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Interviewed by Steven Krivit, August 8, 2003, Menlo Park, California
When critics argue that
nuclear reactions cannot occur at room temperature,
They're not so much arguing the fact that excess energy
is released but that the process is highly unlikely.
Is this correct?
The argument was basically “it’s not
our experience that fusion can occur in this way.” We didn’t violate any fundamental principles, we were
violating their experience of hot fusion. It was Julian Schwinger who put it best, he said, “The
defense of cold fusion is simple, the circumstances of cold
fusion are not those of hot fusion.”
The fact that it occurs in a lattice means that new
pathways are possible, new reaction rates and new reaction
products become possible. This
is something that the high energy physicists ignored.
Some of them ignored it because they’re ignorant and
some of them ignored it cynically.
They understood that this statement of Schwinger was in
fact true and it wasn’t a comfortable reality for them.
Please tell me more about
“the lattice.”
The lattice is the bulk. It’s a
three-dimensional network. It’s a thing that conveys the properties of hardness. This is what makes a diamond a diamond.
All of its atoms are connected by equivalent bonds.
It permits a condition called “coherence.”
By coherence, we mean that every participant species, in
this case, the atoms in the crystalline lattice, behave in
exactly the same way, at exactly the same time. The ensemble of atoms has the special property which is
significant, and that is of "coherence." They all know
and experience the happenings of all the other members of this coherent system.
How does hot fusion differ from this
work involving the lattice?
The hot fusion experience is
"billiard-ball" physics. You take two round solitary balls and impinge them upon
each other with high relative velocities in order to overcome
their Coulombic repulsion. The
problem is you only have two “billiard balls.”
Each of these are deuterium nuclei with a neutron and a
proton. So when
your composite state is achieved -- when you finally direct one
“billiard ball” at the other fast enough to overcome the
repulsion and have them unite, you have only four particles to convey the energy you
produced in this reaction. Four particles are not enough to hold 24 million electron-volts (MeV) worth of energy, which is the amount released when
two deuterium atoms fuse and create Helium-4. What happens is, instead of the reaction proceeding to
its logical thermodynamic final state, which is Helium-4, the
reaction particles and potential products fly apart well before
they reach their thermodynamic equilibrium. In hot fusion, one of two reactions will occur. Either
you will get Helium-3 and a neutron, which is highly energetic
and flies out and does enormous amounts of damage on the
containing environment. Or
the
other result is tritium and a proton. Tritium is not so energetic but it's still radioactive so
you wind up with two undesirable products.
But reacting deuterium plus deuterium to
produce neutrons and tritium is like reacting carbon, hydrogen
and oxygen to produce high-octane gasoline.
It’s a highly unlikely product. It's thermodynamically possible but
it's highly illogical
and it occurs in hot fusion only because there is no surrounding
medium able to contain the energy of the pair wise interaction.
Is it true that "Hot fusion" scientists
have been trying to make fusion work for 50 years?
I think the hot fusion guys earnestly
tried to create a useful energy product for maybe a decade, then
they realized it was not possible. They
are using a Tokamak because of the neutron problem – we have
no materials able to withstand the neutron flux. So they then used the rest of the 40 years to
explore plasmas and high energy physics. I think that currently
no hot fusion scientist who knows anything about materials has
any illusion that hot fusion via Tokamaks is likely to produce a
useful energy product.
Does it matter what the cold fusion
critics say anymore?
The critics still play an important role, but there
basically aren't any more. They've either retired or died, or become so discredited
themselves that their words are not harmful. I've never taken aboard any substantive criticism. I've lectured numerous times all around the world and
have never been heckled or had any substantive critical
questions or comments raised. These guys basically did it in private. They're part of the establishment.
Aren’t the cold fusion
researchers advancing in age also?
Sure many of them are of
advanced age but that’s primarily because a person looking for
tenure or attempting to make his reputation can’t afford to
work in anything so controversial. You need a person of
reasonable stature, confidence and experience in order to work
in the field. They have to have the confidence and experience to trust their
own observations.
How were you so fortunate to have the
opportunity and freedom to pursue this controversial
field?
I don’t know. I guess my path, or footsteps were
pre-destined, though I didn’t know it. I did my post-doctoral
work in Southhampton. At that stage, Martin Fleischmann was the
pre-eminent electrochemist in the world. The reason I went to
Southampton was because it was the number one school of
electrochemistry in the world and it was the number one school
because Martin [Fleischmann] was there.
You had already been working on some parallel experimental work
that served as a foundation for your work in cold fusion. Please
talk about that.
I was familiar with the
deuterium-palladium system, I was familiar with the means of
loading hydrogen and deuterium into palladium.
I was familiar with the technique which ultimately came
to dominate the measurement of the loading rate which is resistance measurements. My expertise is in resistance
and impedance
measurements and I was working with the electrochemical kinetic
analysis tools that were needed to understand how to load
hydrogen or deuterium into palladium to
high levels.
The only things different that we did in
the early days were firstly, we were quiet about what we were
doing and secondly, we established a hypothesis that there will
be no interesting new effects unless you operate outside the
regime that’s been well studied. If the fuel is deuterium, then presumably that regime is
the high-loading regime. It
seems obvious in retrospect, but having lived through it I can
tell you that not a single person working in the field, either
on the pro or con side, had any concept of measuring loading and
correlating the loading with the effect. I can tell you that the
1989 ERAB report was based entirely
upon people who were gambling that somehow with clumsy
electrochemistry in some cases, able electrochemistry in
others, they were able to achieve the high loading condition.
But
they didn't know how to measure loading and they didn't know
what conditions were necessary to obtain high loading. Fleischmann
and Pons knew and understood because a) they're better
electrochemists than 99.99% of everybody else that tried and b)
they'd been working on it for three years already.
What is your
particular area of research relative to Cold Fusion?
I'm a
traditional electrochemist. My specific
contribution,-- and its not mine, its the 20
people that have worked with me over this time.. is
electrochemical kinetics which is studying the rate of electrochemical
reactions and understanding what you needed to do to obtain high
loading of deuterium into palladium. [It relates to] the ability to measure loadings in
situ, inside your experiment, in real-time. So we have an internal diagnostic as to whether we've
obtained the conditions we believed were necessary. And calorimetry which is the measurement of heat. And
honestly, in 1989 when this all started, I didn't know anything
about calorimetry. The
only thing I knew about it was that it was something I never
wanted to do. It
was old-fashioned and clumsy, except that if you want to measure
heat, it is what you had to do.
So we trained ourselves with some help from some good
people here at SRI and Stanford University, and we developed a
first-principles mass-flow calorimeter, and in doing so brought calorimetry
into the 20th century. We were the first people to computerize
and automate mass-flow calorimetry and reduce the uncertainties
to the levels needed to study this new effect. We
increased the accuracy, computerized measurements for long-term operations,
so that we could maintain good calorimetric control for the
periods of months that were necessary to do these experiments. This had never been done before.
Despite
our laboratory successes, we
had a hard time publishing papers. The critics
made editors scrutinize submissions with much greater diligence
and also consider the reviewers' comments with higher weight
than the authors'. We published a few, but it just wasn't worth the effort. Besides, we have the International Conference. People who are actually interested in learning and the people
who need to be taught, attend the conference so we can share
information there.
I remember reading that when you saw the
nuclear evidence first hand, you felt a responsibility to pursue
the research. Why
was that?
Well that's
interesting. At the
time, it seemed to me that there was nothing more useful I could
apply my talents to. It's
almost as if I'd been pre-destined to run these experiments. I came armed with the skills and had a group of people
around me who were armed with the skills that I didn't have. We were able to pursue this field, we were
well-positioned. We
had achieved a positive result in a controversial environment. The time of decision for me came with the explosion that killed Andy Riley. So we had at that point a perfect
opportunity to say "its too dangerous, its too risky." We had perfect time to bail out and say, "This is
not for us."
When did
this occur?
January 2,
1992. It was a
shock to us all and a terrible tragedy.
And that was
the result of a cold fusion experiment?
Right. At the time, we were struggling with critics, we were
struggling with the experiments. But we had a moral duty to continue. A scientist is really
given his training. I
didn't pay for my training, I've been trained at other people's
expense, at society's expense. Society deserves something in return in exchange from me,
what can I do most usefully in exchange?
"Do something good for society. What does society need?
A non-polluting energy source." So to stop working on something you know to be true and
know to have potential, something of that sort, it would be a
largely immoral act. But
we had an excuse at the time of the explosion. We could have said "it's too dangerous.
I've lost a friend." We're going to stop and go back to our regular research
which was profitable and also useful, not to the same degree,
but it was still useful research.
And I asked my group and close friends, "What should
we do?" Every
one of them said "we have to continue". The next year was a huge struggle. We had an accident investigation going on, our time was
very stretched, emotions were strained, basically we did no work
for a year. We
floundered, we were just chasing our tails, yet not a single
person said we should stop this, everybody wanted to continue.
What are
your hopes and expectations for the field?
We're in a
financial crunch in the moment. In the 1990's we ran a group effort which varied between
five and ten people. We
had physicists, material scientists, electrochemists,
calorimetrists, the sorts of people that we needed in order to
make progress, and we made good progress. But the funding takes a long time, 14 years is a long
time to
fund a research project. We
need to find a commercial object, something which will inspire
re-investment in the fundamental issues because of its
commercial and practical significance. So I do believe that commercial interests have to step in, and
we're looking for such investments. I think government has done a lot. It's not fair to criticize the investment that the
U.S.
Government has made. [The
U.S. Department of Energy]
has been conspicuously absent from funding this field so far. But
[the Department of Energy]
has a huge commitment to hot fusion.
So it doesn't surprise me that the US Navy and DARPA have
both continued to provide funding in the area, at reasonable
levels of funding. Not the levels which we need to push forward such a
multi-disciplinary topic, but they have continued to provide
funding.
Is the
challenge for funding by the private sector due to the fact that the
commercial application of this work seems to be so far away?
Yes, the
event horizon is long. On the other hand, the payback is
enormous. These two
factors balance each other out. With what we know now,
and the clear vision we have now of a commercial object,
if we had this on the other side of the bubble, when everybody
was feeling rich, we would have had no difficulty getting
investments. The
problem is that people feel poor now. They're not poor, but they believe themselves to be poor.
Are they
resistant because the underlying science of this technology is
not clear enough yet, or because they won't be able to
sufficiently secure the intellectual property rights?
No, they
believe the science in every case and they believe that we have
a pathway to the intellectual property. The timeline, the first foreseeable payback being five
years or more down the road, gives them pause for concern. But
again, this is a strange animal for a venture capitalist.
Are you
surprised that large corporate interests are not eager to
collaborate with you?
Machiavelli
most accurately described it: "You can't go to a member of
the establishment to seek assistance to overturn the
establishment." The people in the energy industry, for example, have no
interest in a new technology. Innovation is a threat, its not a
benefit to them.
Would this be considered a disruptive technology?
Yes, very
disruptive.
I've seen a
wide range of experimenters with varying skills and backgrounds
who are attempting cold fusion.
How is the world to assess the reports once they start
popping up from everywhere, including "garage tinkerers?"
I think it
would be useful somewhere to set up a template of how to judge an
experiment's success or otherwise, particularly if the claim is
heat. What is the
accuracy of the measurements? What are the sorts of systematic errors that might be
introduced into the measurements? Undoubtedly one of the big problems in the whole cold
fusion field is that not everything that has been reported has
been correct. So
filtering the evidence is very difficult.
Its very
complex. I don't
know if another's experiment is producing something out of the
ordinary or not, and I wouldn't know from simply looking at it
and I couldn't know from a cursory inspection. The only way to know is to either have the experiment
here and subject it to our own discipline, or spend a lot of time
on site with the experiment and experimentalist to come to
understand it well. It's
not a trivial thing, it involves an investment of considerable
amounts of labor and time.
Even though
one might see a lot of light, bubbling and perhaps flashy
sparkles, is it fair to say that such visual observations are of
little significance?
One of the
early mistakes made in reporting this field is a good example of
that. There was an
experiment being run in a famous calorimetrist's laboratory in
Texas and the media came and you saw on television this picture
of a flashing light that looked so awesome, like something
pulsing. It turned
out it was just a light bulb that was being used to control the
temperature of the water bath but as far as you could tell from
the reporting and what you saw on TV, the light was the product
and it was very spectacular. A real-time photograph of an experiment is never going to
be definitive.
At SRI we
worked for three months on our first experiment. Actually we designed it for three months, we operated it
for one month, at the end of that time we had a result. And all the result encouraged us to do was to go back and
do the experiment better. So
after four months of effort, we still didn't know what we had. All we knew was that it was encouraging enough to spend
some more time on it.
Our focus is
no longer on the heat. That
has
been clearly demonstrated. There's no doubt in my mind that under certain rather
well-defined conditions more heat comes out of the
deuterium-palladium system than you can account for by known
chemistry. We've
seen this effect on more than 50 occasions, sometimes lasting as
long as a week. The
effect is not small, it's not fleeting, it happens only with
deuterium and only if you have high levels of deuterium. In our
experiments, it doesn't happen with hydrogen. There IS a heat effect. What is it due to? Since we know it's not a chemical reaction, it must be a
nuclear effect. We spent six years pursuing what the nuclear
product was. And the product, in the large part, is Helium-4.
We also see Helium-3, which is mostly or perhaps entirely
the result of tritium decay. So we're producing tritium and
we're producing helium-4. The diagnostic for these is mass
spectrometry. Most of what we're doing now is operating cells
making measurements of helium-4 in the presence of deuterium. It requires scrupulous focus, a rather expensive
instrument, careful and painstaking measurements and it is
extremely painstaking. But
I'm not an expert in mass spectrometry so it would not even be
appropriate for me to try. Some things you need experts for, and
my colleague Fran Tanzella, co-author who has worked with me now
for over 15 years, is a very capable guy who makes the
measurements. But
it's extraordinarily boring. We've done everything we need to do. We have a clear demonstration of a heat
effect. We have a
measurement at confidence level of 90 sigma, that's 90 times the experimental
measurement uncertainty. We've
published it, we've repeated it, it's clearly there. We've established the conditions under which it occurs. And we've established the nuclear product. What more
must we do?
It sounds to
me that in your research, you don't even try to prove that cold
fusion is real anymore. Is your current focus to figure out
why it works and how to make it more effective?
We have, in
conjunction with Peter Hagelstein at MIT, figured that out too. He's developed a theory which is by this point,
essentially predictive. We
know what we need to do to convert a laboratory oddity into a
commercial reality.
We have a
very clear trajectory toward that.
We have taken steps to lock up the intellectual property
and we're in an unbelievably strong position with respect to the
science. Yet, we
still can't get anybody to fund it. And the question is...What
else do we have to do? What
else can I do?
Patent it
outside of the US, I suppose.
Well, to
take it offshore is an answer. There's an interesting dichotomy here. We are actually allowed to do what we do because the US
government, specifically DOE, doesn't believe that it happens. We make tritium. It
is not legal to make tritium in this country without a DOE license. We make it! We
have even published papers saying we have manufactured
it. We are able to continue because we are not believed.
If they were
to admit that they believed you, might they be in a bind considering their 1989 ERAB
report?
Partly, yes,
but also, they'd have to start investing in it and they'd have to
start taking that investment from the people who have criticized
us in the past.
Academic
freedom has been trampled in the cold fusion field. John Bockris, a very dear friend of
mine at Texas
A&M, was subject to a threat that they were going to withdraw
his tenured and senior professor status, which is just
outrageous. But to
Texas A&M's credit, they understood that it was an issue of
academic freedom and they did not allow this to go through. There was bad press attention and the fact that this
recall effort of Bockris was unsuccessful was
never publicized, only the fact that the allegations occurred
was publicized. There is strong inertia in support of the status
quo, and harsh punishment meted out to those who seek to
disrupt it.
Is there is a strong cooperative spirit among those in the
cold fusion field?
That's actually one of the delightful things about working in
this field and probably one of the things that has kept me
buoyant over the years. Being
a despised minority is actually a strength. There is a sense of camaraderie in the case of cold
fusion. Its a feeling of teamwork, warmth and acceptance which
has very rarely occurred for me in my academic career. I've worked with batteries and fuel cells which is a
field inhabited by people who are very bitter, sort of nasty
back-biting folks.
Everybody's critical of each other, they each have a
battery which is better than everyone else's battery, there's
very little sense of being in it together for the betterment of
mankind.
Do you expect the current camaraderie will continue once the
pre-commercialization research and development phase passes?
Well the cracks in this camaraderie have already occurred
several times, always when one of the members believe that they
are on the cusp of commercial or academic success. If there's a Nobel prize to be awarded, a major
commercial arrangement to be made, people become secretive,
protective. At one
stage, I'm certain, half a dozen groups around the world were all
protecting the same secret. This is not useful or constructive. The breaks in the camaraderie have all been the results
of imagined, imminent success, all of which was an illusion of
course. The success
was never that close, its not that close now. Its still three to five years away. The joke of course is that the payoff, intellectually,
academically and economically is so large that it could easily
be shared between all of the good people who are working in the
field and nobody would be shortchanged.
When it does happen, it will be because a team of
people have worked studiously, diligently for a very long period
of time contributing rare talent in order to produce the
commercial object. It's
been a tremendously enjoyable journey. It doesn't seem like 14 years. It seems like yesterday I was huddling around in the
laboratory trying to figure out what we needed to do in order to
check out this crazy idea of Martin's.
Its been an extraordinarily enjoyable journey with a few
sad points on the way but by and large, its been a great trip,
and I have worked with
the best people I ever met in my life. Thank you Martin.
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