Patterson Power Cell - Claims and Observations

Claims and Observations

Patterson variously said it produced a hundred or two hundred times more power than it used. Clean Energy Technologies, Inc. (CETI) representatives promoting the device at the Power-Gen '95 Conference said that an input of 1 watt would generate more than 1,000 watts of excess heat. This supposedly happens as hydrogen or deuterium nuclei fuse together to produce heat through a form of low energy nuclear reaction. The byproducts of nuclear fusion, e.g. a tritium nucleus and a proton or an 3He nucleus and a neutron, have not been detected in a reliable way, leading a vast majority of experts to think that no such fusion is taking place.

It is further claimed that if radioactive isotopes such as uranium are present, the cell enables the hydrogen nuclei to fuse with these isotopes, transforming them into stable elements and thus neutralizing the radioactivity; and this would be achieved without releasing any radiation to the environment and without expending any energy. A televised demonstration on June 11, 1997, on Good Morning America was not conclusive because there was no measurement of the radioactivity of the beads after the test, thus it cannot be discarded that the beads had simply absorbed the uranium ions and become radioactive themselves. In 2002, the neutralization of radioactive isotopes has only been achieved through intense neutron bombardment in a nuclear reactor or large scale high energy particle accelerator, and at a large expense of energy.

When asked about reliability in 1998, Gabe Collins, a chemical engineer at CETI, stated: "When they don't work, it's mostly due to contamination. If you get any sodium in the system it kills the reaction – and since sodium is one of the more abundant elements, it's hard to keep it out."

Patterson has carefully distanced himself from the work of Fleischmann and Pons and from the label of "cold fusion", due to the negative connotations associated to them since 1989. Ultimately, this effort was unsuccessful, and not it inherited the label of pathological science, but it managed to make cold fusion look a little more pathological in the public eye. Some cold fusion proponents view the cell as a confirmation of their work, while critics see it as "the fringe of the fringe of cold fusion research", since it attempts to commercialize cold fusion on top of making bad science.

In 2002, John R. Huizenga, professor of nuclear chemistry at the University of Rochester, who was head of a government panel convened in 1989 to investigate the cold fusion claims of Fleischmann and Pons, and who wrote a book about the controversy, said "I would be willing to bet there's nothing to it", when asked about the Patterson Power Cell.

In 2006, Hideo Kozima, professor emeritus of physics at Shizuoka University, has suggested that the byproducts are consistent with cold fusion.