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Scientific Disciplines Mix At Chemistry Meeting
By Ira Flatow
National Public Radio's Science Friday

Friday, March 26, 2010

Transcript and audio of Michael McKubre interview on Science Friday

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Transcript:

FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

FLATOW: You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow. We're doing a roundup of the news from this week's American Chemical Society Meeting, which took place in San Francisco, and the meeting wrapped up yesterday.

And at the meeting, what was another interesting aspect of the meeting is that the meeting devoted some considerable attention to cold fusion, which has been in disgrace since 1989, and the research has gone underground, in small laboratories around the world, in quiet, government-sponsored labs.

Cold fusion, or as it's being called now, low-energy nuclear reactions, has been under study for decades very quietly. We've been getting all kinds of reports over the years, and this week, the American Chemical Society brought it out of the cold and into the open.

The ACS sponsored public talks and posters about cold fusion. The question is now: Is the field maturing? Is it finally getting a seat at the scientific table? Here to talk about it is Michael McKubre. He's an electrochemist and director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY. It's been a while, Dr. McKubre.

Dr. MICHAEL McKUBRE (Electrochemist, Director, Energy Research Center, SRI International): Thank you, Ira. It's good to be back.

FLATOW: In all the years since we've spoken with you and the years that we have been watching cold fusion on and off, is it any further along the line toward commercialization now?

Mr. McKUBRE: Well, I think so. You know, it's very hard to know what the commercialization object will be until we fully understand the science, and there's still a lot of science to be done. But we've made a lot of progress since you and I last talked.

FLATOW: Tell me about that progress because we don't hear anything about it.

Mr. McKUBRE: It's available. And there are international conferences every year that 300 or 400 people show up to. There's a huge series of conference proceedings, a lot of papers published in the open literature. So the information is there if you look for it. And you led with the fact that we've been in disgrace for a number of years. I'd like to challenge you on that a little bit. I don't think we've been in disgrace, but we've been quietly minding our own business, working on the experiments and making good progress.

FLATOW: Tell us about the progress. Name some progress areas for me, please.

Mr. McKUBRE: Well, the issue that really caused cold fusion to go a little off the rails was, first, presented at the very beginning, if you remember, a number of prestigious institutions performed experiments rather hastily, but they performed experiments at Caltech, at MIT, at Harwell, Bell Labs also, and they basically didn't find what Martin Fleishmann and Stan Pons had claimed.

They said that they didn't see a heat effect, and a lot of people were turned off at that time because here we have on the one hand Martin Fleishmann, who is a prestigious electrochemist, making a claim, but a number of prestigious institutions did similar experiments it seemed and did not see any anomalous heat. And the question really is why.

And what we at SRI have been digging into over the years is: Under what circumstances is what is now called the Fleishmann-Pons Heat Effect, under what circumstance is this heat effect produced? It has to do with loading of deuterium into palladium. You need to keep it loaded for a very long time by electrochemical standards. You need to apply an appropriate trigger, and then when the circumstances are right, you observe the heat effect.

And what we've done, and what I presented at the American Chemical Society, was: What are the conditions under which this effect occurs, and were these conditions met? In the original negative reports from these prestigious organizations, we are now able to explain why they didn't see a heat effect when others did and to define the conditions under which one might expect to see the effect.

FLATOW: Are you saying that you can reproduce and re-create the effect anytime, at will, if you just do it the right way?

Mr. McKUBRE: Yeah. If you reproduce the conditions, you reproduce the effect. That's actually a statement that contains no information, and we're not claiming magic here. If you reproduce the conditions, you reproduce the effect.

The question is: What are the conditions? They weren't well-understood in 1989. Very little work had been done. The paper that Martin Fleishmann and Stan Pons published was not that informative. So people were left to their own devices to choose the ways and means of their experiments.

But what mostly was missed at that time was the need for very high loadings, high deuterium-to-palladium atomic ratios, and the need to maintain that loading for a very long period of time, much longer than is customary in electrochemical experiments.

FLATOW: If it's a true nuclear reaction, don't you expect to see a lot of neutrons and daughter particles coming off?

Mr. McKUBRE: Well, nuclear reactions, of course, as you know, produce all sorts of products, and high-energy nuclear reactions, particularly occurring in isolation - two-body reactions - In order to conserve energy and angular momentum, you pretty much always have energetic particles, but as was very well pointed out by Julian Schwinger at the time, the circumstances of cold fusion are not those of hot fusion.

The reaction occurs on a lattice. So the expected products, the expected branching ratios, will be different from for reactions occurring in the solid state as compared to reactions occurring in free space. So what you say about neutrons is - or energetic particles is largely true in free space, but it isn't always true in a solid lattice.

FLATOW: Do you, is there a theory, a sustainable theory, about what is actually happening there when packing happens correctly in cold fusion?

Mr. McKUBRE: Well, one of the condemnations of the field of cold fusion, which is legitimate, by the way, is that there isn't a theory that fully explains it, but there are many theories, and there are too many theories.

I am not a theorist, and I pay attention to the people closest to me and the people that I can understand. We have worked over the years - SRI and MIT - in very close concert, working with Professor Hagelstein at MIT, whose theory I am closest to, I've spent the most time trying to understand it, and we've done a number of experimental tests of his theoretical ideas.

Certainly, his theories are moving in the right direction, but, you know, as I said, I am not a theorist, and when I fully understand the theory, I think that at that point, the theory will be, by my definition, right. That is, when it's simple enough for me to understand and use in my experimentation, then we'll have a theory that is, you know, contributing to the field.

FLATOW: But you, to get back to as an experimentalist, then, you're convinced that anybody can do a successful cold-fusion demonstration?

Mr. McKUBRE: Oh, I dont think so. You need a huge amount of skill as an electrochemist in order to obtain the high deuterium-to-palladium loading ratios. This is a skill that is by no means common in the general populace.

You also need very particular kinds of palladium. One of the areas that's received the most attention and interest in the last, let's say five or six years, is the structure of the palladium metal itself, the configuration of the lattice, how you make your piece of palladium that you are going to turn into electrode. It very, very much defines whether or not you're going to be able to obtain the conditions that we have defined as being necessary to produce the effect.

So it's not easy. I didn't say we'd solved and mastered the problems. What I did claim was that if you achieve the conditions that are set out, you will obtain the same results as we have and as Martin Fleishmann and Stan Pons and scores of others have obtained.

FLATOW: All right. Well, thank you. You know, it's interesting that you're getting the attention from the Chemical Society, and maybe one of the problems early on was that people called it physics.

(Soundbite of laughter)

FLATOW: It upset a lot of physicists when it may it be chemistry.

Mr. McKUBRE: Well, it's in the realm. You know, the energy that we see produced in these experiments is thousands of electron volts per palladium atom or thousands of electron volts per deuterium atom. So that isn't chemistry in any way. Chemistry occurs on the scale of electron volts. We're seeing thousands or tens of thousands of times more energy than can be explained by any form of chemistry that I'm familiar with.

FLATOW: You know, the final question that people always ask is: If you're so smart, why ain't you rich? In other words, if you can make one of these things work, why can't you make any commercial product out of (unintelligible)?

Mr. McKUBRE: Well, I guess I sort of resent that question, too. Maybe I should be rich, but...

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. McKUBRE: ...no, we well, first of all, we don't know what the product will be, really. Until we have a good understanding of the physics of the process...

FLATOW: Right.

Dr. McKUBRE: ...all attempts to scale up what is quite evidently a nuclear effect without a better grasp of the fundamental physics than we have now, I think, would be a little bit irresponsible. So we have to understand what's going on. We have to understand what happens when we scale it up. The scale-up attempts that I'm familiar with - and there a number of them out there - really are just trying to capitalize on the heat at relatively low levels. The experiment that I'm most familiar with that would put us on a pathway to rapid commercialization was performed by Energetics Technologies in Israel. It's a U.S. company with research labs in Israel.

But they, in one experiment, put in 40 kilojoules of energy as electrical input power, and saw 1.14 megajoules of heat coming out of the experiment. They, in fact, boiled the water of their experiment. So you have 25 times more energy coming out of your experiment as heat than you put in as electrical power.

If you could do that every time with cheap materials and no dangerous byproducts, that is a practical technology. That is commercializable, just there.

FLATOW: All right. Dr. McKubre, thank you for taking your time to be with us. Good luck to you.

Dr. McKUBRE: Oh, thank you very much.

FLATOW: Michael McKubre is an electrochemist and director of the Energy Research Center at the famous SRI International in Menlo Park, California.

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