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

Thursday, March 23, 1989

Two scientists will today formally announce that they have carried out controlled nuclear fusion in a test tube. If their discovery is confirmed, they will have gone a long way towards taming the forces powering the sun and the hydrogen bomb. These could provide virtually unlimited, clean and inexpensive energy.

Professor Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University in the UK and Professor Stan Pons of the University of Utah in the US, have apparently done in a simple laboratory what has not been achieved by gigantic projects costing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Nuclear fusion, which releases energy by joining light atoms such as deuterium and tritium has several potential advantages over nuclear fission - the process of splitting heavy atoms such as uranium and plutonium, which fuels all current nuclear power stations.

Fusion produces little radio-active waste. Its raw material, deuterium, is abundant in sea water. Fusion reactors are also expected to be safer that fission reactions, because the fusion process would shut down if anything went wrong.

Technically, the experiments carried out by Professors Fleischmann and Pons at the University of Utah are no more complex than the practical work done by chemistry undergraduates. They use electrochemical techniques to achive fusion of deuterium nuclei trapped inside an electrode made from palladium, a metal similar to platinum.

"What we have done is open the door to a new era of research," Professor Fleischmann said. "Our indications will be reasonably easy to make into usable technology for generating heat and power, but a lot more work is needed to prove its validity further and then to develop practical generating devices."

Physicists find it hard to believe the deuterium nuclei could be squeezed together enough for fusion to occur.

However, Dr Mick Lomer, head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority's fusion laboratory at Culham, Oxfordshire, said: "We're approaching it with a sceptical but open mind. We shall be doing our utmost to reproduce the experiment."

Professor Fleischmann said: "The nature of the experiment is so ridiculously simple yet in a way so far-fetched, that we decided not to raise money from external sources but to finance the early work ourselves."

If the Utah research can be commercialised, small or even portable nuclear fusion cells may be feasible.

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