US review rekindles cold fusion debate
Geoff Brumfiel
Energy panel split over whether experiments produced power.
Claims of cold fusion are intriguing, but not convincing. That is the conclusion of an 18-member scientific panel tasked with reviewing research in the area.
The findings, which were released on 1 December by the US Department of Energy, rekindle a 15-year-old debate over whether nuclear fusion can occur at room temperature.
According to the report, the panel was "split approximately evenly" on the question of whether cold experiments were actually producing power in the form of heat. But members agreed that there is not enough evidence to prove that cold fusion has occurred, and they complained that much of the published work was poorly documented.
The review is a positive step for the field of cold fusion, according to David Nagel at George Washington University in Washington DC, who co-authored the summary of cold-fusion work that the panel reviewed. "Most scientists think that cold fusion is laughable, but when the dust settled, the researchers reviewing our work were evenly split," he says.
Others remain sceptical, however. "It is astonishing that the panel didn't find cold fusion convincing after almost 15 years of additional research," says Bob Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Voodoo Science, a book about junk science. Park says that although the quality of research has improved, no one should buy into cold fusion just yet...cont'd
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041129//full/041129-11.html