Scientists Skeptical, But Intrigued By Utah Fusion Claim
By Paul Recer, AP Science Writer
The Associated Press

Friday, March 24, 1989, AM cycle

WASHINGTON - Scientists at major laboratories are skeptical that a simple, low-cost experiment in Utah could achieve nuclear fusion - the energy secret of the sun which has been sought for 20 years by thousands of researchers who spent millions of dollars.

But some experts admitted Friday they also are intrigued by the University of Utah reports and at least one warned that if the experiment actually achieved fusion, it could pose a serious radiation hazard.

And some scientists also expressed a bit of envy.

"Suppose you were designing jet airplanes and then you suddenly heard on CBS news that somebody had invented an anti-gravity machine. That's the way we feel, " said Ian H. Hutchinson, a nuclear fusion researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "And, of course, we're skeptical."

An Idaho laboratory announced Friday it was conducting experiments to confirm the Utah reports, and scientists at other laboratories said they were searching the literature to determine if others have performed the experiment. And all are waiting for more technical details expected to be published later this year in the journal Nature.

At a news conference Thursday, B. Stanley Pons, chairman of the University of Utah chemistry department, and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in England said they achieved a sustained nuclear fusion reaction with equipment that is available in any college laboratory.

Pons said they were able to force atoms to fuse together at room temperature using a rod of palladium metal and a platinum cylinder immersed in a flask of deuterium, a chemical commonly called "heavy water."

The Utah scientist said that when an electrical current is applied, deuterium nuclei are driven into the lattice structure of the palladium where they are compressed together long enough for fusion to occur.

Proof that it works, said Pons and Fleischmann, is that the experiment generated heat that cannot be explained in conventional chemical reactions. They said it produced four watts of energy for every watt of electrical energy used.

Fusion is the energy source of the sun and other stars. A hydrogen bomb is an uncontrolled fusion reaction.

The reaction occurs when the nuclei of two deuterium atoms are forced together. As they fuse, a burst of energy is produced, along with fast neutron particles and helium 3, a benign chemical that could be used in children's balloons.

Fusion is the opposite of nuclear fission, which involves splitting the nucleus from heavy atoms.

Scientists have long viewed fusion as the ideal energy source because it could be fueled with deuterium, which is easily extracted from seawater, and because it would produce a much smaller radiation hazard than the fission of conventional nuclear power plants.

Thousands of scientists in every major industrialized nation of the world have spent the last two decades researching fusion. Most efforts concentrate on duplicating in a controlled way the processes on the sun. This involves compressing deuterium plasma while heating it to 200 million to 500 million degrees.

Most research has involved doughnut-shaped machines, called Tokamaks, that use powerful magnets to contain and compress the plasma while it is being heated. Other efforts use laser beams that zap pellets of deuterium, attempting to achieve the heat and compression for a fractional second.

The goal is to reach a "break even" point, where the amount of energy produced matches the amount used to achieve fusion. Once this is reached, the fusion process could sustain itself.

"Cold fusion," such as that claimed by the Utah experimenters, has been recognized theoretically, but most such concepts use muons, a type of subatomic particle.

John Soures, a University of Rochester fusion researcher, said that if the Utah experiment actually produced four watts of energy, it is also emitting a dangerous level of neutron particles.

Four watts of fusion energy, said Soures, would produce about a trillion neutrons a second "and would certainly be a safety hazard."

"It would require some shielding to prevent people in the vicinity from being irradiated," he said. "You wouldn't put it out in the open."

He said the neutrons would be easily measured and since the Utah experimenters said this hasn't been done, "it certainly raises some questions in my mind."

At the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy contractor, EG&G Idaho, Inc. announced plans to conduct an experiment in May or June to test the Utah results.

Doug Holland, manager of EG&G's fusion safety program, said that fusion research has a history of "wild, flaky ideas," but he noted, "we can't dismiss it."

Fusion scientists at other major universities and at two national laboratories declined to comment about the Utah experiment because they said they lacked the technical details necessary to evaluate the claim.

"They have suspended judgement," said Anthony DeMeo, a spokesman who reported on the reactions of scientists at the Princeton University Plasma Physics laboratory. "Their curiosity is aroused, but they won't comment until they see more details."

Jean Madden, a spokesperson at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said scientists there "want to know more facts before they comment. This thing took everybody by surprise."

"We're eagerly awaiting the published results," said Jeff Schwartz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We've got to know what they're saying in detail before we can comment."

Hutchinson said MIT scientists had "fundamental reasons" to question the Utah results and have been unable to get the scientific details.

"If the claims of the folks in Utah are borne out...that would constitute a very remarkable result," he said. "I'm skeptical, but who knows? There are surprises in science."

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