DOE Labs Advise Hill: Wait On Cold Fusion
By David Kramer
Inside Energy with Federal Lands

May 1, 1989

Urge No Funding Yet

Scientists from DOE-operated labs warned lawmakers last week that cold fusion should be verified before large sums of money are sunk into further developing the process.

But the researchers who claimed to have discovered the extraordinary process, and officials of the University of Utah, where the findings were made, countered that delaying development of the process will open the way for Japan to beat the U.S. to the marketplace with an American breakthrough.

Some members of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, including ranking Republican Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, said they would support a university request for $ 25 million in federal funds to help establish a $ 100 million cold fusion institute.

But Harold Furth, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, DOE's lead lab on magnetic confinement fusion, warned congressmen that “before you launch anything, you've got to know if it's real or not.” Noting that the excitement caused by the findings of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann “could prove to be a big embarrassment” if not confirmed, he advised the panel to “turn the screws on the verification process.”

Earlier, during a packed, daylong session, the committee heard Fleischmann call for an accelerated research program, with applications-related r&d proceeding in tandem with further basic research on the phenomenon. He argued that the traditional consecutive, or sequential, development process for new technologies employed in the U.S. must be “short circuited” by a parallel development process in order to beat competitors to the marketplace.”

His remarks were echoed by Ira Magaziner, a consultant to the University of Utah, who asserted that international competition required full bore r&d work even before the cold fusion phenomenon is proven. Already, “fusion fever” has gripped Japan's scientific and commercial communities, he noted, and “dozens” of Japanese industry engineering laboratories are now trying to duplicate the fusion results claimed by Pons and Fleischmann.

“A half dozen MITI officials are working hard on a plan for a coordinated push into this new industry,” Magaziner said. MITI is already in the process of forming a committee to implement its plan.”

But rival researcher Steven Jones, of Brigham Young University, also advised caution. “I'd want more confirmation of the Pons and Fleischmann results before we jump in completely,” Jones said.

Cold fusion “does not offer a short cut to fusion power. It's another door to open, but it's just a start,” said Jones, who also claims to have produced fusion in a metal rod infused with deuterium, but at energy levels a billion times lower than the Utah researchers. Magnetic confinement and inertial confinement, the two main research programs at DOE, “represent the best approaches to achieving fusion power,” he asserted.

Michael Saltmarsh, associate director of the fusion energy division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said neither ORNL nor any of the other DOE labs had achieved the reported results of either Utah or BYU, but added that he was not certain the exact experimental conditions had been duplicated.

“In the short term, it would be most helpful if one or more of the major laboratories were to collaborate with the Utah and BYU groups by bringing a range of different diagnostic equipment to bear on an already working experiment,” Saltmarsh said.

Fleischmann told the committee that since announcement of his and Pons' findings a month ago, more recent experimental cells had achieved sufficient heat to boil water. The scientist projected that the energy release from their electrochemical cells could be raised as high as 100 kw per cubic centimeter, compared with the 100 watts per cubic centimeter achieved to date.

In the experiments, a palladium electrode was immersed in a bath of heavy water, in which ordinary hydrogen is replaced by the isotope deuterium. After application of an electric current to the electrode for a period of time, Pons and Fleischmann claim the deuterium atoms were absorbed into the palladium in sufficient quantities that some fused, giving off heat in the process. Their earlier claims were that the amount of heat given off was up to four times greater than the electric current used to get the reaction going.

Both researchers reaffirmed their findings last week, and repeated their assertions that the quantity of energy produced could not come from any known chemical reaction. They also acknowledged that they do not know what nuclear reaction may be occurring.

“Many people are preoccupied explaining the nuclear process,” Fleischmann noted. “We have been more interested in the heat release,” what he termed the “social side of our research.”

The Utah researchers are already working on a power plant design that would utilize existing nuclear technology, Fleischmann said. But unlike nuclear fission plants, their cold fusion facilities could be scaled to smaller sizes, an especially important feature for the developing world, where construction of a power distribution system represents the major impediment to widespread electrification.

To go beyond boiling water to building a demonstration of a high pressure steam generator will require a large effort, between $ 1 million and $ 10 million, he told the committee.

Commercial development is “totally limited” by funding, he asserted. “You can do science on the cheap, but not engineering.”

University of Utah President Chase Peterson called for the $ 25 million in federal seed money for an institute to which the state of Utah has already appropriated $ 5 million. An additional $ 1.1 million has already been obtained from private sources.

“We are prepared to build a novel consortium of federal, corporate, state and university resources if you choose to join us,” Peterson told the panel. “Without federal participation the race for competitive leadership will be handicapped.”

Verification of the Utah results could be done speedily, suggested Furth, by measuring the accumulation of helium in the palladium electrodes used by Pons and Fleischmann. “Since there is little hope for a theoretical model that accounts for deuterium-fueled fusion power without any production of helium (or tritium), failure to observe the appropriate accumulation rates would constitute a clear-cut disproof of the 'cold fusion' interpretation of 'excess heat,'” he said.

Furth also suggested that the production of heat in an ordinary, or light water, control experiments would also be extremely difficult to explain through any nuclear fusion process, including new theories advanced by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Peter Hagelstein and others. Pons and Fleischmann have hinted that such a control did produce heat, but they refused to discuss those results. This led to speculation by Furth and others that the Utah researchers may be withholding details until they ensure that their patent rights are protected. Fleischmann explained to reporters that he and Pons were not sufficiently confident of their light water data to discuss the results.

Adding to the confusion, other researchers, including Robert Huggins of Stanford University, who is so far the only U.S. experimenter to have confirmed the Utah cold fusion results, say they have not detected heat from a light water reaction.

Huggins told the committee that other attempts at duplicating the Pons- Fleischmann deuterium results have failed for two reasons, both of which he said were related to the materials used. He declined, however, to detail those problems to the committee prior to presenting a paper on the subject at a scientific conference.

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