 1999, the definitive cold fusion
video documentary written by Dr. Mallove and his colleagues, "Cold
Fusion: Fire from Water," was released. Its narrator is James Doohan,
"Scotty" of "Star Trek" fame.
Back To 
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