This is a little bit off topic, because it looks back rather than looking forward, but it's a great piece of history.
I think few people realise that the UK's Financial Times newspaper was actually FIRST to break the cold fusion story back in '89 because MartinF gave Clive Cookson (the author and an acquaintance) an exclusive in advance of the Utah press conference. This meant the FT was thus able to break the story 'on same the day'.
Why was that? Fleischmann and Clive's Professor father were friends and colleagues in the Chemistry department at Southampton. This is the tale..pasted in here as it might be paywalled.
https://www.ft.com/content/4f1…6e-11e1-ac5f-00144feab49a
Clive Cookson AUGUST 17 2012
OBITUARY. -The death early this month of the electrochemist Martin Fleischmann at the age of 85 stirred memories of the “cold fusion” affair 23 years ago – and my role in reporting it.
The claim by Fleischmann and his scientific partner Stanley Pons to have achieved nuclear fusion in a simple electrochemical cell on their lab bench caused a sensation. If confirmed, the discovery could have led to unlimited clean power. Until then, fusion – the reaction that powers the sun and the H-bomb – had been the province of multi-million-pound research reactors unlikely to produce commercial power for another 50 years.
Unfortunately, cold fusion turned out to be an unpredictable and uncontrollable phenomenon at best, and at worst an illusion. It is no longer mentioned in polite scientific society – although, rebadged as “low energy nuclear reaction” or LENR, it remains under investigation at several labs around the world, from Italy and Japan to the US. Usually, a pair of inventors making such an extraordinary claim would be dismissed as deluded crackpots – but the world paid attention to Fleischmann and Pons because they were respected professors with excellent records in chemistry research.
I knew Fleischmann, then aged 62, as a colleague of my father, Richard Cookson. Both had been chemistry professors at Southampton University. On Palm Sunday 1989, soon after I had joined the FT, Fleischmann phoned from the US and breathlessly asked to speak to me in confidence. He wanted advice about how to reveal to the world what he believed would be one of the biggest research breakthroughs of the century. He was both excited and upset, because the University of Utah, where he was working on cold fusion with Pons, wanted to hold a press conference in five days’ time to announce their breakthrough. Fleischmann, on the other hand, felt the press conference would be premature, because they hadn’t yet submitted their work to a peer-reviewed journal, the conventional means of disseminating research.
I advised him to resist the pressure, but on Tuesday he called again to tell me that he had failed. The university was apparently motivated by patent concerns and rumours that a researcher at Brigham Young University had made a similar discovery, so there would be a press conference two days later, on Thursday. I could not fly to Salt Lake City for the occasion, so Fleischmann offered to give me the information in advance, under embargo, so that the FT could publish it on Friday, like other newspapers. Then I realised that the FT, unlike its competitors, does not come out on Good Friday. So I persuaded Martin to let me publish the story in Thursday’s paper, on the grounds that cool, calm coverage in the FT would help to set the tone for the press conference later that day. He agreed and faxed over some technical information, including a diagram of the Utah apparatus, where fusion had apparently taken place between deuterium (heavy hydrogen) atoms absorbed in a palladium electrode. He also accepted that a story with such sensational implications – and no peer review – required third-party endorsement. So he put me in touch with Mick Lomer, head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s fusion lab, who knew of the Utah experiment and gave me a short statement that his lab was taking it seriously and would try to reproduce the experiment. The scoop duly appeared in the FT, with a front page story and more inside the paper.
The worldwide scientific frenzy lasted a few months but died away as other labs failed to get positive results or found cold fusion too capricious to pursue. Fleischmann and Pons carried on for several years, with funding from the Japanese auto giant Toyota, but even they could not tame cold fusion.
Today LENR – cold fusion – remains mysterious. No one knows whether hydrogen nuclei can really fuse in an electrochemical cell, whether another nuclear process is taking place or whether any excess heat is an experimental artefact. Some big US companies and government agencies are still following the field. For instance, a new report by Boeing for Nasa, includes LENR among the options for powering a future generation of “ultra green aircraft”. But no commercial LENR device has yet been demonstrated in public.
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