No other scientific endeavour has consumed so much talent, so much cash and so many years of sustained effort as the race to harness the power that makes the Sun shine. Billions of pounds, (and dollars, roubles and yen), more than four decades of research and the careers of thousands of physicists have been expended on the search for a nuclear reactor that will generate limitless power from the fusion of hydrogen atoms.
There are grey-haired professors with lined faces still poring intently over the equations they first looked at eagerly with bright young eyes in the 1940s and 1950s. They will go into retirement with their dreams of cheap, safe power from fusion still years in the future. For the obstacles in their paths are as formidable now as ever.
Fusion is the process taking place in the Sun's core where, at temperatures of millions of degrees, hydrogen atoms are compressed together by elemental forces to form helium and a massive outpouring of energy in the thermonuclear reaction of the hydrogen bomb.
It is not difficult, then, to imagine how people who have invested their talent and their lives in the quest to tame such forces are likely to react when told that fusion is possible at room temperature, and in a jam jar.
The scientific world was astounded when, in March 1989, Professor Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University and his former student, Professor Stanley Pons of the University of Utah, held a press conference at which they jointly announced the discovery of 'cold fusion' -- the production of usable amounts of energy by what seemed to be a nuclear process occurring in a jar of water at room temperature.
Fleischmann and Pons told an incredulous press conference that they had passed an electric current through a pair of electrodes made of precious metals -- one platinum, the other palladium -- immersed in a glass jar of heavy water in which was dissolved some lithium salts. This very simple set-up was claimed to produce heat energy between four and ten times greater than the electrical energy they were putting in. No purely chemical reaction could produce a result of such magnitude so, said the scientists, it must be nuclear fusion.
Both scientists are distinguished in their field, that of electro-chemistry. But in making their press announcement they were breaking with the usual tradition of announcing major scientific discoveries of this sort. The usual process is one of submitting an article to Nature magazine which in turn would submit it to qualified referees. If the two chemists' scientific peers found the paper acceptable, Nature would publish it, they would be recognised as having priority in the discovery and -- all being well -- research cash would be forthcoming both to replicate their results and conduct further research.
But the two scientists perceived some difficulties. First, their paper would not be scrutinised by their exact peers because the discovery was unknown territory to electrochemists and indeed everyone else. It would probably be examined mainly by nuclear physicists -- the men who had grown grey in the service of 'hot' fusion. This would be like asking Swift's 'Big Endians' to comment objectively on the work of 'Little Endians'. It is not that 'hot' fusion physicists could not be trusted to be impartial, or were incapable of accepting experimental facts, but rather that they would be coming from a research background that would naturally give them a quite different perspective.
Despite the experimental difficulties it was not long before confirmations were reported. First to report in were Texas A & M University, who reported excess energy and Brigham Young University who found both excess heat and measurable neutron flow. Professor Steve Jones of BYU said his team had actually been producing similar results since 1985, but that the power outputs obtained has been microscopically small, too small in fact to be useful as a power source.
One month after the announcement the first support from a major research institute came with the announcement by professor Robert Huggins of California's Stanford University that he had duplicated the Fleischmann-Pons cell against a control cell containing ordinary water, and had obtained 50 per cent more energy as heat from the fusion cell than was put in as electricity. Huggins gained extra column inches because he had placed his two reaction vessels in a red plastic picnic cool-box to keep their temperature constant. This kitchen-table flavour to the experiment added even further to the growing discomfort of hot fusion experts, with their billion-dollar research machines.
