More Than Junk Science Video

More Than Junk Science Video Transcript

>> Twenty years ago, it appeared for a moment that all of our energy problems could be solved. It was the announcement of cold fusion, nuclear energy like that which powers the sun but at room temperature on a tabletop. It promised to be cheap, limitless, and clean. Cold fusion would end our dependence on the Middle East and stop those greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. It would change everything, but then just as quickly as it was announced, it was discredited so thoroughly that cold fusion became a catchphrase for junk science. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion. For many scientists today, cold fusion is hot again.

>> Michael McCubry [assumed spelling]: We can wheel the power of nuclear physics on a tabletop. The potential is unlimited. That is the most powerful energy source known to man.

>> Michael McCubry says he has seen that energy more than 50 times in cold fusion experiments he's doing at SRI International, a respected California lab that does extensive work for the government. McCubry is an electrochemist who imagines in 20 years the creation of a clean nuclear battery.

>> Michael McCubry: For example, the laptop would come precharged with all of the energy that you would ever intend to use. You're, you're now decoupled from our charger and, and, and the wall socket.

>> Automobiles?

>> Michael McCubry: Same. The potential is for an energy source that would run your car for three, four years, for example, and you take it in for servicing every four years, and they give you a new power supply.

>> Power stations?

>> Michael McCubry: You can imagine a one for one plug-in replacement for nuclear fuel rods, and the difference only would be that at the end of the lifetime of that fuel rods, you didn't have radioactive waste that needed to be disposed of.

>> McCubry showed us just how simple the experiment looks. There are only three main ingredients. First, palladium, a metal in the platinum family. Second, a kind of hydrogen called deuterium, which is found in sea water.

>> Michael McCubry: Deuterium is essentially unlimited. There is ten times as much energy in a gallon of sea water from the deuterium contained within it than there is in a gallon of gasoline.

>> The palladium is placed in water containing deuterium, and the third ingredient is an electric current.

>> So the experiment's running inside this box?

>> Michael McCubry: That's correct.

>> Can we open it up?

>> Michael McCubry: We can look inside. There, there's, there's very little to see.

>> The experiment is wrapped in insulation and instruments. They're looking for what they call excess heat. In other words, is more energy coming out than the electric current puts in? No one knows exactly how excess heat would be generated in the experiment, but McCubry shows us what he thinks is happening.

>> Michael McCubry: This is an artist's rendition of deuterium atoms -

>> At the atomic level, palladium looks like a lattice, and the electricity drives the deuterium to the palladium.

>> Michael McCubry: They sit on the surface, and they pop inside the lattice -

>> McCubry believes there is a nuclear reaction, possibly a fusion process like what happens in the sun, but occurring inside the metal at a slower rate and without dangerous radiation. Scientists today like to call it a nuclear effect rather than cold fusion. At least 20 labs working independently have published reports of excess heat. Heat up to 25 times greater than the electricity going in.

>> Michael McCubry: This little piece of palladium metal has about a third as much energy as the battery in your automobile. So very small volumes, very small masses can produce large amounts of energy.

>> McCubry has been working on this since that first discredited claim of cold fusion made headlines 20 years ago.

>> Martin Fleishman: We devised an experiment -

>> Martin Fleishman and Stanley Ponds [assumed spelling] amazed the world in 1989 with their cold fusion news conference at the University of Utah. Fleishman, in particular, was one of the world's leading electrochemists, and the announcement of room-temperature fusion set the world on fire.

>> Martin Fleishman: We had found conditions where fusion takes place.

>> Immediately, prestigious labs at MIT and Cal Tech rushed to reproduce the experiment, but they didn't get the same results as Fleishman and Ponds.

>> We have no evidence in our laboratory with any of our samples for fusion.

>> The careers of Fleishman and Ponds were destroyed quick as a nuclear flash.

>> Martin Fleishman: We worked for five years on this.

>> Names once linked to a Noble Prize were forgotten by nearly everyone, and most of the scientific world today is happy to leave it that way.

>> Richard Garwin [assumed spelling] : I'm still waiting for the water heaters. I'm still waiting for the thing that will produce heat on demand.

>> Richard Garwin is one of the most respected physicists in the world and has been since the 1950's when he helped designed the most successful fusion experiment of all time.

>> The hydrogen bomb sort of the ultimate in hot fusion.

>> Richard Garwin: Yes. It was, unfortunately, a very successful experiment.

>> Martin Fleishman: This experiment.-

>> Garwin was a critic of Martin Fleishman back in 1989, and he has seen the reports on the research that has been done since.

>> You think McCubry is mistaken?

>> Richard Garwin: Yes.

>> After all the work that he's done?

>> Richard Garwin: Yes, I think so. Why? I think probably he measures the input power wrong.

>> It's one of the most common criticisms of cold fusion experiments that the amount of the electricity going in and the heat coming out are simply mismeasured.

>> Michael McCubry: It's possible. It is possible that I have been mismeasuring energy for, for 20 years, but I think it extremely unlikely. A very large number of people to be making these measurements and measurement of current, voltage, temperature, resistance. They're some of the simplest measurements that a physicist or physical scientist will measure.

>> But there's another problem that critics point out. The experiments produce excess heat, at best, 70 percent of the time. It can take days or weeks for the excess heat to show up, and it's never the same amount of energy twice.

>> Richard Garwin: I require that you be able to make one of these things, replicate it, put it here. It heats up the cup of tea. I'll drink the tea. Then you make me another cup of tea, and I'll drink that too. That's not it.

>> For you to be a believer, it has to work 100 percent of the time?

>> Richard Garwin: Yeah. Pretty much.

>> Martin Fleishman: Our critics often complain that we can't boil water to make tea. We could, in fact, boil 64 gallons of water and made a thousand cups of tea had we chosen to do so.

>> No one's sure why the experiments can't be consistently reproduced. McCubry thinks it has something to do with how the palladium is prepared. He's working with this Italian government lab called Anaya [assumed spelling] where some of the most reliable palladium is made. With so many open questions, we wanted to find out whether cold fusion is more than a tempest in a teapot. So we asked the American Physical Society, the top physics organization in America, to recommend an independent scientist. They gave us Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri and an expert in measuring energy.

>> When we first called you and said we'd like you to look into cold fusion for "60 Minutes", what did you think when you hung up the phone?

>> Rob Duncan: I, I think my first reaction was something like, well, isn't that, hasn't that been debunked?

>> We asked Duncan to go with us to Israel where a lab called Energetics Technologies has reported some of the biggest energy gains yet.

>> We are delivering power into the cell.

>> Rob Duncan: When I got there, I just kept asking about, OK, how do you know this? How do you know that?

>> Rob Duncan: How do you get 30 percent on -

>> Duncan spent two days examining cold fusion experiments -

>> Rob Duncan: I mean, I'm just skeptical because I'm always skeptical.

>> And investigating whether the measurements were accurate.

>> Rob Duncan: Do you measure that aluminum temperature directly, or just assume it's -

>> And when you walked out of the Israeli lab, you thought what?

>> Rob Duncan: I thought, wow, they've done something very interesting here.

>> He crunched the numbers himself and searched for an explanation other than a nuclear effect.

>> Rob Duncan: I found that the work done was carefully done, and that the excess heat, as I see it now, is quite real.

>> Are you surprised to hear yourself saying this?

>> Rob Duncan: Very much. I never thought it [laughs].

>> And we found that the Pentagon is saying it too. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, did its own analysis, and we obtained this internal memo that concludes there is "no doubt that anomalous excess heat is produced in these experiments."

>> Do you feel vindicated after all these years?

>> Martin Fleishman: I don't have any real need for vindication. I know what I've seen.

>> That was a pretty big smile on your face, though.

>> Martin Fleishman: [laughs] It's good. It's not bad. Certainly, it's good.

>> Now, the Pentagon is funding more experiments at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C. and at McCubry's lab in California. We wondered what Richard Garwin would think of the defense department's appraisal.

>> The experiments leave no doubt that anomalous excess heat is produced.

>> Richard Garwin: Well, that's a statement.

>> You just don't buy that?

>> Richard Garwin: Well, I am living proof that there's doubt. You know, they can say that there, that, excess heat is being produced, but they can't say there's no doubt. All they can say is they don't doubt, but I doubt.

>> If you ask me, is this going to have any impact on our energy policy, it's impossible to say because we don't fundamentally understand the process yet. But to say that we don't fundamentally understand the process, and that's why we're not going to study it is like saying I'm too sick to go to the doctor.

>> You know, I wonder how you feel about going public endorsing this phenomena on "60 Minutes" when maybe 90 percent, I'm guessing, of your colleagues think that it's crackpot science?

>> I certainly was among those 90 percent before I looked at the data, and I can see where they'll be very concerned when they see this piece. All I have to say is read the published re, results, talk to the scientists. Never let anybody else do your thinking for you.

>> There was one more scientist we wanted to find. A man who left America in disgrace and retired with his wife to the English countryside. Martin Fleishman, the man who announced cold fusion to the world, is hindered now by years, diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and maybe a little bitterness. At home, he pulled out an improved version of his experiment, something that he was working on when he was hounded out of science.

>> When you hold that in your hand, and you think back on what's happened these 20 years, what do you think?

>> Martin Fleishman: Wasted opportunity.

>> Wasted? Because it was discredited at the time?

>> He told us he has two regrets: calling the nuclear effect fusion, a name coined by a competitor.

>> Martin Fleishman: If you look at the cell with heavy wall -

>> And having that news conference, something he says the University of Utah wanted.

>> Now that you know that you're experiments have been replicated and, and improved upon in labs all around the world, I wonder, do you see a day when homes will be powered by these cells, when cars will be powered by these cells?

>> Martin Fleishman: I think so. It, it won't take very long to implement this. [laughs] [inaudible] feel that I should take it [inaudible].

>> I'm getting you interested again?

>> Martin Fleishman: Yes. [laughs]

>> The potential is exciting?

>> Martin Fleishman: The potential is exciting, yes. [ watch ticking ] * ^M00:12:22