FUTURE PROSPECTS IN ENERGY*

by

Michael G. Zey

Before 1973, most Westerners gave little thought to energy. Issues such as the overall availability of energy and the form that energy would take were considered the domain of policy makers and technocrats, but a series of war and political upheavals in the Mideast and various actions by the OPEC cartel, including oil embargoes, and price increases changed all that. Confronted by long lines at the gas pumps and rising prices, consumers no longer considered themselves immune from the geopolitics of world energy production.

Most Westerners instinctively suspect that over the next two decades nations will be required to make fundamental decisions about how much energy we will need and how we will produce or acquire this energy. As we shall see, European and Asian countries have already registered an increased awareness of the swift changes in the supply of and demand for energy, and recently the U.S policy making establishment has also undergone a consciousness-raising over the need for changes in energy policy.

This sea change in our perspective on energy will be dictated by some unpleasant realities regarding the supply of traditional fuel sources. We know that we can not rely on the world's oil supply to fuel our macroindustrial machine. The Earth at most holds an estimated 1744 trillion barrels of oil, which would fill Lake Erie one and a half times. Based on current usage rates, we will run out of this resource in seventy-five years. In short, most of the children born in 1992 will live to see the oil supply diminish and then entirely dry up and will spend the latter parts of their lives dealing with this crisis. Conservation may extend this resource somewhat, but over the long run, oil will not be fueling our economy.

Natural gas has similar upper limits. According to Princeton energy analyst Robert Williams, the planet has perhaps a fifty- to one hundred year supply of natural gas. And while many have portrayed coal as the ultimate energy panacea, if all the available coal was applied to the economic system, its supply would last at most for 200 years.

On a global and national level, companies, industries, and governments are beginning to realize that these fuels must be replaced if the world is to have any of hope of achieving long-term economic growth. Indicative of this adjustment is the growing trend toward electrification of the industrial and public power grid. Electrification is specifically defined as the trend toward the use of electricity, regardless of its source, and away from the direct burning of fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal.

Electricity increasingly plays a major role in the energy grid. Since 1973, the percentage of all U.S. energy consumption represented by electricity use has grown dramatically. All indications are that it will continue to grow over the next two decades. In 1960, 19 percent of all energy was produced from electricity; in 1970, 24 percent; in 1990, 36 percent; and by the year 2010, according to the Energy Information Administration, electricity will account for 40 percent of total energy consumption.

As an example of the megagrowth of electrical production over the last three decades, consider that the global output for all fuel sources in 1958 did not equal the electricity generated in 1991 just by nuclear power plants. Nuclear only represents about one-fifth of all electricity production.

------------------*REPRINTED FROM: Michael G. Zey, Seizing the Future. (Simon and Schuster: New York, 1994).

Chapter 2, pp. 67-80.1

In absolute terms, electricity demand in the United States is up 58 percent since 1973, with all three sectors of the economy--residential, commercial, and industrial--weighing is as major electricity consumers. American industry especially has demonstrated that it needs to replace fossil-fueled production processes with electrical power. In the late 1980s, as the world and U.S. economy rebounded from the recessionary 1970s, industries such as steel, aluminum, and chemicals, all electricity-intensive industries, underwent a dramatic resurgence. As they expanded, they sharply boosted their demand for electricity.

What the public has not been told is that continued economic growth, even at the current tame 2 to 3 percent national product (GNP) growth rate, will require much more electric generating capacity than the United States or the world can presently provide. The president's National Energy Strategy projects that even if society endeavors to conserve fuel and restrict demand, it will still require 190,000 to 275,000 megawatts of additional generating capacity to fuel economic growth.

Within the context of the evolving Macroindustrial Era,+ even these estimates are conservative. Such hyperprogress programs as supertrains and smart roads demand an ever-greater supply of power. Significantly greater amounts of electricity will be required to sustain economic growth. According to the Department of Energy, the country will have to increase its generating capacity by almost 40 percent by the year 2010, an amount of energy equivalent to the output of 250 large coal or nuclear power plants. If old plants are dismantled as scheduled by 2030, the need for new plants will most definitely skyrocket.

Conservation will not solve society's energy needs. These projections on global energy needs prove that no matter how well we insulate our houses or how carefully we recycle spent energy and waste, we will not escape the responsibility of constructing a reliable and productive energy grid. We cannot enjoy economic growth and raise our standard of living without dedicating ourselves to building a new generation of power plants. According to the U.S. Council for Energy Awareness, "Simply stated, if this [economic] trend continues, the U.S. would need more new electric generating capacity than is now recognized."

In spite of the monumental effort that will be required to meet such demand, there is one bright spot. The overall trend in the price of electricity production is downward. In fact, since 1984, real prices of electricity have fallen 24 percent, a downward trend experts believe will continue.

Nuclear Power: The Pendulum Swings Back

Policymakers agree that the coming era's energy source must be readily available, easy to produce, relatively cheap, and to the extent possible, immune to international political and military developments. It is the one of the great ironies of technological history that in this debate the pendulum of scientific opinion is swinging back in the direction of nuclear power.

Perhaps no energy source has been more the focus of controversy than nuclear power. Once heralded as the savior of humanity and the pathway to cheap energy, since the 1979 near disaster at the Three Mile Island plant, this energy source has been the object of media derision and public apprehension. Ironically, in spite of such controversies, the percentage of electrical energy supplied by nuclear plants, in the United States and throughout the globe, has risen dramatically during this period.

_____________________+This is the term used by the author to refer to the emerging future.

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The Macroindustrial Era requires a fuel source that deliver the massive and abundant energy supply that nuclear power can provide. In March 1991, several governments, including Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium, reaffirmed their belief that nuclear power, if developed in conditions of "optimum safety, ensuring the best possible protection both for populations and for the environment," was the energy of choice. They agreed to participate jointly in the development of new, safer reactors.

Other countries, sensing the transition into a new era of supergrowth and hyperprogress, do not hesitate to use nuclear power to drive their electrical apparatus. For instance, France derives 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear sources; Belgium, 61 percent; Sweden, 45 percent; West Germany, 40 percent; and Japan, 27 percent. In fact, France has become a net exporter of energy. Germany, a major purchaser of France's energy, now desires to receive its own nuclear program.

Taiwan, Korea, and Japan are building their economic futures on a sound nuclear base. Japan, which as recently as 1990 enjoyed a 5.6 percent rise in GNP, seems to be in the vanguard of implementation of nuclear power, planning to construct a total of forty new plants over the next few decades. Using American technology, Japan is building the world's first next-generation nuclear plants. The two units, which will be built in less than half the time the most recent U.S. plants required, are expected to be operating by 1997. South Korea has also begun construction on two nuclear units based on a state-of-the-art U.S. design.

Ex-President Bush's energy policy unveiled in June 1991 explicitly made nuclear power a major focus of the United States' growth-oriented energy program. A combination of next-generation reactors and a new dedication to industry standardization will help the United States develop a robust nuclear industry that will underwrite its transition into the macroindustrial era.

The United States currently seems to favor the advanced light water reactor (ALWR) in its various permutations as the next generation of nuclear plant. The United States already utilizes light water reactors, such as the one located at Indian Point, New York. In all such plants, regular water serves as a coolant for the reactor shell.

ALWRs are evolutionary: They incorporate into their design several decades worth of accumulated knowledge about nuclear power. These new plants will employ technological improvements like instrumentation and control system that use state-of-the-art multiplexed/fiber optics, superior fuel and reactor core designs, dramatically improved safety systems, and a host of design and structural changes that enhance maintenance and operation of these advanced reactor.

The smaller-sized ALWRs will be relatively simple to construct, maintain, and operate. They also rely on so-called passive safety features, such as cooling water which depends on gravity instead of pumps for its delivery to the reactor shell. such features require a decreased amount of pipe, control cable, valves, and pumps. The fewer the parts, it is believed, the less chance of mishap.

These plants will be standardized. According to the Nuclear Power Oversight Committee, for nuclear power to succeed and remain safe there must be a "comprehensive commitment to standardization." They insist that the United States should follow the French example and build nuclear power plants to standard designs. Because engineers and technicians would be familiarized with one basic design technology, they would find such standardized plants simpler to operate. Inspectors, having full knowledge of these plants, would be better able to evaluate whether a given plant is operating safely.

The European Community will not be left behind in the nuclear power research and development race. It has marshaled its collective research and economic forces to develop the conceptual design for the European Fast Reactor (EFR), a technology that will extract sixty times more energy from a given amount of uranium than other types of reactors. Plus, they use the more abundant plutonium as fuel. In

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addition, the reactors breed even more plutonium by converting the uranium that is left after the fuel has been converted.

Japan is also building a fast-breeder reactor. In 1992, France sent Japan the first of thirty shipments of plutonium by sea to help fuel Japan's first breeder reactor. Ironically, the United States abandoned this high-potential power source in the 1970's in an effort to prevent the proliferation of bomb-grade material. Japanese officials say that the United States will eventually regret not taking a longer-range vision regarding the breeder reactor. Japan seems unfazed that countries such as Great Britain are bowing to political pressures to eliminate their breeder reactor programs. According to the Japanese foreign ministry, "Were Japan to be the only nation working in this area, [it] would view its responsibility as even greater and redouble its efforts to contribute to the international community through technological development."

The evidence is clear. Many countries, such as France and Japan, are pinning their hopes for economic growth on nuclear power as a reliable energy source. However, countries are favoring nuclear power not only because it is efficient, but because it is a nonpolluting, environmentally clean alternative to coal and petroleum. Ironically, the United States, having restrained nuclear power development at the behest of the environmentalists and the public they have so thoroughly unnerve, may become the world's number one polluter by increasing its dependency on coal and oil.

Recognizing that nuclear power has had some positive impact on the environment, some environmentalists, long the arch-opponents of nuclear power, have recently altered their position. For instance, since the first oil embargo of 1973, by turning to nuclear power the world has significantly reduced total global emission levels of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide (thought to cause acid rain), and nitrogen oxides, which contribute to urban smog and acid rain. Ample evidence exists that countries that depend on nuclear energy, like Spain, France, and South Korea, are among the lowest producers per capita of carbon dioxide.

In an astounding about-face, the Club of Rome stated in 1990 that coal and oil are "probably more dangerous to society, because of the carbon dioxide they produce.... There are, therefore, strong arguments for keeping the nuclear option open."

Some fears about disposing of nuclear waste should be allayed by advances in biotechnology. Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey have identified several strains of bacteria that may help clean up radio-active uranium. These microbes reduce uranium to a precipitate, a concentrated form that can easily be disposed of or recycled.

In the Macroindustrial Era, national strength will largely be a function of a country's economic growth patterns, which in turn will be determined by a society's access to a cheap and abundant energy supply. Unless it embarks immediately on an aggressive program of new plant construction, the United States will not be able to support more than a minimal growth pattern, in the range of an annual 2 to 3 percent GNP increase. Even these increases will only be possible because many nuclear and other power plants contracted for before 1979 came on line in the 1980s. These plants allow the United States to maintain a fairly robust basedload energy system, the main power plants that run twenty four hours a day and provide the major share of energy to industry and cities.

At the end of the century, however, the United States will find itself facing energy shortages, unable to embark upon and support the macroengineering feats, such as supertrain technology, that require large outlays of energy. President Bush's 1991 energy plan reflected such concerns and called for development of nuclear power and offshore drilling. However, well-organized opposition made some of the proposed program politically risky. During the 1992 election, all major candidates maintained an eerie silence regarding the disturbing possibilities of impending energy shortfalls in the coming years, nor would any politician publicly discuss the need for hundreds of new power plants.

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Nonetheless, there are signs that the political sectors in the United States will respond to the nation's energy needs. In 1992, the energy bills fashioned by the House and Senate were overwhelmingly pronuclear, sharply reducing the waiting period for approval and construction of plants. According to Marvin Fertel of the U.S. Council for Energy Awareness, "This was actually a referendum on 'are you going to foreclose the option, or are you going to allow the option to continue.' The support was just overwhelming. Politically its looking better than it has in a decade." The legislation recognized that the next generations of reactors will be of standardized design and operation.

I interviewed Congressman Dick Zimmer in early 1993 on a number of technology issues, including the prospects for nuclear power in the Unites States. Zimmer, who sits on the key Science, Space, and Technology Committee, a conduit for information on energy issues, feels that although energy prices are still cheap, "I think we should look at all sources, including nuclear ... it should compete with all other forms of energy on an equal footing."

Barring resistance from the Clinton Administration, nuclear power plant construction may enjoy a revival. According to Zimmer, "We somewhat streamlined the licensing requirements so there won't be a separate license required to begin operation if the design is the same as originally proposed and approved ... I voted for that streamlining because there are plenty of safeguards." He suggests that with the new energy bill "it may be that there will be a revival of nuclear power."

Over the next five or ten years, only about five or six nuclear plants are scheduled to be built. If the United States wants to grow economically, it must quickly embark on plant construction, especially because it takes about ten years between the initial planning of a plant and its ultimate operation.

Industries of all types already sense the imminent shortfall in the ability of the utilities to deliver energy. To compensate for this deficiency, big companies are building their own power plants. According to Fertel, "We're seeing a change from where almost every kilowatthour you had in this country came from an electric utility. While at least for the next decade the great preponderance of electricity will come from utilities, a significant portion of new electricity will come from non-utilities."

Of course, DuPont and other mammoth industrial companies do not have the know-how to bring on-line a nuclear reactor. Hence, the power plants they privately build are generally powered by gas. Ironically, since these plants are private, the companies are exempt from the public service hearing process. Needing only to secure such documents as environmental permits, they can go on-line quicker.

The Unites States realizes that implementing a nuclear power program is contingent on its acceptance by the American public, which will be forthcoming only when Americans are convinced that nuclear fission is safe energy.

According to recent polls by the United States Council of Energy Awareness, American attitudes toward nuclear power are laden with contradictions. When asked which source of energy the United States should rely on most over the next ten years, fully 40 percent of the respondents claimed that we should go nuclear. (Oil was a weak runner up with 25 percent; coal, 22 percent.) When asked if we should build more nuclear power plants to generate this electricity, 52 percent said no; 40 percent, yes. Such polls indicate a conflicting attitude toward technology. People desire the benefits of growth, but fear the risks involved in acquiring such benefits.

The Macroindustrial Era is arriving, and a society without a firm energy base will rapidly devalue into a second-or third-class nation. The lurking danger for the United States and other nations if they forestall the development of a viable energy grid is that they will wait too long to begin construction of twenty-first-century power plants. Then, confronted with demand they cannot meet, they may turn to familiar technologies that can be quickly implemented. Many of these, however, such as coal and gas plants, increase our dependency on polluting and often inaccessible first resources.

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FUSION POWER: FUELING THE MACROINDUSTRIAL ERA

In spite of its benefits, many see nuclear fission as a transitional energy source. By the middle of the text century, we should have at our disposal a form of energy that will dwarf the capabilities of even fastbreeder nuclear power plants.

When science finally cracks the knowledge and technological barriers that so far have prevented fusion from becoming the energy source of choice, the Macroindustrial Era will finally have the power necessary to fuel its factories fully, its spaceships, and ultimately the entire society itself.

In principle, fusion power is the opposite of fission. Fission is based on the splitting of the nuclei of heavy atoms, like uranium, in two. In fusion, the nuclei of very light atoms, like hydrogen, are forced together to make a single atom. The sun is a primary example of fusion power generation. Here the gravitational strength of the sun forces heavy hydrogen (deuterium) atoms to fuse to make helium. This reaction releases heat, light, and neutrons.

At the JET (Joint European Torus) fusion lab in Culham, England, the first successful breakthroughs occurred at the end of 1991. The JET fusion experiment combined two forms of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, which when fused form one helium nucleus. In this process, an extra neutron, a subatomic particle, is hurtled away, carrying energy with it.

In theory, the mass of extra neutrons released by fusion would heat a surrounding "blanket" and boil water, which would in turn power a generator. Instead of employing wood, coal, or petroleum to run power generators, we would theoretically use as our basic fuel anything that contained a basic element like hydrogen; for instance, water.

What keeps scientists chasing down this nuclear Holy Grail is the sheer energy potential of fusion reactions. The energy produced from fusion would be more than 10 million times more efficient than that generated by coal and 600 times more efficient than present nuclear power stations, without the pollution of fossil fuels.

The reactor, also, would be inherently safe. Any operating problem would result in an almost immediate halt to the reaction, since the quantity of fuel within the reactor can only operate for a few tenths of a second. In other words, any problem would be related only to the minute amount of fuel in the reactor at a given time. Also, fusion creates no radioactive by-products.

The current stumbling block is the difficulty in effecting reactor conditions that enable more useful energy to be created than that which is put in. To get this atom to fuse, incredibly hot temperatures of 200 million degrees centigrade must be achieved. Throughout the late seventies and eighties, many reactors were getting close to the break-even point at which they could generate some energy from the fusion.

However, in November 1991, at the JET lab, director Paul-Henri Rebut said that they achieved fusion for two seconds and produced about 1.7 megawatts of power for nearly a second. According to Rebut, "This is the first time that a significant amount of power has been obtained from controlled nuclear fusion reactions." He claimed that it was "clearly a major step forward in the development of fusion as a new source of energy." This breakthrough currently propels JET and therefore Europe way ahead of the American Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor in Princeton, New Jersey, and the Japanese JT60 reactor. The leaders at JET envision building an experimental station that will produce 1000 megawatts of power.

However, many believe that Princeton's Tokamak will be the site of the real breakthrough. It is here that physicists will fire up an experimental fusion reaction that could produce more energy output

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than input for significantly longer periods of time. By 1994, the Princeton Tokomak was expected to produce about 5 million watts of fusion power in experiments using tritium and deuterium, the very mixture that will be used in a fusion reactor. This power level will be triple the power produced at the JET lab. According to Dr. Ronald C. Davidson, director of the Princeton laboratory, achieving such a goal will be "quite a milestone in fusion energy."

Of course, the race of achievement of fusion power will be greatly affected by government funding. Billions have already been spent on fusion, but ominous cuts in the United States seem to suggest that America may fall behind in the race. In 1991 Stephen O. Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates in Maryland, claimed that U.S. government funding of fusion peaked early in the 1980s, and had only grown modestly in the last few years. Instead of being fifteen to twenty years away, a fusion-based U.S. economy now seemed thirty to forty years away.

Ild be located at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in Plainsboro, New Jersey. If all goes as planned, construction could begin in fiscal in 1995 and be operational around 2000.

David said that the Fusion project could help maintain the "vitality of the United States fusion research program "because it would lead to a "cheaper, more compact, simpler fusion power reactor." The Clinton Administration requested an initial $13 million for starting up the Tokamak Physics Experiment. Davidson said the total project construction cost is estimated to be about $600 million. With added funding this new experimental project could hasten the development of a commercial reactor in the United States by the year 2025.

On the international level, fusion experimentation is progressing at lightning speed. And the fusion breakthrough, when it occurs, could potentially liberate economies by lifting from them the burden of fossil fuel dependency.

Cold Fusion: The Message in the Bottle

Of course, you can never predict when and where actual breakthroughs in the energy area will emerge. In March 1989, two chemists at the University of Utah, Stanley Pons, an American, and Martin Fleischmann, a British national, rocked the world when they reported that they had performed an experiment in which they achieved cold fusion of hydrogen atoms in a jar on a kitchen table! When they announced that they had actually produced energy and heat with such simple equipment, the scientific world was aghast.

They supposedly achieved fusion with tabletop apparatus that included battery-powered electrochemical cells with palladium and platinum electrodes submerged in heavy water mixed with salts and other chemicals. The "cell" was nothing more than a steel test tube, a Tefloncoated flask, about 8 centimeters in diameter and 20 centimeters tall, large enough to hold a quart of liquid. The flask was filled with half a quart of heavy water, at which point the platinum and palladium rods were lowered into the vessel.

Their experiments flew in the face of contemporary scientific wisdom, which claims that to achieve fusion we must reach temperatures up to about 200 million degrees centigrade. Now two scientists were claiming that they fused atoms at room temperature.

They were attacked that year by the scientific establishment, especially since they would not replicate their experiments in public. Others, however, have corroborated their results. A team at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, has claimed that it was able to switch power production on and off in three types of fusion jars by monitoring and controlling the electochemical reactions inside.

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In fact, although the findings of Pons and company have been regularly disputed, replications of their experiments periodically reappear around the globe. U.S. Navy researchers in March 1991 reported matching the production of nuclear products in cold fusion experiment similar to those of Utah scientists. Their experiments, involving heavy water and electrochemical cells similar to those of the Utah researchers, apparently produced more than half a watt of electricity.

The navy chemists, Melvin II. Miles and Benjamin F. Bush, claimed that the "excess heat" and helium observed in the experiment is caused by a fusion experiment. They said that the production of helium-4 in the experiment proved that the cell put out more energy than it took in.

Fritz Will, the director of the Cold Fusion Institute, labeled the navy results "a stunning finding." However, skeptics within the scientific community greeted the navy chemists' findings with the same derision and incredulity they previously aimed at Pons and Fleischmann.

In spite of such skepticism, research in cold fusion has suddenly erupted all over the world. Scientist in Russia and China claimed that they also observed the production of helium in their experiment. Japan boasts twenty-five government institutes furiously attempting breakthroughs in this field. The Italian and Indian governments are establishing cold fusion experiments, and many other governments are encouraging the entrepreneurial small scientist to forge ahead in his or her cold fusion research. It is rumored that a young Italian physicist received a quarter-million-dollar grant from his government for a cold fusion experiment.

The controversy over this technology has grown with every passing year. MIT now seems to have become the bastion of cold fusion skepticism. Scientist after scientist brings his or her data to a scientific meeting at MIT, only to discover that those present refuse to accept the validity of the findings. Scientists now openly clash in the press, one side claiming successful cold fusion experiments, the other side claiming that such experiments cannot and have not been replicated by other scientists.

In 1991, Eugene Mallove, former chief science writer in the MIT news office, filed an official complaint of scientific misconduct against the university's Plasma Fusion Center. He claimed that the center's director, cold fusion critic Robert Parker, along with his researchers intentionally distorted a data curve in one of their experiments to camouflage the fact that the experiment was confirming, not invalidating, the Pons-Fleischmann 1989 experimental findings regarding cold fusion. Mallove resigned his news office position at MIT to protest the "unfortunate way the [cold fusion controversy] has been dealt by MIT." (he still holds a teaching position at the university.)

The skeptics openly describe cold fusion researchers as suffering from delusions, and one writer included cold fusion research on his list of such delusions in an article labeled "Case Studies in Pathological Science."

This has become one of the most bitter scientific controversies in decades. After reporting their findings in 1989, Pons and Flieschmann went underground, continuing their experiments in Europe and Japan. Skeptics immediately suggested that the two disappeared due to the embarrassment over their "discredited" research, but recent developments suggest that they are privately perfecting their cold fusion methods in preparation for applying for a patent for the process. A successful method for fusing atoms would be worth billions.

In the summer of 1992, Pons and Flieschmann gathered several Japanese companies together in closed-door meetings to discuss what the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry labeled "new hydrogen energy." A Japanese scientist present at meeting said that the two scientists presented "some interesting data, convincing as to accept that cold fusion is taking place." This came on the heels of the first successful replication of a Japanese cold fusion experiment that produced 70 percent more energy than was being put in. The replication was performed by material scientist Edmund

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Storms at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The Japanese experiment, performed by a Dr. Takahashi, is also being replicated in Japan and Italy.

Ironically, cold fusion may succeed using a completely different technology than the simple tabletop apparatus currently employed. Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, $12 million government grant, is collaborating with Britain's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in an effort to use powerful atom-smashing-type equipment instead of electrolytic cells to coax deuterium atoms into fusing. The ingenious experiment involves changing the atom's structure so that they will be so attracted to each other that they will achieved fusion. Some are predicting that soon the Rutherford lab, working jointly with Japan, will develop a reliable cold fusion technology for commercial application.

Although the quest for cold fusion has become an international adventure, in the United States the only remaining source of funding for cold fusion research is the utility-supported Electric Power Research Institute. The institute has already spent about $14 million on these projects, whereas the U.S. Department of Energy dropped all such support in late 1989. The state of Utah, which had spent $5 million to support the Pons-Fleischmann experiments, terminated such finding in 1991.

By 1993, more and more companies and individuals were reporting successful cold fusion experiment s. The Japanese in particular were pioneering a variety of cold fusion techniques. Researchers at Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Corporation and the Catalysis Research Center at Hokkaido University claimed that their fusion experiments were generating much more heat and energy than they were consuming. An American company, Thermacore Inc., in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is already planning to capitalize on these experimental breakthroughs. Since 1992, it has been operating an electrolytic cell that produces sixty-eight watts of power for every eighteen in consumes.

By 1993, the spate of new research on cold fusion had led such magazines as popular science to at least consider cold fusion a viable source of energy. The magazine's July 1993 cover story on the controversy, entitled "Cold Fusion: Fact of Fantasy," demonstrated that many segments of the international scientific community had shed their skepticism and were maintaining an open mind regarding the cold fusion issue.

Regardless of the technology employed, if cold fusion accomplishes its goal of producing excess energy, the age of abundant and cheap energy may arrive more quickly than predicted. However, harnessing this energy for maximum economic benefit would require a country to retool its entire energy grid.

Any country that hopes to compete in the emerging macroindustrial arena must have an energy source that is reliable, safe, and powerful and can increase the nation's productivity and enhance its citizens' standard of living. All things considered, the balance will shift first to nuclear fission and then fusion. In the coming era, the litmus test for any energy form to be universally adopted will whether it can fuel the macroengineering and macromanufacturing projects necessary for human growth and economic progress.

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