Scientists Claim Energy Breakthrough
By Pearce Wright, Science Editor
The Times (London)

Friday, March 24, 1989

Two scientists from Britain and America last night claimed to have carried out controlled nuclear fusion in a test tube. If confirmed, their discovery could become the greatest breakthrough of the century.

Professor Martin Fleischmann, of Southampton University, and Professor Stan Pons, of the University of Utah, released the results of research which could open the door to a limitless source of 'clean' energy. Considering the potential significance, their discovery came from a very modest experiment.

In studies costing a few thousand pounds, the two professors say they have succeeded where international research teams, spending hundreds of millions of pounds a year for the past 20 years, have failed.

The scientists believe they have shown that the process of nuclear fusion, which includes the type of energetic reactions that power the sun and is the source of the destructive force of the H-bomb, can be reproduced in a test tube by electro-chemistry.

Their experiment is to be published in a specialized scientific periodical, The Journal of Analytical Electro-analytical Chemistry and Interfacial Electro-chemistry.

The University of Utah said: 'We are anticipating much scepticism from physicists'. Researchers at the leading European fusion laboratory at Culham, near Oxford, did indeed express scepticism.

They said it was just over 30 years ago that British physicists believed they had harnessed fusion in a vast machine known as Zeta.

It was subsequently found that the particles were the result of non-fusion processes and the claim was withdrawn amid embarrassment.

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