Cold Fusion - The Full Story

Transcript

Utah, 1869. Promontory Summit. Located in the  great plains almost 70 miles from Salt Lake   City. It is the site of a moment in history.

The  last spike in the first transcontinental railway   is being hammered in. There is media abound.  Railway baron Leland Stanford has the honour   of hammering in the final spike. The moment 

he swings that hammer, a message is sent out   across the telegraph network. “Done”. Except  he misses his swing. It doesn't matter though.   The spike is for show.

A hole had already  been dug and the spike was placed into it   beforehand. It's also not even full gold,  it was iron painted with gold. And besides,   right after the famous photograph was taken 

they would remove it and put a regular one in   after. People would just steal it otherwise. The  golden spike is a symbol of the completion of a   monumental task, the meeting of two industrial  titans whose work cost millions and produced   an engineering marvel that connected the 

Atlantic and Pacific oceans with one final   leg. A celebration of rival companies, and the  backbreaking labour of thousands of immigrants.   It's the moment that made it into the history  books, because it made for one hell of a photo. 120 years later, and just 64 miles to the 

south east, a new Golden Spike ceremony is   playing out once again, but instead of the Great  Plains, we’re at the Salt Lake City airport in   a FedEx office. There is a camera crew here.  They're filming a grad student, Marvin Hawkins,   who is clutching an envelope. Inside it is 

the most important paper of his career. He's   waiting for someone who will never show up. They  had an agreement that they would submit their   papers at the same time, back to back. A show 

of good faith. Marvin doesn't realize it yet,   but he's just an unfortunate pawn about to  be trampled in a much larger dispute. In   about a month, he’d be fired, just  months away from getting his PhD.

The people he’s waiting for right now had  no interest in playing pretend nice for the   media. This was war now. This was more than  a potential Nobel prize.

Their discovery was   the solution to the world's energy crisis, the  key to eliminate the world’s dependence on oil,   the resource that was slowly killing the planet.  Just days ago Exonn-Valdez had caused the largest   oil spill in history off the coast of Alaska. The  timing is almost prophetic.

Today is Good Friday.   Salvation was here, and it had been discovered  in Utah. It was time to spread the good word. [Music] Utah is not exactly the first the place you think  of when you hear about a scientific breakthrough.   Let’s be honest here, your mind almost certainly 

went to the church of Latter day Saints.   The state was founded by the controversial  religious group while they searched for a   promised land to make their own, and they  fought with the federal government for   decades before they were eventually  accepted into the union. Notably,   only after the church publicly disavowed 

their former tradition of polygamy, and   throughout the 20th century Utah as a state craved  legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the nation. The state spent years building up their image as  something more than just the home of the Mormons.   Their national parks and ski resorts attract  millions of tourists each year.

Now iconic films   have made their premiere there at Sundance. They  lobbied for almost 20 years to host the eventual   2002 Winter Olympics. But for every success there  would be a Utah story making national news for all   the wrong reasons.

In the 1980s there were the  deadly Salt Lake City bombings of Mark Hofmann.   Another was a shoot-out with police involving  an illegal family of polygamists. The issue was   summed up by a local political pundit: “If you ask  a lot of people in Utah what they fear, it’s that   everyone is going to laugh at us.

We want money  and we want respect. We would very much like to   be respected, not as Nevada is for gambling, or  Wyoming, for coal, but for brains and for talent.” Despite its perception as a bit of an intellectual  backwater, in the 90s Utah had the 2nd highest   rate of high school graduates that went on 

to higher education. It’s home to plenty of   great schools, with the top 2 locked in an eternal  rivalry with each other. Brigham Young University,   located in Provo, is owned and operated by the  Mormon church, and it enforces a draconian and   regressive honour code, but has a good reputation 

in the field of engineering and nursing. And then   there was BYU’s longtime football adversary.  The top school in the state. The University of   Utah. Or the U, for short.

An all around good  research institute, its genetics program was   respected all across the country, and it was  the birthplace of the now iconic Utah Teapot,   the benchmark of 3D modeling. And its chemistry  department was no slouch either, ranked within the   top 20 in the country.

One Utah resident wanted  to improve those rankings. And he was going to do   everything he could to earn his state the respect  he felt it deserved. Even if it cost him his job.

Chase Peterson, like most people from the state,  was a Mormon. Although he was not a fanatical   one. He had spent most of his early career out  east, and got a medical degree from Harvard,   and eventually became the dean of admissions.

But  his home state beckoned to him, and he eventually   returned, becoming the President of the University  of Utah in 1983. His time out east had taught him   how to rub elbows with the wealthy and attract  donors, skills he would desperately need as U   of U was facing a period of steep decline.

State  education budgets were being slashed each year   as Utah’s whole economy slowed. And that meant  Peterson had to cut his school’s budget 8 times in   just as many years. If he wanted money, he either 

had to convince the government he deserved it,   or he had to make friends in the private  sector. And the way you go about that is   by making headlines. Back in 1972, a U of U  chemist announced that he’d invented the first   ever X-ray laser.

After much excitement, no other  labs could reproduce it, and it became jokingly   known as the Utah Effect. What Peterson needed  was another one of those, but real this time. His first real time in the national spotlight 

was when U of U doctors implanted the first   ever artificial heart into a man named Barney  Clarke. Clarke had long suffered from severe heart   problems and was going to die without medical  intervention. It was a ground breaking surgery,   and 70 reporters came from all over the globe 

to cover it. It was an intense 6 hour procedure,   and Clarke had severe complications, including  seizures and breathing problems. Unfortunately,   he died in hospital 112 days later. Although 

clearly a step forward, it was not a success,   Clarke was intended to live much longer. The Utah  effect had struck again. But despite the failure,   Chase Peterson’s handling of the announcement  was positively received.

He was a calm voice of   reason who had a clear handle on sharing complex  topics with the world, and he had high ambitions.   His name was floated in political circles,  potentially as a Democratic candidate for senate. One more solid announcement and he could  maybe think about planning his next moves.   It was just a matter of time until some 

at the U came up with a real breakthrough.   That moment came in late 1988. Peterson  learned of this project through bits and   pieces. It was apparently highly confidential,  even a whisper of it getting to the wrong person   could jeopardize it.

It was something supposedly  world changing. Two professors in the chemistry   department had been working on something for  years in secret. The administration first   got wind of it when they submitted a funding 

proposal to the dean of science, Hugo Rossi. Rossi had read it, but the implications didn’t  click until he woke up in the middle of the   night. The first thing he the next morning was  call the scientist and asked quite bluntly:   “Are you building a bomb?” And the answer he got 

was, quote: “Well, I suppose you could put it that   way.” It was not, in fact, a bomb. But Washington  would soon be paying close attention anyway.   The lab in which this discovery had taken place  had been working 24/7 for almost the past month,   desperate to get as much data as possible before  the announcement.

Now Peterson was having secret   trustee meetings where everything was locked  down, leaks would be devastating. No one was   allowed to use the actual words to describe  the breakthrough. It was referred to simply as   “the F-word”.

Although secrecy was of the utmost  importance, Peterson was rumored to have spoken   to the Governor of Utah in late 1988 and told  him that his school may soon win a Nobel Prize. On March 13th, 1989 the school filed its first  patent.

The first of several. By March 16th,   Peterson called an emergency meeting with all  their lawyers and the two scientists. Peterson   and the lawyers were in agreement. The time was 

now. If they waited any longer it would jeopardize   the patent applications. The two scientists  however are reluctant. But after a long argument,   they are slowly swayed.

They realize the  gravity of the situation. Years later,   Peterson will argue that if they had stood their  ground, he wouldn’t have forced them to hold the   press conference. And yet the recollection 

of another attendee, was that one of the two   scientists was on the verge of tears. Whatever  the case, the decision had been made. The   press conference was scheduled for 1pm Mountain  time, March 23rd 1989.

The media was given just   a single day advance warning. Campus security is  deployed around the chemistry department, locking   down access to the basement lab where all of this  had started. The room is packed.

TV crews capture   the whole thing, which will last for a little  over half an hour. This is a moment in history. >> First let’s get the news of that scientific  breakthrough at the University of Utah, Brian? >> It’s a late story—thanks 

very much Carol and Keith,   good afternoon everyone. In about an hour  researchers at the University of Utah are   scheduled to make an announcement that they  revolutionized the way we energize our world. >> Narrator: Chase Peterson and his VP, James 

Brophy, welcome the journalists to the talk.   Peterson, knowing full well his words  will be broadcast across the country,   makes sure that everyone knows this  discovery happened at his school. >> This university prides itself, whether it  be in creative writing or dance or chemistry   or genetics or artificial organs, in a 

long tradition of intellectual freedom,   intellectual excitement, and a willingness to  try new ways to solve old problems. Those minds   and that knowledge are then dedicated to the  benefit of the people of the world generally,   and to the cultural and economic well-being  of the state of Utah specifically.

>> Narrator: Next, the mic is handed over  to our first protagonist, Stanley Pons. >> Well first of all let me thank Dr Peterson  and Dr Brophy for the kind introduction,   and further for their strong encouragement  and support throughout this entire project.   The experiment we have accomplished has been 

described in the news release which you have   and I’ll just give you synopsis, and that it is  basically we’ve established a sustained nuclear   fusion reaction by means which are considerably  simpler than conventional techniques. Deuterium,   a component of heavy water, is driven  into a metal rod similar—exactly like   the one I have in my hand here, under—to such 

an extent that fusion between these components,   these deuterons, in heavy water fused to form  a single—a new atom. And with this process   there is a considerable release of energy  and we’ve demonstrated that this could be   sustained on its own. In other words much more 

energy is coming out than we’re putting in. >> Narrator: That was a lot of words,  but the most important are these, quote:   “sustained nuclear fusion reaction”, and  “considerably simpler than conventional   techniques”, and then finally “Much more energy  is coming out than we’re putting in”.

Pons then   turns to his partner, Martin Fleischmann,  and asks him if he wants to add anything. >> And he has really described  the experiment it is very simple,   you drive the deuterons into the lattice,  you compress the deuterons in the lattice,   and under those circumstances we have 

found conditions where fusion takes   place and can be sustained indefinitely.  Now indefinitely is an emotive word,   we have run experiments for hundreds of hours  and on our timescale that is a pretty long time. >> Narrator: Again, there’s that phrase. Quote:   “Very simple”.

Following this Pons explains  why they think this can only be fusion. >> Well first of all the heat that we then measure  can only be accounted for by nuclear reactions.   The heat is so intense that it cannot be  explained by any chemical process that is known.

>> Narrator: They have some  additional evidence too. >> The other evidence is of course that we have  direct measurements of neutrons by measuring the   gamma radiation which builds up in a tank  where one of these cells is under operation.   We can measure a—have a gamma ray spectrum. 

In addition there is a buildup of tritium   in the cell which we measure  with a scintillation counter. >> Narrator: Radiation. Again, a clear  sign that this is a nuclear effect.

>> I would think that it would be reasonable   within a short number of years  to build a fully operational  device that could drive—produce electric  power or to drive a steam generator. >> Narrator: Fleischmann quite  clearly explains that for every   1 watt they put in, they get 4 watts out.

>> We have run cells now in excess of—generating  in excess of 20 watts per cubic centimeter. >> Narrator: In terms of percentages that’s  300% excess heat. This is astounding.

>> If I might just add, it is clear, it  has been clear for three or four decades,   that the promise of virtually unlimited, radiation   free energy is something that is worth  spending perhaps billions of dollars on. >> We would also like it to come to the to the  benefit of the economy of Utah.

That's not always   easy to guarantee because ideas aren't contained  by borders, but perhaps ownership and patents are. >> Narrator: The conference has one very brief  mention that a peer reviewed paper has been   submitted, but is not yet published. If you were 

only paying attention to the tone of their voices,   you might think that was something as mundane  as the renaming of a campus building, not the   unveiling of a world changing technology.  Rumours leading up the conference said   that any number prominent politicians would  personally attend, including the President,   the Vice President, or UK Prime Minister, although  none of these were true.

But the existence of such   rumours conveyed just how monumental this  announcement was. One politician did make   a small appearance. The Utah governor had sent in  written statement to be read.

As a devout Mormon,   he linked the discovery with the famous words  of Brighham Young. “This is the place”. Miracles   happen in Utah. It is here where a mythology is 

born. This was a rags to riches story. This was   the university of Utah. It wasn’t some elite  East Coast University, this wasn’t MIT, this   wasn’t Harvard, this was two relatively unknown 

guys from Utah that had just upended physics.   Two pioneers who boldly went against  the scientific paradigm, gambling on   a risky idea that never should have worked. >> Stan and I thought this experiment was so   stupid that we financed it ourselves, and I think  it would be fair to say we have burnt up about   $100,000 in the process. So it’s not that 

cheap and this is just a kitchen experiment,   so if you scale it up we could burn up a  few million dollars fairly quickly too. >> Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann are not  remembered in the most positive light today,   for reasons you’ll soon come to understand. But 

one trap their critics sometimes fall into is   underplaying their achievements prior to March  23rd, 1989. I think it’s important to make clear   that among their peers, Pons and Fleischmann  were well respected, and productive scientists.   That’s what makes their fall from grace all the  more tragic.

One thing that comes across even   in just these short clips, is that Stan Pons  is not very comfortable speaking in front of   crowds. He stumbles over some of his words, and  trails off at the end of sentences. Fleischmann   is much more confident, and his jokes get 

laughs from the audience multiple times. >> The Rubbermaid basin is for lecture  presentations because we want to have   the punchline that we paid for it ourselves  and we couldn't actually pay for very much. >> Reporter: Basically this has 

been described as a kitchen type   experiment. How do you feel knowing  that you could do in a kitchen what   other researchers can do with half  a million dollars and large scient- >> It’s a pretty big kitchen. [Audience Laughter] >> Narrator:   That confidence comes from experience.

There’s a  bit of an age gap between the two men. Fleischmann   is 61 here, and Pons is just 46. And while  Pons has a solid resume, Fleischmann’s is   extensive.

Born in Czechoslovakia, he grew up  in the UK and made a name for himself there as   a prominent electrochemist. Electrochemistry is a  particular niche that’s fairly simply to explain:   They study electricity that induces chemical  reactions, or chemical reactions that generate   electricity.

He was known for his invention of  a type of calorimeter, a device used to measure   heat with great precision, and he also did some  pioneering work with the diffraction of X-rays. In   1986 he was inducted into the UK’s Royal Society,  which is essentially a lifetime achievement award   in science, placing him among the greats 

such as Isacc Newton and Michael Faraday.   He was quote: “more innovative than any other  electrochemist in the world”. And Marvin Hawkins,   the PhD student once said of him: “You  meet Fleischmann and you’re going, ‘wow,   if I can spend just a month with this guy, I’ll  be a god myself.” Fleischmann’s renown as an elder   statesman was no doubt a major contributor to why 

so many people took the announcement seriously.   He would not simply rush out to make a bold  claim without plenty of evidence to back it up. Stanley Pons was much more of an unknown,  he had taken a more meandering route in his   career. Born in North Carolina, he quit academia 

for 10 years to work for the family business,   before eventually returning to get his PhD  in 1975. And he earned it at Southhampton,   which is where Fleischmann became his mentor, and  eventually his friend. After hopping around a bit,   he landed himself a professorship at the 

University of Utah. He wasn’t a Mormon,   but U of U wasn’t as strict as they were at BYU.  Over the course of the 1980s he began publishing   more and more papers every year. In 1988 he  published a staggering 36 papers.

He even ran   his own company, selling homemade lab equipment  out of his house. A true “worker bee” his peers   called him. U of U must have been impressed,  because they made him chair of the chemistry   department in 1988.

His grad students knew him  to be an introvert, uncomfortable with giving   presentations, especially in front of large  audiences. But they also spoke highly of him.   He was humble, generous, and a good  friend once you got to know him.

>> It’s hard to get a feel for what kind of  person you are when you see someone on TV   a few minutes. He’s a very intensive person.  Family and science takes up 97% of his time. >> Reporter: Stan Pons is also very private.

In   his world family and science mix,  and little else enters the picture. >> Narrator: Despite their age gap the two  were genuinely close friends who loved to ski,   cook, hike, and throw parties together. >> Reporter: I've heard some 

people describe both of you as   the odd couple of fusion. He seems to be more  outgoing, you’re so private. Does that fit? >> I think so, I think so. >> Narrator: By the mid 1980s 

Fleischmann was effectively retired,   but he had set up an arrangement where he’d  split his time between his labs in the UK,   and visiting Pons at U of  U as a visiting researcher.   The duo’s dynamic was very obvious. Fleischmann  was the ideas man, and Pons was the one who   tested the ideas out.

Before this historic day,  they had published close to 30 papers together. >> Reporter: Fleishmann, who’s based in  England, has spent four months each year   at the university on the project. In between 

both men rack up $400 a month phone bills. >> Chase Peterson told a CBS reporter later  that day that this research may win Pons and   Fleischmann a Nobel Prize. Although they never  actually say these words in the announcement,   the world will come to know it as “cold 

fusion”. Even if you have no idea what it means,   you’ve very likely heard those two iconic words  before. Marvin Hawkins, the group’s PhD student,   recalls Fleischmann telling him that  everything was going to change after   that day.

For the better or for worse, he  didn’t specify. But Hawkins realized soon   that it was going to be for the worse. This  press conference should never have happened.   Pons and Fleischmann had wanted an extra 18 

months before going public. Pressure outside   their control had forced their hand. There had  been a leak. And so against their better judgment   they gave a press conference that doomed their 

careers and forever tarnished their reputations. [Singing] >> It would really be a pity, if they blew  up Salt Lake City, then we’d know, yeah. >> When it comes to nuclear physics,  there are actually two F-words.   Fission you’ve definitely heard of.

Splitting the  atom. A massive nucleus breaks apart into two,   releasing a massive amount of energy. So  much energy it could start a chain reaction,   leading to an explosion so immense it could 

flatten a city in an instant. Nuclear fission   changed the course of the 20th century. But  its sibling, fusion, is even more powerful. The   joining of atoms.

When we divide by the amount of  mass used for fuel, fusion beats out fission by a   factor of four. All the atoms around you are made  up of protons and neutrons. Bundles of particles,   protons with a positive charge, and neutrons 

with none. The smallest possible nucleus is   that of Hydrogen, with just one solitary proton.  If you were to take another atom of Hydrogen,   and slowly push them closer and closer together,  you would find yourself at war with an immense   force. The electromagnetic force repels positive 

charges away from each other. The closer they get   together, the harder it pushes back. But there is  a barrier you can surpass. If you were to supply   enough force, enough heat, enough pressure, 

you can get the protons close enough together,   and a new force dominates. The strong nuclear  force. At small enough scales it overpowers the   electromagnetic force, and the two protons  fuse together.

Two atoms of Hydrogen have   become one atom of Helium, and this releases a  ton of energy, much of it in the form of heat.   Self-sustaining fusion has been one of the holy  grails of physics since the concept was first   theorized in the 1920s. The idea that an initial  fusion would release enough energy to kickstart   a chain reaction, unleashing more energy than it 

took to start the first one. Fusion is all about   probabilities. If you have two nuclei close enough  together for a long enough period of time, there   is always a chance, no matter how infinitesimal,  that they will overcome their repulsion and fuse.   One way you can increase the odds of fusion is to 

add neutrons. This is deuterium. one proton, one   neutron. Although it sounds like another element  entirely, it is really just a variant of Hydrogen.   Heavy hydrogen.

Because neutrons have no charge,  they provide a bit of a buffer. It’s much easier   to fuse two deuterium atoms than two hydrogen  atoms. In the modern day, we try to induce fusion   in gigantic reactors called tokamaks, donut-shaped 

rooms that trap protons with immense magnetic   fields. However, despite our best efforts, the  energy we get out is always less than the energy   we put in. Self-sustaining fusion has only  been observed in two places.

Here’s the first: [Flame sounds] Here’s the second: [Thermonuclear explosion]. An immensely huge ball of gas that warms our  planet and grows our crops, and the H-bomb,   a device so destructive that if it was used  for its original purpose it would doom us to   extinction. Sustained hot fusion in a lab would 

fundamentally alter our society. But hot fusion   was not a widely used term in the 1980s. When  physicists spoke of fusion, it was implied that   it had to be hot. Of course, that all changed 

on March 23rd, 1989. Like any good mythology,   the early history of their cold fusion project  has varied over the years. Fleischmann has said   that they were inspired during a hike in Millcreek  canyon.

Later that day they pulled an all-nighter,   frantically writing down calculations  and sketching out an experiment. >> Should we tell the truth? >> Yeah >> It was in one of our Jack Daniels phases. [Laughter] >> Narrator: According to Fleischmann, their convo  went a little like this, Quote: “It’s a billion   to one chance, shall we do it?” to which Pons 

said: “Let’s have a go”. Fleischmann’s decades   long career meant he was familiar with dozens  of material systems, and he had done extensive   work with palladium. Palladium is a decently rare  metal which can absorb surprisingly large amounts   of hydrogen.

It was almost like a metal sponge,  and he wrote about it in a paper as early as 1948.   A palladium lattice can absorb about as 900  times as much hydrogen inside the same volume,   and as it fills up it also expands slightly, and  the internal pressures increase dramatically. This   effect is the same if you swap out hydrogen for 

deuterium. Fleischmann’s thinking was that you   could load a palladium lattice with so much  deuterium that it would compress the atoms so   tightly, that some of them could undergo fusion.  And all that could be done at room temperature.   A colleague at Southampton said that Fleischmann  mentioned this idea to him as early as 1974,   but it wasn’t until he went to Utah to work 

with Pons that he had someone willing to try   it out with him. In order to load the palladium  with deuterium, they devised the following set   up. They take a battery, and hook it up to  two electrodes.

One is platinum, and one is   palladium. Next, they submerge this into a giant  water bath. Except this isn’t regular water, H20,   this is heavy water, D20. The hydrogen is replaced 

with deuterium. Heavy water is not exactly common,   it makes up only about 0.0156% of the Earth’s  total water, but for chemists it’s easy to get   their hands on. Next, they dissolved some lithium  into the heavy water.

Lithium is a conductor,   and they plan to run electricity through the  water. When the electricity is turned on,   the heavy water molecules, D20, are split apart  through electrolysis. They separate into oxygen   and deuterium.

The oxygen is negatively  charged and floats over to the anode,   and the deuterium is positively charged and floats  over to the palladium cathode. The palladium acts   as a sponge, and absorbs the deuterium atoms. And 

theoretically, when the palladium is loaded up   with as much deuterium as physically possible,  fusion might occur. How would they be able to   tell though? By measuring the temperature of the  water. If the heat energy released was more than   the amount of electricity pumped in, that would 

be excess heat. A potential new energy source.   Although it takes some work to get, the oceans  have enough heavy water to last us centuries.   Certainly much more renewable than oil or natural  gas, and with none of the pollutants. This   experiment was not an entirely new idea, however. 

In the 1920s, a German group was trying to find a   reliable way to produce helium. Following World  War I Germany had been banned from importing it,   so a reliable way to make it in a lab would be a  game changer. They had tried loading palladium up   with hydrogen, and saw some evidence of helium. 

However this work was fairly obscure, it had   been forgotten about for decades, largely because  the authors eventually retracted their work. They   realized they had made a mistake. The helium they  were seeing had been absorbed from the air, and   not produced via fusion.

Of course, the neutron  wasn’t even discovered until a few years later,   and so they wouldn’t have known to use deuterium  rather than hydrogen. Fleischmann had heard of   this work before, as he briefly overlapped at  the same school as one of the authors in the   1950s.

And so, all these years later Fleischmann  had taken that general idea, but swapped out   hydrogen for deuterium. Pons and Fleischmann said  several things in this press conference they will   later come to regret. The first was calling 

the phenomena a “sustained fusion reaction”.   The second, was claiming that the experiment was  quote: “very simple”, and implying it would be   easy to reproduce. Fleischmann will later say  he regrets doing the press conference at all.   He knew that by going public like this they were  opening themselves up to more scrutiny than they’d   ever seen before.

He thinks that Pons may not have  realized that at the time. Fleischmann is close to   retirement here, and could leave the field any day  if he ever chose to. When they write his obituary,   cold fusion will be just a paragraph among 

several in a long and successful career. Pons   though is younger, and with children still in  school. He was not prepared for how this would   up-end his life. By the end of it he will be left 

so defeated that he’ll give up his US citizenship. >> We did it! For the first anywhere- >> A big step forward in a little test tube >> What could be the discovery of the century >> The dawn of a new nuclear age >> They have successfully  maintained a nuclear fusion— >> Fusion— >> Fusion— >> Fusion— >> Fusion— >> Fusion— >> Fusion— >> Fusion reaction and generated  more energy out, than they put in.

>> It was like an avalanche. There  was no news channel you could flip   to that wasn’t running a cold fusion  story. Most of the initial headlines   portrayed the announcement as an 

earth shattering discovery that   may change physics as we knew it. This was  a potential solution to the energy crisis. >> Clean nuclear power. >> Pons: Period.

>> Period. At an affordable price. >> Reporter 1: One cubic foot of sea water  contains enough deuterium to produce 250,000   BTU of energy. It would take 10,000 tons 

of coal to equal that kind of energy. >>Reporter 2: No more acid rain from  burnt coal and other power plants— >>Reporter 3: —and the exhaust  of the automobile's internal   combustion engine would be a thing of the past. >> Narrator: Nuclear fission 

had been become a political   nightmare following the Chernobyl  disaster, and the Exxonn Valdez   oil spill had occurred literally  the same day as the announcement. >> The fact is there are a lot of people  including the Chase Manhattan Bank who   are going to find themselves broke 

if oil doesn't stay at $20 a barrel >> The Middle East crisis gets settled just  like that because there's nothing to fight over. >> The headlines wrote themselves. Two  local papers, the Salt Lake City Tribune,   and The Deseret News, would religiously follow 

the story with a sense of hometown pride. In the   latter case I mean that literally. Deseret News  is owned by the Mormon church. Not all reactions   were all so positive though.

Many outlets took a  more mixed stance. Some were outright skeptical.   For some papers it wasn’t even worth a front  page story. The New York Times squirreled it   away on page 12.

Optimistic, incredulous,  there was an entire spectrum of emotions,   but everyone was paying attention. There was a  distinct 3rd type of reaction that went on largely   behind closed doors however. Did this have the 

potential to be turned into a weapon? Or if not   a weapon, a source of fuel for one? Countries  without nuclear weapons programs may have just   been handed a golden ticket. Governments around  the world scrambled to ask their top scientists   their opinions. At the University of Utah things 

quickly devolved into a mad house. Following the   press conference, Marvin Hawkins led the media  through a tour of the lab, explaining the setup.   The kitchen comments were bang on. It looked liked  something a hobbyist could do in their basement.   Car batteries, a Rubbermaid washtub.

All right  next to a janitor’s closet. This was certainly   not like the hot fusion Tokamaks’ that were the  size of entire buildings and cost half a billion   dollars to run. News TV crews were wandering the 

halls of the University looking for anyone willing   to be interviewed. Many had no idea about the  experiment, but hey, it was a chance to be on TV! >> What are they doing the  experiments and things, I’ve— >> Reporter: Do you know what it is? >> Well I have no idea— >> I really don’t. >> Reporter: What’s your idea? >> Well it’s just—it has to do with energy >> This openness will soon be replaced by the 

opposite. U of U will lock down external access   to the lab, even covering up some windows.  The school’s phones were ringing off the   hook. Hundreds of calls a day, from every walk  of life.

Politicians like Al Gore called in,   offering congratulations. Pons got personal  calls from Edward Teller, the controversial   father of the hydrogen bomb, and Carlo Rubbia,  director of CERN. But they were also flooded   with random people looking to invest, or cranks 

who wanted to talk about their pet conspiracies.   Fleischmann and his wife were quickly assigned  a pair of bodyguards to follow them wherever   they travelled. Soon, Pons had to change his home  phone number, otherwise it would be ringing all   night. The attempt to capitalize on the phenomenon 

was immediate. The U started selling cold fusion   T Shirts. A soda shop down the street had a  novelty cold fusion drink. Many researchers,   when they first heard of it, were dumbfounded. 

Cold fusion was a nonsense concept right? >> It would be the greatest—the most significant  technological discovery since man discovered fire >> This had come out of nowhere, if anything  you’d expect it out of a place like MIT,   or one of the big federal labs like Los Alamos  or Oak Ridge. Some didn’t even dare touch the   subject.

Quote: “It’s got to be wrong. I’m  afraid we’ll look like idiots if we are seen   trying this thing”. But on the other hand Pons  and Fleischmann were not complete nobodies,   they had some level of credibility and they 

wouldn’t make an announcement like this without   solid proof. And hey, Fleischmann had said that  the experiment was very easy to replicate, and the   materials were cheap and easy to get. Why not take  a week to try and get their own versions going?   This was basically just a modified electrolysis 

setup. Quite literally something that highschool   students do in their chemistry classes. You just  needed some palladium, and some heavy water.   Those who were quick on the draw were lucky, as  soon palladium stock prices were about to spike.

>> Reporter: But in the last two months  palladium has been the most profitable mineral. >> I think we ran from about $142  up to $180 at one point in time. >> Narrator: Some groups even managed to 

track down Pons and Fleischmann’s supplier,   Johnson Matthey. Although their palladium  was standard stuff they sold off the shelf,   they did start marketing it as quote:  “fusion grade”. And so began the cold   fusion mania that swept the United States. 

But this was not just an American phenomenon,   cold fusion had captured the  attention of the entire planet. >> But as scientists around the world  attempt to recreate the experiment in   their own labs, fusion has turned to confusion. >> I’ve logged 63 or 64 laboratories 

trying to do the thermal experiment,   and I can say honestly that not one of those  laboratories is doing it the same way that we did. >> It didn’t take long for them to  realize that the announcement lacked   a bunch of critical details.  Here’s just a short list: What size were the palladium rods? How 

are the rods made? Are they machined,   or cast? Is the surface of the rod baked,  etched, or left alone? How much deuterium   needs to be loaded into the rods? How  long did it take to load the deuterium?   Hours? Days? Weeks? What current should you  supply? Should the current change over time?   Which electrolyte do you add to the water?  Was there any stirring done to the liquid? All legitimate questions that could have a major 

impact on the results. Everyone knew that a paper   was in the works, but only a select few  had managed to see a copy. Most of what   people had to go on was a story that evolved  into a key part of cold fusion’s mythology.   The “meltdown”.

The meltdown is supposedly the  first time Pons and Fleischmann saw something   that might suggest fusion. Exact dates for  this meltdown are inconsistent and hazy. They   stretch back as early as late 1984 or early 

1985. Why then specifically? Well, notably,   it would be the earliest possible time where they  could have come up with their experiment, but also   late enough that both Pons and Fleischmann had  fully left their prior jobs at Southampton and   the University of Alberta. Any potential patent 

rights would fall only to them, and the University   of Utah. According to the mythology, they had been  loading a palladium electrode for seven entire   months. And then one night Pons had instructed  his son Joey, who was working in the lab, to   adjust the current running through the cell.

His  son did as he was asked, left, and then returned   hours later to check on the experiment. What  he saw was astounding. A 1cm cube of Palladium,   which has a melting point of 1500 degrees, 

had fully melted. Exact details, are again,   inconsistent. In some versions of the story the  rest of the setup melted too, in others it was a   mini explosion. In some versions Joey had lowered 

the current, in others he had raised it. There   is one detail that remains consistent though.  There was a hole in the concrete floor 4 inches   big. At least one independent source, Pons’ grad  student, Kevin Ashley, confirmed that he saw the   hole the next day.

Something had generated  a shocking amount of heat. So much heat,   that it could not have been explained by any  chemical reaction. The only logical conclusion,   according to Pons and Fleischmann was 

that something nuclear had just occurred. And it was stories of this meltdown that  supposedly convinced the university that   this discovery was genuine, leading to the  eventual press conference. And yet, there   exists no official University records of this 

meltdown from the time it supposedly occurred.   Fleischmann, years later, claimed that they  covered it up out of fear of having their   experiment shut down as a clear fire hazard.  But regardless, the meltdown story would be   a particular point of fixation among scientists.  Because even though the story lacked hard numbers,   it still implied them. A 1cm Palladium 

cube has a melting point you can estimate,   and you can calculate how much energy would  be necessary. So does a four inch hole in   concrete. Physicists would soon be working  backwards from what little info they had.   The first week was a mad dash to uncover as much 

information as possible. Researchers phoned their   friends to brainstorm, faxes of rough drawings  and calculations sent out across the country.   People even analyzed footage of Pons holding  one of his cells and used the size of his wrist   to try and guess at the dimensions of the cell.  There are even alleged reports that some people   managed to crack their way into Pons’ personal 

email, hoping to snoop for answers, but found   nothing of interest. Back then the internet was  still in its infancy, and barely anyone called it   that yet. But universities and research labs were  some of the first in the world with access to it,   making cold fusion one of the first ever 

viral news stories. Early bulletin boards   hosted daily news updates, and information was  spreading faster than it ever could before. Very few people were able to speak  with Fleischmann and Pons directly,   save for a few of their close friends.

Chuck  Martin at Texas A&M had known Pons for years,   and had heard a few days beforehand that’d  he’d want to keep an eye on the news. Chuck   Martin was extremely eager to get his  own cold fusion experiment running,   and he phoned Pons asking for any tips. 

But Pons only gave him cryptic warnings   about the potential danger. It seems this was  sage advice, as some labs were about to prove. >> The Lawrence Livermore labs got a reaction  they did not expect.

Their experiment blew up >> –but the hydrogen gas apparently  caused a small explosion which sent   shards of glass all over the lab.  North Carolina State University   scientists earlier suspended their fusion  experiment following a small explosion >> Narrator: And Fleischmann had given some  friends at Harwell labs an early head start.   He’d been shipping them some of their cold 

fusion cells throughout March for them to   measure. He wanted at least one UK lab to get a  head start so the US didn’t get all the glory.   It's around this time when the criticism  starts to pour in. So far the best sources   for hard numbers were newspapers like the 

Wallstreet Journal and the Financial Times. >> In all of this what has been  the most frustrating thing for you? >> The most frustrating part is not having  enough details to replicate the experiment,   or trying to get the details out of newspapers.  This is not usually the way we do science.

>> Narrator: This whole situation was  bizarre. Why had the press conference   come before a peer-reviewed paper? For  many people that was a major faux pas. >> You know not aware that 

we did anything at all wrong,   we were very cautious not to say that  papers have been accepted anywhere >> Pons and Fleischmann had in fact submitted  their paper a couple weeks earlier to the   Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry.  And although it hadn’t been published yet,   it had been accepted. Where this gets 

iffy, is why it was accepted. You see,   a couple weeks before the announcement, Pons had  received an unrelated call from a friend who was   an editor at the journal. Pons and Fleischmann had  published often with them before, and Fleischmann   was a longtime friend of the managing editor, 

Roger Parsons. Parsons, upon hearing that his   friends may have the discovery of the century  and that they had a tight deadline, tells Pons   he’ll push it to be published as soon as possible.  Parsons was the only person to review the paper. Pons and Fleischmann had also sent the 

paper to the much more prestigious Nature,   but they had refused to publish it without a much   more careful review. There’s more  to that side of the story later. The paper was eventually published on April 8th,  but the preprint leaked a little earlier.

Pons   have given five copies to friends in Utah.  These were quickly faxed and copied across   the world so many times that most of the text  quickly became unreadable. Except of course   the massive stamp that read “confidential”.  But even this paper was only eight pages,   and had little new that people didn’t 

already know. The assumption that many   were working on was that Pons and Fleischmann  were intentionally withholding details because   of patent concerns. Some people even speculated  that the cells they showed off on TV were dummies,   and that deep in their basement lab they had the 

real heavy duty cells hidden. The press release   given to the media by U of U’s comm’s department  was also devoid of many details. Pam Brogle, the   school’s comm’s director, later said that she was  actually forced to remove sentences at the request   from the University’s legal teams, which she 

fiercely disagreed with. And yes, that was teams,   plural. She noted there were three separate groups  of high powered lawyers, ones from the East coast,   West coast, and Texas. She had wanted to 

speak to Pons and Fleischmann well in advance,   but had only been allowed to just days before  the announcement leaving her no time to research. Although the press conference was heavily  promoted by the school, the exact topic was   not fully revealed beforehand. Despite this, 

at least three reporters had managed to get   an inside scoop. One of them was Jerry Bishop  at the Wall Street Journal. Brogle, who wanted   to guarantee coverage from the journal, tells him  it’s room temperature fusion.

Despite his initial   skepticism, he too ends up making some calls to  physicists and pieces together that this story   is a major deal. And his headline: TAMING H-BOMBS  was certainly not the kind of thing you expect to   see in a financial paper. Jerry Bishop’s coverage 

of cold fusion is some of the most in depth in   the traditional media sphere. He will later win  a science writing award from the AIP. However,   it should be noted that his award ceremony  will be also be boycotted by many physicists.   They found his reporting misleading and often 

one-sided. Some actually credit Jerry Bishop   with popularizing the name cold fusion, because  as you’ll see in their written press release,   Pons and Fleischmann called their discovery  N-fusion. Jerry Bishop did not come up with   the term cold fusion on his own however, 

and you’ll find out who did a little later   on. Nothing was conventional about cold fusion.  And it was only going to get weirder from here. By mid April the first reports  from other labs began to roll in.   Pons and Fleischmann had set the 

precedent that if you had a result,   you were fine to hold a press conference before  you even had a paper published. And that’s what   many of these labs did. Called in the media,  put on their best suits, and got their 15   minutes of fame.

It’s rare for scientists to  get on TV and this might be there only shot. >> Hundreds of laboratories have tried  to confirm the Utah experiment. It looks   as though Texas A&M won the race 

with Georgia Tech a close second. >> We found that there is more  energy coming out of this cell   than we are putting in. We couldn’t believe it. >> We couldn’t believe it.

>> Reporter: But then another  announcement from another school,   Georgia Tech. Researcher there  duplicated the Utah experiment— >> and this weekend two Hungarian researchers say— >> The University of University of Washington— >> Italian news reports– >> Stanford researchers today— >> Two Mexican scientists say— >> —government project in India. >> Researchers at the University of Florida— >> Swedish physicists said today— >> The University of Minnesota— >> The Los Alamos National 

Laboratory in New Mexico— >> Incidentally this brings to more  than 60 the number of laboratories   that have confirmed at least  part of the Utah experiment. >> Over the next few weeks Pons and Fleischmann  will be traveling non-stop.

Fleischmann had gone   to Europe the day after the announcement and  he had given talks at some of the top physics   labs on the continent. Harwell in the UK, Erice in  Italy, and now CERN in Switzerland. He was filling   auditoriums beyond capacity each time.

Pons was  just as in demand, and had given talks at U of U,   Indiana, and soon, he would give the biggest talk  of his life. Cold fusion was such a big deal that   nearly every major scientific organization decided  to hold emergency sessions entirely dedicated to   the subject.

And for a chemist like Pons, there  was no bigger stage than the American Chemical   Society. They had scheduled a meeting in Dallas  on April 12th. They had booked out a basketball   stadium, and early registration suggested chemists 

all across the country would swarm the event. >> Dr Pons has been escorted around Dallas much  the way you would escort around a presidential  candidate or even a president himself. Incredible  for a chemistry convention, it felt like a   Jazz-Lakers seventh game in the playoffs. 

I'll tell you one thing it was quite a day. >> Narrator: The first day of the conference  the arena has 7000 people in it. Looking back,   many call this event the Woodstock of chemistry.  As a comparison, the American Physical Society   had their own Woodstock event just two years 

earlier, when a group had found evidence of   high temperature superconductors. That  work had won its discoverers the Nobel   prize. Every chemist in the country wanted to  see their new hero Stanley Pons.

The President   of the society opened his talk with a bit  of a jab at their rival field of physics. >> Well much has been learned  about plasma physics the goal   has remained elusive. Now it appears the 

chemists may have come to the rescue. [Massive applause] >> Narrator: Although intended as a  lighthearted comment, it cut to a real   feeling among chemists. The physics community  was still extremely pessimistic.

Many of them had   ties to traditional, hot fusion research. Cold  fusion would certainly disrupt their funding,   and so they’d have an incentive criticize it.  The energy in the room was electric. Right as   Pons is being introduced the MC takes a 

moment to announce some breaking news. >> Before I have Stanley come on up, I'd like  to comment we were just informed before we   came on that a Dallas radio station has  reported that the University of Moscow   has just announced that it has successfully  repeated the Pons-Fleischmann experiment.

[Applause] >> Narrator: History is being made  during the event itself. As for Pons,   he’s clearly more comfortable now than  he was in Utah. He opens with a joke.

>> It’s incredible to me what an electrochemist   has to do today to get an invitation  to the American Chemical Society. [Audience laughter] >> Narrator: Most of his talk is just  him going over the experiment. But,   he finds time for another joke.

>> Next slide is a photograph  of the U1 Utah tokamak. [Audience laughter] >> Narrator: It’s a clear flex. Hot fusion  tokamaks are the size of entire rooms,   and weigh tonnes.

His can sit in a  Tupperware container. The applause   he gets at the end is what you’d expect a  rock star to get at the end of a concert. >> Pons: Thank you very much.

[Massive applause] >> Narrator: During the Q&A one of the audience  members asks Pons a question: “Prometheus,   Pandora, or Piltdown man?”. Three options for how  this could turn out. Was this like stealing fire   from the gods? Was it like unleashing a curse 

upon mankind that could not be undone? Or was   it simply a hoax? Pons’ response was short: “No  comment”. Meanwhile, Pons and Fleischmann were   not the only two who’d had a busy couple weeks.  Chase Peterson, not wanting to waste the momentum   of the publicity, flew out his team and personally  visited the Utah Governor at his vacation house.   The Governor could tell they weren’t just there 

for pleasantries, and asked them point blank how   much money they wanted. When they say around  two or three million, he hits back with five. >> We we hold a special session of  the legislature with one item on the   agenda.

That item will be to deal  with the $5 million appropriation— >> Narrator: A state senator, Eldon  Money, even suggested a proposal   where Utah residents could donate to the  research and receive tax cuts in return. >> Some believe it will do for Utah 

what gambling does for Nevada. With   so much money coming in, who needs taxes? >> Reporter: results show that 60%  of those who called thought taxpayers   should pay for the research. 40%  said no, taxpayers should not.

>>Narrator: On April 7th the Utah legislature  will vote 97-3 to approve the $5 million. >> But it’s kinda like politics, they’re  certainly generating a lot of heat. >> Narrator: During the session the governor 

paraphrased the bible when expressing his support:   “He that doeth nothing is damned, and  I don't want to be damned.” This was an   energy source so plentiful, it would be quote:  “too cheap to meter”. Most of this $5 million   would presumably go to some sort of research  institute, although almost immediately half   a million is allocated entirely to the army of 

patent lawyers. Who would run this institute?   Surely the competition would be fierce.  The earliest rumour was James Fletcher,   who had just retired as head of NASA. A perfect  fit, given he was a Mormon from Utah.

This   appointment would not pan out though, but it did  show just how much interest was being generated.   The eventual name would be the National  Cold Fusion Institute. Of course looking   at that name, it implies at least some sort  of collaboration with the rest of the country.   Washington was absolutely paying attention to 

cold fusion, and things were already in motion. [Music] >> On April 13th Glenn Seaborg got a phone call  in a California diner. It’s from Washington. He   needs to take a flight there, because it’s urgent. 

This is not the first time he’s done this. He’s   a well respected veteran in nuclear science.  In a few years he’ll get a chemical element   named after him. He’s been a personal scientific  advisor to a half dozen US Presidents.

And George   Bush wants his opinion on cold fusion. When he  gets there, he tells Bush, his chief of staff,   and Secretary of Energy James Watkins his honest  opinion: This wasn’t going to be anything. >> There wasn’t enough evidence there to convince 

me, and I’m not convinced. Everybody knows about   it, nearly everybody is talking about it, but most  of the people I’ve talked to are not buying it. >> But at the same time you couldn’t just  declare it wrong.

The world was paying attention,   cold fusion looked like a solution to the energy  crisis. If you are going to evaluate this,   you need to do it slowly. Make a panel, have  them visit the labs, and write a big report.   Don’t rush it out.

Secretary Watkins orders a  dozen of the country’s national labs to start   working on cold fusion. And none of this  secrecy business. If there’s confirmation,   he wants to know immediately.

This was not the  only major development in Washington that month. >> This is not a science project, this is an  American project quite frankly and a Utah project. >> So I couldn't agree with you more 

and I think we ought to jump right   on it and not let anybody else steal this thing >> The last 20 years are full of American  inventions and Japanese promotion   we'd like to have both opportunities >> In the House, the Science Space and  Technology Committee held a hearing on   April 26th. With 42 members it is one  of the largest committees in the House,   and that day there was full attendance.

The  opening remarks are full of pomp and circumstance. >> Morning ladies and gentlemen, in recent weeks  an atmosphere of high excitement and anticipation   has permeated the scientific community as  startling possibilities for sustained nuclear   fusion reactions at room temperature have emerged. 

The potential implications of a scientific break   breakthrough that can produce cold fusion  are at the least in our judgment spectacular. >> We all want this to work. Energy  is the lifeblood of our nation and   fusion energy would be an enormous step 

toward the goal of energy independence. >> In a period when our news seems to be  filled with items telling us about drugs,   budget deficits, decline in  America's economic position,   and environmental problems, the news of  the possible discovery of cold fusion   in Utah with its accompanying—even with its 

accompanying controversy was wonderful news. >>Narrator: Wayne Owens, congressman  from Utah, was eager to introduce   the distinguished guests from his home state. >> The possible achievement of solid state fusion,   or the so-called “cold fusion”  is nothing less than a miracle.

>> Narrator: Later he would make plans for  a trip with his fellow committee members to   go visit U of U and see cold fusion with  their own eyes. The first guest to speak   is Stanley Pons, clearly quite humbled  and honoured to be speaking in congress.

>> Robert Roe: The one thing about  those microphones is they're not   very good so you have to pull them closer. >> Ok, thank you very much. [Laughter] >> Chairman first we would like  to thank you and the committee   for the opportunity to testify here today.

>> Narrator: He starts us off with a fairly  in depth with the nitty gritty technical   details. He has a slideshow that lasts for  nearly 15 minutes. Fleischmann is up next,   and does what he does best, giving 

a digestible big picture view,   and speculates about how this could be applied.  Notably, he says something interesting here. >> Now the experiment which Professor Pons  has described to you is superficially simple,   but is actually quite difficult to carry out  because you have to go through a process of   optimizing the experiment such that you 

will make a significant observation. >> Narrator: This is in contrast  to the initial press conference,   where he said it was, and I quote: “very  simple.” Although most of the politicians   in attendance were enraptured, some of  them asked the occasional tough question.

>> I must say Mr chairman the process so  far by which we've learned about this has   been more confusion than cold fusion, and  there seems to be a feeling about that,   the process has been more driven by a wish to  protect future potential profits than it has   been adherence to normal peer-review processes.  >> The public release of the information prior   to the publication in a journal, and 

the fact that the lack of data seems   to have inhibited the replication of your  results in most cases where it's been tried. >> In chemistry it is generally the situation  that when you have submitted a paper and the   paper is accepted, which was the case in in our  case, then it is okay to make an announcement.   I think that the problem we've had is that 

physicists don't do things exactly the same way. >> Narrator: Pons is correct in  saying that their paper was accepted,   but he’s not being entirely honest  here about the peer-review. And as for   the lack of experimental details, 

Fleischmann hits back with this: >> We admit that there were not the experimental  details there, but in a preliminary note  there never are these experimental  details, and we do now have fax   machines and telephones which would allow  people to request that information from us   and those that have we have given them that  advice.

I reject that particular criticism. >> Indeed, many scientists had been calling  the two men non-stop asking for details.   However, you either had to be extremely  lucky, or one of their close friends,   to actually get a response. Fleischmann plays 

the diplomat very well here. He makes it clear   he does not want money taken away from hot  fusion researchers. He does not want to make   any unnecessary enemies. When he’s asked how much 

he thinks scaling up this technology might cost,   he is careful to avoid giving an exact number.  Rather, he passes that particular hot potato   to Chase Peterson, who has brought with him a  high profile lobbyist, Ira Magaziner. Together,   they made their hail mary pitch to all 42  members of the committee, who listened intently.

>> The figure that comes to mind is $25  million from the federal government.   Maybe that needs to be $125 million someday  but that's not of any importance right now,   $25 million would allow us to start the  onion growing with state and private sources. >> Narrator: $25 million, at the low end. 

$125 million at the high end. That is a big   ask. Peterson also, in vague terms, alluded  to potential national defense concerns about   the research. Although cold fusion was not 

a bomb, fusion was known to produce tritium,   a radioactive isotope that is used in making  bombs. A reliable way to generate tritium would   certainly be of use to the US army. Ira Magaziner  tapped into the political fears of the period,   and described a scenario where Japan, their 

fearsome economic rival, would swoop in   and steal cold fusion from them just like  they had with electronics and automobiles. >> You know we have consulted in Japan, we've  consulted with Japanese companies in the past,   and we understand the kind of effort that  the Japanese are now devoting to this   discovery even before they’ve replicated.

>> Narrator: This was an existential threat that  meant they had to act now to fend it off. The   total hearing is five hours long, and much of it  is dry. As the University of Utah group departed,   so did many of the representatives.

Most of  them simply don’t want to stay to listen to   the much more skeptical witnesses. Of the other  speakers that day, by far the most interesting   was the group from Brigham Young University. The 

rival school to the University of Utah just 40   miles down the road. And representing them was a  soft spoken physicist named Steven Jones. And he   was singing a very different tune than Pons and  Fleischmann.

He didn’t think that cold fusion was   worth dumping millions into. At least not yet. He  had even brought along a prop to help him explain. >> Now this is a tender shoot as you can 

tell. It is difficult to say what it will   become. Some think, and suggest strongly,  that this is a tree and it will grow up   very quickly and provide us enough wood  for all our energy needs for generations.   I do not think it is.

I think adding too much  fertilizer at this stage will be detrimental.   I think we need to give it time,  at least a couple of months please,   to see whether this is something that's a rose  or a tree. If it should turn out to be a rose   we can then admire it for its beauty even if 

we are a bit disappointed it was not a tree. >>Narrator: And by that he meant, this  is a new unexplored bit of physics,   and that is worth studying, but a miracle energy  source this was not. To hammer home the point,   he made a comparison that the 

politicians could easily understand. >> On the other hand I heard Mr Jones say that  the difference between that experiment and   commercial productivity, was the difference  between a dollar and the national debt. >> For a room of politicians who 

had just been asked for $25 million,   it made a compelling case. But why had he, of all  people, been invited? Who even is Steven Jones?   Well, Steven Jones is the reason any of  this was happening at all. What he isn’t   telling the committee here, is that he 

feels Pons and Fleischmann have fucked   him over. Because what he’s claiming…is  that he is the inventor of cold fusion. [Music] >> Narrator: Steven Jones is a soft spoken man.

He’s just spent the better part of  an hour speaking to a room full of   Washington politicians about his work  in cold fusion. He comes off as humble,   downplaying his work as a nuclear physicist.  Like most professors at Brigham Young University,   he is a devout Mormon.

Most of his colleagues know  him to be trustworthy, honorable, some might even   call him a boy scout. And it was almost certainly  burning him up inside that for the past month,   Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann had  been accusing him of stealing their work.

[Music] Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann are remembered  as the fathers of cold fusion, for better or for   worse, and that’s because they went public in a  now infamous press conference on March 23rd, 1989.   And one month out from that, they were asking  congress for $25 million. As Fleischmann mentioned   in their announcement, he and Pons had funded 

their experiment with $100k of their own money,   and they had no other financial support. But what  he didn’t say is that in the year before they   went public, they did try to get external funding.  And that process had set off a domino effect that   resulted in a leak, and was ultimately the reason  they had went public an entire year and a half   before they intended to.

Through much of the 1980s  Pons had been funding his work through grants   awarded by the Office of Naval Research. But when  he approached them about his cold fusion research   they didn’t think it was a good fit. After some 

shuffling around, Pons resubmitted to the Office   of Advanced Energy Projects at the Department of  Energy. The office had a bit of a reputation as   the office of Hail Mary’s. Its administrator,  Richard Gajewski, once called it the home of   “orphans and infants”.

What he meant by that was  his office was the last chance for projects that   were considered too crazy for other departments.  Pie in the sky pitches that still deserved at   least a little bit of funding. Gajewski had a  lot of power in this office, and he liked to   pick favorites.

As it happened, one of his longest  running funding programs was for a professor at   BYU. Steven Jones. Jones was one of the experts  in a niche area called muon catalyzed fusion.

A muon is a particle similar to an electron,  it’s just 207 times as massive. A muon can   replace an electron orbiting a nucleus of  deuterium. Because a muon is so much heavier,   its orbital radius is almost 200 times as small. 

This allows two atoms to sit much closer together,   which vastly increases the odds of fusion. Muon  catalyzed fusion can, and often does occur at   room temperature. After it was first demonstrated  in 1956, for about a decade researchers scrambled   to perfect it, hoping that it would unlock 

an immense new energy source. And in fact,   a New York Times article from 1956 even referred  to it as quote: “cold fusion.” The issue, is that   the numbers just weren’t there. It wasn’t frequent  enough to sustain itself as an energy source.

But   the concept never fully died. Steve Jones at BYU  was one of its true believers. Gajewski clearly   took a shine to him. He’d funded Jones for 6 years 

now, giving him around $250k a year by 1988. It   was a strong show of faith, but Jones knew his  clock was ticking. Gajewski was getting pressure   from his bosses to call it quits on Jones’ work.  Muon catalyzed fusion was as dead now as it was   30 years earlier.

He needed to pivot. Inspiration  came in September 1988 when Gajewski sent Jones a   proposal. The title was: “The Behavior of  Electrochemically Compressed Hydrogen and   Deuterium”.

And it was submitted by Stanley Pons  and Martin Fleischmann. Jones was intended to act   as a neutral referee, one of five. The proposal  was confidential.

The cover specifically mentioned   quote: “to use the information contained in  the proposal for evaluation purposes only.” You can probably guess where this is going. Later,   Jones and BYU’s legal team would release a  detailed timeline of his research on fusion,   supported by pages and pages  from Jones’ own notebook.

>> Reporter: BYU has documents such as  these lab notebooks showing their work  goes back to at least 1986. >> Narrator: And if you watch his   testimony in congress, he will hammer home the  point that he’d been working on this for years.

>> Deuterium into metals is going to lead to  fusion which we had in early ‘86. I should   say by the way that this has been funded  by this same advanced energy project,   this particular idea cold nuclear fusion  since ‘86.

We pioneered that in May of 1986. >> Jones has claimed that while his primary  focus had been muon catalyzed fusion,   he had spent some time and funding working  on more traditional fusion work like that   of Pons and Fleischmann, even before he saw  their proposal.

And this is technically true. In March 1986, Jones had a chance run in with  a geophysicist, Paul Palmer, who had an idea   that fusion can take place within the earth via  extreme pressure. They began to spitball the idea   of piezo-nuclear fusion.

Piezo means pressure  in Latin. In a memo, dated April 1st 1986,   Jones wrote: "Could it be that metal hydrides  provide an environment conducive to confinement   and fusion of hydrogen isotopes? And on April  7th, Jones, although he never actually uses the   word “electrolysis”, he does write down several 

different metals. Among them is palladium. In one   of his annual updates to Gajewski, he mentioned  this piezo-nuclear fusion idea. Two of Jones’s   graduate students in May 1986 began experiments 

where they would load hydrogen into metals via   electrolysis. But after months of attempts,  nothing useful came of the experiments, and in   September they abandoned the idea. The most they  got out of it was two term papers.

And so, if we   want to be lawyers about it, Jones’s group did,  independent from Pons and Fleischmann, come up   with a cold fusion concept as early as 1986. But  they soon put the idea on a 2 year long hiatus. Jones’ later explanation for the hiatus is that 

they were waiting on a colleague to build an   ultra sensitive detector that would allow them  to continue the experiments. This detector was   indeed finished around August of 1988.  And we know, from Jones’ own notebook,   that he assembled his team for a meeting on  August 24th, and they discuss restarting the   fusion project.

But then, and this  is where it gets a little suspect,   his notebook has a 29 day gap where he does not  mention the fusion project. And then finally,   he notes on September 20th that he received the  Pons and Fleischmann proposal from Gajewski.

It   is only after this point that his group  begins to start up experiments again. The whole saga is full of coincidences, both  in timing, and in location. What are the odds   that it’s two Utah labs, just 40 miles apart, 

that would be racing to unlock the secrets of   fusion? What we do know for sure, is that Jones  and his team jumped into action only after they   had read Pons and Fleischmann’s proposal, at  a time when his funding was on the verge of   ending. And so by late September his group was  starting up experiments, and Jones wrote back   to Gajewski that the proposal should be rejected. 

Or at least, he needed some clarifications first.   And so he begins to write to them anonymously.  To Pons and Fleischmann, here is an anonymous   reviewer asking very basic questions, clearly  of the opinion that this experiment won’t work. Only when they had shared enough details for him  to replicate the experiment in its entirety did he   change his tune and give it the thumbs up.

Pons  and Fleischmann had managed to guess that the   reviewer was Jones because one of his critiques  was that they hadn’t cited a 1986 paper by him.   And then one day, Gajewski phones up Pons and  suggests that since Jones had worked on similar   stuff before, they maybe work out a collaboration.  From the perspective of Pons and Fleischmann, this   was outrageous.

Pons had refused to talk about  this project to anyone outside Fleischmann or   his own family for years, and now as soon as they  submit a grant application they had a physicist   trying to force himself onto their paper. Although  Pons and Jones have a friendly phone conversation,   deep down Pons feels like their work has been 

stolen. Pons tells the patent officer at U of U   they may have a legal dispute on their hands,  and he makes a call to a childhood friend. Gary Triggs grew up with Pons in North  Carolina.

He was a charming country lawyer   who was not afraid to get his hands dirty. When  the dispute with Jones’ group began to heat up,   Pons had Triggs fly in to town to help him  restrategize. Triggs also acted as a confidant,   one of the few people Pons trusted 

without question. Even before cold fusion,   Pons had used Triggs as an attack dog when  he got into some hot water. At least two   prior collaborations involving Dow Chemical and  Synthetech used Pons as a researcher.

When those   companies couldn’t reproduce his results, they  asked for his data. Pons blocked them by getting   Triggs to send cease and desist letters. One of  Triggs’ first acts in the cold fusion saga was   to have Pons call up Gajewski, and tried to get 

him to admit to manufacturing this whole mess   to help out his buddy Jones. If he said anything  incriminating, they never did anything with it. Both groups go into overdrive trying to gather  data in a race to get their paper out first.   The U of U group is working 24/7, swapping out 

in shifts. The dispute begins to boil over around   February when Gajewski tells Pons that he’s  putting a freeze on their funding until the   dispute is resolved. They’ve now lost all trust  in Gajewski.

They start to become paranoid. Both   groups escalate the issue to the heads of their  respective schools. Both the U of U and BYU   administrations take over the negotiations.  They arrange for sit down talks, the U of U   team visits BYU and tour the lab on February 23rd. 

Jones’ team is impressed by how well made Pons and   Fleischmann’s cells are, and Pons and Fleischmann  are impressed by BYU’s radiation detector. But Jones tells them that he’s been at this for  two years and he wants to publish now. Pons and   Fleischmann beg him for 18 more months.

They need  more time. But Jones says he can’t wait. He agrees   to cancel a talk later that week, but he’s been  scheduled to speak at a major conference in May,   the American Physical Society.

“Can’t you present  something else?” they asked him. No, he says he   can’t. He already submitted an abstract, and  in it he mentions cold fusion.

He’s given them   a no win scenario. Pons and Fleischmann are at  a loss. The final negotiation is an agreement   to publish back to back submissions to the same  journal.

After some debate, they agree on Nature,   one of the most prestigious in the world. At  the end of the meeting, both sides shook hands,   but no paper had been signed. Nothing written  had cemented the deal.

Neither side was happy,   and any pleasantries were just performances.  Reportedly by the time Pons and Fleischmann   had walked back to their cars, they  were calling Jones a thief. What if   one of the papers got rejected and the  other accepted? That paper would get all   the credit.

They believe there is only the  nuclear option left. Go public immediately. >> Reporter: BYU fusion researcher Steven  Jones says the U breached an agreement with   Brigham Young University by announcing its 

fusion discovery to the media last month.   Jones says the two universities had agreed to  announce their separate findings simultaneously. >> There was no commitment, no promise  of any sort that we wouldn't go public >> Around March 13th Jones gets the feeling that  Pons and Fleischmann are going to screw him over.   He phones them, and they tell him something 

that is either quote: “a threat or a warning”,   he can’t tell which. And so they hold their  press conference on March 23rd without any   heads up to BYU. At the press conference  a reporter asks if they are aware of any   other group doing similar work.

VP of  research James Brophy takes the mic. He   says he wasn’t aware of any other group,  something he knows for a fact is a lie. >> And with fusion coming to 

the forefront the big rivalry   between BYU and the University of  Utah is no longer over football. >> Okay so now what's the deal here? Is it  because somebody stole it? The guy, the profess— >> BYU says that we were working on it together   and that he came out first so he  could get all of the publicity.

>> Imagine that. >> Fleischmann and Pons will go on to say  many years later that they did not name their   discovery cold fusion. That it was Steve Jones  who was responsible for that.

A couple weeks   later in Italy, Fleischmann and Jones will have  a private conversation in the hall. Reportedly,   Fleischmann will apologize for how things got out  of hand, but you can’t put that cat back in the   bag. By going public early, they had doomed their 

careers. Jones had found out about the betrayal   when the Financial Times called him asking for  comment. Jones was furious, but he feels a sense   of relief at the same time. Knowing he’s been 

betrayed rather than waiting for it is almost   freeing. He goes on vacation with his family for  the Easter weekend. They mail the paper to Nature   as soon as possible. No one from his team will be 

going to the airport on March 24th to meet with   Marvin Hawkins. And that leads us back to where  we started. Marvin Hawkins, Pons’ PhD student,   clutching an envelope in a FedEx at the airport.  A TV crew is there to film the meeting that won’t   be taking place.

He’ll end up submitting the  paper and going home. Hawkins name didn’t make   it into the history books the same way Pons  and Fleischmann’s did. He’s not a protagonist,   but his story is still worth telling.

Marvin  Hawkins was 27 here. In the fall of 1988 he   was pretty much wrapped up with his PhD work.  The only thing left for him to graduate was to   write his thesis. If he focused on writing he’d 

be out in just a couple months. It was in his   best interest to try and get it done sooner  rather than later, because after all, he was   the sole source of income for a family of five.  He had taken a two year break from school for   his Mormon missionary work, so he was a bit behind  his academic peers.

He needed a decent paying job. But in October of 1988, Stanley Pons,  chair of the chemistry department,   approached him with an offer. He was working  on an incredibly interesting fusion experiment.   Well actually it was more than interesting, it 

sounded ground breaking. The sort of thing that   could win a Nobel prize. It would certainly delay  his graduation, and it wouldn’t pay him very much,   just $10k a year, but Marvin recognized it  as the once in a career opportunity that it   was.

And to work with Martin Fleischmann  too? When it came to chemistry that man   was a god. Stanley Pons was a secretive man.  Outside his family and his mentor Fleischmann,   he’d barely told anyone about this. His wife 

worked as his secretary. And up until August   he’d had his son Joey run most of the experiments,  but he was getting married that month and left the   lab. With a vacancy to fill, Pons approached  Marvin.

Part of why he chose Marvin was that   he knew he could set up experiments on  his own. He wouldn’t need outside help.   Fewer chances for a leak. Marvin worked for  months, and to hear him tell it, without much   help from Pons and Fleischmann, on developing 

the cells that would soon become world famous. >> Reporter: Does every one you build now work? >> Uh, no. You know, as with any scientific  endeavor, you've got some buildup,   some mistakes, some reevaluation, some  new processes that you want to incorporate >> As January turned into February, it was clear 

to him that Pons’ group was in a race with someone   at BYU. Whoever published first was guaranteed  to make it into the history books. And whoever   was second might, if they were lucky, get a single  mention at the end of a long paragraph.

They began   to pull 24/7 shifts. Quote: “There were times  where I would go home for three or four hours   and sleep, and then get up and go back. And that  happened for a month and a half—no weekends, no   nothing.

Your kids kind of tend to wonder who you  are.” Jamie Hawkins, Marvin's wife of five years,   said simply: “It brought on a whole new meaning  of the term widow. Having Marvin away from home   was difficult.” Jamie said “But we could see it  was for a great purpose, so that made it a little   easier to deal with.” Quote: “Obviously it's been 

very stressful on her. She's been very supportive.   She's even come in from time to time and helped  me collect data just to try and maintain some kind   of relationship. It’s not been horrible, but  it’s been hard.” His kids missed him at home.   Their daughter was old enough to understand it was 

important for her daddy’s job, but their younger   son was emotional. Pons seemed to recognize what a  sacrifice Marvin was making, especially as a young   father. Quote: “Stan would call me numerous  times and say, ‘Jamie I'm sorry that Marvin's   never home, but realize soon Hawkins’, Pons’ 

and Fleischmann’s names will be in the lights.’” Hawkin’s name never made it on to the paper.  Two days before the announcement Pons gives   him the bad news. The school, for legal reasons,  thinks its better if it’s just him and Fleischmann   on the paper. Marvin is devastated.

In the  couple days after the March 23rd announcement,   the energy around the Utah campus was frantic.  News crews were everywhere, and everyone wanted   to catch a glimpse of the famous cold fusion  cells. Someone had also allegedly stolen the   transparencies Pons and Fleischmann had used 

in their press conference. And the day after   the announcement Fleischmann took a plane back to  Europe, where he’d be for a few weeks. Now that   meant Pons had been left alone in Utah without his  mentor, and receiving more public attention than   he’d ever had in his entire life.

Phone calls were  ringing all hours of the day. News crews wanted   to interview him. His email account got hacked.  They had to change his home phone number to stop   the ringing.

In a profile for the Deseret news,  Pons described himself with one word: “Scared.” >> Tensions can get very high,  emotions can get absolutely destroyed >> Reporter: That’s a lot of pressure. >> It's not that much more. For me he's the 

same guy. The kids say yeah there's dad on   TV and they run on and play. We don't  know when we're going to have dinner,   people want to talk all the time. We always 

say we're normal, we're still the same as ever. >> Soon, a mysterious man from MIT would roll up  uninvited and began asking questions. He only left   when Pons tried to contact security. With all 

this context in mind, Pons realizes on March   26th that some of his lab books were missing. With  Fleischmann gone, the only other person who could   have the notes was Marvin Hawkins. And so, Pons  calls up another grad student, Mark Anderson,   and asks him to take over a bit of the work from 

Marvin Hawkins. Here is where it gets odd. Hawkins   attests that Pons and Fleischmann asked him make  a copy of the notebooks and protect the original.   And so he did that, making copies and then putting  the originals in his brother’s safety deposit box.   After weeks of endless hours stuck in the lab, 

Hawkins and his family go on a ski trip for the   holiday weekend, which Pons had supposedly offered  to pay for. On Monday the 27th Pons calls Hawkins   and urgently tells him he needs the notebooks  that day. It’s not much of a leap for Pons to   assume that Hawkins is upset with his name being 

left off the paper, and that he may have taken the   notes for leverage. Unaware that Pons suspects  him of anything nefarious, Marvin leaves the   ski trip and drives into Salt Lake City to  drop off the photocopies of the notebooks,   and then returns back to his family vacation. But Pons is not happy with just the photocopies,   and when Marvin checks in via the phone, Pons 

tells him he needs the originals right now. He   essentially accuses him of stealing the notebooks.  Pons and Hawkins stories contradict each other   quite a bit here. Pons claims he got a call from  the Mormon church saying the notebooks were with   them, and he should come pick them up.

He alleges  that Hawkins tried to sell the notebooks for   millions of dollars, or as some sort of religious  donation. When Hawkins returned to the lab,   Pons threatened to send the police after him.  Eventually Hawkins returns the notebooks, realizes   he's been replaced, and leaves for his vacation 

a third time but in a significantly worse mood. And finally on April 4th he receives a letter  from Stanley Pons. He’s been fired. Hawkins   immediately goes to the administration and says 

he’ll go to the media if they don’t rectify the   situation. He even calls Fleischmann, who  tells him he’ll try and talk some sense into   Stan. A day later Pons and Hawkins sit down and  have a meeting with two neutral third parties,   in it they agree that Hawkins should 

be allowed to finish his thesis,   and his name will appear on the  paper in the form of an errata.  Marvin Hawkins, despite everything Pons  put him through, still defends him to this   day. Forgetting to add an author to a paper,  especially when there are only three total,   is not a very common mistake.

When the errata was  published it raised eyebrows across the field. But   it was not even the most suspicious correction.  A small detail, easy to miss, suggested something   deeply wrong about the science. A mistake so 

fundamental, that some would accuse them of fraud. When Stanley Pons addressed a crowd of  7000 chemists at a stadium in Dallas,   he was their rockstar. He had delivered  not just a win to the field of chemistry,   but he had done what so many physicists had 

been failing to do for decades. Chemistry   and physics are sibling fields, and they go  hand in hand. But the scientists who study   them naturally develop rivalries. And so to 

their peers, Pons and Fleischmann were heroes,   but to the physicists, they were tourists. A  pair of overconfident hucksters messing with   things they didn’t fully understand. Fritz Will,  former president of the Electrochemical Society,   recounted a story where a Nobel laureate 

of physics told him quote: “Fritz,   if cold fusion were ever to be discovered,  it wouldn’t be discovered by a chemist.” >> If you look at the confirmations they come  principally from electrochemists rather than   from physicists, if you look at the negative  criticism they come principally from physicists. >> After people have been studying 

these reactions for 50 years,   and they really have, that somebody  at Utah you know happens to stumble   across a previously unseen low energy  reaction, the odds are pretty small. >> Narrator: Even worse in their eyes, was that  Pons and Fleischmann had committed two major   transgressions.

The first was that they had gone  to Washington and begged for money from congress,   a blatant attempt to skip over the usual  peer reviewed budgetary process. The   second was jumping the gun with a press  conference before they published a paper.

>> And frankly we're getting a little bit tired  of having science done by news conference. >> I wonder where your greatest  responsibility is? Is it to the   general public through a press conference,  or is it to the scientific community? And   I submit that is the case that the public 

had a right to know as soon as possible. >> But if most physicists were caught off guard,  none were more shocked than the physicists working   next door to Pons and Fleischmann at University of  Utah. You would think that at least one of them,   hopefully a specialist in nuclear science, 

would have been asked their opinion, but no!   Chase Peterson’s mandate of secrecy meant that he  really only consulted with two physicists. His VP   James Brophy, an administrator who hadn’t done  research in years, and a distant relative, Hans   Bethe over at Cornell. When some of those physics 

profs attempted to speak to Pons directly, they   found him in his office swamped with calls. They  were getting messages from physics departments all   across the country with the assumption that they  had seen and signed off on Pons and Fleischmann’s   work. They hadn’t even seen the paper yet! Now 

their credibility was on the line despite having   nothing to do with the work. They were not afraid  to tell the local news exactly how they felt. >> Before you commit yourself publicly  and make a big hoopla about it, that   you still do the critical work necessary 

to make sure you're absolutely certain. >> News Anchor: They say they're embarrassed by  last Thursday's announcement to the world before   scientific peer review has had a chance to decide  whether this really is, or is not a breakthrough. >> Narrator: But even when the paper 

eventually got published on April 8th,   many physicists were shocked by its quality. >> The nuclear physics part of the program  was not done in a very careful way. >> The papers that were written by  both groups were papers that had   they been written by my graduate 

student I would not have let them   publish it. I would have said go back  to the laboratory and finish the job. >> The text had several errors and contradictions  all of which suggested to experienced scientists   that the paper had been prepared in a rush. 

Although both clearly intelligent chemists,   the general consensus was that Pons and  Fleischmann had waded into an area way outside   their expertise. Whatever their conclusions,  they were almost certainly the result of several   blunders. Many physicists didn’t even bother 

reading the paper. They knew for a fact this   couldn’t be fusion for one very simple reason:  They were still alive. Their skin hadn’t been   irradiated to a crisp. The fusion of two deuterium 

atoms has been studied since the 1920s, and is one   of the most well understood nuclear reactions  we know. As soon as fusion happens, you get an   excited helium nucleus with two protons and two  neutrons. But it only lasts for a moment, because   it’s unstable, and will end up decaying into one 

of three radiation branches. In the first branch   the helium loses a neutron and sends it flying.  In the second, the helium loses a proton, which   leaves an atom of hydrogen with two neutrons.  This isotope has its own unique name, tritium. The first two branches occur approximately 50% of 

the time, they’re evenly split. The third branch   is the most rare, with less than a half a percent  chance. It stays as a helium-4 atom but it ejects   a super high energy gamma ray as a photon. All 

three of these branches produce one high energy   radiation particle, either a neutron, tritium, or  a gamma ray. In other words, you cannot have heat,   without radiation alongside it. And remember,  according to Fleischmann, they saw 4 Watts   for every 1 Watt they put in.

A single fusion  reaction would produce about 1 trillionth of   a watt. Meaning, to generate 4 watts, as claimed  by Fleischmann, that would be around 2.5 trillion   neutrons per second. More than enough to burn the 

skin off your body. So that begs the question, how   many neutrons did they see? Well in their paper  they reported just 4000 per second. 1 billion   times too low. An amount so low you’d basically 

feel no adverse health effects. This issue became   known by physicists as: the dead grad student  problem. The problem, was that there wasn’t one.   If Pons and Fleischmann had spoken to even  one physicist at their school, they would   have pointed this issue out immediately. 

But through a combination of overconfidence,   ignorance, and their desire for complete secrecy,  they didn’t ask any of their U of U peers. This is far from the only neutron number  that they’ve shared. At his talk in Dallas,   Pons mentioned a figure of 10,000 neutrons 

per second. And when Pons and Fleischmann   recounted their mythical meltdown, they  can’t get their story straight at all.   Fleischmann once said the meltdown produced  quote: “no untoward radiation”. And Pons said   there was no noticeable radiation detected. 

And then even later they gave a third version,   where he said the lab was quote “contaminated”.  Okay so then which is it? No matter the number,   there were anywhere from 1, to 10 billion times  fewer neutrons than they should expect. Orders   of magnitude upon orders of magnitude. Their 

method for establishing the background level   of radiation was not exactly reliable either.  Pons and Fleischmann observed that their neutrons   had no clear pattern. They appeared randomly in  bursts. But all around us, cosmic rays from outer   space result in small random bursts of neutrons 

all the time. That is background radiation.  A lab underground will have a lower background  than one above ground, and even air pressure can   have a huge impact. Apparently, to get their  background level they took two measurements,   one right next to their cell, and then 

at a spot 50 meters away. This is not a   useful background test because the location is  completely different. They should have instead   measured the background at the same location,  once with the cell removed or turned off.

Why were they being so vague with their  numbers? Well because they don’t usually   do this sort of work, they had  to borrow a neutron detector.   The thing is, the one they borrowed was a  medical device, and so was normally used to   measure large radiation spikes that might cause  a health risk.

It’s really inaccurate for the   low levels they were reporting. And the thing  is, they seemed to recognize all these issues.   They knew their readings were far too low.  They say it in the initial press conference. >> We have a relatively low rate of production 

of neutrons. Generation rate of generation   of tritium and the rate of generation of  helium-3 is only 1 billionth of what you   would expect if the fusion reactions were  those experienced in high energy physics. >>Narrator: But of course, the media covering 

the story would not have picked up on just   how significant that detail was. Even the  not-dead grad student himself, Marvin Hawkins,   acknowledged this issue as early as April 14th.  This is a damning admission. It shows that they   were not seeing what theory predicted, but 

rather than assume they had made a mistake,   they made a huge leap in logic, and ran with the  idea that maybe the theory wasn’t fully correct. >> Theories are made to explain experimental  data. We have the experimental data and we   see no theory for it yet, so they're 

going to have to rethink some things. >> That means there's some  additional physics going on   in the material that we do not yet understand. >> Reporter: Could it possibly  mean there's a mistake? >> No.

>> Reporter: You're sure that it's right? >> I'm sure. >> It is a bold strategy to say the least,  and one they were forced to adopt because   of their race to beat Steven Jones. With  this in mind, it does reframe Jones’ work.   Let’s put aside the matter of priority 

for one minute. Steve Jones and his team,   are physicists. They know exactly how  many neutrons they should be seeing,   and have a state of the art detector to do it,  and they did a proper background test.

His group   was seeing literally just 2 neutrons per hour.  Just 2. That is 10 thousand times less than the   already shockingly low number from Pons and  Fleischmann. That amount should work out to   just 1 trillionth of a watt.

And that’s where  the distinction between the two groups lay. >> Number one, there is fusion, cold nuclear  fusion, at a very low level. Number two,   the level is not enough to lead us to suspect 

heat therefore my conclusion is that we don't   have heat due to fusion. I would say that  cold fusion is hopeless as a source of energy. >> This is a very, very critical difference, and  the media coverage in the immediate aftermath did   not do a great job of conveying this.

Both  groups are claiming something remarkable,   but only Pons and Fleischmann are arguing this  could be a new source of energy. To go back to   Jones’ favourite analogy, if his was claim  was a dollar, theirs was the national debt.   He may not have been first, but his results 

certainly sounded more realistic. Indeed,   among physicists, Pons and Fleischmann were  viewed largely as quacks, but this Jones   fellow, well maybe there’s something there.  Although certainly the most obvious problem,   the lack of neutrons was not the only issue  people saw with the paper.

Take the tritium,   the other radioactive product you’d expect to  see after fusion. In their paper, they reported   10,000 to 20,000 counts per second. Compared to  the neutrons, this was around 10 times as much.   But it was still 1 billion times too small to 

correspond to the heat they saw. It was also weird   they were seeing more tritium than neutrons. The  50/50 branching ratio means you should be seeing   pretty much equal amounts. So where else could 

tritium come from? Tritium, just like neutrons,   can be created naturally via cosmic rays. The  difference though is that this only happens   in the upper atmosphere, and even then extremely  rarely. However, the U of U chemistry department   isn’t exactly a good baseline.

Labs that often  deal with radioactive materials will leave behind   radioactive contaminants. Heavy water, although  primarily deuterium, will have tritium in it a few   times higher than the normal background level.  Not to mention, another common lab material is   something called tritiated water, where all the 

hydrogen atoms have been replaced with tritium.   It’s a notorious contaminant that will get into  the air if you’re not careful. If you haven’t   assessed the tritium background before running the  experiment, how do you know the tritium came from? Let’s go back to the main reason this is even  supposed to work at all.

Palladium absorbs   deuterium like a sponge. So much deuterium packed  so tightly causes astronomical pressures, at least   according to Fleischmann. Let’s give you a frame  of reference.

1 atmosphere of pressure is what   most of you are breathing right now. The bottom  of the ocean, is around 1000 atmospheres. The   pressure in the core of the sun, is 100 billion  atmospheres.

And yet, Pons and Fleischmann claimed   that their palladium rods were experiencing an  effective pressure of, 10 to the 27 atmospheres. >> By compressing deuterium gas, D2,   then you would need between 10 to the 26  and 10 to the 27 atmospheres of pressure. >> That is 10 quadrillion times more, than the 

core of the sun. This is such a baffling number,   and should have been a major red flag to either  of them. Once again, this was a detail announced   in their press conference, but the media reporting  on it would not have picked up on the absurdity.   As it turns out, they had made a basic mistake. 

They had used the wrong equation. When the correct   equation is applied, the pressure in their cells  is only 15,000 atmospheres. Higher than ambient   yes, but still far, far too low to enable fusion.  But perhaps the most outrageous omission from   their experiment, was a basic control test. 

The most primitive control they could have   run. Instead of using heavy water, use light  water. Use hydrogen, instead of deuterium. If   heavy water produced excess heat, and light water 

didn’t, then it was solid proof that fusion was   behind the heat. But if light water also produced  excess heat, it would suggest that there was some   sort of mistake in their heat measurements. Pons  and Fleischmann had simply not done a light water   control.

We know this because Fleischmann was  asked this exact question by the director of CERN,   Carlo Rubbia, at a publicly recorded talk.  This is the actual audio of their exchange. >> Rubbia: Martin if you don't allow me to  do that by asking you a direct question,   namely this all this has been done with deuterium 

in the water. Did you ever try to do the same   experiment replacing deuterated water with  ordinary water, if you do so what happens? >> Fleishmann: I must confess to you that  those those experiments are just going on now,   and we will hope to give you that answer very  shortly.

The reason we haven't done so is   that if you do that experiment you  do in fact ruin the electrodes, and   we have so far had very limited resources. >> Those who were present recall that several  people gasped. His answer effectively boils   down to, we didn’t have time or money.

But  this just doesn’t line up. They have said   repeatedly that they first started experiment  in 1984, almost five years ago. And they didn’t   run a light water control, even once? 

In the press conference he said this: >> We have tried very hard to prove  ourselves wrong, all the way down the line. >> Narrator: Evidently they didn’t try  hard enough. According to Marvin Hawkins   they didn’t start running light water 

tests until late April, almost an entire   month after they had announced to the world  their breakthrough discovery. On April 9th,   Stan Pons will claim that he ran light water  controls. We know this, because Chuck Martin,   a good friend of Stanley Pons, called 

him up about an experiment he had run. >> What had happened was, that Chuck Martin  was doing experiments with both heavy water   and light water. We now know what was incorrect  with that particular experiment, that he had a   bad earth connection to a thermometer, so power 

was entering the cell through the thermometer   and heating it up. Which was not of course in  the book balancing, and he called up Stan Pons   this weekend immediately before that date and  said “We're seeing heat with heavy water we're   really excited.” and Pons said “That's great  I knew that somebody was going to reproduce it   soon I'm glad it was you.” and then Martin 

said to him “But we have a problem, we are   also seeing heat with light water.” and Pons said  “That's the most exciting thing we see it too.” [Laughter] >> When he’s asked if he’s run a light  water control at the ACS meeting in Dallas,   he responds quote: “A baseline reaction run with  water is not necessarily a good baseline. We do   not get the total blank experiment we expected.” 

It’s a cryptic way to answer that question,   but reading between the lines one can imagine  that he was hoping for a different result. Later,   on April 20th, Nature will publicly  refuse to publish the paper submitted   to them by Pons and Fleischmann as all three  of its reviewers have been highly critical,   and they focused in on the lack of a light water 

control. If they had truly been working on this   for five entire years, how had they not once run  a light water control? Pons was indignant, quote:   “I’ll argue that the control is taking a palladium  rod that absolutely does not work, and place that   side by side to an experiment that is, in the same  solution, and that is a control experiment.

It’s   never done anything there but sit at you.”  This is nonsensical. You can only know that   a palladium rod doesn’t work until after you’ve  tested it, by which point, it can’t be a control.   Unless there is some measurable difference  between the working and non-working palladium,   this is worthless.

On April 25th, the Wall Street  Journal will report that “Mr Pons said he has a   plain water experiment producing small unmeasured  amounts of heat.” In summary, we really have no   idea what their light water result was because  Pons and Fleischmann don’t seem to know either. >> The referees in that journal, that is 

the people who decide whether to allow   that article to be published or not, said they  needed more information. The Utah group said:   “Hey listen we don't have the time, we don't  want to go through the trouble right now to   provide you with information. Give us our 

paper back. We won't even be bothered.” >> He also got Gary Triggs to send Nature  a threatening letter. In a move that likely   stung quite a bit, Nature did say that they would  publish Steven Jones’ paper.

A mistake is not the   same thing as fraud. You can unknowingly make  an error. If you find out later that you made a   mistake, the proper course of action is to come  out publicly, admit it, and either retract or   correct it.

Embarrassing, yes, but certainly not  unethical. Where it turns into fraud is when you   deliberately try to cover up that mistake. Just  a couple weeks after their paper was published,   they released an errata, adding the name 

of Marvin Hawkins. But in that same errata,   they had also changed a graph. They did not  provide a reason why. If they had, it would have   raised alarm bells.

Unfortunately for them, at  least one person had been paying close attention. [Music] On May 1st a Boston Herald story is printed that  quotes MIT physicist Ronald Parker, calling the   work quote: “scientific schlock” and possibly  “misrepresentation and maybe fraud.” A few weeks   earlier Parker’s group had attempted to repeat the 

experiment, and hadn’t seen evidence of neutrons. >> Our analysis indicates it's likely that many,   many fewer neutrons were observed  than claimed, if any at all. >> Narrator: Although they said they would  keep at it.

But this headline was a clear step   up from the previous statement. Parker,  likely fearing that he might get sued,   later tried to deny he said any such thing,  despite his interview being recorded.   Given Pons’ tendency to sic Gary Triggs on  people, he was probably right to be worried.

>> MIT is used to being right on top  of every scientific discovery just   as it happens that increases their frustration. >> But his reason to suspect fraud seemed to be  justified, thanks to a tip from a colleague named   Richard Petrasso. Petrasso had stumbled upon a 

highly suspicious piece of data in the paper.   In his eyes cold fusion was a ridiculous claim.  It was quote: “Just glib bullshit, as far as we   know.” The only piece of evidence that made him  remotely interested was the gamma ray spectra.   Fusion is supposed to emit neutrons. That much  you know by now.

Because they were short on funds,   Pons and Fleischmann borrowed a low sensitivity  neutron dosimeter. All this detector could do   was count neutrons, they don’t tell you anything  about where those neutrons came from. If we could   measure the energy of those neutrons, we could 

be far more certain they’re coming from fusion.   And so, we want to look for gamma rays.  Gamma rays are high energy photons,   typically emitted by a radioactive source.  By measuring all the gamma rays in a lab,   you can plot them on an energy spectrum. It will  have a sloping background level, with lots of   distinct peaks jutting up.

Each peak is associated  with well known energy levels. This peak at 1.46   MeV for instance comes from radioactive potassium,  which is present in the environment, and also your   body. Same with this peak at 2.62 MeV which comes 

from radioactive thallium. There is also a peak   that can prove fusion is occurring. When a neutron  is emitted into a water bath, it will gradually   slow down until it collides with a proton and  become captured by it.

This emits a gamma ray.   And its energy level is extremely precise. It is  2.224 MeV, with very little wiggle room. A gamma   ray from fusion should look like this. A peak at 

exactly 2.224 MeV. And in the paper published by   Pons and Fleischmann, that’s exactly what you  see. A peak in almost the exact right spot.   Except, there was an earlier draft of this graph.  In both their submissions to the Journal of   Electroanalytical Chemistry, and Nature, they had 

submitted a graph with a peak way to the right,   at 2.5 MeV. There is no relevant radiation  phenomena that occurs at 2.5. It is just   straight up the wrong value. Pons and 

Fleischmann might have realized this,   if they had asked even just one colleague  in U of U’s physics department. Indeed,   if the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry  hadn’t rushed the peer review process, they would   have sent it out to a reviewer with knowledge  of nuclear physics, who would have caught this   problem and likely rejected the paper.

Ultimately  though, the graph with 2.5 was never made public,   because on March 28th Fleischmann was giving a  talk in the UK at Harwell labs, and the audience   members there immediately recognized the peak  as a mistake. Later that day he told Pons over   the phone, and Pons then submitted a new graph, 

with the peak moved to 2.22. Not just that though,   the Y-axis had been scaled from 20,000 down  to 2200, just 10% of what it used to be. In   the fax he sent to Nature, he did not explain the  reason for this correction.

This of course is all   behind the scenes, not public knowledge.  When the paper was eventually published,   the only hint that something had changed  is that an equation still had 2.5 in it. Without knowing that the graph had been  changed, people thought this was just a typo.   Richard Petrasso initially thought the same.

But  fortunately for him, he happened to have friends   who worked at Nature, who had seen the original  graph, and they let him know the peak had changed.   Now Petrasso thinks that there is something  highly suspicious going on. But beyond that,   the new graph had other problems.

For  one, it was far too zoomed in. Sure,   there may be something at 2.22, but unless  you can see the full range of energies,   you can’t tell if it’s a signal, or if it’s  noise.

The shape of the peak also looked weird,   it’s about half as wide as it should be. And  there are distinct features that were missing   to the left of the peak. There should be a slope  known as the Compton edge.

And even further left   there should be a bump known as the first escape  peak. The Pons and Fleischmann graph lacked both   of those. Petrasso wondered if there was a copy  of the full spectrum somewhere.

Luckily for him,   Pons and Fleischmann had let a bunch of Utah  news stations come in and film their lab. And so,   he went and scoured every news clip he could  find until he found a clip from CNN. In it was   a computer screen with the full spectrum.

Because  he knows exactly where the peaks for potassium and   thallium should be, Petrasso was able to scale  the rest of the spectrum. And low and behold,   when he looked for the so-called fusion  peak, it was at 2.5, and not 2.22.

Petrasso began phoning people at U of U to get  more info. He even sent a student to Salt Lake   City just to see if any more news channels  had more footage. Marvin Hawkins confirmed   to Petrasso that the peak was originally 

measured at 2.5. But he wasn’t the only   person who backed that up. Pons had needed  help with the gamma ray measurements, and so   he had asked a medical radiation physicist named  Robert Hoffman to perform them.

In fact Hoffman,   just like Hawkins, had his name left off the  paper at the last minute, a move that felt   like a personal slight. After the press conference  Hoffman refused to work with Pons and Fleischmann   ever again. Hoffman later ran some new tests, 

and came to the conclusion that an issue with   the preamplifier caused artifacts in his spectrum.  He wrote a letter on April 27th to Pons where he   stated there was no evidence for anything at  2.2, and that the 2.5 peak was an artifact. He   was essentially retracting his data from their  paper, despite being left off as an author.

Petrasso was outraged. With no explanation, Pons  and Fleischmann appeared to have fabricated a   critical piece of evidence. He began to write  a paper lambasting them which he would later   submit to Nature.

He was reportedly so angry  about this that the original draft of his   letter was so emotional he needed a colleague  to help him tone it down. Nature will reach   out to Pons for comment, and after he doesn’t  reply for weeks, they gave him a deadline.

His   response was apparently so volatile, Nature  declined to publish it. Petrasso’s paper is   published on May 18th. It will be a crushing  blow to Pons and Fleischmann’s credibility,   an indisputable smoking gun.

Gary Triggs  will later attempt to block the paper,   but this amounts to little more than idle threats.  But, Petrasso’s paper wouldn’t matter. That’s one   of the ironies of this story. Scientists 

knew just how damning the gamma rays were,   but to the media it was just one of a dozen  other criticisms flying around. Really,   the media only paid attention an entire year later  when a book by Frank Close exposed the behind the   scenes shenanigans, and he heavily implied fraud,  or at least as far as UK libel law allowed him to.

>> I then spoke to Marvin Hawkins the graduate  student, and he didn't know either. And I said   let's get this straight I said. It's clear  that a peak was measured at 2.5.

There are   four people involved in this experiment.  Fleischmann doesn't know how it's moved,   Hoffman doesn't know how it's moved, now you're  telling me that you don't know how it's moved,   and he said “I think you've got the picture now.” [Laughter] >> But by that point it didn’t matter.  Cold fusion had been dead for a year. >> Five laboratories have 

successfully repeated the experiment,   six others have failed. >> Tonight other scientists at MIT and elsewhere   are saying they have evidence  suggesting there was no fusion. >> For now at least, the skeptics 

seem to outnumber the believers   in the San Francisco Bay area where  so many top ranked scientists work. >> News Anchor: And a Duke scientist says  the problem with Pons and Fleischmann's   work is that it amounts to “sloppy  science versus reproducible science.”   Two groups of scientists at the 

University of Michigan announced   today that they have found no evidence  to confirm claims of a fusion reaction— >> But back here in this country a spokesman  for the Los Alamos labs is denying earlier   reports that scientists there were  close to repeating the experiment. >>Narrator: Weeks earlier lab after lab announced 

that they had confirmed part of cold fusion,   but by now just as many labs had declared the  exact opposite. They couldn’t see enough neutrons,   tritium, or any gamma rays. For physicists, any  of those three would be the gold standard proof   of fusion, and yet they did not see them.

But for  chemists, the most compelling piece of evidence   had always been the calorimetry, the heat.  After all, if we go back all the way to 1985,   we have the original piece of evidence that  was so convincing, so unambiguous, that it   swayed both Pons and Fleischmann into believing  they had seen something nuclear.

The mythical   meltdown. A 1cm cube of palladium had melted,  and left a hole in the lab bench and concrete.   They could think of no chemical reaction that  could cause so much damage, produce so much   heat. It had to be nuclear.

But the thing is,  no one actually witnessed the event itself,   all we know is that the cube melted. By this  point plenty of theories had been put forward   that weren’t so mythical. If you have a partially 

enclosed container that is slowly being filled   with oxygen and hydrogen gas, and a bunch of  it leaks out of the palladium all at once,   all you’d need was a rogue spark, and you’d go  up like the Hindenburg. And as we saw before,   at least two labs, Livermore in California, and  North Carolina U, called off their experiments   because they had explosions.

And their  conclusions were that they had accidentally   caused traditional chemical explosions. Nothing  nuclear about it. Pons and Fleischmann have said   repeatedly that they could not think of a 

single non-nuclear explanation for the heat   that they saw. They’d had five years to ponder  this issue. Maybe they just lacked imagination. Even besides the meltdown, Pons and Fleischmann 

said they had seen 300% excess heat. 4 Watts out   for every 1 Watt in. It was those numbers that  made the news. Those numbers that convinced the   world the era of fossil fuels may come to an 

end far sooner than expected. But there was   at least one chemist, one electrochemist in  fact, who seriously doubted those numbers as   well. Nathan Lewis was a 33 year old professor  at Caltech, with a solid reputation among his   peers especially for his age.

Chuck Martin, a  friend of both him and Stanley Pons said quote:   “I’m not as young as Nate, and nobody’s  as smart as Nate” He called him quote:   “one of the most fiercely competitive  son-of-a-bitches you’ll ever meet”. On   March 23rd, when cold fusion was announced to 

the world, Chuck Martin had phoned Lewis’ wife   and frantically told her to record it on  CNN. Nate absolutely needed to see this. Lewis’ group at Caltech had been trying to  replicate cold fusion since day 1.

Initially,   Lewis let his postdocs do most of the work as  at first as he was highly skeptical. He told   them they were allowed at most a single day. But  after talking to some peers and hearing more about   Pons and Fleischmann he figured maybe there was 

something to this. Quote: “They’re a little flaky,   but they’re not crazy. I don’t know what to  think.” What really got him interested was talking   to a Caltech physicist named Steve Koonin, who  told him about the extremely similar work by Steve   Jones at BYU, who was known to be a fusion expert. 

The scandalous backstory there wasn’t public yet,   so to Lewis this seemed like two groups  independently stumbling onto the same thing.   And so he directed his group to try and take a  real crack at this thing. As the frenzy around   cold fusion grew, Lewis’ team grew to 15 chemists  and physicists working side by side.

Their neutron   detector was around 100,000 times more sensitive  than the one used in the Utah work. But they could   only do so much when the paper lacked experimental  details. There was no calibration data for the   calorimeter.

In fact, the paper didn’t list even  a SINGLE temperature reading, it only reported   results in terms of watts of power. Lewis had  personally emailed Pons asking for more info,   even just a preprint of the paper. Pons called him 

and was friendly, but said he’d had to wait for a   copy. Lewis asked for anything, just anything he  could give him, and Pons only gave him a cryptic   warning. Quote: “be careful, we’ve had explosions.  I don’t want you to hurt yourself.

I want you to   be careful.” As for what to avoid, Pons only  offered this: “Avoid high current and sharp   edges.” Lewis and his group would have to push  forward using their best guesses. Weeks go by,   and they see nothing. And through the grapevine, 

they hear about some folks at MIT who think   the gamma ray data is highly suspect. Lewis is  convinced that this has been a wild goose chase. >> This is the Caltech cold fusion group,  which of course was with the major anti-groups.

>>Narrator: But even at this point, he  wasn’t willing to go public against it yet.   Steve Koonin had invited him to speak at the  upcoming American Physical Society meeting in   Baltimore. This was going to be the physics  equivalent of the Woodstock level meeting in   Dallas.

Lewis initially declined the offer.  But one night, he stayed up late to watch   the congressional hearing on CSPAN. It was  there he saw the University of Utah ask for   $25 million for unproven research. And it was also 

where Fleischmann divulged a piece of information   that had not been public before. A comment so  innocuous that no one in the room caught its   significance. But Lewis did. And it was so 

offensive that he decided that he couldn’t   sit back anymore. He phoned Steve Koonin back.  He was going to speak in Baltimore after all. Dallas had managed to attract 7000 chemists  into a basketball arena.

APS in Baltimore   would manage just 2000. It is no Woodstock, and  some likened it more to a political convention,   but it will still go down as the stuff of legends.  Steve Koonin gave one of the more memorable talks,   and he had a dry sense of humour that played  well on TV.

Quote: “One could theorize about   how pigs would behave if they had wings. But  pigs don’t have wings.” He had been running   computer simulations to see how likely it was  that deuterium would fuse at room temperature.   He found, that even with a deuterium  ball the same size as the sun,   only 1 fusion was likely to occur in an entire 

year. To end his talk he did not mince words: >> Theoretically I would say that  the BYU results are dubious, but not   impossible. My conclusion is that the current  situation is gloomy but not yet terminal,   and one needs a few more sensitive experiments 

to decide what's going on. Let me then turn to   the Utah experiments. My conclusion based on  my experience, my knowledge of nuclear physics,   and my intuition is that the experiments are  just wrong.

And that we're suffering from the   incompetence and perhaps delusion  of doctors Pons and Fleischmann. [Applause] >> Narrator: Now by the standards of an  academic conference, Koonin had dropped a   bomb, but this was still a toned down  version of what he’d wanted to say.   The Caltech lawyers had told him that whatever 

he did, he couldn’t use the word fraud. He had   warmed up the crowd, and they were hungry  for the killing blow. In Koonin’s words,   if he had hit a triple, then  Lewis was about to hit a home run.

>> Well Steve you really shook ‘em up. Steve  knows something about the experiments I'm   going to tell you about, so he's a little  justified. There are two pieces of news,   one I'm a chemist, two I'm an objective scientist.

>>Narrator: He starts out with the questions  many in the audience had been asking:   Where are the neutrons? Where is the tritium? He  also gets a small jab in about the gamma rays. >>Lewis: We never saw anything above the  background, and to prove that to you I'll   show you the foreground, and I'll show you 

the whole spectrum not just one peak. And   you see that we basically if anything see a  little bit of negative peak in the 2.2 region. >> Narrator: But soon he'd move on to  the real issue in his area of specialty,   the calorimetry.

The heat. >> Lewis: Let's turn to heat. Heat is confusing  to almost everyone including almost all of my   electrochemical friends and I will try to walk you  through this and you will be shocked.

Guaranteed. >>Narrator: Calorimetry is not as simple  as pumping in electricity and seeing the   change in the water’s temperature. You need  to measure how fast the water is heating up.   Accurate calorimetry needs a closed system.

You  have a box, and you make sure no heat is entering   or leaving that box without being accounted  for. Notably, the Pons and Fleischmann cells   were open topped. And since electrolysis of 

heavy water generates deuterium and oxygen gas,   it’s fair to assume that not all of it will  be absorbed by the palladium, and some of it   may escape the cell into the rest of the lab.  Now, this is not inherently flawed as a setup.   In fact compared to a closed cell this is  a much safer design that reduces the risk   of explosions. As long as you’re keeping track of 

the gases leaving the cell, your calculations can   still be accurate. But Lewis argued that Pons  and Fleischmann’s math only worked out if you   assumed that 100% of the gases escaped. However,  in reality some percentage of the gases will   recombine back into water, injecting small bursts 

of heat into the system. Lewis argued they had no   way to prove that wasn’t happening. Another flaky  assumption was that the temperature in the cell   was uniform. Lewis argued that cells could easily 

have hot and cold spots. Even something as simple   as stirring or using multiple thermometers  would help eliminate potential errors. Lewis   gets a major laugh when he explains how his  team got the dimensions for the fusion cell.

>> We built an exact cell as best we  could from all the press photos that   we had of the Pons-Fleischmann cell.  We measured the ratio of their wrist   to their arm and got a good scale  length, and we built the cell. [Major Laughter] >>Narrator: But by far the biggest bomb 

dropped during Lewis’ presentation was the   realization he had while watching  Pons and Fleischmann on CSPAN. >> Where do these last numbers  come from? The 4 to 1 and 10 to 1,   by the way these last two numbers the biggest  two were calculated in error even by their own   formulas.

This 1224 should really be only  306 and this 286 should really be 143,   but that's not the real part. If  you read the congressional record [Laughter] —and you look on CSPAN. I told them that 

we knew this and they didn't reply to me. >> Narrator: It is this moment, right here: >> Fleischmann: One of the results which I'll  show you—one of the sets of calculations which   I'll show you on the next slide, and is  a really a hypothetical energy release,   I'd stress that because in— it  involves the recalculation of our data.

>> And he said it so casually, so quickly  before moving on to another point,   that no one caught what he meant. But he  had just admitted that the heat values,   the 1 Watt in and the 4 Watts out, weren’t  measured directly.

They were theoretical. >> Lewis: But Fleischmann pointed  out, if you read it very closely,   that the third column numbers were  hypothetical and he knew that we knew   that. So he did point it out for the 

first time in public last Wednesday. >> They had measured a palladium rod that  was 1.25 cm long, but through some scaling   process they did not explain, they extrapolated  this result to a 10 cm long rod. So in their   extrapolation they could get 300% excess 

heat, but their average measured value   was only 27%. Obviously, that’s still in the  green. But compared to 300% this was a much,   much smaller number, which meant there was  plenty of room for error in the calorimetry.

>> And instead of dividing it by the total power  in, they divided it by an imaginary quantity. The   current times an assumed voltage, half a volt, not  the voltages they measured just the voltage they   assumed. All of these were this numerator divided 

by this fixed arbitrarily chosen voltage. And so   those numbers in the third column were scaled  based on this arbitrary choice of half a volt,   and that's where the 4 to 1 and 10 to 1  that are reported in their paper come from.   I just want to make sure that that is  clear.

We have no evidence for neutrons,   we have no evidence for gamma rays above  background, we have no evidence for tritium   production at any reasonable rates, we  have no evidence for ambient helium—for   helium above ambient, and we have no evidence  for any excess enthalpy in our measurements. >>Narrator: As soon as he finishes 

the applause is roaring. It lasts an   entire minute. Lewis himself said that  he felt like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Lewis   had spoken quickly and with confidence, and 

had plenty of quips to share with the media. >> This experiment hasn’t been reproduced by any   national laboratory or any university  yet without a good football team. >>Narrator: The Lewis talk was so devastating  that around half the audience left the conference   immediately after.

An organizer tried to get  them back to work, meaning they had more talks   to listen to. One person shouted back: “We are  getting back to work.” Pons and Fleischmann,   despite an extended invitation, decline to  attend Baltimore.

They were right to avoid it.   An editor for Nature, David Lindley, called the  conference quote: “A hanging party lacking only   its intended victims.” Notably, Steve Jones  did accept an invitation. If you remember,   it was an abstract he had submitted to  APS in February mentioning cold fusion,   that had kicked off this entire chain of 

events. By now his set of talking points   was locked in. His dollar, vs the national  debt. The flower growing vs the tree.   He’d also taken the time to practice some 

limericks poking fun at Pons and Fleischmann. >> Last night upon the stair,  I saw a man who wasn't there,   he wasn't there again today,  oh how I wish he'd go away. >> Narrator: I have no idea what this means.

The  rehearsed nature of his talking points helped to   cover up the fact that he was extremely stressed  from all the public attention and criticism.   He was still being accused of stealing the  idea, and was no doubt covering his bases   with BYU’s lawyers. One reporter from the LA 

times said that Jones had lost 13 pounds in the   past few weeks from stress. Still keen to assert  himself as the rational cold fusion discoverer,   at a panel of 9 including himself, he proposed  a show of hands vote as to whether the group   believed Pons and Fleischmann’s results  were real.

The vote went 8 to 1 against.   When he asked the same question about his own  work, the vote was better, 6 in his favour,   3 against. His neutron rate of just 2 per hour was  so low, some thought he had just measured a cosmic   ray burst and was deluding himself. Others found 

his presentation tacky, a chance to grandstand   with Pons and Fleischmann being absent. He even  showed off his legally notarized logbook pages,   which made him seem more interested in patent  rights than figuring out any scientific truth. >> Some of the physicists who've 

heard Jones use that analogy say   they don't think the sprout is a tree  or a flower, they think it's a weed. >> Narrator: This was still the Pons and  Fleischmann show, and Jones’ attempts to redirect   the spotlight were floundering. The APS conference 

threw a wet blanket all over Washington. >> Today White House chief of staff John Sununu  was supposed to meet with U of U fusion chemist   Stanley Pons but Sununu cancelled. To  top it off the house science committee   was supposed to visit Pons’ lab next 

week but today the committee cancelled. >> When we look back on the history of this  scandal, most point to Nathan Lewis’ talk as   the fatal blow. But many scientists had  already chosen sides by this point.

In   an audience of mainly physicists, he was just  reinforcing a view that many of them already   believed. He wasn’t the first to come out  against, nor was he the most famous or even   the most vocal. His presentation, while more 

interesting than your typical academic talk,   would quickly bore the average person. Maybe part  of it is that it feels satisfying in a dramatic   sense. Here came a fellow electrochemist,  willing to speak out against two of his   peers.

By the end of the night CNN was running  the story, and the tide was beginning to turn. >> Scientists meeting in Baltimore have declared   cold fusion studies at the  University of Utah dead. >> I think it's improbable in the Jones case but 

not impossible. I believe that it's impossible in   the Utah case. Either there's some secret  ingredient or some uncontrolled variables   that they're not telling us about or be that it's  wrong, and I put my bets on the latter right now.

>> The number of experiments that have been  done in the University, there’s very few,   I mean it's incredible in five and  a half years they’ve done so little. >> Tens of millions of dollars are  at stake dear sister and brother,   because some scientists put a 

thermometer at one place and not another. >> Reporter: The Times remarked the government  would do better to put the money on a horse. >> Narrator: Whether you want to attribute it to  Baltimore, or the public’s short attention span,   the media decided that as of early May, cold 

fusion fever was over. Lewis’ talk was held   on May 1st. This graph of articles on a week  by week basis shows that there was a massive   plummet the week following the conference.  And despite a small spike the week after,   interest had died by June and would never recover.

>> It hit the cover of Business Week, Time,  and Newsweek in the first week of May 89,   and I was told that this was the  first time the same story had been   on the front cover of all these  since Kennedy's assassination. >> This is the last time cold fusion will be 

receive this level of mainstream spotlight.   Only local Utah media will continue to  cover it with any consistency. But as   one physicist said at the time: “The  corpse of cold fusion will probably   continue to twitch for a while”. I don’t 

think he realized just how bang on he was. >>Narrator:   On the 22nd of July 2023 a preprint of a physics  paper appeared online. It will be all anyone can   talk about for the next month. It concerns 

a material called LK-99. A room temperature   superconductor. Superconductors were first found  in the early 1900s. They’re remarkable because   they have almost zero electrical resistance when 

brought down to frigid temperatures, often close   to absolute zero. And then in 1986 something  amazing happened. Physicists had stumbled onto   materials with critical temperatures as high as 77  Kelvin, a temp we can reach with liquid nitrogen.   It was a complete upending of the scientific 

status quo. In one of the fastest turnarounds   in the field’s history, the discoverers won  the Nobel Prize the very next year. Since then,   the path forward has been obvious. Keep raising 

the temperature. Find one that can operate   at room temperature. Without the limitation of  cryogenic coolers, maglev trains could go further,   MRI machines would be cheaper, and even our  power grids might be 20% more efficient.   Maybe one day we could end our dependence on 

oil and gas. It would fundamentally change   the entire way we lived. And we’ve been  searching for that holy grail for decades. That’s why LK-99 took the world by storm.

For  a brief moment, people wanted to believe in   something. LK-99 wasn’t particularly  exotic. A mixture of copper, lead,   phosphorus and oxygen with a hexagonal crystal 

shape. It looks like a hunk of unremarkable   grey metal. Two of the paper’s authors, Lee and  Kim, said they’d been working on it since 1999,   hence the name. This made for a great 

underdog story. If real, it would almost   guarantee Korea its first ever Nobel prize, a  goal the country had been chasing for decades. Because it was made of relatively  cheap and easy to find materials   the barrier for entry was super 

low. It was so accessible in fact,   that everyone from huge national labs to  hobbyists in their basements were cranking   out experiments. Science is most often done out  of the public eye, mostly because it’s difficult,   but also because it’s generally very boring.

But  with LK-99 this was something different. Amateurs   were documenting their progress on Twitter.  Reddit threads tracked updates with meticulous   detail. LK-99 was a spectator sport because it 

felt like history was being made in real time. Part of what really captured people’s imagination  was the videos. The Korean team had shown a piece   of LK-99, about the size of a coin, levitating  in a magnetic field.

This was a showcase of the   Meissner effect, one of the two main properties  of a superconductor. Soon, several more videos of   levitating scraps began to appear on twitter,  each one being viewed as further evidence of   confirmation. On Bilibili, a Chinese social 

media app, one levitation video became the most   viewed video of August 1st. The reaction from  many was that there is clearly something here,   it doesn’t take fancy equipment to tell  you what you can see with your own eyes. With the cryptocurrency market crashing in 2023, 

many speculative investors turned their attention   to LK-99 as the next big thing. Korean and  Chinese tech stocks surged for two weeks   before returning to normal in early August.  Scams, hype and misinformation flourished.   Fan fiction about the authors was being published  on Twitter but shared without people realizing it   was completely fake.

The language barrier made  it even harder to verify fact from fiction. But many scientists, from the beginning, had been  skeptical. This was not their first rodeo.

They’d   lived through Hendrik Schon, and Ranga Dias  had a paper retracted just the year before.   Everyone and their kitchen sink had claimed  a room temperature superconductor before,   and it was unclear why this one  would be any different. First of all,   the paper hadn’t even been peer reviewed, it was 

just a preprint. And second of all, levitation   is not exclusive to superconductivity. Plenty  of magnetic materials levitate for a variety of   less interesting reasons. And thirdly, no one 

had provided the data that actually mattered,   the resistivity. Unless it reliably went to  zero, there was plenty of room for error. The   skepticism was met with pushback. Open minds are 

how paradigms are upended. Let’s wait and see. But as the weeks wore on, the tide quickly  began to change. At least 15 labs found they   couldn’t replicate the effect.

A paper  published in Nature on August 16th was   considered by many the definitive final  word. LK-99 isn’t a superconductor. It   is an insulator.

Any effect that looked like  superconductivity was inconsistent at best,   and due to impurities in the samples, which arise  due to contamination in the fabrication process.   These effects are not superconductivity, but  rather small instances of regular magnetism.   There was no obvious evidence of fraud, no data  that was knowingly manipulated.

They just got   it wrong. None of this controversy needed  to happen, and it can all be traced back   to one key reason. Because the team went public  before their paper was properly peer reviewed.

Both Kim and Lee said that the initial paper  was posted online without their permission by   another author. Lee called it incomplete,  and Kim admitted it was full of flaws. As   for why that author rushed to go public, 

the reasons are unclear, but some signs   point to a fear of leaks. But it is clear that  they thought they had something truly real. Even though much of the world stopped  paying attention in August of 2023,   some true diehards persisted.

The original Korean  group told anyone still listening that future   papers would fix the issues. And throughout  2024, groups in Japan and China insist that   they are on the verge of a breakthrough. At the 

time of writing it is a little more than a year   since LK-99 had its 15 minutes in the spotlight.  There is something powerful about its promise that   allows it to persist in people’s minds. They  put aside their usual skepticism because the   potential payoff is so big. Like betting on 

the lottery. You know the odds aren’t great.   Astronomical even. But if it ever paid off  it would change the world. So why not keep   trying.

What’s a couple extra months? What’s  one year? What’s two? The longer you keep at it,   the lonelier it gets. Every day you keep going  your peers lose a little respect for you,   and you may even pass a point where your  credibility is permanently stained.

By then,   why not go all the way? You just have to  keep hoping that it will all be worth it. >> Without some morals, or something to  believe in on this planet, be it god,   or science, or whatever you truly believe  in.

And what do you have? What do you have?   What do you have—what reason do you have to  survive? What reason do you have to go on? >> “He that doeth nothing is damned,  and I don't want to be damned.” [Music] For the majority of the world, Baltimore  1989 is where cold fusion died. It was so   thoroughly eviscerated, alongside the 

credibility of Pons and Fleischmann,   that anyone with just a passing interest gave up  on the dream. It became just another entry in a   long list of scientific inventions that turned out  to be nonsense. Polywater, N-rays, turning lead   into gold.

Shorthand for the impossible. But ideas  are nearly impossible to kill entirely. If it’s   tantalizing enough, there will always be champions  for it.

And so began the long, long, summer. If you were in the room itself, cheering  alongside 2000 others to Nathan Lewis’ talk,   you might have been compelled to call cold  fusion dead then and there. But those who   weren’t in Baltimore that day were not as 

easily swayed. Dozens of other labs had   reported positive results. They were  also seeing heat, neutrons, tritium,   or some mix of the three. Many were still on the 

fence, and the overwhelmingly negative atmosphere   in Baltimore felt like a witch hunt to some.  A level of skepticism that was crossing the   line into prejudice. A refusal to even consider  that there may be something new going on here. >> People who have been unable to reproduce 

the experiment are not doing it correctly. >> Lewis’ talk had been recorded, but many  scientists were not able to watch it for   themselves, and only heard of it secondhand  from colleagues. Some argued that Lewis had   done what he so many others criticized Pons 

and Fleischmann of, going public before they   had a peer reviewed paper. But Lewis and  his group were aware of this criticism,   and so they did what Pons and Fleischmann did  not. They opened themselves up to questions.   Lewis was personally on the phone for hours each 

day, speaking to those who wanted answers. His   group sent over their data and calculations  via fax machine to anyone who wanted them.   And in several cases, his team called up  labs with positive results and pointed out   errors in their experiments that eventually  led to retractions.

And this is why   ultimately many groups came over to Lewis’ side.  Pons and Fleischmann had spent months refusing   to divulge key information despite asking  for millions of dollars in taxpayer money,   and on the rare occasions they did respond to  questions, they often contradicted past answers. In Dallas, cold fusion’s advocates 

were on top of the world. In Baltimore,   its critics struck a near fatal blow.  But you could argue that in both cases,   those were echo chambers. The true decisive  battle would require a confrontation of both   sides.

And that would take place in Los  Angeles on May 8th. This was a special   session of the Electrochemistry Society.  This is the definition of home turf for   Pons and Fleischmann. It’s not just chemistry, 

it’s electrochemistry, their exact subfield. >> We visited the Colosseum where  the Christians you know were   fed to the lions. I mean the parallel has occurred to me.

>>Narrator: They’ll be surrounded by allies, in a  smaller arena of just 1600. And the organizers had   made a point of stacking the list of speakers  with only those who reported positive results.   However, as soon as news of this became public  the organizers received massive backlash,   and agreed to accept negative papers too. 

The conference itself took place without   much friction. But it was the press  conference that took place after that   caused a PR nightmare. Hugo Rossi, dean  of science at U of U called LA, quote:   “the end of innocence.” After enjoying 

an amicable relationship with the press   for over a month, you can tell from the very  first question that the vibes have shifted. >>Reporter: Dr Fleischmann, I was one of the  few reporters that paid the 200 to get in there,   and I think on behalf of the press we'd like to  object that the session was not open to regular   press coverage.

Are you willing to acknowledge  any possibility at all that your observations   are wrong and you did not have fusion, or  are you completely convinced you had fusion? >> I have always been ready  to acknowledge the fact that   our experiments may be faulty. If we turn

out to be wrong I'll be the first to admit it. >> Narrator: Fleischmann shows visible frustration  here. Pons and Fleischmann had done a major pivot   since Baltimore, the lack of neutrons wasn’t bad  news, it was actually good news.

Why? Of the three   radiation branches, they were focusing on the  wrong ones. They shouldn’t actually be seeing   neutrons or tritium, they should be seeing helium.  Here’s the big issue though, the third branch does   not occur nearly as often as the first or second.  Whereas those two occur roughly 50/50, the third   branch is just a fraction of a percent.

You could  make the argument that something about doing it at   room temperature might change these percentages,  but there was no solid evidence to back this up.   In fact, muon catalyzed fusion, which can and  does often occur at room temperature, shows   no significant change in its branching ratios.  And there’s another thing, this branch should   give off gamma rays at 23.8 MeV.

And since they  weren’t seeing those gamma rays, they argued that   those rays are being absorbed by the palladium  lattice. A convenient explanation. But again,   even this would have some visible evidence. 

High energy electrons whizzing through water   causes Cherenkov radiation which has a distinct  blue glow, which should be visible to the naked   eye. When asked if they had seen this, Pons said  quote: “To tell you the truth, we haven’t even   looked for it. We’ve turned off the lights in 

the laboratory and haven’t seen anything, but   it’s not that dark.” Helium tends to stay embedded  within palladium, and so two labs present at the   conference, MIT and Sandia, called Pons’ bluff.  They said they’d be happy to analyze the palladium   to see how much helium was present. Pons says  they can’t do that for nebulous legal reasons.

>> That decision is not up to us. We have  a prior commitment and the decision is not   up to us. We will get fast results, we  will get these analyses done forthwith.

>> Reporter: Can you explain the  nature of the prior commitments? >> No. >> Narrator: Los Alamos is in talks with U of  U to make a collaboration happen. That deal,   like many more to come, would soon fall apart. 

Pons’ ever growing paranoia, and Utah’s fear of   handing the reigns over to the federal government,  meant that negotiations would soon break down. >> Los Alamos laboratory has broken off  negotiations with the University of Utah   to collaborate on the Pons-Fleischmann  experiments.

The lab director says Los   Alamos is tired of waiting for the U and will  continue collaborating with BYU and Texas A&M. >>Narrator: Later on a reporter, Tom Heppenheimer,   angrily asks them why they haven’t been  able to run tests looking for helium. >> Reporter: Where is it? >> Pons: We have not run that analysis yet.

>> Reporter: Why not? >> Pons: It is being run now. >> Reporter: You heard that people  promised a three day turnaround, I can get— >> Pons: I did not—I found out about that an  hour ago okay. I’ve not waited for labratories— >> Reporter: You just dodged 

the must essential issue— >> Pons: What? >> Reporter: You just dodged  the must essential issue— >>Narrator: To make matters worse for our duo,   the list of speakers got a last minute  addition. Nathan Lewis had called in a favour,   and was going to commandeer the podium to ensure  the negative side was properly represented.

>> We have no evidence for helium. We have  seen no neutrons at levels 10 to the 7 times   more sensitive than are reported by the  University of Utah results. We have seen   no evidence of gamma rays.

We have seen no  tritium in excess of the tritium that would   be obtained by the natural enrichment  of tritium in water. In conclusion,   we have no evidence in our laboratory  with any of our samples for fusion.

It   is very difficult to believe that there are  three sets of magic samples in the world. >> One of the more memorable criticisms Lewis  made was the lack of stirring in the cell,   which may lead to hot and cold spots. Pons and 

Fleischmann tried to rebut this with a video   presentation. They showed one of their cells  bubbling, and then added a red dye to it. They   argued that if the dye mixed in uniformly, then  by extension so would the temperature.

Lewis   disagreed, and argued they could not know this for  sure unless they had actually measured this with   multiple thermometers. When they’re asked some  critical questions about their gamma ray data,   Fleischmann, through a bit of wishy-washy  language, retracts the data.

Their most   convincing piece of evidence was now gone,  and a key reason many scientists lost respect   for the duo. And for what felt like the  millionth time, they were asked if they   had run a control with light water. Fleischmann 

jumps in to say they never have. Chuck Martin,   who is sitting in the audience, is stunned by  this, as he had spoken to Pons over the phone   one day and heard the exact opposite. But one  moment, more than any other, will be shared on the   news all across the country.

While Nathan Lewis  is complaining about the lack of public data,   Fleischmann loses his cool and they have a tense  exchange which requires a moderator to intervene. >> I'm very sorry that professor Lewis  has no information on the tritium levels,   that is available and is available 

in the correction list to the paper. >> Lewis: We know the foreground, we don't know  the background. I would like to specifically— >> The background—I beg your pardon,   the background is available in  the corrections to the paper.

>> Lewis: That might be. I would like to  specifically hear whether or not helium— >> Well then please don't—don’t laugh it off. >> Moderator: Could we go  on to the questions please? >> Narrator: Fleischmann claims here that the 

info Lewis wants is in the errata. Lewis backs   down in the clip, and Fleischmann appears to  get a win here. But when Lewis later checks   the errata published in April, the data is  nowhere to be found.

Fleischmann had been   referring to a second errata, which wouldn’t  be public until June. While this is going on,   Pons stares into the crowd with an expression  that says he’d rather be anywhere else. >>Reporter: Do you wish now looking 

back on what you've been through in   this last month or so, that  you had just published this   quietly instead of holding the news  conference and kicked off this whole. >> I don't think the result would have  been any different when the paper came out.

>> I think it would have been a very marginal—in  the end a very marginal difference, but I wish   we had been left to get on with our work at  our own pace without the media attention. >> Narrator: This would be their last press  conference in public for almost an entire year.   There had been six major meetings in just two 

months dedicated to cold fusion. Unprecedented   for any scientific phenomena. There will  continue to be meetings hosted all over,   but attendance continues to drop. The next 

one in Santa Fe they plan for 1500 attendees,   but only 500 show up. And although they have  their fair share of interesting details,   they can be summed up with the comments of Edward  Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. Perhaps the   most accomplished fusion expert in the world. 

Although he wanted to believe in cold fusion,   he suggested that they needed an entirely new  particle to explain what they were seeing. The   Meshugatron. A play on the Yiddish word for  crazy.

It’s here where we’ll fast forward. [Music] If you wanted, you could tell the story of cold  fusion week by week all the way till the end of   1989. I’ll leave that for the books. Instead, I’ll 

cover the highlights. In April the Secretary of   Energy, James Watkins, had ordered all 12 of  the US national labs to work on cold fusion,   and he had asked for weekly progress reports. In  the meantime, he had also ordered the creation   of a dedicated panel to investigate the issue. 

This panel was led by John Huizenga, an alumnus   of the Manhattan project. He assembled a group  of 22 members, including Richard Garwin of IBM,   Steve Koonin of Caltech, and Darleane Hoffman  of Berkeley. Their job was to review the data   of all labs reporting positive results, and in 

several cases they had members visit in person. To avoid accusations of bias, the  panel consisted of a mixture nuclear   fusion physicists, electrochemists, and  everything in between. Accusations of   bias would be made regardless, 

many of them by Stanley Pons. >>News Anchor: Fusion scientist  Stanley Pons previously put his   lab off limits to the committee saying they  are biased against the experiments. The last   minute changes in that committee 

cleared the way for this visit. >>Narrator: Despite telling him beforehand they  wanted to see a full calibration dataset for a   working cell, when they arrived Pons said he  didn’t have that, and that none of the cells   were currently producing excess heat because they  had just had a power failure.

Notably, when the   panel visited other labs, like that of Texas A&M,  and Stanford, not a single visit happened to occur   when a cell was actively producing heat. But on  the other hand there was an ever growing list of   labs that had negative results: MIT, Caltech, Bell  Labs, Brookhaven, Yale, Los Alamos, Princeton,   University of Michigan, Sandia, Argonne, 

Max Planck Institute, University of Tokyo,   Chalk River. For Fleischmann the most demoralizing  one on a personal level had to be Harwell. >> Britain's Harwell laboratory  announced it is giving up its   attempts to duplicate the fusion experiments.

>>Narrator: He had personally sent them fusion  cells a month before the announcement banking on   their neutron detectors to see something he  hadn’t. But they declared in June that they   were stopping all cold fusion experiments.  Harwell’s reputation is such that it basically   killed cold fusion entirely in the UK.

And  by now many of the labs that had initially   come out in favour had one by one retracted  their results for one reason or another.   It’s worth exploring some of those reasons. On April 10th, two groups had raced to become   the first in the country to confirm cold fusion.  They were Georgia Tech, led by James Mahaffey,   and Texas A&M, led by Chuck Martin.

Georgia Tech  later announced an error just four days later. >> Fusion researchers at Georgia  Tech have apparently run into a snag. >>Narrator: They realized with horror that 

their neutron detector was highly sensitive   to temperature. So much so that even holding it  in their hands doubled the neutron reading. This   is the sort of everyday equipment issue that  would have been identified long before ever   going public.

But because this was cold fusion,  and everyone was in a race to get second, basic   mistakes were made due to urgency. It was such a  miserable experience that Mahaffey described the   retraction as quote: “like going to a hanging,  where I was the hangee.” The oversensitivity   of neutron detectors was a widespread problem 

at several labs. At the minuscule scales they   were observing, you could see a neutron spike from  nearly anything. A radiation source one room over,   a sodium lamp, or a sudden power draw in the  electrical grid.

Nuclear science labs, more than   most places, would be filled with contaminants  leftover from past experiments. And even suppliers   of palladium are found to have traces of tritium  in their stocks before they ever get to a lab. Chuck Martin’s group found they were 

seeing excess heat in light water as   well as heavy water. They even swapped  out palladium for carbon electrodes,   and they still saw it. After much digging  they realized that their thermometer had   not been properly grounded.

It was supplying  extra electrical current, heating the water   slightly. Their retraction comes two weeks after  their initial press conference. Chuck Martin,   who was a close friend of Pons, spent weeks 

in a state of personal agony over the issue,   but eventually decided to retract the paper.  Pons viewed this as a personal betrayal. Two grad students in Seattle made waves on  April 13th when they became the first groups   to claim evidence of tritium production. They were 

using a mass spectrometer to count gas molecules.   H2 has a mass of 2. D2 has a mass of 4, DT  has a mass of 5, and TT has a mass of 6.   If they saw masses of 5 and 6, it would imply  tritium production. However, this is still an   ambiguous test, as it relied on the assumption 

that DDH and D3 were not being produced,   which also have masses of 5 and 6 respectively.  When they reran the experiment, they confirmed   that they were seeing plenty of DDH, but no  DT. They retracted their results on May 25th. Lewis’ group at Caltech worked for weeks trying 

to come up with every possible explanation for   a false positive. When they found one, they  would go around phoning labs and warn them of   these pitfalls. One way to detect tritium is  to mix a special chemical cocktail.

Tritium,   being radioactive, will cause the cocktail  to emit small flashes of light. However,   they soon discovered the lithium electrolyte  in the water bath has small traces of potassium   in it, which also causes the small flashes.  They also found an explanation for why some   labs were seeing small amounts of helium 

embedded in their palladium rods. Helium   is often used as a cooling agent in general  lab work. Over time glassware will slowly   absorb helium. Throughout the cold fusion 

experiments small amounts of helium were   leeching into the palladium. In fact, this  was the same reason that Paneth and Peters   retracted their fusion paper all the way back  in the 1920s. History had just repeated itself.

Robert Huggins’ group at Stanford claimed they  saw excess heat in both light and heavy water,   with heavy water showing noticeably  more. What his group didn’t account   for is that heavy water and light water  have different electrical conductivity   when lithium is added.

With everything else  the same, the heavy water will get hotter.   But besides this there also seemed to be a pattern  with when they saw excess heat. It happened most   often on the weekends. This is because less 

electricity is used on the grid on weekends,   meaning slightly higher voltages were  being supplied to the experiment. One thing that both critics and advocates of  cold fusion agree on is that excess heat is   inconsistent. You’d only see it very occasionally. 

As one member of the government panel, Al Bard,   argued, what was happening is that all the results  are points on a bell curve distribution. Some will   show excess heat, most will show nothing, and some  will even show negative. But that’s how statistics   work in an experimental setting.

The average  result is what you want to focus on. Therefore   it’s misleading to publish a paper with positive  results while neglecting to mention you saw far   more negative results. If you actually took 

the negative results into account, your graphs   would have massive error bars, showing that the  excess heat was well within the margin of error. The government panel worked well into the Fall.  By their estimation around $30 million had been   spent by US labs attempting to replicate the  effect, and another $10 million abroad.

When they   published their final report in November, they  concluded that there was not quote: “convincing   evidence that useful sources of energy will result  from the phenomena attributed to cold fusion.” >> The prospect of federal funding for  cold fusion research virtually vanished   today. The advisory group's recommendations 

are not binding on the energy department,   but it would be unusual if they were ignored. >> Although the panel largely came to a  consensus, there was one bit of internal drama.   One of the two co-chairs, Norman Ramsey,  had been largely absent from the panel   for most its tenure. When he took the role 

on he made a note to say it seemed quote:   “a terrible job”. And according to John Huizenga  his co-chair, Ramsey spent most of the summer   abroad, and later in the year he won a Nobel  Prize, and was even less available. When they   were drafting the final report he blindsided by 

them by announcing that he was going to resign.   Having such a high profile member resign right  before they published would severely undermine the   credibility of the report. Ramsey was willing to  stay on if they included a preamble he wrote which   was much less negative about cold fusion than the  rest of the report.

The panel, feeling they had   been backed into a corner, accepted the lesser  evil of including the wishy-washy introduction.   Still, Ramsey’s ultimatum would fuel rumours  of conspiracy and a coverup. Chase Peterson   alleged that the panel was biased. Quote: “the 

university’s loudest critics have come from large,   well financed schools that have sizeable stakes  in the more conventional, and more expensive,   hot fusion projects.” On the other hand, more  than a few hot fusion experts said the opposite. >> In terms of the hard work I've put in  for 10 years on this project, you know   it's sort of like a kick in the teeth, but I 

certainly hope that they have something there. >> If this development says that all  the work that you've done in the past is   really not relevant now because  we have this new energy source,   safe, cheap, and environmentally benign.  I’d just be tickled pink if we had that.

>> The federal government would not fund cold  fusion, although they were quote: “sympathetic   toward modest support for carefully focused and  cooperative experiments within the present funding   system.” The report almost concluded with a quote  from Alice in Wonderland. It was removed from the   final version at the suggestion of Darleane 

Hoffman. She felt that it would only feed into   pre-existing perceptions of believers that the  panel was biased. The quote went like this: ‘Alice   laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said.

“One  can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you   haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When  I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour   a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many 

as six impossible things before breakfast.’” [Music] >> If cold fusion was to be brought back from  the brink of death, it needed a miracle. How   appropriate given its birthplace. Most of the  American public had lost interest and moved   on with their lives, but according to a poll 

taken in September, 61% of Utah residents still   believed in cold fusion. When Nature rejected  Pons and Fleischmann’s paper, the lieutenant   governor stated quote: “We are not going to allow  some English magazine to decide how state money   is handled.” The first ever annual cold fusion  conference was held, as you might have guessed,   in Salt Lake City, just a little over one year 

since the announcement. The Governor of Utah was   a guest of honor at the reception, and dessert was  provided by the Utah based company Mrs. Field’s   cookies. The state of Utah had paid $5 million to 

establish their National Cold Fusion Institute,   and they were going to make sure they got their  money’s worth. In July 1989 a state appointed   panel would vote on whether to release the bulk of  the $5 million to the NCFI. The decision rested on   whether cold fusion had been “confirmed” or 

not. Notably, the council had nine members,   but only two of them were scientists, and  one of those two was actively writing his   own cold fusion funding proposal. Although by  this point there were far too many conflicting   results to determine anything concrete, all 

9 members of the panel voted yes on the 21st. >> I didn’t say I would give us an A, or a B ,or  a C, or a D. I said we passed and so I voted. >> Justification? Well it seems to me that if 

you can spend half a billion dollars for 20   years on hot fusion and not get anywhere you  can certainly spend a few million dollars,   a mere 10 million or something like that, on  cold fusion. So I would vote absolutely for it. >> News Anchor: And with the vote of confidence 

attorney general Paul Van Dam says despite news   reports to the contrary, the experiments  are now legally scientifically confirmed. >>Narrator: They rented out a fancy new building  in the university’s research park, which would   cost them nearly $300k in just the first year.  Chase Peterson’s vision for the institute was to   hire somewhere between 40 to 100 researchers. 

They would not just be studying cold fusion,   but making working commercial prototypes.  But ever since its inception it had been   doomed to fail. Namely, because Pons and  Fleischmann wanted nothing to do with it. Hugo Rossi was the dean of science at U of U 

and one of the first people Pons told about   cold fusion. They had a solid relationship,  and because he was trained as a mathematician,   Rossi mostly took Pons at his word on the  experiments. By the summer it was clear that   they needed someone in charge of the institute, 

and Rossi stepped up as interim director. A big   part of his job was to attract funding, which  translated to PR. Rossi became a target for much   public criticism, which likely contributed  to a sense of stubbornness.

He thought that   the critics of cold fusion were being far too  negative when it was still early days. Quote:   “I am somebody who left the whole Cambridge  complex to come out to Utah not because it’s   God’s territory but because I rebelled against the  smug sureness.

And that’s what I kept seeing in   all this. Maybe it was just wishful thinking.  God, I want those smug assholes to be wrong.   Those people who were just so damned sure of  themselves.” His first order of business was   to hire researchers, and naturally, he asked Pons  and Fleischmann.

To his surprise, they said no. >> That Carol, was one of the concerns expressed  by the council today. It has been made very clear   that Pons and Fleischmann prefer to stay in their  own lab in the basement of the chemistry building.  >> Why? Explanations vary, but it would be 

reasonable to assume that they were a bit   territorial after their issues with Steven Jones  and Marvin Hawkins. This was their discovery, and   splitting the credit even further wasn’t something  they were super eager about. It’s also likely that   Pons and Fleischmann were distrustful of the U 

of U administration, particularly Chase Peterson,   who they were now blaming for forcing the press  conference and any embarrassment that came along   with it. Many people observed that between the  two of them, Fleischmann dealt with the stress   far better than Pons. Fleischmann had always 

been very social and a confident public speaker,   whereas Pons was an introverted homebody  who had a very close circle of friends.   And as questions about the work began to turn  into doubt, Pons was visibly cracking under   the pressure. Quote: “I don’t think I’ve  ever seen a man driven to such impatience,   almost as though a stone in the shoe would have 

driven him wild at that point. The way people   behave when they’re under far more pressure than  the good Lord meant them to be under.” Even John   Bockris, one of Pons’ remaining allies,  said he worried for Pons’ mental health. At first, Rossi had understood Pons and 

Fleischmann’s reluctance to collaborate   with other groups, but as the months marched  on and the retractions kept coming out he was   now frustrated with their unwillingness to play  nice. In June, he sent them a letter that said   something to the effect of “we’re losing the  propaganda war.” After significant prodding,   they agreed to some form of partnership, they set 

up a couple of their cells at the institute. But   later, Rossi found out that they set them up  as a dummy experiment. Two cells were running,   but with nothing to collect data. In other 

words, they were just running electricity   into a jar of water for show. Rossi would  defend Pons and Fleischmann for longer than   most. He didn’t assume fraud for the longest  time, although he did call Pons paranoid,   and mentioned that he was quote: “sandbagging the 

community.” And Rossi only grew further wary of   Pons when he submitted a funding request for  equipment sold by a company his son worked at. By August the institute had  only hired two researchers,   and their names didn’t start with a P or  an F.

Rossi was quickly becoming jaded and   desperate. BYU flatout refused to be  associated with the place for obvious   reasons. Eventually he did sign on Marvin  Hawkins, since he had nowhere else to go.

>> Reporter: If this is not fusion, if it is  some unknown chemical reaction, did we lose? >> Who lost? Are you kidding, we've done  science, we've got results that has stretched the   imagination, we have got the public thinking in  a very positive scientific way. Has anybody lost?   Not a single person.

If this goes absolutely  bust nobody's lost, especially not science. >>Narrator: Mark Anderson, who had taken over  from Hawkins, decided to take a job elsewhere,   and leave cold fusion behind. In the 

meantime, Rossi had managed to recruit   at least one physics prof in a sort of watchdog  role. Mike Salamon from U of U. He knew all about   the drama surrounding the gamma rays and  he wanted to help clear up the confusion.

>> One, has fusion been seen here at the  University of Utah? Quite possibly. Has the large   energy output that Pons and Fleischmann see due to  nuclear fusion? No, we really don't believe it is. >> Reporter: It's probably something else? >> Our attitude is— we're raising our hands,   we don't know what it is.

It's possible it  is fusion. If it is we have a lot to learn. >> He offered to set up some of his detectors in  Pons’ lab.

One night Salamon got a call from Mark   Anderson that a cell was boiling. Salamon  rushed over to the lab, saw that it was,   and rushed off to get more equipment. Except when  he came back, the cell was off.

Pons had told   Anderson to turn it off so they wouldn’t waste  any heavy water. Salamon was dumbstruck. This   was the only time in over a month he had seen  any cells boil, and Pons was clearly trying to   prevent him from getting any meaningful data.

Then  Pons told him needed space for a new detector,   and so Salamon took his gear and he left. Pons  would later send him a letter telling him that   there had been one cell with excess heat  while Salamon’s equipment was in the lab,   but it just so happened to occur right after a 

power outage that had reset his equipment. It   was the kind of coincidence that was  downright insulting to even suggest. On August 23rd, Salamon holds a press conference  where he announces his negative results.   He went on to write a very negative paper and 

submitted it to Nature, which was published on   the one-year anniversary of the original press  conference. Once the paper was in print Gary   Triggs sent threatening letters accusing him of  libel and demanding a retraction. Pons had tried   to use Triggs to silence critics before, but 

this had crossed a very serious line because   Salamon was a fellow professor at U of U, causing  a major PR crisis. It was soon uncovered that U   of U had previously paid Gary Triggs as much  as $68,000 for Pons’ legal fees. That meant,   technically, U of U was paying a lawyer so that 

one of their professors could sue another one of   their professors. This was a massive conflict  of interest, and as soon as this fact was made   public, U of U cut ties with Triggs. Salamon too  would abandon cold fusion.

Quote: “My continued   involvement, even in a sort of an adversarial  role, was being perceived as extraordinarily   stupid on my part. It was beginning to  blacken my reputation with the faculty.” On September 26th Rossi tells the Salt Lake City  Tribune that if that if the institute has no   solid data to present by February, then they’ll 

have to shut down. He gave that statement in   response to a direct question from a reporter,  but the way it was portrayed in the paper was:   Quote: “State-funded lab may soon  stop cold-fusion experiments.”   Now you’ve got the governor pissed, and  Pons and Fleischmann think Rossi has   stabbed them in the back.

In private they send  letters where they rant about Rossi. Quote:   “He’s bent…he lies out of his teeth.” Now you’ve  got private companies freezing their investments.   Rossi wants to resign but realizes the terrible  optics of that move, and so he sticks with it.

But the final straw for him was the double-blind  double-cross. By now Pons and Fleischmann were   full in on the third decay branch as their  last resort. It was statistically unlikely,   but if the palladium rods showed evidence of 

helium, then it would be potential evidence   of fusion. And so a bunch of skeptical labs like  MIT and Sandia, called their bluff, and said sure,   let us analyze them. After much back and forth,  Pons finally agrees as long as a neutral third   party acted as a mediator.

Two of the five rods  had helium artificially added as a control.   One rod was completely clean and had no helium.  And the remaining two rods had been run in fusion   cells and had supposedly generated excess  heat, and therefore helium. Critically,   the labs testing for helium don’t know which rods 

are which, and Pons doesn’t know which rods were   sent where. It’s a double blind test. On October  6th Stan Pons went to meet with the neutral   third party. The deal was that both parties would 

exchange data. Pons was given the helium analysis,   and then he just refused to share which rods  showed excess heat. He had just willfully,   knowingly, ruined the double blind nature of  the test.

The results of the helium analysis   were just as confusing. The rod that was supposed  to have zero helium in it ended up showing helium.   Whether this was an accidental contamination or  an intentional mix-up was impossible to prove,   but it rendered the entire experiment useless.  But more to the point, the one cell that had   supposedly generated heat did not show helium 

above the background level. The other labs   wanted to publish these results, but Gary Triggs  sent them all legal threats. This meant that the   helium results were only made public an entire  year later in late 1990.

The helium fiasco was   a step too far for Rossi. Not only that,  but the faculty at U of U were saying that   if he stayed involved with cold fusion, they’d  likely push for him not to come back as dean. >> The interim director of Utah's cold fusion   institute is stepping down to 

make room for some new blood. >> News Anchor: But the man who's headed  this controversial private corporation   claims convenience, not conflict,  prompted his resignation 6 weeks early. >> When he was back at U of U, he joined the 

rest of the faculty in demanding a full review   of the institute. Pons and Fleischmann would be  hauled in and interrogated by state officials. [Music] There was just one problem. They were 

nowhere to be found. Between the two of them,   Fleischmann was the easier one to track down. He  had long since gone back to England, supposedly   for medical reasons. He claimed the school had 

not made a good faith effort to contact him,   and he declined to attend the review. Pons on the  other hand was nearly impossible to track down.   He was so rarely in his own lab that  some people theorized he had moved his   experiments to his own home, although there was  no major evidence of this.

And then one day,   he’s just gone. He has subs teaching his classes.  His house was put up for sale. No one knows where   he is. The first official contact from him is 

a letter via Gary Triggs where he says he’s   resigning as a tenured professor, and asks for a  temporary research position instead. Later he’ll   ask for a year long leave of absence, which  will be denied. The public pressure had been   crushing for Pons.

By this point, physicist Frank  Close had published his book, Too Hot to Handle,   which came as close as UK libel law would allow,  to implying fraud on the part of Pons. When Close   had interviewed Fleischmann, he appeared to lay  the blame of the gamma ray peaks entirely on Pons.

But the hate had extended to his family.  His house was bombarded with phone calls,   some threatening. His wife Sheila described how  classmates of their daughter began to bully her.   Quote: “Our daughter was in school. At 

the time, she was 11 or 12 years old,   a very sensitive age. Some of the children said  to her, ‘Your dad’s a fraud. Why did he do this   to us. Why do we have Utah smeared like this 

because of your dad.’” Cold fusion had begun as   a source of Utah pride. But the state had turned  on Pons for embarrassing them. Even Fleischmann   is told in February that it’s highly unlikely  he’ll be reappointed as a visiting professor.   The next time Pons was seen in Utah was when 

the institute was undergoing its review,   for which he was required to make an appearance.  He did so only after Utah’s Assistant Attorney   General told him he didn’t have a choice. This  very well could be the final time he stepped   foot in Utah. When questioned by the review 

panel, he said the same thing he’d said since   it was first announced to the world. To Pons,  cold fusion was real. But that didn’t matter. Following some investigative reporting it 

was revealed that $500k in donations was   made to the cold fusion institute that did not  come from an external source, but was in fact   university funds that Chase Peterson shuffled  around. Although not strictly illegal, it was   incredibly deceptive, clearly an attempt to reel  in more outside money.

This was a disaster for PR,   and a private company halted their donation of  $160k. Chase Peterson had a no confidence motion   pushed on him by the faculty. They wanted him  gone.

Contrary to what he said a year earlier,   Peterson says he did not necessarily believe  in cold fusion. He just said that if there’s   even an infinitesimal chance it was, that the  enormous benefits justified taking a chance on   it. He clearly believed that enough that it cost 

him his job. Knowing he was a dead man walking,   he announced he would resign in a year’s  time. This seemed to satisfy his faculty,   and they let him live out his remaining term as a  lame duck.

Peterson resigned as president in June   1991. That same month the institute is shut down.  The $5 million they had been gifted by the state   had run out, and no new money was coming in. It  was over.

Even Utah had given up on cold fusion. The same could be seen in miniature in  Washington, where cold fusion had become   taboo. Only Wayne Owens, representative for  Utah, wasted any breath on the topic.

Here he is   giving a passionate speech arguing for continued  funding despite the earlier disappointments. The   way he’s speaking you’d think he was addressing a  packed audience, but when the CSPAN feed cuts to   a wider shot of the chamber, it feels almost  like the camera crew has a sense of humour.

We should take a moment to  revisit our friend Steven Jones,   who had spent that past several months  portraying himself as more pragmatic and   rational version of Pons and Fleischmann. He  had accepted an offer from Yale to collaborate.   They had offered up their highly 

sensitive neutron detectors. Remember,   Jones’ claim was that he saw no excess heat, but  he did see an extremely subtle neutron spike. >> The confidence level is about 1 chance in 2  million right now that we have made a mistake.

>> Narrator: Yale was even going to shut  down its particle accelerator for a week   to lower the background radiation. This  was a prime chance for Jones to cement   his credibility. But several months went 

by, the collaboration went up in flames. >> I’m not sure you're doing  the right experiment either   Moshe. You have to look at the—you look at just— >> You are not sure I am  doing the right experiment— >> Jones: My experiment.

>> —but I am convinced that you’re  not doing the right neutron counting >> Narrator: Jones refused to put his name  on any of the data, data that showed no signs   of neutrons. The Yale group went ahead and  published without him, a scathing rebuke of   Jones’ claims.

There are other controversial  disputes that arise. One of the more notable   is the tritium spiking allegations at Texas  A&M. A group led by John Bockris is accused   of fraud by fellow professors and a journalist. 

An internal investigation dragged on for a year,   and in the end did not conclusively prove  intentional tampering. But the tritium readings   that were once credited with keeping cold fusion’s  hopes alive during the summer of 1989 were   almost certainly due to contamination. Bockris’ 

reputation is stained for the rest of his career.   Pons had warned many people of the deadly  potential of this experiment. Only once did his   fears come true. On January 2nd 1992, a group at  the Stanford Research Institute had accidentally   mixed together a highly flammable amount of 

hydrogen and oxygen. It wasn’t fusion, it   was just a normal deadly explosion. Three people  were injured, and one researcher, Andrew Riley,   was killed in the blast. The lab continued their 

work, but now with bullet proof glass installed. A year goes by. Then another. Cold fusion has  become a taboo.

In America and the UK it is seen   as a colossal waste of time, energy and money.  The only ones still working on it are either   doing it through self funding, or they’re doing  it in secret, tucked away in a larger lab afraid   of what their bosses might say if they found  out. Even if you were trying to disprove it,   it’s seen as beneath you.

Anyone who wanted to  be taken seriously were better off pretending it   didn’t exist. For the public, who can only follow  what the news tells them, cold fusion feels like a   future that was ripped away from them. The lofty 

promises that were made on March 23rd 1989 have   yet to pan out. They were promised a future that  would be full of clean energy. They were told that   a gallon of sea water was enough to power a city.  There wasn’t supposed to be another Exxon Valdez,   no more Chernobyls.

Cold fusion had instead become  a joke. A throwaway punchline in an episode of the   Simpsons. That thing you heard about a few years  ago.

“Whatever happened to that?” you’ll wonder,   before moving on with your day. But there were  also those who didn’t forget. A certain subset,   they believe something more sinister happened.  Who was trying to shut this down? Hot fusion   physicists? The Big Banks? Big Oil? Even as early 

as May 1989 members of the public were suspicious   that some sort of coverup must be happening.  Take for instance this CSPAN phone call-in hour. >> Caller: All right you know on an  ABC station in Fort Wayne Indiana,   they said there's nothing to this fusion  deal.

That was early this week and I   was wondering who's trying to cover it up  will it come to pass will we ever get it. >> Uh, sure— >> Narrator: Among the most prominent of these  conspiracy mongers was Eugene Mallove. At the   time of the Utah announcement he was MIT’s 

chief science writer and wrote many of their   press releases. He believed that researchers  at MIT altered their data in an attempt to   disprove cold fusion, and resigned in protest. He  founded a magazine, wrote books, and even shot a   documentary arguing that cold fusion was a victim 

of a conspiracy, a widescale reputation trap. >> The field of cold fusion has been marginalized  by the establishment by creating certain myths   about it, and pejorative terminology  being used which is highly inappropriate,   has no bearing at all on what's being  done, called pathological science,   junk science.

It's just basically name  calling. The equivalent of demanding   that cold fusion works like hot fusion is like  saying a transistor works like a radio tube.   It's idiotic, it's stupid, it makes no  sense and yet that's what was demanded.

>> He will spend the rest of his life arguing  that commercial cold fusion energy is just a   couple years away. Always a couple years away.  By 1994 there was a bit of a lingering question. >> Pons and Fleischmann themselves 

disappeared from the scene. Where   did they go? To the south of France that's where. >> Narrator: A company called Technova had  decided to invest in Pons and Fleischmann’s   research. Technova as it turned 

out, was a subsidiary of Toyota. >> Reporter: Pons and Fleischmann now work  in a $15 million lab created for them by the   Japanese. In retrospect they recall they really  had no choice but to leave the United States.

>> Narrator: Yet another moment of irony.  For the first time in years the two men   seemed happy to be giving interviews. But it  was clear the controversy had taken its toll. >> I can remember that I was extremely 

bitter and upset at the time. Thought we'd   been treated extremely unjustly which  I still do. Again I think the critics   were not operating within the bounds of sanity and I think we were victimized in   that respect.

I really don't have any feelings  about it anymore it's just a non-issue now. >> Fleischmann: I think you become numb >> You become numb to it. >> Narrator: But if anything,  he was even more confident.

>> I mean the criticisms that came  were—90-95% of the criticism was   just unwarranted. Could almost use  the word stupid for most of it. >> Reporter: And how many years away might 

you be from developing something like that? >> Well the first the first prototypes we built   now are—need to be redesigned. I would  say probably by the end of the year. >>Reporter: Within a year? You're kidding. >> No I think that's attainable.

>> Narrator: This prediction by Pons did not  come to fruition. In 1995 he and Fleischmann   had a permanent falling out. Japan’s  government pulled their funding in 1997,   and a year later the lab closed entirely. 

The estimated investment was £12 million.   We have very few details about what went down  between the two men. According to Physics World,   Fleischmann and Pons disagreed on the direction  of the research and Fleischmann felt like he   was being ignored. The 2012 documentary The 

Believers contains some of the last interviews   with Fleischmann. It ends with the question of  whether he’s still friends with Stanley Pons,   the man he used to host a yearly Christmas  party with. His answer is no.

It’s clearly a   painful memory. He ponders for a moment what he  would ask Pons if he saw him again. Two things.   “How are you?” And after a bit of laughter,  quote: “Are you continuing with the dreadful   research?” Fleischmann will never fully give 

up on cold fusion, he’ll continue to keep in   touch with those in the field, and even attend the  occasional cold fusion conference. He passed away   in 2012 due to complications from Parkinson’s.  If Stanley Pons was hard to get a hold of before,   he would eventually vanish off the face of the  earth.

He lives on a farm in France with his wife.   He has no plans to return to the US, and he  gave up his citizenship. He has never given   a recorded interview since. All we know  is that he just wants to be left alone.

[Music] In 1911, frustrated by a flood of patent  applications for perpetual motion machines,   the US Patent Commissioner mandated that all  submissions now required a prototype to run   for a full year before it would be accepted. To  date there has never been a successful patent for   a perpetual motion machine.

And in 2004 the  Patent Office had made it routine policy to   reject any submission that mentioned cold fusion.  Many will still try by using a different name,   but it’s nearly impossible for them not to  mention the Pons and Fleischmann experiment   in some form. By the late 1990s cold fusion 

had become ubiquitous shorthand in popular   culture as a synonym for nonsense science.  The name had become toxic. This a graph of   papers mentioning cold fusion since 1989.  After the massive explosion of papers in   1989 and 1990 the publication rate falls off a  cliff.

Most of them never even peer reviewed. As early as 1994 even advocates had begun to  downplay the label. They argued that cold fusion   was a misnomer. It hadn’t been coined by Pons 

and Fleischmann, and by now many felt that the   effect they were seeing might not even be fusion.  Some took to calling it the Pons and Fleischmann   effect. Steven Jones tried to push for, quote:  “anomalous effects in deuterated metals”,   but his word salad never caught on. The only 

name that had any major staying power was LENR,   or L.E.N.R. Short for low energy nuclear  reactions. It does its job well. It’s mundane,   and could apply to a dozen different phenomena. 

And it has none of the baggage. Although even   this acronym is divisive, as some people insist  that it should stand for something like lattice   enabled nuclear reactions, or some other variant.  And that hints to the critical issue. LENR   research is highly splintered, full of conflicting 

theories, methods, and even interpersonal feuds.   When Pons and Fleischmann left the public eye,  there was no clear leader in the field to take   their place. Some insist it’s still fusion, while  others argue it’s an electroweak interaction.   Some argue it can be a new source of energy,  others argue it’s just a scientific curiosity.   Some say it can only occur in heavy water, others 

say light water works just fine. Some still insist   on using palladium, others have moved on to  nickel. Some believe Pons and Fleischmann were   mistaken but onto to something real, while others  believe they were correct from the start but the   scientific establishment buried their results in 

a concerted smear campaign. There are as many as   60 competing theoretical models, none of which  can make reliable predictions. And even those   who claim to see neutrons or tritium admit that  they can’t do it with any sort of consistency.

The LENR advocates feel they have been pushed  out of the establishment and no one will take   them seriously. Nobel Laureate Julian Schwinger  left the American Physical Society in protest when   they refused to publish his papers on it. And so 

they’ve built their own communities. Forums that   serve as echo chambers, where critical members  are banned if they ask the wrong questions.   The crux of the issue is that  maybe there’s something there,   but the reputation trap is based  on legitimate issues.

Some of the   advocates are respectable researchers with solid  backgrounds. Edmund Storms from Los Alamos,   Micheal McKubre from Stanford research, and  Peter Hagelstein, a tenured professor at MIT.   According to this proposal from a futurist  think tank: “At the beginning of 2017,   there were 114 entities actively engaged 

in LENR R&D across four continents.” But for every person with a decent  resume, there is someone who has   attached themselves to LENR’s and cold fusion  just to make a quick buck. Take Randell Mills,   whose theory would require a complete  reworking of how we modeled the hydrogen atom,   a new type of particle he called the hydrino. 

Mills has also trademarked the term hydrino,   which means that a third party experimentalist  can’t easily test his theories without first   signing an IP agreement with him. Then  there is Italian entrepreneur Andrea Rossi,   who promised commercial cold fusion reactor  called E-Cat for a decade with no results.

He   is a blatant snakeoil salesman, with a prior  history of white collar crime convictions.   Despite his claims all patents he’s been awarded  do not mention cold fusion. And Patrick Cochrane   had his Nevada cold fusion startup go bankrupt  after raising a million dollars and he faced   charges from the SEC.

Those are just some of  the grifters, and then you have the quacks. Take Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson. He  firmly believes in cold fusion, just like   he advocates for homeopathy, quantum mysticism 

and parapsychology. Next is Dirdrek Irving. A   former cardiologist turned cold fusion advocate,  he speaks of a personal theory of “superwaves”.   In the 2012 doc The Believers, he can be seen  telling Martin Fleischmann that he can reverse his   Parkinsons, as cold fusion is the mechanism that 

both creates energy, and powers his metabolism.   Irving’s medical license was revoked in 1995.  Enthusiast blogger Ruby Carat wrote a comic book   promoting cold fusion, and the way she speaks  of it is uncannily similar to the way religious   missionaries speak about their work. Quote: “You  can drop a copy by the high school chemistry club,   or leave one at the doctor’s waiting room, your 

political representatives office, or the airport   terminal – someone is sure to be inspired.” Even  Steve Jones, who portrayed himself as the rational   cold fusion guy, descended into conspiracy when  he began vocally giving talks on how 9-11 was   an inside job. This photo has been cropped the  entire video.

This is the full photo. He parted   ways with BYU in 2006 over his views. Even if we  were to give the benefit of the doubt to the more   credible scientists on this end of the spectrum,  their association with these folks gives plenty of   reason to be skeptical.

The fact that cold fusion  and LENR attracts this sort of person does not do   it any favours. With all of this in mind, it was  a major news story when in 2019 a paper appeared   in Nature titled “Revisiting the case of cold  fusion.” A team of 30 researchers across several   labs took four years to try and induce cold 

fusion. Although the bit that made the headlines   was that one of the labs was funded by Google.  The Pons and Fleischmann effect was not repeated.   One of the authors, Chiang, stressed that to his  knowledge, no experiment has unambiguously shown   excess heat, once all energy sources and sinks are  fully accounted for.

When I wrote to one of the   other authors, Matt Trevithick, he responded with  this: “The conclusion of our work was that neither   LENR believers nor skeptics have done enough work  of enough quality to support their positions. LENR   covers a vast parameter space. In the limited 

time and budget we had, we got a sense of the   difficulty of producing the conditions under  which cold fusion is hypothesized to exist.” Another group I spoke to, ReResearch, similarly  found no evidence of excess heat or nuclear   products. As for why the repeatability of  results is so poor, they argue that most   thermal calibrations runs are far shorter than the 

lengths of the experiments themselves. It’s only   when you calibrate for longer than the experiment  can you be sure that your heat measurements are   reliable. Quote: “As the majority of research  over the past 30 years has not demonstrated   this kind of calibration stability, that 

eliminates most of the effort in this field.” As skeptical as I am I understand why  people have clung onto this for so long. >> As it was pointed out we're in  deep trouble come the year 2030,   so we're going—or 2040 I think he said, so we're  going to have to do something fast and you know   that's why we're going to push as hard as we 

absolutely can to see if this is going to work. >> The issues that felt so urgent back in 1989 are  still the same issues we’re dealing with today,   and are barely any closer to solving them. The  necessary political and societal solutions are so   divisive that they feel impossible to implement. 

People want to believe in a revolutionary   source of energy that can be powered by our most  abundant resource, seawater. Because it would be   a magic bullet that would render everything else  irrelevant. Cold fusion won’t save us.

We’ve been   through this cycle before, and we’ll go through it  again. We can’t bet everything on just technology. With all that being said, with the renewed  attention in the past few years, LENR advocates   have finally gotten their wish.

In 2023 the  Department of Energy’s R&D fund, ARPA-E, awarded   $10 million to LENR research, spread across five  labs. That’s obviously quite a huge sum of money,   but to put that in context, I’d point out that  they also awarded $1 billion to traditional hot   fusion research.

The $10 million is also not  an endorsement of LENR being a real phenomenon,   just that it warrants more funding to, in their  own words: “break the stalemate.” “evidence   for LENR is insufficient due to the ambiguous  nature of heat, numerous confounding variables,   potential sources of measurement error,  and possible prosaic explanations.” I have not read the vast majority of what’s 

been written on LENR in the past two decades.   I cannot tell you definitively that there isn’t  something there. And so I’m not going to object   if the US government or Google wants to divert  some of their vast pools of wealth. But what I   am confident on is that the work of Pons 

and Fleischmann was rushed, misleading,   and mired with dishonesty. In recent years  there has been an effort to whitewash that   history. As to whether they were treated  fairly, you’ll have to decide for yourself.

The last time cold fusion made prime time news  was in 2009, when 60 Minutes aired a special   interviewing Martin Fleischmann. The special had  little new to show, just the same claims that   people have been making since the 90s. Fleischmann 

himself hadn’t done active research in years. >> When you hold that in your hand and you think   back on what's happened these  last 20 years what do you think? >> The wasted opportunity. >> Wasted? Because it was discredited at the time? >>Narrator: What it did show was  a man at the tail end of his life,   wondering how this things went so wrong.

>> I’m getting you interested again? >> Yes >> Interviewer: The potential is exciting? >> The potential is exciting, yes. >> The truth is, you can’t really  kill an idea. Once it’s out there   you can only turn the cameras off.