Is Cold Fusion “Warming Up”?
Nineteen years ago, in the spring of 1989, Professors M. Fleischman and S. Pons of University of Utah announced that they had caused nuclear fusion reactions to occur in an ordinary electrolysis experiment at room temperature. Their claim was based on their observation that more heat energy was coming out of their experiment than they were putting electrical energy into the experiment. Although this was generally believed to be impossible, a month of excitement in some of the technical community resulted in the US government forming a committee chaired by John Landis, then President of Bechtel Corp., to decide whether the government should fund research in the area. The committee, after a month of investigation, decided that there was insufficient evidence that the Pons and Fleischman result could be duplicated. The committee recommendation was “do not fund”, a reasonable decision at that time. Cold Fusion was branded as “Bad Science”. However, there has been active world wide interest
