BOSTON, TEDxBoston Planetary Stewardship Event — On November 13, Dr. Frank Ling, Chief Scientist for Anthropocene Institute, addressed the audience at the Planetary Stewardship Event at TEDxBoston. Ling began with a series of hypothetical questions: “What if I told you that you could have a carbon-free energy source that was easily manufacturable and widely distributed, enabling humanity to restore our climate? And what if I told you that there was a clean energy technology that could be the ultimate source of safe and reliable power? It would provide virtually unlimited energy, be radiation-less and pollution-free. And what if I told you that we could do all this with a little bit of metal and some hydrogen and that this device would be the size of a microwave, something that could power your home, your car and eventually your aircraft? And that this is also scalable by stacking these together? This would give us industrial-scale heat for chemical processing and steel processing,” he said.

Ling noted that these are not wild assertions. Instead, this is the promise of cold fusion, a technology that could be key to meeting the goal of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 and solve the scalability issues of renewables and storage. “We need to go beyond net zero, and we need new technologies to get there,” he said. “Cold fusion could be a shortcut to our climate crisis.”

He went on to explain how cold fusion, also known as LENR and solid-state fusion, works. “Unlike experimental fusion that seeks to replicate the temperatures on the sun, cold fusion makes energy at room temperatures and pressures. And unlike nuclear power plants, cold fusion does not require radioactive elements like uranium. Fukushima-style meltdowns will not be possible,” he said.

The topic of Ling’s talk may come as a surprise because he lives in Japan and has family there. It’s the only country that has experienced both a nuclear attack and a nuclear disaster, so many Japanese are very apprehensive. Still, nuclear power accounts for 6% of Japan’s energy mix. Ling noted that the energy situation in Japan is precarious because the country gets over 94% of its fuel from abroad, a situation that is made more insecure due to recent geopolitical tensions. Ling lauded the Japanese Prime Minister’s call to resume operation of idled nuclear power plants instead of importing fossil fuels.

He then discussed the history of cold fusion: its discovery by Pons and Fleishmann at the University of Utah, subsequent discrediting, and current resurgence. Despite the controversy, Nobel Prize winners, leading research scientists from around the world, and Google have been pursuing cold fusion and reporting similar results to those of Pons and Fleischmann. “The momentum has been building,” he said. “There are even research scientists here at MIT, along with others around the country in the EU, and Japan, who have been pursuing this. In 2015, Google assembled a consortium of scientists from different universities, and they had a second look at the cold fusion phenomena. This was published in the journal Nature, and although they did not detect this phenomenon, they were able to show that this research could overcome the reputation trap. This led to further research around the country. At the same time, NASA has been actively involved under the title of lattice confinement fusion. The space agency has been looking for alternative power sources to fuel long-distance space travel.”

Curiosity in the field continues to strengthen, and so does funding. The U.S. Department of Energy through its ARPA-E program announced a $10 million funding opportunity for LENR. More young scientists are joining the field. In the last two years, he noted, $5 billion in funding has flowed into hot fusion. Ling called for more funding for cold fusion, due to its tremendous potential.

He ended with a question, “Would you take a job that could damage your reputation, make you shunned by your colleagues, and perhaps ruin your career? That's the risk I took six years ago, when I joined the Anthropocene Institute. I was told by some of my friends and colleagues that cold fusion was risky business in that I will be associating myself with fraudsters. But as you've seen, legitimate and high-quality work has been done. History shows us that the innovations we see right now, from the car to the airplane to the Internet, were thought to be impossible. And the people who led their introduction often had to battle naysayers. The same thing could be said of cold fusion. ..So perhaps, cold fusion can one day be the power that enables us to power our cities, our factories, and maybe even our state space stations.”