Cold Confusion

Abstract

On March 23 two chemists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons startled the world with a press conference at the University of Utah where they announced that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperatures. As evidence they cited the production of “excess” amounts of heat in an electrochemical apparatus and observation of neutron production. While the production of heat in a chemical apparatus is not in itself unusual the observation of neutrons is certainly extraordinary. As it turned out, though, careful measurements of the neutron production in electrochemical apparatus similar to that used by Fleischmann and Pons carried out at dozens of other laboratories has shown that the neutron production fails by many orders of magnitude to support the assertion by Fleischmann and Pons that their discovery represents a new and cheap source of fusion power. In particular, independent measurements of the neutron production rate suggest that the actual rate of fusion energy production probably does not exceed 1 trillionth of a watt.