Chemists, Using Sea Water, Discover Fusion Reaction
By Ralph Wakley
United Press International

Friday, March 24, 1989, BC cycle

Two chemists said they overcame their own skepticism and developed an improbable method of sustained nuclear fusion in which a cubic foot of ordinary sea water could safely generate as much energy as 10 tons of coal.

''It had a one-in-a-billion chance of working, although it made perfectly good scientific sense,'' said Stanley Pons, chairman of the University of Utah chemistry department, who made the discovery with Martin Fleischmann, electrochemistry professor at England's University of Southampton.

While Fleischmann and Pons focused the table-top experiments on chemical reaction, U.S. physicists, financed with more than $500 million in federal grants this year alone, were looking at fusion furnaces and laser devices to power their experiments.

''Without our particular backgrounds,'' Pons said, ''you wouldn't think of the combination of circumstances required to get this to work.''

And Fleischmann said, ''The stakes were so high, we decided we had to try it, '' with $100,000 of their own money and working in a chemistry laboratory at the University of Utah. ''We thought we wouldn't be able to raise any money since the experiment was so farfetched.''

Although the applications of this form of nuclear fusion were not immediately evident, the scientists said the energy available in one cubic foot of sea water is equivalent to 10 tons of coal.

In commercial nuclear fission reactors, large radioactive atoms are split apart, creating smaller atoms, energy and long-lived nuclear waste. Fusion reactors, still in experimental stages, would combine tiny atoms to produce energy and only a minimum of radioactive refuse.

Conventional nuclear fusion research requires temperatures of millions of degrees, similar to temperatures found in the sun's interior, to create a reaction.

Fleischmann and Pons said they concentrate deuterium from sea water to make ' 'heavy water'' and place it in a vessel containing platinum and palladium electrodes and use an electrical charge. The palladium metal electrode separates and absorbs the heavy water's hydrogen ions, which carry an extra neutron.

The hydrogen atoms then join together, or fuse, creating a helium atom and an extra proton or produce tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen with two extra neutrons, and a proton -- plus heat energy in both cases.

''The fuel is heavy water, driven by electric force into enormously compact concentrations in the holes inside this metal (palladium),'' thus heating the water, University of Utah President Chase Peterson said.

''You boil water, and when you boil water you make steam, and when you make steam you run a turbine, and if you run a turbine you can create electricity. So this has the potential to create electricity,'' Peterson said.

And while the chemists and Peterson emphasized that more work is needed to confirm their findings, understand the process and determine its value, Pons said, ''We think it would be reasonable, within a short number of years, to build an electric power system.''

Fleischmann added, ''What we have done is open the door. We don't know what the implications are. The subject has to be fully researched, to establish our finding, to challenge our findings, to extend our findings. But it does seem there is here a possibility of realizing sustained fusion with a relatively inexpensive device.''

They have to put electrical energy in to jump start the reaction. But, once it begins, Fleischmann said, the experiment exceeded the break-even point -- producing more energy than it consumed -- for more than 100 hours.

He said the system has the ''potential of 1,000 percent of break even.''

''This generation of heat continues over long periods,'' Fleischmann said, ' 'and is so large that it can only be attributed to a nuclear process.''

Along the way, however, the researchers had to overcome their own doubts about the project.

''When we started this,'' Fleischmann said, ''Stan and I thought this experiment was so stupid that we financed it ourselves.''

They hammered out the research strategy on a trip through Texas, they said, while hiking in the Wasatch Mountains east of Salt Lake City, and in Pons's kitchen ''for the fun of it and to satisfy scientific curiosity.''

The joint research began, they said, when independent experiments produced ' 'odd results'' and they started sharing their findings.

The first indication that they had discovered a new form of fusion energy was when the palladium electrode, which melts at about 1,550 degrees centigrade, began to melt.

''We didn't want to believe we had ignition,'' said Pons. But he said they are convinced they produced ''a safe nuclear fusion reaction with a considerable release of energy.''

Fleischmann and Pons use 99.5 percent pure deuterium, rather than hydrogen gas, and electrical force to achieve concentrations of 10 trillion trillion atmospheres of hydrogen ions.

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