Foundation Throws Cold Water on Cold Fusion

Almost nine years after two chemists first claimed to have produced nuclear fusion in a test tube, the University of Utah Research Foundation has abandoned its pursuit of patents for the work.

Japan spent $20 million trying to make cold fusion work, but gave up last year. The U.S. Patent Office has continued to reject cold-fusion patent applications.

Utah Research Vice President Richard Koehn said March 9 that the foundation no longer will pursue patents based on the experiments of chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.

At a March 23, 1989, news conference, the pair claimed that their tabletop device was producing heat that could only be explained by nuclear reactions. That triggered a worldwide scramble to reproduce the experiment.

Most researchers abandoned the effort when they could not reproduce the results or find supporting evidence.

Pons and Fleischmann left the university within two years, and the university eventually transferred the patent rights to a private company, ENECO. The university was forced to seek another licensee when ENECO returned the rights but received no viable offers. Pons and Fleischmann had the option to take up the fight themselves, but the university never heard from them.