Fusion Researcher Admits Error
By Philip J. Hilts
The Washington Post

May 10, 1989

Puts Faith in New Test

One of the two scientists who set off an international furor by claiming to have achieved nuclear fusion in a jar of water said Monday night that a key result of their experiment, which they had taken as a sign of fusion, was in error.

But the scientist, Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton, said that he and his colleague, B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah, remained confident that they had achieved cold fusion and said they are staking their claim on a new experiment designed to overcome the shortcomings of the defective earlier one.

If the new experiment fails, Fleischmann was asked, would all hope for cold fusion be gone?

"Yes," he replied, "the most substantial part would be gone."

Fleischmann, facing a now almost overwhelming consensus among scientists that his and Pons' cold fusion claims were false, made the remark late Monday when the two took the defense of their much-advertised experiments to the annual meeting here of their own scientific society, the Electrochemical Society.

The audience was polite but not enthusiastic as the two chemists also gave a few new details of their experiments.

In response to a question from Stanley Luckhardt of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about whether neutrons were produced in the experiment, as would be expected according to conventional fusion theory, Fleischmann said a graph in their published paper indicating that neutrons were created was wrong because his neutron detector was faulty.

"We are well aware that peak {in the graph} is wrong . . . . It disturbs me greatly," Fleischmann told the audience of hundreds.

Pons said that a new detector will be used and the tests run again.

Throughout a long evening meeting, scientists presenting results of their experiments disagreed on point after point, but returned repeatedly to the key test-the test for helium-4, the atom created by fusing two atoms of the hydrogen isotope called deuterium.

Steven Jones of Brigham Young University said that all laboratories that claim to produce excess heat must now show proof that this reaction is nuclear fusion.

"I must insist: Let's see the nuclear products," Jones said, referring to helium-4. If fusion is happening, theorists say, it should be creating atoms of helium-4 within the palladium electrode and leaving them trapped there.

Several laboratories offered to take a sample of the palladium claimed to be producing high levels of energy at the University of Utah, and test it for helium-4 within days.

Pons and Fleischmann declined the offers, saying they are now working with another laboratory to carry out the tests. They refused to name the laboratory.

Fleischmann and Pons have said several times since their March 23 announcement of nuclear fusion, that the reaction they believe is occurring produces energy and, as a waste product, helium-4.

In their experiments, Pons and Fleischmann passed an electrical current through electrodes immersed in heavy water, splitting the deuterium atoms from the oxygen atom in a water molecule and, theoretically, packing the deuteriums inside the palladium electrode.

The process, they said, yields far greater heat than can be accounted for by any known chemical process. Therefore, they concluded, the energy must be coming from fusion of deuterium atoms inside the palladium. They guessed that the forces inside the electrode were great enough to squeeze deuterium atoms so closely that they merge their nuclei into a single entity, helium-4.

But Pons and Fleischmann said they saw relatively few of the expected waste products-neutrons and gamma rays-so they speculated that the fusion must be a kind not known to science in which helium-4 and energy, but no gamma rays, are produced.

Other researchers such as groups at the California Institute of Technology and MIT have tested for helium-4 in copies of the Utah experiments but found none. Pons said he hopes to have the results of the helium tests back soon.

If no helium-4 is found, Fleischmann said there is only one possible fusion reaction that might account for the heat. It is a bizarre one in which a double fusion reaction occurs, creating helium-4 which then reacts with lithium atoms, which are added to the water to make it conduct electricity, to produce energy.

"That is very very far out," Jones replied when the reaction was suggested.

Asked if he was prepared for his work to turn out wrong, Fleischmann said, "I have always been ready to acknowledge our experiments may be faulty. After all, you cannot prove something to be right. You can only prove it wrong," he said, echoing a fundamental tenet of science.

Most of the data he presented was not new, but he did offer a new chart showing that the energy produced by the experiment does not come steadily, but appears in bursts.

In one two-day-long burst, for example, Pons said that as much as 50 times the energy put into the apparatus was produced.

Among the other speakers at the meeting, opinions were split. Several laboratories reported no effects.

Three labs continued to report confirmation of the Utah results with additional fragmentary results of their own. Stanford University reported seeing heat but did not check for waste products. Texas A&M reported seeing excess heat in five of 20 experiments and a small amount of neutrons as well. Case Western Reserve University also reported seeing excess heat.

A group at the University of Washington that had last week announced seeing the waste produce tritium in a cold fusion experiment retracted the claim. They said more careful tests showed that other molecules were mistaken for tritium.

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