This attempt by NASA to connect a return to the Moon to hot fusion research is unlikely to impress a financially beleaguered U.S. Congress or deflect the plasma physics community from an interest in D + T as the most promising potential process. D + T research continues and is one of the most heavily funded programs in American science. The field has prestigious, academically entrenched, vested interests working on a "Manhattan Project" style breakthrough. MIT, Princeton, and other leading physics research centers have a perpetual federally funded research program and NASA is making an attempt to piggy back on this lobby. The potential for a fundamental advance in energy technology has made hot fusion research politically fundable over four decades. The New Paradigm: Cold Fusion Hydrogen and heavy hydrogen are absorbed by many metals in large amounts. Palladium absorbs up to 500 times its volume in hydrogen and the chemistry that takes place in its hydrogen loaded metal structure is the basis of a very specialized scientific literature. Work published in Nature in 1976, as well as elsewhere' ^outlined the quantum mechanics of how heavy hydrogen sometimes will fuse at room temperatures with catalytic action from muons. Dr. Jones from the Brigham Young University in Utah had led teams doing key work on this phenomenum. Muon catalyzed fusion was contemplated in theory as a trigger for laser implosion fusion [Ibid. 5]89; technology developed by KMS Fusion of Ann Arbor Michigan in the 1970s. This presaged other lines of thought on "cold" fusion. Dr. S. E. Jones' team at BYU and Fleischmann and Pons in their basement, followed these lines of research into the possibility of electro-catalytic fusion in Palladium. Both teams got positive results and went public with their data in 1989. The abstract from Dr. S. E. Jones paper in Nature is understated: [Ibid. 2] "When a current is passed through palladium or titanium electrodes immersed in an electrolyte of deuterated water and various metal salts, a small but significant flux of neutrons is detected. Fusion of deuterons within the metal lattice may be the explanation" Dr. Jones defended his work at the 1989 American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Princeton. Critics at this meeting, invoking "Occam's Razor," felt that variations in background cosmic radiation were a simpler explanation than fusion for the neutrons detected.100 Dr. Jones has continued to insist that his results are valid in letters to Nature and in other forums. Since the Fleischmann/Pons press conference about 100 labs around the world have reported some positive results on cold fusion. Of particular interest was an Italian lab, Frascati,108 which used titanium and gaseous cryogenic deuterium and detected neutrons. Teams from the University of Idaho and Los Alamos have reportedly tried the same approach with positive results.
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