MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report - Infinite Energy Magazine

EXHIBIT A
While the MIT PFC-Chemistry Department team was going
through the early stages of its motions to “debunk” the work of
Drs. Fleischmann and Pons, one of the team members, Professor
Ronald Ballinger, was sent to Washington to testify before
Congress. The MIT hot fusion people wanted to minimize the
chance that Congress would divert any hot fusion funding to the
investigation of cold fusion. In his testimony, Ballinger audaciously
claimed that the MIT calorimetry methods were more
sophisticated than those of Fleischmann and Pons—a great
irony in view of later serious questions about the MIT PFC work.
While this Congressional blocking action was carried out, the
plan to launch a PR assault against cold fusion was moving forward.
Only two days later, Professors Ballinger and Ronald R.
Parker would give a secret interview with Boston Herald reporter
Nick Tate (see Exhibit B), the story that would mark the beginning
of accusations of fraud against the Utah electrochemists.—
Eugene Mallove (EFM).
Comments on “Cold Fusion”
Testimony presented to the Committee on
Science, Space, and Technology
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D. C.
by Professor Ronald G. Ballinger, Department of Nuclear Engineering,
Department of Materials Science and Engineering,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
April 26, 1989
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee:
I am Ronald Ballinger, a faculty member of the Departments
of Nuclear Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I am very grateful
for your invitation to convey my views related to the recent
reports of the achievement of
“cold fusion.”
I am a member of an interdisciplinary
team at MIT that is
involved in an attempt to reproduce
the reported “Cold
Fusion” results of Professors
Pons and Fleischmann of the
University of Utah. The team’s
principals include Dr. Ronald R.
Parker, Director of MIT’s Plasma
Fusion Center; Professor
Mark S. Wrighton, Head of the
Professor Ronald G. Ballinger
MIT Photo
Chemistry Department; and
myself. (A complete list of team
members and areas of expertise is included). The team is composed
of experts in the fields of physical metallurgy, electrochemistry,
plasma physics, instrumentation, and radiation
detection. The team has been involved in attempts to reproduce
the results, reported by Professors Pons and Fleischmann since
shortly after their results were released to the press and for publication
in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry.
As I am sure that you and the members of this committee are
aware, any breakthrough in the area of energy production that
has the potential to supply current and future energy needs in a
non-polluting manner must be given serious attention. Quite
apart from its impact on basic science, the results recently
reported by Professors Pons and Fleischmann, should they
prove to be correct, represent such a breakthrough. The basic
nature of their results have been described and discussed by
earlier testimony before this committee. Basically, the team at
the University of
Utah has reported
the fusion of deuterium
atoms in a palladium
matrix at room
temperature.
As evidence that
“cold fusion” has
taken place, the production
of excess
heat and neutron
radiation has been
reported. The reported
magnitude of both
of these is such that
their presence could
be verified by other
investigators.
Much more modest
results have been reported by a team of investigators at
Brigham Young University. We feel that it is important to distinguish
between the BYU results, which are of scientific interest
but of limited or no practical significance and those of the
University of Utah which, should they prove correct, have
major implications for future energy production.
Since the reports of these results, a number of teams worldwide
have been attempting to reproduce these results. To my
knowledge, with the possible exception of the Stanford results
and results from Europe and the USSR of which I have no personal
knowledge, no team has been successful. As far as the
results of attempts by the team at MIT are concerned, we have
been thus far unable to scientifically verify any of these results.
This is in spite of the fact that we are employing calorimetry and
radiation detection methods of even greater sophistication and
sensitivity than those of the University of Utah. Having said
this, I can assure you that these negative results have not been
the results of a lack of effort. The MIT team has been, as I am
sure is the case with other teams, laboring around the clock.
However, we and the other teams have been handicapped by a
lack of enough scientific detail to guarantee that we are actually
duplicating these experiments.
In the scientific community, the soundness of experimental or
theoretical research results is evaluated through peer review
and duplication. For results such as those reported, whose
potential impact on the scientific community and the world are
so great, this review process is absolutely essential. Unfortunately,
for reasons that are not clear to me, this has not happened
in this case—at least so far. The level of detail concerning
the experimental procedures, conditions and results necessary
for verification of the Pons and Fleischmann results have not
been forthcoming. At the same time, almost daily articles in the
press, often in conflict with the facts, have raised the public
expectations, possibly for naught, that our energy problem has
been “solved.” We have heard the phrase “too cheap to meter”
applied to other forms of electric energy production before. And
so the scientific community has been left to attempt to reproduce
and verify a potentially major scientific breakthrough
while getting its experimental details from the Wall Street Journal
and other news publications.
Experiments conducted in haste and based on insufficient
detail coupled with premature release of results have often
resulted in retractions and embarrassment on the part of the scientific
community—caught in the heat of the moment. I guess
we are all human.
22 Infinite Energy • ISSUE 24, 1999 • MIT Special Report