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

MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report
Compiled and written by Eugene F. Mallove, Sc.D.
MIT Class of 1969, S.B. Aero/Astro Eng., 1970 S.M. Aero/Astro Eng.
Photo: E. Mallove
Introduction
When on March 23, 1989 Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley
Pons announced that they had measured nuclear-scale
excess energy from a palladium-heavy water electrochemical
cell, and that they had also detected some preliminary evidence
of nuclear signatures from their exotic energy-producing reactions,
the world was in awe. Their famous afternoon press conference
at the University of Utah, coming less than twelve hours
before the Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska’s pristine coast
and spilled millions of gallons of oil, reminded us of the serious
problems linked with fossil fuel dependency. The Chernobyl
nuclear reactor accident of 1986 also hovered in the background.
It was already clear that conventional fission nuclear
power was in deep political trouble in many countries. The close
coupling of energy and the environment was growing ever more
apparent.
Following the Utah disclosure, the prospect loomed of a
quantum leap in energy technology—a solution to the dilemma
of fossil fuel domination and its threats to the environment and
world peace. The Utah claims soon came to be known as “cold
fusion,” because the electrochemists were saying that they had
solved the problem that the plasma physicists and engineers in
the “hot” fusion program had been working on for four
decades.
The hot fusioneers had been trying to mimic the stars—to
“bring the power of the Sun down to Earth” in the form of controlled,
thermonuclear fusion. This was the attempt to use the
deuterium in ordinary water as an effectively infinite fuel supply.
In only one cubic kilometer of ocean, the nuclear fusion
energy that could be extracted from the approximately
1/6,500th fraction of water’s hydrogen that is heavy hydrogen
exceeds the combustion energy content of all the known oil
reserves on Earth.
Tantalizing as the prospect of infinite energy from the oceans
was, the hot fusion program had never generated even a single
watt of excess power in its huge plasma reactors, which cost
hundreds of millions of dollars per year to support. Success—
“break-even” or “more energy out than in”—with magnetically-confined
hot plasma fusion always seemed to be twenty
years away. This led to the perennial joke that hot fusion is “the
energy source of the future. . .and always will be.” Moreover,
even if the hot fusion program were to succeed in building a
commercially viable central-station generator of electricity
sometime in the year 2050 or beyond, the technology would
have serious limitations. The energy from the hot fusion reaction
of deuterium and radioactive tritium, which had to be supplied
in bootstrap-fashion from the reaction, would emerge in
the form of deadly neutron radiation (14 MeV neutrons). That
would have to be transformed into more benign thermal energy
in a hot jacket of molten lithium in order to heat water for
steam-generated electricity. The practical engineering problems
would be enormous, the technology would add more nuclear
waste to the global inventory (though not as much as conventional
fission power, or so claim the tokamak hot fusion advocates),
and it was far from certain to be economically viable.
In fact, in October 1983 MIT Professor of Nuclear Engineering,
Lawrence M. Lidsky, published an article (“The Trouble
with Fusion”) condemning the hot fusion program. It was a
high-profile cover story for MIT’s Technology Review. The stark
black and white cover of the issue read, “Even if the fusion program
produces a reactor, no one will want it.” Other key
remarks made by the outspoken Lidsky, who was then an Associate
Director of the Plasma Fusion Center: “Long touted as an
4 Infinite Energy • ISSUE 24, 1999 • MIT Special Report