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Your support makes all the difference.Cold fusion is dead, according to the Japanese government, which has spent 2.3bn yen (pounds 12.5m) in the past five years trying to see whether the process that powers the sun could be reproduced at room temperature in a laboratory test tube.
The project - to create helium atoms from hydrogen in a test tube, and harness the energy to create incredibly cheap power - will receive no funding next year, said an official at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). He added that the technology simply didn't hold enough promise to be worth the money.
The idea of cold fusion first leapt into the headlines in 1989, when Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced that they had generated huge power outputs from a bench setup using electrodes made of the metal paladium.
Pons and Fleischmann claimed to have a "slow release" of energy. But the work was denounced, and by 1992 most researchers had rejected the sensational findings after consistently failing to reproduce them or find supporting evidence.
Japan was eager to investigate it because it relies on imported oil for much of its energy needs.
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