Is the Dream of Cold Fusion Still a Possibility?

Back in March 1989, at a press conference in Salt Lake City, scientists Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of Great Britain’s University of Southampton made a startling announcement. The researchers had managed to fuse the atomic nuclei of a hydrogen isotope to create helium — the same sort of process that powers the sun — and they’d been able to do it at room temperature, without putting in more energy than the process produced, as this Wired retrospective from 2009 details.

The research raised hopes of a new source of abundant energy that would replace fossil fuels and conventional nuclear power, as a CBS News story from that time reported. But other researchers who tried to duplicate the experiments were unable to reproduce…