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A Frenzy Over Fusion in Hundreds of Labs
By William J. Broad
The New York Times

April 18, 1989

AT Yale, graduate students labored night and day in an underground bunker to place five tons of lead bricks around sensitive detectors and tiny plastic bottles, shielding the experiment from stray radiation. They waited eagerly to see if the bottles would produce signs of nuclear fusion.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scientist renowned for reclusiveness stayed up all night finishing a paper on a theory to explain fusion at room temperature - and then startled M.I.T.'s public affairs officials by telling them he wanted to release a statement about his idea.

At the University of Washington, two graduate students kept an all-night vigil around a fusion experiment in a test tube, thrilled by intriguing results that ultimately may or may not prove significant.

''We've been going at it 24 hours a day for 10 days,'' Van L. Eden, 28 years old, one of the students, said late last week. ''We look back at our lab notebooks and say, 'God, did we do all that?' It's crazy.''

Feverish activity is occurring at hundreds and perhaps thousands of laboratories around the world as researchers race to confirm or refute startling claims made in Utah last month that nuclear fusion had been achieved in a jar of water at room temperature.

One of the Utah researchers said yesterday that 60 laboratories had duplicated parts of the fusion experiment. [ Page C7. ] Talk in the laboratories working on fusion crackles with excitement as scientific detectives hunt for clues. Whether cold fusion proves to be a nearly endless supply of cheap energy or one of the greatest scientific delusions of recent times, it is now the hottest of scientific topics, so stimulating researchers that they often put personal lives on hold and camp out in labs, skipping meals and sleep.

''If this is true, we are going to a whole new world out there,'' Moshe Gai, a skeptical Yale physicist, said as he stood next to a cold-fusion experiment in a cavernous bunker deep beneath the Yale campus.

The vision of a ''whole new world'' is what makes cold fusion so intriguing. Scientists know nuclear fusion is the force that powers the sun, the stars and hydrogen bombs, fusing atoms together rather than breaking them apart as is done in nuclear reactors. The achievement of fusion usually takes hundreds of millions of degrees of heat, and its controlled release on earth has so far eluded scientists, despite decades of effort and billions of dollars.

In contrast, researchers in Utah asserted that their feat of controlled fusion had been done in a simple table-top apparatus that could easily be enlarged to generate huge amounts of heat and electric power. If true, such a discovery might alter the course of mankind, revolutionizing industry, warfare, space flight, and the balance of power between energy-rich and energy-poor nations.

For scientists far and wide, the Utah claims offer rich opportunities. One seldom mentioned is the chance to engage in scientific one-upmanship, using superior experiments to show the claims are empty. In the past, scientists have won esteem for exposing all kinds of apparent finds as hoaxes and self-deceptions, showing that N-rays did not exist, that a fossil believed to be the Piltdown man belonged to an ape and that a mysterious substance called polywater contained no water at all.

'Good Science Takes Time'

At the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, four teams are preparing an exhaustive search for cold-fusion clues, or the lack of them, with one team borrowing a giant radiation detector from a $3 million machine hooked to a $45 million particle accelerator.

''Good science takes time,'' said Peter D. Bond, head of Brookhaven's physics department. ''You don't do it in a day.''

Another opportunity for scientists is to share the glory if cold-fusion proves to be true. At stake are Nobel prizes, billions of dollars in patent royalties, and the approbation of scientific peers and the public for doing what seemed impossible.

The allure is so great that some scientists fear that rushed attempts to duplicate the Utah results may be riddled with errors. ''People know they have to be first or second, otherwise it means nothing,'' said David Prichard, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ''There's tremendous pressure, which can result in mistakes.''

Shortly after those comments were made, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta announced that their cold-fusion work, once hailed as the strongest independent support for the Utah claims, was seriously flawed. It turned out that inflated readings had been given by an instrument used to measure neutrons, subatomic particles that are a key byproduct of some fusion reactions.

Caution and Skepticism

Such embarrassments have strengthened a sense of caution and skepticism among many scientists.

''We feel a responsibility to try to get something that's definitive,'' said D. Allan Bromley, head of the Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale University. ''There've been too many reports that have been subsequently withdrawn, or not complete, or not calibrated.''

In the depths of the Wright lab, beneath the Yale campus, scientists from Yale and Brookhaven have erected an experiment they hope will give the world's most definitive cold-fusion results. At its core are neutron detectors borrowed from an $11 million particle accelerator.

Most fusion reactions fire off neutrons by the billions. But the Utah apparatus gave off far fewer, producing a mystery for theorists and a headache for experimenters trying to duplicate the effort. The scarcity of neutrons means detectors can easily be fooled by background radiation from cosmic rays or a building's bricks and structural materials.

At Yale, great effort is directed at blocking background radiation. The fusion experiment, in a cavernous underground bunker, is further shielded by layers of radiation-blocking bricks made of boron, paraffin and concrete. Laboriously, five tons of lead bricks were also placed around the experimental setup, but the bricks were removed after it was discovered that they resulted in more radiation than they suppressed. #4 Crucial Plastic Bottles At the heart of the experiment are four tiny plastic bottles, each containing platinum and palladium electrodes immersed in heavy water (water in which hydrogen is replaced by its heavy isotope, deuterium). The Utah researchers said fusion occurred in the palladium electrode when electricity passed through the electrolytic cell. Chemists from Brookhaven vary the electrodes and heavy water from bottle to bottle in hopes of achieving fusion.

''Caution,'' reads a sign overhead. ''Fire hazard. Wear protective eyeglasses.'' The Utah scientists reported a danger of fires and explosions, possibly from chemical, not nuclear, reactions.

Six extremely sensitive neutron detectors, hooked to a bank of computers, sit beside and below the plastic bottles. Covering the whole apparatus is another detector, which tells if a cosmic ray managed to sneak through overhead shielding.

Dr. Gai would say nothing about results so far, vowing to publish them whether they showed fusion had occurred or not. ''I was really hoping this was true,'' he said. ''But then we started reading the papers, asking all the questions scientists ask. A lot of questions were left unanswered.''

At Brookhaven, the quest for cold fusion has broadened beyond neutrons. Experiments there are being readied to hunt for protons and gamma rays, which can be produced by some types of fusion reactions.

''Utah saw a billion times more heat than there should have been for the number of neutrons generated,'' said Dr. Bond, Brookhaven's physics director. ''So the question is how you can produce heat without neutrons. You look for all kinds of reactions that can take place.''

So many experiments have been mounted at Brookhaven that ''we're running out of palladium'' for electrodes, said Harold J. Wiesmann, a scientist working on cold fusion.

At the University of Washington at Seattle, Mr. Eden, the graduate student, and his colleague Wei Liu, 27, focused their hunt on tritium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen produced by some fusion reactions. ''It's been an exciting time,'' said Mr. Eden, noting that his lack of sleep was starting to make the days blur together.

A few days into their experiment, the students were thrilled to get indications on a mass spectrometer of the possible presence of tritium. ''We've got a signal that looks right, although it might be other things,'' said Mr. Eden.

Possible Tritium Contamination

Skeptics say that even if the presence of tritium is confirmed, the experiment's results may be ambiguous since heavy water is often contaminated with tritium.

At M.I.T., a top theorist has proposed a novel way in which Utah's fusion reactions may be occurring. If true, it means conventional searches for particles and traces of fusion will have little success.

The theorist is Peter L. Hagelstein, an elusive, brooding genius. In 1979, when he was 24 years old, he came up with an inspired idea for a top-secret laser that became a key component in the nation's ''Star Wars'' program.

This month, Dr. Hagelstein worked around the clock at M.I.T. to finish papers outlining his cold-fusion theory, which posits that excess energies from fusing deuterium nuclei go not into radiation or subatomic particles but directly into the crystal lattice of the palladium electrode, eventually appearing as heat. Four papers describing the hypothetical process were submitted to The Physical Review Letters, a publication of the American Physical Society.

But another M.I.T. scientist, Keith H. Johnson, has proposed that the bulk of the energy released in cold fusion is of a chemical rather than nuclear origin.

Resolution of the cold-fusion frenzy is now mostly a waiting game. In theory, experiments should produce a bevy of byproducts that are difficult to measure. Finding the truth, scientists say, will take costly, sensitive, accurate instruments and the most exact experimental design to make sure no hidden variables give false indications of fusion success.

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