OFFS - "Cold Fusion" Is Back From The Grave And Making A (Brief) Appearance In The Guardian
1/19/2025
Luca Garzotti observes (Letters, 22 January) that serious challenges face the production of energy from processes based on thermonuclear fusion, but failed to mention a crucially important alternative, low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), commonly known as cold fusion.
Readers of the Guardian’s 2012 obituary of Martin Fleischmann will know that the situation regarding cold fusion is more complicated than that commonly assumed: that the claims of Fleischmann and Stanley Pons for the process were discredited. The reality is that subsequent research showed that it was the critics who were wrong, something not widely known because editors of the main journals, under the impression that the claims were false, blocked the publication of papers suggesting otherwise.
For a long time, difficulties with making the process work reliably, or in making useful amounts of energy using cold fusion, meant that LENR had no practical value, but now the situation is very different. In the time since the original discovery there has been much progress, a number of companies having been able to make these reactions work quite reliably, one at least confirming claims of genuineness by powering a device from its output.
Apart from removing the current reliance on fossil fuels, together with processes requiring the large-scale disposal of radioactive material, such devices would have the advantage of being small in size, and usable in any location. Some companies are now working on making such devices commercially viable, and recently there has been support from governmental organisations such as APRA-E in the US and Horizon 2020 in the EU. More needs to be done, however, to accelerate the rollout of such devices, thereby ameliorating the damaging effects of climate change.
Brian Josephson Emeritus professor of physics, University of Cambridge
David J Nagel Research professor, George Washington University
Alan Smith International Society for Condensed Matter Nuclear Science
Dr Jean-Paul Biberian Honorary professor, Aix-Marseille Université
Yasuhiro Iwamura Research professor, Tohoku University
2/3/2025
I was disappointed to see a letter promoting a pseudo-scientific fringe theory (Cold fusion may be a viable energy alternative to end reliance on fossil fuels, Letters, 28 January). Many scientists have tried and failed to reproduce Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons’s initial report of cold fusion. After years of intense scrutiny, the mainstream scientific community overwhelmingly concluded by the early 1990s that cold fusion was not a credible idea supported by experimental evidence – a conclusion that stands after three decades of research.
The authors of the letter to the Guardian suggest that cold fusion research is now being suppressed from publication. In reality, credible, rigorous studies continue to be published in reputable journals (such as a 2019 study in Nature), but none of them has successfully observed cold fusion. The letter claims that companies have “been able to make these reactions work quite reliably”, but do not provide any evidence to support this.
The climate crisis requires immediate action, but those actions must be based on rigorous, reproducible science. It would be wonderful to live in a universe where cold fusion was a reality, but we cannot wave a magic wand and change the laws of nature.
Dr Philip Thomas
Postdoctoral research fellow, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Exeter
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/02/cold-fusion-claims-that-dont-bear-scrutiny