Cold Fusion

The recent electoral success of the Greens will accelerate the phasing out of nuclear power in Germany. The search for new energy sources is being intensified. I should admit that Freiburg's population is stuck between a rock and a hard place. So far, opposition to wind energy plants is considerable, with one convincing argument being that the rotating blades may kill bats during their night flights. However, this is a trumped-up assertion, for the real reason is that nobody likes the technical asparagus on top of the Black Forest and certainly not in his/her backyard.

I read the other day that Dane County's manure digester is ready to provide electricity. This certainly works if there are enough cows or pigs to deliver the raw material. 





What does not work is Cold Fusion, a flaw that Dogbert has lately re-invented as an energy source.

TIME, the cover of May 8, 1989

I still remember. In the spring of '89, Carlo Rubbia (later Nobel Prize winner and my Director-General) caught me in a hallway at CERN, saying: "Look what Fleischman and Pons do in the States, and we are all sleeping here." I gulped and later provided him and other teams at CERN with neutron counters, so that my Group could hardly fulfill its radiation protection tasks at the Lab. 

Yes, even Cold Fusion, if it works, will create radiation! To make a long story short, a CERN spokesman said that "essentially all" attempts in Western Europe to reproduce the results had failed (Wikipedia). This means that Cold Fusion did not, and I add will not work.

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