Excerpt from "This Machine Might Save the World"
By Josh Dean
Popular Science

January 2009

Two things have conspired to hamper evolutionary leaps in peacetime fusion research. The first is bad press. To the great frustration of people like Laberge and Richardson, fusion's good name has been besmirched by a handful of highly publicized failures, most prominently the cold-fusion experiments of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann and the "bubble fusion" experiments Rusi Taleyarkhan conducted at Purdue University. Pons and Fleischmann announce in 1986 that they had achieved fusion at room temperature, but later review showed that faulty equipment had failed to accurately measure the results. The U.S. Department of Energy all but called them frauds. In 2002, Taleyarkhan published a paper stating that he had used ultrasonic vibrations to make bubbles in a liquid solvent and that, when the bubbles collapsed, they had created fusion. His results, too, would later be discredited, and last year he was stripped of his university chair.

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