Background Information

In 1989, two chemists announced that they could produce nuclear reactions and thermal energy under ordinary conditions of temperature and pressure using electrochemistry. They were Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. The reactions were termed “cold fusion”, even though no one really knew then with confidence that nuclear reactions were occurring. Their novel experimental results were at odds with hot fusion data and were not supported by theory. Many scientists concluded that there were no nuclear reactions and the reported experiments were in error. In fact, cold fusion became a widely-known and still-cited example of science gone wrong.

Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, originally known as cold fusion, has been studied by hundreds of scientists globally since the field began in 1989. At this time, the experimental evidence for the ability to induce nuclear reactions at low energies and temperatures is very strong. Further, many of the characteristics of the reactions and their products are already known. Measurement techniques and results obtained with them have been published in over 1000 scientific papers, many of them in refereed journals. The mechanisms for the nuclear reactions are not yet understood. Nevertheless, the empirical information shows that they produce energy with harmless helium as the primary by-product. In most experiments, there is neither significant immediate radiation nor residual radioactivity. Several start-up companies in the US, and many other academic, government and industrial organizations world-wide, are working on the science of nuclear reactions, in which a solid lattice plays a central role. The emerging results might provide the basis for green energy sources with many applications, such as the production of clean drinking water.