For everybody who is interested I have just downloaded the Washington Post
article.
Greetings
Peter van Noorden
Warming Up to Cold Fusion
Peter Hagelstein is trying to revive hope for a future of clean,
inexhaustible, inexpensive energy. Fifteen years after the scientific
embarrassment of the century, is this the beginning of something
By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page W22
On a quiet Monday in late August -- a time of year when much of the
Washington bureaucracy has gone to the beach -- a panel of scientists
gathered at a Doubletree Hotel set between the Congressional Plaza strip
mall and a drab concrete office building on Rockville Pike. They sat around
a U-shaped table decked with laptops, with three government officials at the
front, ready to hear about an idea that, if it worked, could change the
world.
The panel's charge was simple: to determine whether that idea had even a
prayer of a chance at working.
The Department of Energy went to great lengths to cloak the meeting from
public view. No announcement, no reporters. None of the names of the people
attending that day was disclosed. The DOE made sure to inform the panel's
members that they were to provide their conclusions individually rather than
as a group, which under a loophole in federal law allowed the agency to
close the meeting to the public.
At 9:30 a.m., six presenters were invited in and instructed to sit in a row
of chairs along the wall. The group included a prominent MIT physicist, a
Navy researcher and four other scientists from Russia, Italy and the United
States. They had waited a long time for this opportunity and, one by one,
stood up to speak about a scientific idea they had been pursuing for more
than a decade.
All the secrecy likely had little to do with national security and more to
do with avoiding possible embarrassment to the agency. To some, the meeting
would seem no less outrageous than if the DOE honchos had convened for a
seance to raise the dead -- and in a way, they had: Fifteen years ago, the
DOE held a very similar review of the very same idea.
It was front-page news back in 1989. The subject was cold fusion, the claim
that nuclear energy could be released at room temperature, using little more
than a high school chemistry set. In one of the most infamous episodes of
modern science, two chemists at the University of Utah announced at a news
conference that they had harnessed the power of the sun in a test tube. It
was, if true, the holy grail of energy: pollution-free, cheap and virtually
unlimited.
If it worked, cold fusion could supply the country's energy needs, with no
more smog, no more nuclear waste, no more depending on other countries for
oil. For a brief moment, an energy revolution seemed on the horizon.
But when many laboratories tried and failed to reproduce the Utah results,
scientists began to line up against cold fusion. Less than a year after the
announcement, a DOE review found that none of the experiments had
demonstrated convincing evidence of cold fusion. Almost as quickly as they
had become famous, the scientists involved became the butt of comedians'
jokes; they were even
lampooned in a Canadian production called "Cold Fusion: The Musical." A
Time magazine millennium poll ranked cold fusion among the "worst ideas" of
the century.
But now, at the Doubletree in Rockville, it seemed all that could change.
For the scientists who had risked ostracism to persist in studying cold
fusion, the very fact that the Energy Department was reviewing their work
this summer seemed like a breakthrough. True, according to two of the
presenters who were there, the meeting began with harsh questions. But at 5
p.m., the presenters were ordered to leave the room, and when they returned,
the mood had visibly lifted. At the end, the scientists presenting the idea
and those reviewing it all shook hands. The reviewers stayed on to discuss
the material. The cold fusionists went to a barbecue, feeling celebratory.
No one had told them if the presentation had convinced anyone that cold
fusion was real. But it was nice, they said, after so many years, just to be
treated with respect.
"WHERE'S PETER?"
It was noon and the sun was shining in California's Bay Area. It was the
week before the DOE meeting in Rockville, and at SRI International, a
nonprofit research center in Menlo Park, chemist Michael McKubre was gearing
up for what he hoped would be cold fusion's big break. He believed that
after 15 years, the new DOE review could give him and others a chance to
build an energy source that had the potential to revolutionize society.
But first he needed to find Peter Hagelstein for a meeting with a reporter.
McKubre's secretary poked her head in the office and said she'd ask Jessica,
the summer intern. A minute later the secretary was back. No Peter.
"Can you call Peter?" he asked. "Tell him to comb his hair and stuff," he
added, shaking his head. McKubre checked the time and settled back in h