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Panel Rejects Fusion Claim, Urging No Federal Spending
By William J. Broad
The New York Times

July 13, 1989

A panel of experts convened by the Federal Government concluded yesterday that the prospects of producing energy with low-temperature nuclear fusion are quite remote and that no new laboratories should be built by the Government or private groups to study the disputed phenomenon.

The preliminary report from the 22-member panel is the first Federal assessment of the merits of the process, which gained prominence in March when two chemists asserted that they had achieved fusion in a jar of water at room temperature. The startling finding was originally hailed by some scientists as possibly opening the way to huge amounts of inexpensive heat and electric power that could alter the lot of mankind.

The judgment by the panel of experts, appointed by the Energy Department, is a blow to the University of Utah, where the initial research took place and which has recently been trying to persuade the Utah Legislature to release $5 million it set aside for a laboratory to study ''cold'' fusion.

Evidence 'Is Not Persuasive'

The finding also virtually ends the chances that the Federal Government will give the school money to help it build a center for fusion research. In April the university asked Congress for $25 million in Federal funds to help open such a center.

In the report, the panel found that ''the experiments reported to date do not present convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from the phenomena attributed to cold fusion.'' It added, ''Evidence for the discovery of a new nuclear process termed cold fusion is not persuasive.''

Therefore, the report said, there is currently no justification for ''special programs to establish cold fusion research centers or to support new efforts to find cold fusion.''

The preliminary report was released after a two-day meeting of the panel in Washington. A final version is scheduled to go to the Secretary of Energy, James D. Watkins, in November.

Nuclear fusion, the force that powers the sun, the stars and hydrogen bombs, fuses atoms together rather than breaking them apart as nuclear reactors do. It frees vast amounts of energy but usually requires temperatures of millions of degrees. The controlled release of ''hot'' fusion has eluded scientists for decades.

On March 23, two electrochemists, B. Stanley Pons, chairman of the University of Utah chemistry department, and Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University in England, startled the scientific world by announcing they had achieved fusion in a simple table-top apparatus by passing an electric current through heavy water and palladium rods. If it proved true, it would have behooved the Government to mount a large effort, possibly including large laboratories, to study the phenomenon.

'We're Pretty Unanimous'

The Energy Department panel was established on April 24 to investigate the claim. Some members of the committee were unable to attend the two-day meeting that ended yesterday and may want to make slight modifications to the preliminary report.

''I think we're pretty unanimous on the content, but people may want to change a word here or there,'' Dr. John R. Huizenga, a nuclear chemist at the University of Rochester who is a co-chairman of the committee, said in an interview. The other co-chairman is Dr. Norman F. Ramsey, a physicist at Harvard University.

The committee is an arm of the Energy Department's Energy Research Advisory Board, a group of outside experts that counsels the department on science issues. Before being sent to Secretary Watkins, within the next month, the panel's preliminary report needs approval by the full advisory board, which may make some changes.

Dr. Huizenga said the report released yesterday would be ''the gist of the final report, unless something surprising happens between now and then.''

The committee has drawn heavily on a network of a dozen or so Federal laboratories around the country that have pursued cold fusion research, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. In May, many panel members attended a Energy Department conference at Los Alamos at which 500 scientists debated the merits of the findings on cold fusion.

No More Visits Planned

In addition, panel members visited six other places conducting cold fusion research, including the laboratory of Dr. Pons and Dr. Fleischmann. The other sites were Brigham Young University, Texas A & M University, the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif.

''So far,'' the panel concluded, ''we have seen no experimental results that are sufficiently free of ambiguities and calibration problems to make us confident that the steady production of excess heat has been observed.''

Dr. Huizenga emphasized that the panel's findings were preliminary and that ''there are still some unresolved issues.''

For instance, the panel said the bursts of excess heat that have been reported in some cold fusion experiments remained unexplained and deserved further study.

In concluding, the panel said none of the outstanding questions required a special effort by the department.

In a telephone interview, Dr. James Brophy, director of research at the University of Utah, dismissed the panel's findings, saying he is confident cold fusion is real.

''We continue to observe heat output in three different groups of experiments,'' he said. ''There is something very interesting going on. The mechanisms are clearly not understood yet. But we are confident there is a scientific effect of importance for producing heat.''

Dr. Brophy said he found the Federal panel's conclusion difficult to understand. ''Since March 23d, everybody has been rushing to judgment,'' he said. ''Everybody wants to know right now whether it's true or not. But you can't work it that fast.''

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