IT’S more than a decade since Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann famously suggested they had made nuclear fusion happen in a test tube. The claim triggered years of frenzied but doomed attempts to replicate their work and give the world limitless clean energy. Is history repeating itself (see Bursting with energy)?
The Tennessee team at the centre of the new controversy is certainly sticking its neck out. As of now, there are only three proven ways to recreate the fusion reactions that power the Sun: explode a hydrogen bomb, spend billions on an experimental reactor capable of Sun-like temperatures, or smash atoms together at high speed. None has yet yielded any usable electricity. So to suggest you can fuse atoms simply by passing pressure waves through a beaker of liquid is one hell of a claim.
But let’s not get upset simply because someone is daring to make it. Pons and Fleischmann had no credible theory to explain their “cold fusion”. This team is using a different method and thinks its fusion is caused by tiny but astonishingly intense bursts of heat released when bubbles implode in the liquid. It’s an unlikely scenario, but not impossible. And whereas the earlier cold fusion claim surfaced at a press conference, the new research is published in a peer-reviewed journal.
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That does not make their claim correct. But history has taught us it is better to have controversial findings out in the open, where they can be properly scrutinised, than leave them in the shadows.
