Cold fusion was discovered by Professors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, and announced in March 1989. Other researchers had earlier observed fleeting evidence for it. In the 1920s Paneth and Peters thought they had measured helium from a metal hydride room temperature fusion reaction, but they later retracted the claim. Y. E. Kim believes that P. I. Dee may have seen evidence for cold fusion in 1934. In 1981, around the time Fleischmann and Pons were beginning their experiments, Mizuno observed strange charged particles from palladium deuterides, but after puzzling over them for some time, he dismissed them as instrument error. Unlike these early researchers, Fleischmann and Pons observed a clear signal, which they repeated many times, and after years of effort in the 1980s they developed fairly reliable techniques to reproduce the effect.

It is a reaction that occurs under certain conditions in metal hydrides (metals with hydrogen or heavy hydrogen dissolved in them). It produces excess heat, helium, charged particles, and occasionally a very low level of neutrons. In some experiments the host metal has been transmuted into other elements. The cold fusion reaction has been seen with palladium, titanium, nickel, and with some superconducting ceramics.

Many chemical and nuclear processes are exothermic, meaning they release heat. For example, when you strike a match, you heat it with friction. It catches on fire and burns until the fuel is exhausted. It releases stored energy; overall it produces much more output than the input heat from friction. Some gas-loaded cold fusion cells are similar: once the reaction gets underway, no energy is input, and a stream of heat comes out. Other devices require an external source of electrical energy to maintain the conditions that keep the reaction going. The input electricity produces some heat, and the cold fusion reaction produces additional or “excess” heat. When you input 2 watts of electrolytic power and the cell produces 3 watts, 1 watt is excess.

From a practical point of view, heat is the most important aspect of cold fusion. Some researchers, including Fleischmann, feel it is also the best proof that the reaction is nuclear, not chemical. This aspect of cold fusion has been widely misunderstood. It is discussed in detail in the next section.

This is explained in detail in the next section. To summarize briefly: Cold fusion cannot be a chemical process because it consumes no chemical fuel and it produces no chemical ash. Cold fusion cells contain mostly water, which is an inert substance that cannot burn or undergo any other exothermic chemical reaction. Cells also contain metal hydrides, which can produce small amounts of chemical heat, but cold fusion cells have produced hundreds of thousands of times more energy than a chemical cell of the same size could. In some cases, this large energy output is the product of a very low level of power integrated over a long time, which means it could be an error. A researcher might mistakenly think he is measuring 50 milliwatts excess, when there is actually zero excess. But several experiments have produced much higher power, ranging from 500 to 10,000 milliwatts (0.5 to 10 watts), and this much heat can be measured with great confidence.

Cold fusion does produce nuclear as opposed to chemical ash, including: helium, a small number of neutrons, and in some cases tritium and transmutations in the host metal. It sometimes produces gross physical changes, such as melted or vaporized metal.

Some people think that because nuclear reactions produce gigantic amounts of energy, they must be very hot, like the inside of a fission reactor or the photosphere of the sun. This is not necessarily so. A sample of impure radium or uranium that is undergoing fission might be cold to the touch, or barely warm. The individual fission reactions that occur atom by atom inside them produce millions of electron volts (eV) of energy, whereas the atoms in a chemical reaction release at most 3 or 4 electron volts.

A chemical reaction might produce much more power over a short period of time than a nuclear reaction: a burning match is hotter than impure radium. The atoms undergoing a nuclear reaction in the radium are few and far between, whereas trillions of atoms in the chemical sample simultaneously participate in the chemical reaction. The radium remains warm for thousands of years, whereas the match briefly gives off intense heat, and burns out a half-minute later.

Richard Oriani, one of the world’s leading electrochemists, said that in his 50-year career cold fusion experiments were the most difficult he ever performed. Cold fusion experiments can range in cost from $50,000 to $20 million. They vary in complexity from the isoperibolic half-silvered test-tube used by Fleischmann and Pons up the sophisticated custom-designed mass spectrometers at the Italian National Nuclear Laboratories (ENEA) and Mitsubishi heavy industry. Experiments usually take between six months and two years to perform. When Fleischmann and Pons announced the experiment, Fleischmann called this a “relatively simple” method of achieving nuclear fusion. He meant that it was simple compared with building a billion dollar tokamak reactor.

Cold fusion is difficult to replicate, and the reaction is often unstable. The heat flares up and gutters out, like burning wet green firewood. Poorly understood physical reactions in potentially groundbreaking experiments are often like this. From 1948 to 1952, transistors existed only as rare, delicate, expensive laboratory devices that were difficult to replicate. One scientist recalled that, “in the very early days the performance of a transistor was apt to change if someone slammed a door.” By 1955, millions of transistors were in use, and any of these later mass produced devices was far more reliable than the best laboratory prototype of 1952.

Some skeptics feel that cold fusion must be too good to be true. They suspect that cold fusion researchers are guilty of wishful thinking. They should remember Michael Faraday’s dictum: “Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature.” Mankind has discovered countless wonderful things that ancient people would have thought miraculous.

Modern physicists think it is too good to be true because they cannot comprehend how it could possibly work. They do not fully understand how high temperature superconductivity works either, but they accept that it exists. Before 1939, no one understood how fusion in the sun worked, and before the discovery of DNA in 1952 no one understood how living cells reproduced, yet people had never claimed that the sun does not exist, nor that cells cannot reproduce.

Many people have a sneaking suspicion that cold fusion must be too good to be true, because nature never does something for nothing. They think everything is difficult, and there is always a price to pay for the bounty of nature. Resources are now and always will be in short supply, and we must therefore compete with others to get our share. Such people are mired in a stone-age mentality. The only resources we lack are knowledge and science. Knowledge is power, and with it we can unlock the unthinkably vast material and energy resources of the earth, and ultimately of the entire solar system. In the distant future when interplanetary travel becomes routine, every person may have a thousand hectares of living space: a vast estate on Mars, or in multilevel towers here on Earth. Someday robots will be improved enough to understand speech and perform domestic labor such as cleaning and cooking. They will gradually fall in price until anyone who wants can have a dozen robot servants waiting on them hand and foot. Energy is the most abundant natural resource of all; we need only find ways to harvest it. The sun produces 2.8 × 1026 watts, which is enough to vaporize the Earth in about a day. It is enough to give every individual on earth four-thousand times more energy than the entire human race now consumes.

No. Most of the expense of an experiment is for the instruments used to measure heat, charged particles, transmutations and neutrons. Cold fusion devices do not require extraordinary precision or ultra-pure materials. They are assembled by hand, like jewelry, with tolerances of a millimeter or so. Some of these crude, handmade devices have produced palpable, potentially useful levels of heat. Mass produced cold fusion devices in the future should cost roughly as much as alkaline or NiCad batteries, which they resemble in some ways.

It will take the support of you, the informed public. See the Introduction. Until people put pressure on the government and the scientific establishment, research will not be allowed in the United States, and it will continue to be actively discouraged in Europe and Japan.

After research begins in earnest, it may be many years before a theory is discovered and the reaction can be fully controlled. It seems unlikely that people will embrace commercial cold fusion devices if the reaction is not fully controllable, and if we cannot ensure it will never produce penetrating radiation or other dangerous side effects.

It will not cost anything. All equipment gradually wears out and must be replaced anyway, so it might as well be replaced with cold fusion models. Cars last five to 10 years, so the transition to cold fusion will probably take about 10 years, although it may accelerate in the last stages when people find it inconvenient to operate a gasoline powered car. Setting up cold fusion equipment production lines will be expensive at first, but cold fusion powered models will be simpler and cheaper than fossil fuel models, and they will cost virtually nothing to operate, so overall we will save tremendous amounts of money.