New Energy Times

University of Utah N-Fusion Press Conference Transcript
March 23, 1989
Salt Lake City , Utah

Transcription by Nick Palmer and Steven Krivit. Editing by John Rudiger based on video recording at the University of Utah Press Conference.

[Editor's note: The text in this transcript preserves as closely as possible the exact wording of the original presentations. The only exception to this is the removal of filler sounds. Consequently, readers will observe some language which ordinarily would be edited for clarity and readability.]

Good afternoon, I'm Jim Brophy. I'm vice-president for research at the University of Utah and it is my pleasure to welcome all of you to the campius of the University of Utah to share with us this exciting scientific announcement.

With me at the table are Dr. Chase Peterson, president of the University of Utah, dean Robert Nesbit, dean, faculty of science, the University Southampton, England. On my immediate right, Dr. Stan Pons, professor of chemistry and chairman of the department of chemistry at the University of Utah and professor Martin Fleischmann, research professor of chemistry at the University of Southampton in England .

We will have a very simple program this afternoon. President Peterson will make a few remarks … their ... discovery ... then we will turn the session over for questions which I hope we can hold to a half hour to forty five minutes. Following the question and answer period there will be an opportunity for the press to view experiments underway in the basement of the chemistry department ... president Peterson?

We are here today to consider the implications of a scientific experiment. It’s appropriate that we do this in this room named for Henry Eyring, whose portrait lies on that wall and if you look closely, you’ll see a twinkle in his eye. This man was a major founder of modern chemistry at the University of Utah and ... he’s passed on, but he would … that twinkle would be shining very brightly and probably is and it’s a pleasure to honor and have - stand please - Hal Eyring Jr., who's Dr. Eyring and a University President in the past and now a member of the presiding bishops of the LDS church. Thank you for being with us Hal [applause].

I would also like to recognise Dr. Robert Nesbit who is the dean of the science, department of geology from the University of Southampton . His presence here is further evidence of the international cooperation in scientific exploration that has brought us all together today.

It is a pleasure to welcome members of the university governing boards who are seated here and friends of the free mind, which is what we’re talking about today.

First, what is an experiment? An experiment is an informed probing of the unknown under controlled circumstances. Does it always give clear and full answers? No. Science grows like rings on a tree, each larger, but shaped by the ring it grew from.

The full story of the research professor Pons and professor Fleischmann will announce today will not be known for months or years, as others confirm and challenge and enlarge their ideas and their data. The breakthrough they will report today comes from the work of trained minds, working at an old problem from new perspectives.

This particular study examines a traditional problem in physical science from the chemist’s point of view, specifically that of the electrochemist. This university prides itself, whether it be in creative writing or dance or chemistry or genetics or artificial organs in a long tradition of intellectual freedom, intellectual excitement and a willingness to try new ways to solve old problems.

This announcement today is an expression of an ancient and honorable process called the university, where trained faculty and dedicated students work side by side in processes of teaching and research. Its products are educated minds and new knowledge. Those minds and that knowledge are then dedicated to the benefit of the people of the world generally and to the cultural and economic well-being of the state of Utah specifically. It’s been an honor to be part of this process, however remotely, and I’ll now turn the program back to vice president Brophy.

So we will have a few comments about their work from Stan Pons and Martin Fleischmann. Which one of you is first, Stan?

Well first of all let me thank Dr. Peterson and Dr. Brophy for the kind introduction and further for their strong encouragement and support throughout this entire project. This support has always been ... or such support has always been an important asset to all scientists at the University of Utah .

Second I must thank my friend and colleague and close fellow scientist, Martin Fleischmann for putting up with me for the last fifteen years. A finer scientist and person would indeed be hard to find. The experiment we have accomplished has been described in the news release which you have and I’ll just give you a brief synopsis and that it's basically we’ve established a sustained nuclear fusion reaction by means … by means which are considerably simpler than conventional techniques.

Deuterium, which is a component of heavy water is driven into a metal rod similar ... exactly like the one that I have in my hand here under … to such an extent that fusion between these components, these deuterons in heavy water, are fused to from a single new atom. And with this process there is a considerable release of energy and we have demonstrated this could be sustained on its own. In other words, much more energy is coming out than we’re putting in. So, I guess we’ll get into more details during the questions if you would like ... and did you have anything further to say Martin?

Well, perhaps the only thing I should add is that this is, on the one hand, a scaled-up test tube, with which you might be familiar from your high school background, and on the other hand it’s also a Dewar flask, something perhaps which Stan should have referred to so that we can monitor the release of heat very accurately and he has really described the experiment. It is very simple, you drive the deuterons into the lattice, you compress the deuterons in the lattice and under those circumstances we have found the conditions where fusion takes place and can be sustained indefinitely. Now, indefinitely is an emotive word, we have run experiments for hundreds of hours and on our timescale that is a pretty long time. It means night and day working so I think the best thing is really, at this stage, to ... I’m sure you will have lots of questions ... is to hand this over to the floor [inaudible] and Brophy and ask you to ask us.

All right, we will have questions ... you may direct them to any of us or just questions in general.

Could you have either Dr. Fleischmann or Dr. Pons describe the technique for monitoring ... calculating what kind of energy they’re getting from this technique?

Well, the question is how have the experiments monitored the release of energy that professor Fleischmann has just spoke of?

Well, we insert into the device thermistors – devices for measuring temperature rise. We then measure carefully the amount of heat we put in by measuring the … by monitoring the voltage and the current which is applied to the cell so we know the total amount of joule heat which is being put into the ... into the cell. We then monitor the ... the ... heat build up in the cell with the thermistors I just mentioned with a temperature measuring device … is … the … this is put into a water bath and so that the outside of it is maintained at a very constant temperature. We then calculate what’s called the ... the ... heavy water equivalent and the other thermodynamic constants which we have to know in order to be able to calculate ... the loss of heat from the cell, and then ... from those numbers we can then come up with the figures which will … which we have.

OK, as far as ... direct measurements … well first of all, the heat that we then measure can only be accounted for by ... nuclear reactions. The … the heat is so intense that it cannot be explained by any chemical process that ... is known. The other evidence is of course that we … have direct measurements of neutrons by measuring the ... gamma radiation which builds up in a tank where one of these cells is under operation. We can measure … have a gamma ray spectrum of the ... neutrons as they interact with the water to form a gamma ray and … and another deuterium atom in the water ... in addition -- there is a build up of tritium ... in the ... in the cell which we measure with a scintillation counter.

How promising is this thing, and … in terms of future applications, can you comment on that … what realistically ... we can expect from this?

Well we’ve been concerned primarily with the effect …the observation of the ... fusion event. I would think that it would be reasonable within a short number of years to build a fully operational device that could drive … produce electric power or to drive a steam generator or a steam turbine, for instance.

What does this mean to the general public – I mean how is it going to make our lives better? In other words, to clean up the environment …?

The ... question is what does this discovery mean to the general public. How does it …how is it possible or likely that it would make the world’s population better. Martin, you want to answer that?

I would like … would perhaps … should perhaps … backtrack just for thirty seconds to the previous question. If you want some quantitative information, we have run ... cells now in excess of … generating in excess of 20 watts per cubic centimeter … of electrode structure … we are showing you here a cell which we have not yet ... charged up because this experiment has to be approached with some caution (audience laughter) because this … this device, if this device worked as rapidly as the small scale electrodes which we have run, this would be generating about 800 watts of heat, right? We ... have run … in fusion technology there is something called the breakeven point which is the point at which you get as much heat out as you put in. We have run cells of this kind up to a hundred per cent of break even under very low yield conditions, and perhaps sixty per cent of breakeven ... under very unfavorable … at high yields, that is when … when you generate say 26 … over 20 watts per cubic centimeter, the configuration is actually not suitable for that and if you extrapolate that, we will be at several hundred per cent of break even in this experiment.

So, if I could go to that question about the implications – we don’t know what the implications are. The subject has to be fully researched, the science base has to be established. I would emphasize that it is absolutely essential to establish a science base, as widely as possible, as correctly as possible, to challenge our findings, to extend our findings. Having established that, you have to, of course, consider all the engineering implications. But it does seem that there is here a possibility of realizing sustained fusion in a relatively inexpensive ... with a relatively inexpensive device, which could be ... brought to some sort of successful conclusion fairly early on.

Last year the department of energy spent about half a billion dollars in research of fusion (inaudible) ... basically [the Utah work] has been described as a kitchen type experiment. How do you feel, knowing that you could do in a kitchen what other researchers can do with half a billion dollars of large scientific …

It’s a pretty big kitchen (audience laughter.) I should explain to you that this ... and Brophy won’t like me using this emotive language but ... Stan and I thought this experiment was so stupid that we financed it ourselves (audience laughter) and I think it would be … fair to say that we’ve burned up about … a hundred thousand dollars in the process so it’s not that cheap and this is just a kitchen experiment so if you scale it up we could burn up a few million dollars fairly quickly too (audience laughter) … so … but I think … I have no feeling about that … I think … if you …

At the moment everybody is very relaxed about the energy situation until the next crisis, but the next crisis will surely come and I think the correct … my view about this … it’s … everybody has his personal view … my view is that you have to really pursue all the research in this area. You don’t know what … which particular research strategy and which particular technology will come to fruition or in what … which area. I mean this might be a small scale application … the big fusion … the big tokamaks might be the … the answer for the large scale generation. We don’t know so I think it would be unwise to say just because there is something new around the corner that … spending a few hundred million somewhere else is a mistake.

If I might just add … it is clear … it has been clear for … three or four decades that the promise of virtually unlimited … radiation-free energy is something that is worth spending perhaps billions of dollars on and if indeed this disc … this scientific discovery proves to be practical as … as appears to be, not only do we … the world’s population get a promise of virtually unlimited energy … it gets the elimination of acid rain … reduces the greenhouse effect and allows us to use fossil fuels in a way which is much more important than simply lighting … lighting a match to them. Those are very valuable … chemicals which are the source for production of plastics and a … and a whole host of other things and it’s really a crime to burn them. Yes, sir? In the black and white …

Professor Pons ... or professor Fleischmann, could you tell why there is such a difference ... the basic theory behind why we have to use million of degrees in order to have fusion reactions is to overcome the highly repulsive forces between nuclei ... what is the difference in the case of the experiments that you are doing?

Well, there are several parameters which … directly … well there’s many parameters that directly affect the … possib … that directly affect when you can have the nuclear reaction … the fusion reaction ... one simple … way to look at this is that the product of four major parameters; temperature, confinement time , ... presence or volume and particle density, the product of these things, must be … you must attain a minimum value before a nuclear fusion reaction can occur and ...

Cold nuclear fusion, for instance, is well known, I mean muon catalysed fusion has been known since ... I forgot ... Sakharov, 1940 – in the 40’s – where … and it’s a totally different process that can be run at very cold temperatures and ... they’re ... just substituting some of the … they’re increasing some parameters and letting some of the other parameters decrease but the product still remains the same and this particular slide we have over here ... I don’t have one for conventional tokamaks and everything but this x-axis ... is only around 10¹² or 10¹³ so you can see we’re twenty orders of magnitude … higher up with that one parameter than they are with conventional fusion devices.

On the other hand the … vertical parameter the ... energy of the particles in the system are ... in a tokamak or one of those devices may be considerably ... smaller than we have here. I mean, higher than we have here, we have very low values of the chemical potential compared with what (inaudible) very large confinement time so … all the basic physical parameters are still met.

If you apply … if you drive the deuterons into the lattice with an electric field at the interface, then you achieve a very high compression. If you tried to achieve the same compression by ... compressing deuterium gas, D², the isotopic equivalent of Hydrogen gas, H², then you would need between 10²⁶ and 10²⁷ atmospheres of pressure to achieve the same compression of the deuterons in the lattice as we can achieve in our sophisticated test tube (audience laughter) … and it is that, we believe, which is the crucial factor in achieving fusion at room temperature.

I think in order to conserve time, we'll confine the questions from the press, so yes sir.

At this stage no special constraint on the design parameters… we have this, for example, a central palladium cathode we have chosen to put… to wind… a platinum helical anode and we pass a current between the two… that is… that intrinsic… that is really the guts of the experiment.

We have been up to about half an ampere per square centimetre… so far… but there are no special technical restrictions on the design.

Well, it’s well known that the original nuclear fusion reactions are generated by the neutron going into the water solution that was cooling the cell and reacting with a hydrogen, attached to a water, and that reaction ... gives up a deuterium and ...

... being submitted to a journal ... we have chosen to have a press conference this afternoon, frankly because the results are so exciting, set the record straight so to speak ... the scientific journal paper will have much more detail than you are hearing this afternoon and I guess the...

... these gentlemen to further their research, what does the university (audience laughter)

The first step is that Stan Pons wants to be relieved as chairman of the department of chemistry (audience laughter) ...

... enormous concentration, equivalent to 10²⁷ if it was hydrostatic pressure – that’s one atmosphere to the 27th power, then fusion occurs, out of that comes one or two new elements of less mass and the difference is the energy that comes out and that then would boil water … essentially … and when you boil water you can make steam and when you make steam you can drive a turbine and if you can drive a turbine you can create electricity, just as water drives turbines or steam derived from coal burning drives the turbine. So this has the potential to create electric energy and do the things that vice-president Brophy talked about.

Now, are universities the right place for the development of this pure idea into commercial operations? The answer’s probably no. That’s not what we’re built for ... we will be working with our engineers ... we’ll be working with engineers at the other universities of this state, BYU and Utah State, and we’ll be working throughout the world in the development commercially, and feasibility studies to see what this can, in fact, do on a large scale -- what is clearly done in this glorified test tube

We would like this to … serve all the world in the ways that vice-president Brophy described, namely, if you stop burning so much, you stop the CO² emissions into the atmosphere and that reduces the greenhouse effect. If you stop burning high sulphur coal, you stop producing sulphuric acid in the air which drops out in the rainwater as acid rain and kills the forest in the Black Forest … the trees in the Black Forest or in Canada or America or anywhere else.

You start to use coal and natural gas and oil for what it ought to be used for, which is a rich store of chemicals, rather than a cheap way to light a match, or to light a candle.

What’s likely to happen? There’s no way of knowing. A lot of good ideas come along, and something stops them from ever materializing. We have no idea if this will ever materialize. But everything we know about it suggests it ought to be relatively easy to have this commercial application … if that occurs ... and if the court of science in the world, essentially – that’s an important phrase – because there is … a … such a thing called scientific opinion and they’ll be reviewing these papers and they’ll be asking, "What did these people do, what did other people do, how does it relate to Sakharov and what he did in 1940?" Whatever else – they’ll be asking those questions as to where all the credit lies and where the ownership lies … and … with the ownership, if it turns out to lie with the university of Utah, as we think it will, then we would do all in our power to … have this exploited, by ourselves and others, for the benefit of cheap energy with little cost to the world’s ecology.

We would also like it to come to the to the benefit of the economy of Utah. That’s not always easy to guarantee because ideas aren’t contained by borders, but perhaps ownership and patents are, if, indeed, there is ownership and there are patents to come out of this. So, if that’s the case, we would do all in our power to encourage the further development and the further research of this -- in the university, in the universities of Utah and in commercial operations that would grow up around this.

To follow up, if I might, would you see this moving this into the Centers of Excellence program and … out … [inaudible] basement?

The question was would you consider moving this into a Centers of Excellence program and out of the basement? Ahh, I think they’ve gotten used to their kitchen down there ... I don’t think it matters where it is but … let me … that’s a good cue to read a letter that the Governor gave who had to be out of town today.

"Dear Chase, allow to me to extend my most hearty congratulations to the university on the major breakthrough announced today. This announcement shows the world, once again, that, quote, this is the place (audience laughter) ... you understand that don’t you Dean Goodman ... that's fine (spoken aside) – this place is somewhere east of Dover ... (audience laughter) anyway, this is the place for scientific science … for significant scientific reasear ... research and reaffirms the University of Utah’s place among the finest research universities in the nation."

Well, he says some other nice things but he goes on to say “as this technology continues to develop, I stand ready to offer the resources of the State … at my disposal to ensure that the University of Utah, and our State, get full benefit from the great efforts now going on.”

So you can be sure that, whether it’s a Center of Excellence, whether it’s a tent or a lean-to or a scientific palace, we’ll do what’s needed to be done to be sure this kind of work continues.

I should approach ... that question slightly obliquely. Let me first of all take it down to a very low level. When we started this experiment ... and Chase Peterson said “this is the place” -- we can … Stan and I can take you to our “this is the place” which is ... on a hike above Mill Creek canyon where this all actually started, verbally, if not physically.

We said it had a billion to one chance… well the interesting ... phenomenon about it … this is that the generation … rate of generation of tritium and the rate of generation of helium-3 is only one-billionth of what you would expect if the fusion reactions were those experienced in high energy physics. So we have ... a relatively low rate of production of neutrons. Now how do we know ... that the neutrons come from the cell? Well, by counting them with a neutron counter in the vicinity of the cell. If you move the neutron counter somewhere else, you get a few neutrons from the cosmic rays. There’s a reason why we’re in the basement because we want all that concrete above us … to help cut them out … the cosmic ray neutrons out, as far as possible and we also see the gamma rays generated in the vicinity of the electrochemical cell so they can only originate because of the neutrons coming through the glass wall into the water, reacting with the water to generate gamma rays … they are observed, vertically above. So, basically, that’s the story.

Those of us who’ve had an opportunity to look downstairs already see a, plastic dish pan down there. I is that going to have a place in the museum of science and … how does this … is this Newton’s apple or Bell’s first telephone?

The Rubbermaid basin is for (audience laughter) ... lecture presentations because we want to have the punch line that we paid for it ourselves and we couldn’t actually pay for very much so it had to be done in a Rubbermaid basin but the actual tank was a little bit more sophisticated. I think you saw the real … the real experiment is not a Rubbermaid basin (Fleischmann laughs.)

Can you … can you tell us where in scientific history right now you think this ...

I don't know. We need to clear people out that do not belong in here. Okay? While they're getting set, let me just ... here's the setup. What we have here is the electronics that are driving it. So we have a total of five cells here. The detector you see here is a detector for the high-energy gamma. See that -- this is the multichannel analyzer here that does it. A spectra will pop up in a minute. Over here we have our neutron detector and the batteries that drive it. It's a fairly energy-intense thing and so it takes ... here we have a liquid scintillation system. This is what we are using to detect the tritium with.

We have not detected helium-3. Helium-3 is not one of the things we've looked at yet. It's something we haven't had. This is simply the monitoring area.

That's just a water bath that is an environmental temperature controller, that's all that's going on there.

Oh, I see. But you're getting enough [inaudible] counting gammas from there, I'm just wondering, the neutrons are going to be captured in the water to give off the gamma, I don't understand the ...

They're [inaudible] through the glass and we're picking them up out of the water bath as well.

That's a totally different experiment ... accumulating tritium here, this is a small palladium electrode and a small platinum electrode ... and they are just run in series at the same time, it's purely to do the tritium balances. That ... go on, Marvin.

This is where we're doing the rest of the thermodynamics and the heat enthalpy reaction etcetera. We have our temperature controlled environment so we can know exactly what's being put in and what's coming out as ...

That's our calorimeter, these are calorimeters sitting in here. These are the electronics that's controlling the amps in ... the voltage that drives the current, here we have the temperature monitoring systems through these thermistors here. [inaudible] BF3

Yes, we have two here. This is a smaller electrode. This here is a one millimeter and this is a ...

What we have here is an experimental setup for the fusion reactor that had been discussed earlier today. On this side we have the electronics that simply control the apparatus, alright, control the fuel cells so to speak, and here on this side we have three of our electrochemical cells where the fusion is taking place.

These that are external to the water bath, we are using for tritium generation experiments where we periodically take samples and then put them into this liquid scintillation counter here, pickup the tritium counts, that is what these cells are for.

Inside here is where the majority of the thermal chemistry and the thermal work is being done. It's in a thermostatically controlled temperature bath. The water is just plain water on the outside, but inside the cells we have D₂O or heavy water which we then electrochemically drive as has been described earlier into the palladium lattice and have fusion energy.

Now what we've got also is a temperature bath where we [inaudible] fusion processes and the thermodynamic work we have a high-energy spectrum analyzer. This analyzer monitors the gamma radiation that comes from the end-gamma reaction with regular water.

... also have behind here the neutron spectrometer, neutron counter that we've been using to take and to elucidate neutron fluxes from these cells. Any specific questions? ... This is the area where we collect all of the thermal data. Here we have thermistor ports that we pick up and we're picking up ... we have very precise temperature measurements and have been working easily to the hundredth degree and into the thousandths of degrees so we can elucidate exactly how much heat is being put in and how much is being taken out of the cell and hence how much is generated due to the fusion source.

The electrochemical cells that are doing our fusion process reaction inside is thermal chemistry. The temperature bath is simply a thermostatically controlled environment. That environment has nothing to do with the chemistry, but what it allows us to do is ...

...and then calculate how much fusion is going on.. What we have over here also is a neutron counting system which allows ...

... there's not that much physical room in here. Okay, we're going to do that, alright? If we can keep the people in the hallway ... if you've got a priority ..

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