Revisiting the cold case of cold fusion

• Published in: Nature (London) Vol. 570; no. 7759; pp. 45 - 51
• Main Authors: Berlinguette, Curtis P., Chiang, Yet-Ming, Munday, Jeremy N., Schenkel, Thomas, Fork, David K., Koningstein, Ross, Trevithick, Matthew D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01.06.2019; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 639/301/299/161; 639/766/387/1126; 706/4066/4076; Astrophysics; Case studies; Clean energy; Clean technology; Cold fusion; Energy; Experiments; Graduate students; History; Humanities and Social Sciences; Hydrogen; Metals; multidisciplinary; Nanocrystals; Nuclear energy research; Nuclear reactions; Perspective; Researchers; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); United States
• ISSN: 0028-0836; 1476-4687; 1476-4687
• DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1256-6

The 1989 claim of ‘cold fusion’ was publicly heralded as the future of clean energy generation. However, subsequent failures to reproduce the effect heightened scepticism of this claim in the academic community, and effectively led to the disqualification of the subject from further study. Motivated by the possibility that such judgement might have been premature, we embarked on a multi-institution programme to re-evaluate cold fusion to a high standard of scientific rigour. Here we describe our efforts, which have yet to yield any evidence of such an effect. Nonetheless, a by-product of our investigations has been to provide new insights into highly hydrided metals and low-energy nuclear reactions, and we contend that there remains much interesting science to be done in this underexplored parameter space. Three years of investigation by a multi-disciplinary team into claims of ‘cold fusion’ found no evidence that the phenomenon exists, but identified a parameter space potentially worthy of further exploration.