Cold Fusion

The myths and mysteries behind one of science’s biggest mistakes

- Kathryn Hulick

This box wrapped in aluminum foil works miracles. Inside, hydrogen, nickel, and a secret ingredient nestle together. Heat these substances, and something amazing happens. The box produces a lot of extra heat. And that heat can easily be turned into electricity. It’s a power plant small enough, cheap enough, and safe enough to sit on the dining room table.

The world’s energy woes are over.

Or are they?

Italian inventor Andrea Rossi has been promising exactly such a box for years. He calls it the Energy Catalyzer, or E-Cat for short. He has yet to prove that it can produce useful energy. Still, something strange seems to be going on inside the E-Cat and similar devices. The mystery began with a bang (literally) many years ago.

An Unexpected Explosion

When Stanley Pons arrived at his lab one morning in 1989, something was wrong. He’d left a small glass device called an electrolytic cell running overnight. The device had exploded. Pons, a chemist at the University of Utah, and his collaborator, Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in England, thought they knew what had happened. They had been testing a potential new method for fusing atoms together. They hoped it might lead to a new and exciting source of energy. They called it cold fusion.

Fusion is a nuclear reaction, meaning that it alters an atom’s nucleus. The nucleus sits in the center of an atom. The number of protons and neutrons there define what type of atom it is—hydrogen, or oxygen, or gold, for example. But sometimes, a nuclear reaction knocks protons or neutrons out of a nucleus (called fission) or jams new ones in (called fusion). Both reactions change one type of atom into another.