Cold fusion redux

(Via Jerry Pournelle)

WARNING: GEEK ALERT

Those of you with long memories for scientific esoterica may remember Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann and their palladium electrodes immersed in a bath heavy water–it was called “cold fusion”. When scientists were unable to reproduce the experiment, Pons and Fleischmann were labeled a number of things; none complimentary.

But according to the IEEE, there may be something to it after all. The research has been kept alive by the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center. (Not too surprising if you consider that sea water, which the Navy has access to in some abundance, is an excellent source of “heavy water”. (Heavy water is water with the usual hydrogen atom replaced by deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.))

I guess we’ll have to wait for further developments. Maybe we can tell China and the sheikhs to take a hike.