Nuclear Fusion in a Test Tube
By Clive Cookson
Financial Times [London,England]

Thursday, March 23, 1989

This is the test tube in which Professors Martin Fleischmann and Stan Pons claim to have achieved controlled nuclear fusion, in a chemistry laboratory at the University of Utah.

If Fleischmann and Pons are right and nuclear fusion really can be carried out in a relatively simple palladium electrode, their discovery will transform the outlook for the world's energy supplies in the next century.

Unlike the fission process of the present generation of nuclear power stations, fusion power would not generate radioactive waste. And unlike fossil fuels, it would not contribute to the greenhouse effect and acid rain.

In the Utah experiment, a current passes between the palladium electrode and a platinum anode in an insulated tube full of heavy water. Heavy water contains deuterium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen, and occurs naturally in sea water.

What happens is that the palladium electrode in the centre of the cell absorbs a large volume of deuterium. Under the influence of the electric current, the deuterium nuclei are squeezed so tightly that some of them fuse together.

Fleischmann says that to achieve the same effect by compressing deuterium gas, the pressure would have to exceed a thousand million million million million atmospheres (10 to the power of 27 atmospheres).

The two scientists are convinced that they have achieved nuclear fusion, rather than a conventional chemical reaction, because very large amounts of heat are released and because some of the expected products of fusion - tritium, neutrons and gamma rays - are formed. Even so, it is not clear what fusion processes are taking place.

So far the cell has operated only with heavy water containing deuterium. Fleischmann and Pons believe that if they used a mixture of deuterium and tritium, which should be more suitable for nuclear fusion, the amount of heat released would be greater still - perhaps as much as 10 kilowatts per cubic centimetre of palladium.

Such an experiment would be hazardous, however. Special containment facilities would be required.

Their work could hardly be more of a contrast to the large government-funded nuclear research projects which are trying to achieve fusion by heating gases above 100 m deg C. Although some governments are becoming impatient with the apparently slow progress towards a commercial fusion reactor, world-wide expenditure on fusion research exceeds Dollars 1 bn (580 m Pounds (pds)) a year.

The most advanced fusion project is the Joint European Torus (JET) in Culham, Oxfordshire, which receives 75 m pds-a-year funding from 14 European governments. Half way through a 10-year experimental programme, JET has achieved most of the technical goals set for it.

Scientists at JET have learnt how to confine a hot "plasma" of deuterium inside a doughnut-shaped reactor, using an extremely sophisticated series of magnets. But they are not expected to produce the conditions necessary for fusion until 1992.

Even then, it is not clear whether JET will achieve the "break even" state, in which the energy produced by the nuclear reaction exceeds the energy spent heating up the reactor. Fleischmann and Pons say that their experiment is comfortably in credit.

The idea for the experiment originated in the late 1960s, when Fleischmann carried out research on the separation of hydrogen isotopes in a palladium electrode. The results were rather "odd" and suggested to him that nuclear reactions might be induced in an electrode. Pons reached similar conclusions during his research in the 1970s.

The two men discussed ways of testing the idea while they were working together at the University of Southampton, in the UK, and later at the University of Utah. "Stan and I often talk of doing insane experiments," says Fleischmann. "We each have a good track record of getting impossible experiments to work. In this case, the stakes were so high that we just had to try out the idea."

Supplies of raw materials for fusion are inexhaustible. The fusion energy released from the deuterium contained in one cubic foot of sea water would be the same as that produced by burning 10 tons of coal. 

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