Heavy Watergate : The War against cold fusion | (2009)

On March 23, 1989, respected chemists, Dr. Stanley Pons and Dr. Martin Fleishman made an announcement that rocked the world of science.

Their tabletop experiments with heavy water, a renewable resource readily available in ocean water, yielded enormous amounts of heat energy. Appropriately named, “Cold Fusion,” this breakthrough challenged many basic scientific concepts.

In response, a group of powerful physicists, heavily reliant upon government funding for their hot fusion research, leveled an unprecedented smear campaign against Pons, Fleishman and the entire field of Cold Fusion science. Was the discovery of Fire From Water too good to be true? Or was it the discovery of the millennium?

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Cold fusion is a type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature, compared with temperatures in the millions of degrees required for "Hot Fusion".

Cold Fusion is the collective label for any apparatus that enables non-toxic and radiation-free nuclear reactions, based on low energy, whereby elements fuse together forming new elements, producing excess heat and energy in the process.

Cold fusion refers to a proposed nuclear fusion process of unknown mechanism offered to explain a group of disputed experimental results first reported by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. Cold fusion, under this definition, was first announced on March 23, 1989, when Fleischmann and Pons reported producing nuclear fusion in a tabletop experiment involving electrolysis of heavy water on a palladium (Pd) electrode.

They reported anomalous heat production ("excess heat") of a magnitude they asserted would defy explanation except in terms of nuclear processes. They further reported measuring small amounts of nuclear reaction byproducts, including neutrons and tritium. These reports raised hopes of a cheap and abundant source of energy.