Cold fusion

This article is about the Fleischmann–Pons claims and related experiments. For accepted examples of fusion at temperatures below the millions of degrees Celsius required for thermonuclear fusion, see nuclear fusion. For the original use of the term 'cold fusion', see muon-catalyzed fusion. For all other definitions, see Cold fusion (disambiguation).

Diagram of an open type calorimeter used at the New Hydrogen Energy Institute in Japan.

Cold fusion is nuclear fusion of atoms at conditions close to room temperature, in contrast to the conditions of well-understood fusion reactions such as those inside stars and high energy experiments. Interest in the field increased dramatically after nuclear fusion was reported in a tabletop experiment involving electrolysis of heavy water on a palladium (Pd) electrode by Martin Fleischmann, then one of the world's leading electro-chemists, and Stanley Pons in 1989. They reported anomalous heat production ("excess heat") of a magnitude they asserted would defy explanation except in terms of nuclear processes. They further reported measuring small amounts of nuclear reaction byproducts, including neutrons and tritium. These reports raised hopes of a cheap and abundant source of energy.

Enthusiasm turned to skepticism as replication failures were weighed in view of several reasons cold fusion is not likely to occur, the discovery of possible sources of experimental error, and finally the discovery that Fleischmann and Pons had not actually detected nuclear reaction byproducts. By late 1989, most scientists considered cold fusion claims dead, and cold fusion subsequently gained a reputation as pathological science. However, some researchers continue to investigate cold fusion, and some have reported positive results at mainstream conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Cold fusion research sometimes is referred to as low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) studies or condensed matter nuclear science, in order to avoid negative connotations.

In 1989, the majority of a review panel organized by the US Department of Energy (DOE) found that the evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process was not persuasive. There have been few mainstream reviews of the field since 1990. A second DOE review, convened in 2004 to look at new research, reached conclusions similar to the first.

Prior use of the term

The term "cold fusion" was used as early as 1956 in a New York Times article about Luis W. Alvarez' work on muon-catalyzed fusion.

E. Paul Palmer of Brigham Young University also used the term "cold fusion" in 1986 in an investigation of "geo-fusion", the possible existence of fusion in a planetary core.

History

Before the Fleischmann–Pons experiment

The ability of palladium to absorb hydrogen was recognized as early as the nineteenth century by Thomas Graham. In the late 1920s, two Austrian born scientists, Friedrich Paneth and Kurt Peters, originally reported the transformation of hydrogen into helium by spontaneous nuclear catalysis when hydrogen was absorbed by finely divided palladium at room temperature. However, the authors later retracted that report, acknowledging that the helium they measured was due to background from the air.

In 1927, Swedish scientist J. Tandberg stated that he had fused hydrogen into helium in an electrolytic cell with palladium electrodes. On the basis of his work, he applied for a Swedish patent for "a method to produce helium and useful reaction energy". After deuterium was discovered in 1932, Tandberg continued his experiments with heavy water. Due to Paneth and Peters' retraction, Tandberg's patent application was eventually denied.

Fleischmann–Pons experiment

Events preceding announcement

Electrolysis cell schematic

Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah hypothesized that the high compression ratio and mobility of deuterium that could be achieved within palladium metal using electrolysis might result in nuclear fusion. To investigate, they conducted electrolysis experiments using a palladium cathode and heavy water within a calorimeter, an insulated vessel designed to measure process heat. Current was applied continuously for many weeks, with the heavy water being renewed at intervals. Some deuterium was thought to be accumulating within the cathode, but most was allowed to bubble out of the cell, joining oxygen produced at the anode. For most of the time, the power input to the cell was equal to the calculated power leaving the cell within measurement accuracy, and the cell temperature was stable at around 30 °C. But then, at some point (in some of the experiments), the temperature rose suddenly to about 50 °C without changes in the input power. These high temperature phases would last for two days or more and would repeat several times in any given experiment once they had occurred. The calculated power leaving the cell was significantly higher than the input power during these high temperature phases. Eventually the high temperature phases would no longer occur within a particular cell.

In 1988, Fleischmann and Pons applied to the United States Department of Energy for funding towards a larger series of experiments. Up to this point they had been funding their experiments using a small device built with $100,000 out-of-pocket. The grant proposal was turned over for peer review, and one of the reviewers was Steven E. Jones of Brigham Young University. Jones had worked for some time on muon-catalyzed fusion, a known method of inducing nuclear fusion without high temperatures, and had written an article on the topic entitled "Cold nuclear fusion" that had been published in Scientific American in July 1987. Fleischmann and Pons and co-workers met with Jones and co-workers on occasion in Utah to share research and techniques. During this time, Fleischmann and Pons described their experiments as generating considerable "excess energy", in the sense that it could not be explained by chemical reactions alone. They felt that such a discovery could bear significant commercial value and would be entitled to patent protection. Jones, however, was measuring neutron flux, which was not of commercial interest. In order to avoid problems in the future, the teams appeared to agree to simultaneously publish their results, although their accounts of their March 6 meeting differ.

Announcement

In mid-March 1989, both research teams were ready to publish their findings, and Fleischmann and Jones had agreed to meet at an airport on March 24 to send their papers to Nature via FedEx. Fleischmann and Pons, however, pressured by the University of Utah which wanted to establish priority on the discovery, broke their apparent agreement, submitting their paper to the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry on March 11, and disclosing their work via a press conference on March 23. Jones, upset, faxed in his paper to Nature after the press conference.

Fleischmann and Pons' announcement drew wide media attention. The 1986 discovery of high-temperature superconductivity had caused the scientific community to be more open to revelations of unexpected scientific results that could have huge economic repercussions and that could be replicated reliably even if they had not been predicted by current theory. Cold fusion was proposing the counter-intuitive idea that a nuclear reaction could be caused to occur inside a crystal structure, and many scientists immediately thought of the Mössbauer effect, since it was an example of this happening, and its discovery 30 years earlier had also been unexpected and it had been quickly replicated and explained within the existing physics framework.

Attempts at replication in 1989

Several laboratories in several countries attempted to repeat the experiments. A few initially reported success, but most failed to validate the results; Nathan Lewis, professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, led one of the most ambitious validation efforts, trying many variations on the experiment without success, while CERN physicist Douglas R. O. Morrison said that "essentially all" attempts in Western Europe had failed. Even those reporting success had difficulty reproducing Fleischmann and Pons' results. One of the more prominent reports of success came from a group at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which claimed observation of neutron production. The Georgia Tech group later retracted their announcement. Another team, headed by Robert Huggins at Stanford University also reported early success, but it was called into question by a colleague who reviewed his work. For weeks, competing claims, counterclaims and suggested explanations kept what was referred to as "cold fusion" or "fusion confusion" in the news.

In April 1989, Fleischmann and Pons published a "preliminary note" in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. This paper notably showed a gamma peak without its corresponding Compton edge, which indicated they had made a mistake in claiming evidence of fusion byproducts. Fleischmann and Pons replied to this critique. The preliminary note was followed up a year later with a much longer paper that went into details of calorimetry but did not include any nuclear measurements.

Nevertheless, Fleischmann and Pons and a number of other researchers who found positive results remained convinced of their findings. In August 1989, the state of Utah invested $4.5 million to create the National Cold Fusion Institute.

In the ensuing years, several books came out critical of cold fusion research methods and the conduct of cold fusion researchers.

Critical responses

"Triple tracks" in a CR-39 plastic radiation detector claimed as evidence for neutron emission from palladium deuteride, suggestive of a deuterium-tritium reaction

The extraordinary nature of cold fusion claims together with theoretical issues have caused the scientific community to come to a general skeptical conclusion with regards to the subject. New experimental claims are routinely dismissed or ignored by the community.

In May 1989, the American Physical Society held a session on cold fusion, at which were heard many reports of experiments that failed to produce evidence of cold fusion. At the end of the session, eight of the nine leading speakers stated they considered the initial Fleischmann and Pons claim dead with the ninth abstaining. In July and November 1989, Nature published papers critical of cold fusion claims. Negative results were also published in several scientific journals including Science, Physical Review Letters, and Physical Review C (nuclear physics).

The United States Department of Energy organized a special panel to review cold fusion theory and research. The panel issued its report in November 1989, concluding that results as of that date did not present convincing evidence that useful sources of energy would result from phenomena attributed to cold fusion. The panel noted the inconsistency of reports of excess heat and the greater inconsistency of reports of nuclear reaction byproducts. Nuclear fusion of the type postulated would be inconsistent with current understanding and, if verified, would require theory to be extended in an unexpected way. The panel was against special funding for cold fusion research, but supported modest funding of "focused experiments within the general funding system." Cold fusion supporters continued to argue that the evidence was strong, and in September 1990 the National Cold Fusion Institute listed 92 groups of researchers from 10 different countries that had reported corroborating evidence. However, by this point, academic consensus had moved decidedly toward labeling cold fusion as a kind of "pathological science".

The Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger declared himself a supporter of cold fusion after much of the response to the initial reports had turned negative. He tried to publish theoretical papers supporting the possibility of cold fusion in Physical Review Letters, was deeply insulted by their rejection, and resigned from the American Physical Society (publisher of Letters) in protest.

Further studies

Fleischmann and Pons themselves relocated their laboratory to France under a grant from the Toyota Motor Corporation. The laboratory, IMRA, was closed in 1998 after spending £12 million on cold fusion work. Between 1992 and 1997, Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry sponsored a "New Hydrogen Energy Program" of US$20 million to research cold fusion. Announcing the end of the program in 1997, the director and one-time proponent of cold fusion research Hideo Ikegami stated "We couldn't achieve what was first claimed in terms of cold fusion." He added, "We can't find any reason to propose more money for the coming year or for the future." Also in the 1990s, India stopped its research in cold fusion because of the lack of consensus among mainstream scientists and the US denunciation of it.

In February 2002, the U.S. Navy researchers at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, California who have been studying cold fusion continually since 1989, released a two-volume report, entitled "Thermal and nuclear aspects of the Pd/D₂O system," with a plea for funding.

A 2008 demonstration in Bangalore by Japanese researcher Yoshiaki Arata revived some interest for cold fusion research in India. Projects have commenced at several centers such as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and the National Institute of Advanced Studies has also recommended the Indian government to revive this research.

Publications

In 1989, the ISI identified cold fusion as the scientific topic with most publications, but the publications then went into sharp decline as scientists abandoned the controversy and journal editors declined to even review the papers.

In the 1990s, the groups that continued to research cold fusion and their supporters established periodicals such as Fusion Facts, Cold Fusion Magazine, Infinite Energy Magazine, and New Energy Times to cover the developments in cold fusion and related fringe science topics that were being excluded from the mainstream journals and the scientific press. The Internet also become a major mean of communication and self-publication for CF researchers, allowing for revival of the research.

The Journal of Fusion Technology (FT) established in 1990 a permanent feature for cold fusion papers, publishing over a dozen papers per year, giving a mainstream outlet for cold fusion researchers at a time when other journals were unwilling to review cold fusion papers. When editor-in-chief George Miley retired in 2001, the journal began to cease publishing cold fusion research.

Cold fusion reports have been published over the years in a small cluster of specialized journals like Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry and Il Nuovo Cimento. Some papers also appeared in Journal of Physical Chemistry, Physics Letters A, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, and a number of Japanese and Russian journals of physics, chemistry and engineering. Since 2005, Naturwissenschaften has published CF papers and, in 2009, named a cold fusion researcher to its editorial board.

Conferences

Cold fusion researchers were for many years unable to get papers accepted in scientific meetings, and had to put up their own conferences. The first International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF) was held in 1990 and has been held every 12 to 18 months in various countries around the world since then.

With the founding in 2004 of the International Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (ISCMNS), the conference was renamed the International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science — an example of the approach the cold fusion community has adopted in avoiding cold fusion as a term due to its negative connotations. Cold fusion research is often referenced today under the name of "low-energy nuclear reactions", or LENR, but according to sociologist Bart Simon the "cold fusion" label continues to serve a social function in creating a collective identity for the field.

Thirteen papers were presented at the "Cold Fusion" session of the March 2006 American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Baltimore. In 2007, the American Chemical Society's (ACS) held an "invited symposium" on cold fusion and low-energy nuclear reactions while explaining that this does not show a softening of skepticism. An ACS program chair said that "with the world facing an energy crisis, it is worth exploring all possibilities."

On 22–25 March 2009, the American Chemical Society held a four-day symposium on "New Energy Technology", in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the announcement of cold fusion. At the conference, researchers with the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) reported detection of energetic neutrons in a standard cold fusion cell design using CR-39, a result previously published in Die Naturwissenschaften. The authors claim that these neutrons are indicative of nuclear reactions, although skeptics indicated that a quantitative analysis would be necessary before the results are accepted by the scientific community, and that the neutrons could be caused by another nuclear mechanism than fusion.

Further reviews and funding issues

Cold fusion researchers have complained there has been virtually no possibility of obtaining funding for cold fusion research in the United States, and no possibility of getting published. University researchers, it has been claimed, are unwilling to investigate cold fusion because they would be ridiculed by their colleagues. In 1994, David Goodstein described cold fusion as "a pariah field, cast out by the scientific establishment. Between cold fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. Cold fusion papers are almost never published in refereed scientific journals, with the result that those works don't receive the normal critical scrutiny that science requires. On the other hand, because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here."

Particle physicist Frank Close has gone even further, stating that the problems that plagued the original cold fusion announcement are still happening: results from studies are still not being independently verified and inexplicable phenomena encountered are being labeled as "cold fusion" even if they are not to attract the attention of journalists.

Cold fusion researchers themselves acknowledge that the flaws in the original announcement still cause their field to be marginalized and to suffer a chronic lack of funding, but a small number of old and new researchers have remained interested in investigating cold fusion. Responding to requests from cold fusion researchers, the DOE organized a second review of the field in 2004. Cold fusion researchers were asked to present a review document of all the evidence since the 1989 review. The report summarized its conclusions thus:

While significant progress has been made in the sophistication of calorimeters since the review of this subject in 1989, the conclusions reached by the reviewers today are similar to those found in the 1989 review.

The current reviewers identified a number of basic science research areas that could be helpful in

resolving some of the controversies in the field, two of which were: 1) material science aspects of deuterated metals using modern characterization techniques, and 2) the study of particles reportedly emitted from deuterated foils using state-of-the-art apparatus and methods. The reviewers believed that this field would benefit from the peer-review processes associated with proposal submission to agencies and paper submission to archival journals.

— Report of the Review of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, US Department of Energy, December 2004

The mainstream and popular scientific press presented this as a setback for cold fusion researchers, with headlines such as "cold fusion gets chilly encore", but cold fusion researchers placed a "rosier spin" on the report, noting that it also recommended specific areas where research could resolve the controversies in the field. In 2005, Physics Today reported that new reports of excess heat and other cold fusion effects were still no more convincing than 15 years previous.

Experiments

Typical setup

A cold fusion experiment usually includes:

• a metal, such as palladium or nickel, in bulk, thin films or powder;
• deuterium and/or hydrogen, in the form of water, gas or plasma; and
• an excitation in the form of electricity, magnetism, temperature, pressure, laser beam(s), or of acoustic waves.

Electrolysis cells can be either open cell or closed cell. In open cell systems, the electrolysis products, which are gaseous, are allowed to leave the cell. In closed cell experiments, the products are captured, for example by catalytically recombining the products in a separate part of the experimental system. These experiments generally strive for a steady state condition, with the electrolyte being replaced periodically. There are also "heat after death" experiments, where the evolution of heat is monitored after the electric current is turned off.

The most basic setup of a cold fusion cell consists of two electrodes submerged in a solution of palladium and heavy water. The electrodes are then connected to a power source to transmit electricity from one electrode to the other through the solution. Even when anomalous heat is reported, it can take weeks for it to begin to appear - this is known as the "loading time."

The Fleischmann and Pons early findings regarding helium, neutron radiation and tritium were later discredited. However, neutron radiation has been reported in cold fusion experiments at very low levels using different kinds of detectors, but levels were too low, close to background, and found too infrequently to provide useful information about possible nuclear processes.

Reported phenomena

Excess heat

An excess heat observation is based on an energy balance. Various sources of energy input and output are continuously measured. Under normal condition, the energy input can be matched to the energy output to within experimental error. In experiments such as those run by Fleischmann and Pons, a cell operating steadily at one temperature transitions to operating at a higher temperature with no increase in applied current. In other experiments, however, no excess heat was discovered, and, in fact, even the heat from successful experiments was unreliable and could not be replicated independently. If higher temperatures were real, and not experimental artifact, the energy balance would show an unaccounted term. In the Fleischmann and Pons experiments, the rate of inferred excess heat generation was in the range of 10-20% of total input. The high temperature condition would last for an extended period, making the total excess heat appear to be disproportionate to what might be obtained by ordinary chemical reaction of the material contained within the cell at any one time, though this could not be reliably replicated. Many others have reported similar results.

A 2007 review determined that more than 10 groups worldwide reported measurements of excess heat in 1/3 of their experiments using electrolysis of heavy water in open and/or closed electrochemical cells, or deuterium gas loading onto Pd powders under pressure. Most of the research groups reported occasionally seeing 50-200% excess heat for periods lasting hours or days.

In 1993, Fleischmann reported "heat-after-death" experiments: he observed the continuing generation of excess heat after the electric current supplied to the electrolytic cell was turned off. Similar observations have been reported by others as well.

Non-nuclear explanations for excess heat

The calculation of excess heat in electrochemical cells involves certain assumptions. Errors in these assumptions have been offered as non-nuclear explanations for excess heat.

One assumption made by Fleischmann and Pons is that the efficiency of electrolysis is nearly 100%, meaning nearly all the electricity applied to the cell resulted in electrolysis of water, with negligible resistive heating and substantially all the electrolysis product leaving the cell unchanged. This assumption gives the amount of energy expended converting liquid D₂O into gaseous D₂ and O₂.

The efficiency of electrolysis will be less than one if hydrogen and oxygen recombine to a significant extent within the calorimeter. Several researchers have described potential mechanisms by which this process could occur and thereby account for excess heat in electrolysis experiments.

Another assumption is that heat loss from the calorimeter maintains the same relationship with measured temperature as found when calibrating the calorimeter. This assumption ceases to be accurate if the temperature distribution within the cell becomes significantly altered from the condition under which calibration measurements were made. This can happen, for example, if fluid circulation within the cell becomes significantly altered. Recombination of hydrogen and oxygen within the calorimeter would also alter the heat distribution and invalidate the calibration.

Neutron radiation

Fleischmann and Pons reported a neutron flux of 4,000 neutrons per second, as well as tritium, while the classical branching ratio for previously known fusion reactions that produce tritium would predict, with 1 watt of power, the production of 10¹² neutrons per second, levels that would have been fatal to the researchers.

In 2009, Mosier-Boss et al. reported what they called the first scientific report of highly energetic neutrons, using CR-39 plastic radiation detectors, although some scientists say that the results will need a quantitative analysis in order to be accepted by the physics community.

Helium-4

Considerable attention has been given to measuring ⁴He production. In 1999 Schaffer says that the levels detected were very near to background levels, that there is the possibility of contamination by trace amounts of helium which are normally present in the air, and that the lack of detection of Gamma radiation led most of the scientific community to regard the presence of ⁴He as the result of experimental error. In the report presented to the DOE in 2004, ⁴He was detected in five out of sixteen cases where electrolytic cells were producing excess heat. The reviewers' opinion was divided on the evidence for ⁴He; some points cited were that the amounts detected were above background levels but very close to them, that it could be caused by contamination from air, and there were serious concerns about the assumptions made in the theoretical framework that tried to account for the lack of gamma rays.

Nuclear transmutations

In 1999 several heavy elements had been detected by other researchers, especially Tadahiko Mizuno in Japan, although the presence of these elements was so unexpected from the current understanding of these reactions that Schaffer said that it would require extraordinary evidence before the scientific community accepted it. The report presented to the DOE in 2004 indicated that deuterium loaded foils could be used to detect fusion reaction products and, although the reviewers found the evidence presented to them as inconclusive, they indicated that those experiments didn't use state of the art techniques and it was a line of work that could give conclusive results on the matter.

Analysis of proposed explanations

Cold fusion researchers have described possible cold fusion mechanisms (e.g., electron shielding of the nuclear Coulomb barrier), but they have not received mainstream acceptance. In 2002, Gregory Neil Derry described them as ad hoc explanations that didn't coherently explain the experimental results.

Many groups trying to replicate Fleischmann and Pons' results have reported alternative explanations for their original positive results, like problems in the neutron detector in the case of Georgia Tech or bad wiring in the thermometers at Texas A&M. These reports, combined with negative results from some famous laboratories, led most scientists to conclude that no positive result should be attributed to cold fusion, at least not on a significant scale.

There are at least three reasons that fusion is an unlikely explanation for the experimental results described above.

Probability of reaction

Because nuclei are all positively charged, they strongly repel one another. Normally, in the absence of a catalyst such as a muon, very high kinetic energies are required to overcome this repulsion. Extrapolating from known rates at high energies down to energies available in cold fusion experiments, the rate for uncatalyzed fusion at room-temperature energy would be 50 orders of magnitude lower than needed to account for the reported excess heat.

Since the 1920s, it has been known that hydrogen and its isotopes can dissolve in certain solids at high densities so that their separation can be relatively small, and that electron charge inside metals can partially cancel the repulsion between nuclei. These facts suggest the possibility of higher cold fusion rates than those expected from a simple application of Coulomb's law. However, modern theoretical calculations show that the effects should be too small to cause significant fusion rates. Supporters of cold fusion pointed to experiments where bombarding metals with deuteron beams seems to increase reaction rates, and suggested to the DOE commission in 2004 that electron screening could be one explanation for this enhanced reaction rate.

Observed branching ratio

Deuteron fusion is a two-step process, in which an unstable high energy intermediary is formed:

D + D → ⁴He* + 24 MeV

High energy experiments have observed only three decay pathways for this excited-state nucleus, with the branching ratio showing the probability that any given intermediate will follow a particular pathway. The products formed via these decay pathways are:

n + ³He + 3.3 MeV (50%)

p + ³H + 4.0 MeV (50%)

⁴He + γ + 24 MeV (10⁻⁶)

Only about one in one million of the intermediaries decay along the third pathway, making its products comparatively rare when compared to the other paths. If one watt of nuclear power were produced from deuteron fusion consistent with known branching ratios, the resulting neutron and tritium (³H) production would be easily measured. Some researchers reported detecting ⁴He but without the expected neutron or tritium production; such a result would require branching ratios strongly favouring the third pathway, with the actual rates of the first two pathways lower by at least five orders of magnitude than observations from other experiments, directly contradicting mainstream-accepted branching probabilities. Those reports of ⁴He production did not include detection of gamma rays, which would require the third pathway to have been changed somehow so that gamma rays are no longer emitted.

Conversion of gamma rays to heat

The γ-rays of the ⁴He pathway are not observed. It has been proposed that the 24 MeV excess energy is transferred in the form of heat into the host metal lattice prior to the intermediary's decay. However, the speed of the decay process together with the inter-atomic spacing in a metallic crystal makes such a transfer inexplicable in terms of conventional understandings of momentum and energy transfer.

Patents

Although the details have not surfaced, it appears that the University of Utah forced the 23 March 1989 Fleischmann and Pons announcement in order to establish priority over the discovery and its patents before the joint publication with Jones. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced on 12 April 1989 that it had applied for its own patents based on theoretical work of one of its researchers, Peter L. Hagelstein, who had been sending papers to journals from the 5th to the 12th of April. On 2 December 1993 the University of Utah licensed all its cold fusion patents to ENECO, a new company created to profit from cold fusion discoveries.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) now rejects patents claiming cold fusion. Esther Kepplinger, the deputy commissioner of patents in 2004, said that this was done using the same argument as with perpetual motion machines: that they do not work. Patent applications are required to show that the invention is "useful", and this utility is dependent on the invention's ability to function. In general USPTO rejections on the sole grounds of the invention's being "inoperative" are rare, since such rejections need to demonstrate "proof of total incapacity", and cases where those rejections are upheld in a Federal Court are even rarer: nevertheless, in 2000, a rejection of a cold fusion patent was appealed in a Federal Court and it was upheld, in part on the grounds that the inventor was unable to establish the utility of the invention.

U.S. patents might still be granted when they are given a different name in order to disassociate it from cold fusion, although this strategy has had little success in the US: the very same claims that need to be patented can identify it with cold fusion, and most of these patents cannot avoid mentioning Fleischmann and Pons' research due to legal constraints, thus alerting the patent reviewer that it is a cold-fusion-related patent. David Voss said in 1999 that some patents that closely resemble cold fusion processes, and that use materials used in cold fusion, have been granted by the USPTO. The inventor of three such patents says that his applications were initially rejected when they were reviewed by experts in nuclear science, but that he managed to have a second application reviewed instead by experts in electrochemistry, who approved them. When asked about the resemblance to cold fusion, the patent holder said that it used nuclear processes involving "new nuclear physics" unrelated to cold fusion. Melvin Miles was granted in 2004 a patent for a cold fusion device, and in 2007 he described his efforts to remove all instances of "cold fusion" from the patent description to avoid having it rejected outright.

At least one patent related to cold fusion has been granted by the European Patent Office.

A patent only legally prevents others from using or benefiting from one's invention. However, the general public perceives a patent as a stamp of approval, and a holder of three cold fusion patents said the patents were very valuable and had helped in getting investments.

ICCF (International Conference on Cold Fusion)

1. ICCF-1 Salt Lake City, 1990
2. ICCF-2 Como, Villa Olmo, 1991
3. ICCF-3 Nagoya, 1992
4. ICCF-4 Hawaii, 1993
5. ICCF-5 Monte Carlo, 1995
6. ICCF-6 Sapporo, 1996
7. ICCF-7 Vancouver, 1998
8. ICCF-8 Lerici, 2000
9. ICCF-9 Beijing, 2002
10. ICCF-10 Cambridge (USA), 2003
11. ICCF-11 Marseille, 2004
12. ICCF-12 Yokohama, 2005
13. ICCF-13 Moscow, 2007
14. ICCF-14 Washington, D.C., 2008
15. ICCF-15 Rome, 2009
16. ICCF-16 Chennai, India, 2011

See also

• Muon-catalyzed fusion
• Bubble fusion
• Nuclear transmutation
• List of energy topics
• List of experimental errors and frauds in physics
• Pathological science
• Scientific misconduct
• List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
• Faraday-efficiency effect

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External links

• Template:DMOZ
• Britz, Dieter, Britz's Cold Nuclear Fusion Bibliography, retrieved 2010-08-24. Lists books, papers and conferences about cold fusion; has graphs of publication rate over time.
• Two video press conferences on "Cold Fusion Rebirth" during the 237th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, March 23, 2009, Session 1, Session 2.
• "Cold Fusion Is Hot Again" (video) CBS 60 Minutes, April 24, 2009
• Palladium: The Cold Fusion Fanatics Can't Get Enough of the Stuff Slate Magazine article about cold fusion, July 26, 2010