The Cold Fusion Files

Joseph Newman says he has a solution for California’s electricity crisis: a mechanical device that doubles the amount of energy that goes into it. But he’s having trouble getting anybody to listen. And there’s another hitch: Newman’s machine defies the laws of physics.

Then there is Dennis Lee, a New Jersey inventor who pitches a “free electricity” machine on the Internet. He gives visitors to his Web site information on how to buy a “dealership” for his products--plus an explanation for those eight fraud counts in Ventura County that once landed him in prison for three years.

As the continuing threat of power shortages plagues California, electrical alchemists are using the crisis to seek out new investment and interest in their largely discredited theories of energy generation.

“This tends to happen every time there is an energy crisis or a major new discovery,” said Paul Grant, an energy physics expert with the American Physical Society.

Indeed, the search for inexpensive, abundant energy is nothing new, having generated several hundred billion dollars in investment by governments and industrialists in the last 50 years.

The oil price spikes of the 1970s inspired the synfuel industry, but its efforts to transform coal into liquids proved too costly. Nuclear fusion has never lived up to its promise, despite billions in federal funding since the 1950s. Cold fusion was all the rage until scientists’ initial claims could not be replicated by other researchers.

Then there are inventors such as Newman and Lee, both of whom talk about their devices in almost messianic terms.

“I feel God has built me an army of people in California, the people who are getting hurt,” Newman said in an interview.

Both say grand conspiracies by government and oil interests are working clandestinely to block commercial application of their devices. And they couch their discussions and lectures in scientific terms.

In recent letters to state and utility officials, Newman said his “breakthrough is even more significant than the discovery of the relationship between magnetism and electricity.”

“It is on par with Einstein’s E = mc2,” the Scottsdale, Ariz., inventor told The Times. Invoking his own “mechanical unified field theory,” Newman said he can “convert mass into energy, by utilizing the magnetic field, without any radioactive byproducts.”

Scientists who have reviewed Newman’s claims are more than a little skeptical.

“Work has gone on for a century in magnetic fields, and there is nothing to support this,” said Roy Gould, a professor of engineering at Caltech in Pasadena.

“I know of no credible claims of extracting energy from the mass of a magnet in an electrical system.”

Under the microscope of scientific scrutiny, most of these “discoveries” turn out to be versions of the mythic perpetual motion machine or its modern counterpart, a cold fusion device, said Robert Park, a University of Maryland physicist and author of “Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud.”

In his book, published last year by Oxford University Press, Park says Newman probably believed he “had made a great discovery overlooked by everyone else” when he first started talking of his energy machine several decades ago.

But devices such as Newman’s fail to conform to the basic laws of thermodynamics, which deal with the conversion of heat to other forms of energy and, as Park puts it, represent “the pillars of modern science.”

In simple terms, these laws say, for example, that a ball can never bounce higher than the level from which it is dropped; moreover, because of heat and friction, it won’t even bounce as high.

Newman responds that his critics have never even tested his machine.

“It is like the time of Galileo, when they wouldn’t look through his telescope because they said it was witchcraft,” Newman said.

Yet, citing the laws of thermodynamics, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson blocked Newman’s effort to obtain a federal patent for his machine in 1985.

Certainly, the potential of some energy-generating ideas can be difficult to judge, even for well-informed experts.

Blacklight Power Inc. of Cranbury, N.J., has raised $20 million in private investments, according to the scientific journal Nature. Two large power companies--Conectiv Inc. of Wilmington, Del., and PacifiCorp of Portland, Ore.--are major investors.

Moreover, Blacklight Power has retained investment banker Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. in hopes of making a public stock offering.

Blacklight Power’s founder, Randell Mills, is a Harvard-trained medical doctor who claims to have developed breakthrough theories on the nature of hydrogen atoms in the late 1980s.

The company says it has “a new hydrogen chemical process that generates power, plasma (a hot ionized glowing gas) and a vast class of new compositions of matter.”

“Scientists reacted to Mills’ claim exactly as they had to Joe Newman,” Park wrote in “Voodoo Science.” “They ignored it.”

In essence, physicist Park says, Mills claims to extract energy from ordinary water.

Grant, also a physicist with the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, has criticized Blacklight Power’s science previously but now declines to discuss Mills’ research because of threatened legal action. Through a spokesman, Mills declined to talk to The Times.

Blacklight Power’s claims did capture the interest and, more important, investment dollars of the two power companies.

Conectiv spokesman Tim Brown described his company’s investment in Blacklight as “almost an R&D; issue for us.”

“There was a feeling that there was enough there to make a relatively modest investment,” Brown said. Any potential commercial application is still years away, he added.

PacifiCorp has given up its seat on the board of Blacklight Power and is no longer actively involved with the company, said PacifiCorp spokeswoman Jan Mitchell. But she did confirm that her company has invested at least $1 million in Blacklight Power.

Park calls this type of investment a “Pascal’s wager,” or a comparatively small investment in a project that “has little chance of working” but has “a huge payoff if it does.” He wrote that the odds of Mills’ theory working are zero.

Energy experts generally agree that there will be no instant panacea for California’s power woes, which they say are caused by a combination of electrical generating shortages, high natural gas prices and a troubled energy deregulation plan.

“Nobody is going to show up with a magic box with the energy output of a nuclear reactor,” said Alan Cocconi, president of AC Propulsion Inc. in San Dimas.

“And if they did,” he said, “they wouldn’t be talking about it until it is commercially viable.”

Change will be incremental and must follow basic principles that the scientific community has developed in the last century, said Cocconi, a Caltech-trained engineer whose company has won acclaim for its tZero electric sports car.

“We have to look for evolutionary changes . . . not revolutionary changes,” said Ake Almgren, chief executive of Capstone Turbine Corp., a Chatsworth builder of micro-generators for home and business use.

“If you are looking for a quick cure, the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.”

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* MORE ON POWER

Past Times stories on the state electricity crisis are available at https://www.latimes.com/power.

* DAVIS IN WASHINGTON

Gov. Gray Davis criticized the U.S. energy regulatory commission. A3