Twenty years ago this week the American West appeared to once again be the site of a major breakthrough in nuclear science with a promise of cheap, clean energy to power the future.

Two scientists at the University of Utah, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced they had created fusion energy at room temperature in a test tube. They called it cold fusion. On March 23, 1989 soon after their discovery, instead of going through the traditional peer review and publishing their remarkable findings in scientific journals they pair announced the discovery in a press conference organized by the University of Utah.

Pons and Fleischmann claimed their fusion device -- a battery, an electrode made out of a metal called palladium, and a test tube filled with a form of hydrogen called deuterium or heavy water -- generated four times more energy then they put in. They concluded the reaction was a nuclear reaction not a chemical reaction and the next thing you knew the pair were on the cover of Time Magazine.

Without peer review and with the public excitement and hoopla, the scientific community reacted with skepticism. Other scientists could not reproduce their results and the pair made a few mistakes.

A committee convened by the Department of Energy concluded there was no convincing evidence.

They went from the toast of the world to the goats. Their reputations were ruined, their discovery disgraced, and cold fusion appeared to be a fantasy.

Except today, there remains a dedicated group of scientists who follow in the footsteps of Pons and Fleischmann. These scientists claim to have reproduced their cold fusion results and even improved on them.

They call their work the study of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions.

This week they gathered at the site of the original work, Salt Lake City for an American Chemistry Association conference commemorated the 20th anniversary of Pons and Fleischmann announcement, as reported in Scientific American.

The latest discoveries give new hope that cold fusion can tap a seemingly end energy source and solve the world’s greenhouse gas problem at an unbelievably low cost. But skepticism still reigns.

The Department of Energy said in a report last year the recent experiments “did not conclusively demonstrate the occurrence of cold fusion.”
But it recommended continued funding.

World scientists have been working for years to try to create a hot fusion reaction like that in the sun or triggered by a hydrogen bomb with no success. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested Lawrence Livermore Laboratory might be on the edge of successfully triggering and containing a reaction with lasers.

I followed the cold fusion mania of 1989 while covering the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls. I came away with a heavy bit of skepticism about how science and public relations interact.

But wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony if Pons and Fleischmann turn out to be right?