The device Lewis Larsen plans to build is about the size of a microwave oven. He figures it will sell for less than a conventional home furnace. The fuel—small amounts of lithium and hydrogen—will be cheaper too. Two of these devices, he says, could supply all the heat and electricity needs of a 2,500-3,000-square-foot single-family home without generating greenhouse gases, dangerous radiation, or nuclear waste, reducing gas heating costs by 90 percent and electric costs by 10 to 20 percent.
In 1989, University of Utah chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, racing against competing researchers at Brigham Young University, bypassed the normal scientific review process and held a press conference to announce that they’d found a clean, accessible, inexpensive new way to produce energy—cold fusion. Fleischmann and Pons became overnight celebrities, subject to death threats and protected by bodyguards. A breathless media declared an energy revolution. But the honeymoon was short-lived.
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Detractors objected on several fronts: The electrolysis couldn’t possibly be powerful enough to cause fusion; the measurements of helium and excess heat must’ve been the result of experimental error. And where was the neutron radiation that would be an expected by-product of fusion?
Scientists all over the world tried and failed to duplicate Fleischmann and Pons’s results. Eight of the nine members of an authoritative American Physical Society review panel rejected their data. Fleischmann and Pons themselves were derided as incompetent, fraudulent, or both. Cold fusion research largely went underground: most mainstream scientists shunned it as too risky, too difficult to fund, or just plain fantastical.
In the 90s Larsen ran a technology consulting firm. While exploring alternative energy opportunities for a client, he came across the work of George Miley, a professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign who’s been studying ways to build on Fleischmann-Pons—experimenting with various metal alloys in order to improve the consistency and efficiency of heat production in heavy-water electrolysis. Recalling his astrophysics studies, Larsen decided that this line of research could lead to a new source of cheap, clean energy. “I thought it was doable,” Larsen says. “I was reasonably confident I could figure it out, and if we could do this, we could make a big difference.” He took a gamble, leaving the consulting firm to devote himself to exploring LENRs.
Larsen believes that Fleischmann and Pons “had the right data but the wrong interpretation. There’s no compelling evidence for fusion in these systems. We use established, accepted physics, and the standard model of the weak nuclear interaction” rather than fusion to explain the phenomenon.
Larsen’s fears aren’t unique. Some LENR advocates suspect that the 2004 murder of science writer Eugene Mallove was motivated by his work in championing the field. In the January 29, 2010, issue of the LENR-centric online magazine New Energy Times, for instance, editor Steven Krivit calls Mallove LENR’s “most outspoken proponent” and points out that Mallove was killed just as the Department of Energy was beginning a new review of the evidence for LENR. “The initial speculation, that Mallove walked into his parents’ house in Connecticut and startled burglars, doesn’t work for several reasons,” Krivit writes. He later asserts that “Mallove was not lacking for enemies” but doesn’t finger anyone in particular. (Recently a judge in Connecticut found probable cause to prosecute a suspect whose motive appears related to the eviction of his family from a house owned by Mallove’s family.)
