[This text by Silicon Valley writer and broadcaster Hal Plotkin
(hplotkin@sfgate.com) is reproduced with permission. Plotkin invites all
readers to print out this text and send it to your Congressional
representatives. A longer version is posted at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/technology/archive/1999/05/1
7/
coldfusion2.dtl. GSReport thanks Dan Drasin for bringing this story to our
attention.]

By Hal Plotkin
Special to SF Gate
May 17, 1999

Dr. Michael McKubre, an electrochemist at Menlo Park, California-based SRI,
was generating unaccounted-for heat in a carefully-controlled cold fusion
experiment. McKubre presented his findings at the centennial meeting of the
American Physical Society, the nation's premier gathering of physicists.
Close to 100 scientists attended McKubre's talk, a sizable audience for a
technical session. Despite the crowd, and the importance of the subject, no
major news stories have been published about the event. According to
McKubre,
there was only one journalist present.

In his talk, McKubre detailed the results of SRI's nearly 10-year effort to
replicate the work of Utah chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.
McKubre confirmed that, under the right, difficult-to-achieve conditions,
sustained reactions are taking place in SRI's cold fusion cells. McKubre
says
the reaction appears to be nuclear in origin.

In addition to carefully measuring the excess heat being produced, McKubre
has also detected elevated quantities of Helium-4, a known fusion
by-product.
McKubre's findings turn what is currently known about nuclear science on its
head.

But that is only half the story.

Since writing my first report on McKubre's work two months ago, I've become
convinced that the federal Department of Energy is responsible for a massive
failure to serve the public interest. Rather than budget the funds needed to
explore this new, emerging science, our top national energy science
officials
have adopted what might be called, at best, a policy of benign neglect. At
worst, it's a policy of fraud and deceit.

How could this be happening?

The stakes in the debate about cold fusion are enormous. In this case, an
unholy alliance seems to have come together. The principle players are the
fossil fuel industry, which has no interest in seeing itself eclipsed by a
new, non-polluting source of energy, and the mainstream physics community,
which wants to protect, seemingly at all costs, the federal funding it
relies
on to continue its massively expensive hot fusion experiments.

I've seen how squirrelly even good people can get when a few of their bucks
are in jeopardy. So it's not surprising that when several trillion dollars
are on the table, there are signs of skullduggery.

Take, for starters, the Energy Resources Advisory Board (ERAB) panel
appointed during the Bush administration to look into the cold fusion claims
made by Pons and Fleischmann. That panel leaned heavily on an experiment
done
at MIT that found the field unworthy of financial support. Since then,
however, Dr. Eugene Mallove, the chief science writer at MIT at the time,
has
come forward to denounce the MIT study, citing irregularities in the way
MIT's results were presented.

Mallove contends MIT's researchers did generate excess heat in their cold
fusion experiment, and then fudged that finding in their final report. As
evidence, Mallove has produced a copy of the original heat-measurement graph
used in the MIT experiment, which showed slight heat production above the
expected level. That graph did not appear in the final MIT report. In its
place, the MIT team published an "adjusted" graph that showed no production
of excess heat.

Mallove resigned in protest and demanded an investigation.

In addressing Mallove's complaint, MIT did not dispute that the original
graph had been altered. Instead, one of the 15 authors of the MIT report was
permitted to take the unusual step of changing the description of the
experiment's purpose, AFTER the paper describing it was published.

According to an appendix added to the report as a result of the
investigation
into Mallove's charges, the experiment was redefined to have been a search
for a sudden onset of released energy, rather than to determine if
unaccounted-for heat was being generated in cold fusion cells. Mallove
contends MIT's handling of the matter was fatally flawed. "In science, we
don't usually allow anyone to redefine the purpose of an experiment to match
the results," he says.

Since then, with funding from futurist Arthur C. Clarke, Mallove has been
publishing "Infinite Energy" magazine, a publication devoted to spreading
news about cold fusion experiments. Last month, Mallove released "Fire From
Water," a video documentary about cold fusion. Mallove is currently
negotiating with several national networks interested in broadcasting the
newly released video.

There are several incredible moments in "Fire From Water." It contains, for
example, the first video footage I've seen of sustained energy releases in
cold fusion cells. It's easy to see why the scientists involved immediately
assumed some kind of nuclear reaction was taking place. The cells bubble
with
energy, emitting steam in amounts far greater than can be explained by the
energy put into them. In some cases, the reactions go on for days, even
weeks.

But there's more.

In a telling interview, former Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)
executive Tom Passell says that at least some of those involved in the
campaign to debunk cold fusion intentionally misled congressional
investigators and the public.

EPRI is the Palo Alto, California-based consortium of utility companies that
conducts research into power generation and distribution technologies.
Besides his professional credentials, Passell has an excellent reputation as
a longtime, well-known, Palo Alto civic volunteer.

Passell says that shortly after the ERAB panel persuasively denounced cold
fusion as junk science in congressional testimony, some of the members of
that panel quietly came to EPRI seeking money so they could study the
phenomena themselves. Apparently, cold fusion research was only worthless if
someone else was getting the money to do it.

If Passell's charge is true, it means some members of the ERAB panel
intentionally lied to Congress, offering scientific testimony that cold
fusion was unworthy of further study, testimony which they knew to be false.
In non-scientific language, that's called perjury. "The search for money,
for
research funds, is a big thing," Passell says, "and sometimes takes
precedence over the search for what we call truth."

Despite the federal government's ongoing obstruction, scientists around the
world are continuing to investigate cold fusion. Several recent advances are
worth noting.

Les Case, an MIT-trained chemical engineer with more than 20 patents under
his belt, discovered that cold fusion reactions could be made more reliable
by the addition of a carbon catalyst. Case used his own funds to support his
work; his technique is the one now being replicated by SRI's McKubre.

Others have made similar observations, most notably Tom Claytor at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory. (Interestingly, the current firestorm of
controversy about the alleged leaking of nuclear secrets to the Chinese at
Los Alamos may make it harder, in the future, to obtain information about
the
successful Los Alamos cold fusion experiments).

The biggest slam against cold fusion researchers involves their inability to
replicate the same results each time they conduct the experiment. But, as
McKubre points out, the same could have been said about the first
transistors.

Due to problems with material impurities, only one in a hundred or so of the
first transistors worked. By studying those that did work, however,
scientists were able to perfect the invention. The same thing happened with
integrated circuits, which led to the clean rooms that carefully control the
manufacturing environment now used to produce computer chips.

When it comes to cold fusion, however, the detractors in the Department of
Energy say further scientific inquiry should be abandoned because, in as
many
as seven out of ten tries, cold fusion does not work. (Les Case is claiming
he's got the failure rate down to just 10-20 percent. Recently, he visited
McKubre's SRI lab to demonstrate his latest techniques).

It may be hard to believe that people with vested interests could have been
responsible for dampening, and nearly killing, this field for the last 10
years. Until you realize how much money is involved.

We're not just talking about the $15 billion the U.S. has spent in the last
few decades to support the work of hot fusion scientists, such as those who
dominated the ERAB panel. Those scientists and their institutions would, of
course, be forced to find a new paradigm, and new funds, to support
themselves if cold fusion theories proved valid.

But that is just the tip of the financial iceberg. The foundation of the
fossil fuel dependent international economy is also on the line, down to the
last nuclear power plant, coal mine, and neighborhood gas station. It's no
wonder some people are worried. It would be remarkable if they were not
taking steps to stop advancements in this field.

Clearly, though, stepped up cold fusion research efforts are called for.
Even
if cold fusion claims are bogus, we'll undoubtedly learn a lot we don't know
about material sciences and electrochemistry, two fields vital to future
scientific progress.

It is not enough, though, to encourage the handful of scientists who,
against
all the obstacles, have secured funding to continue work on cold fusion.

We need a full-scale investigation into the Department of Energy's ongoing
campaign to discredit scientists working on understanding the unusual, and
potentially useful, cold fusion effect.