Researchers Defend Results of Fusion Tests;
Debate May Erupt Today at Hill Hearing
By Philip J. Hilts
The Washington Post

April 26, 1989

The American and British researchers who claim to have created nuclear fusion in table-top experiments came here yesterday to explain and defend their results, saying that many researchers who have failed to duplicate the experiments have done them incorrectly.

Despite having received widespread criticism from the scientific community, the two experimenters appeared confident as they prepared to testify today at congressional hearings, where researchers on various sides may clash. The two said they still believe their experiments are producing more energy than they consume.

Through the five weeks since the pair's extraordinary announcement, hundreds of researchers in the United States and elsewhere have tried to duplicate the experiments.

But the record has been muddy: Only laboratories at Stanford University and at Texas A&M have reported seeing excess energy in the experiments. Workers at an array of prestigious laboratories have tried but failed to get similar results.

Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in Britain said yesterday that although the experiments seem simple, they are not, and that many researchers have conducted them in a way that assures failure.

The single greatest problem is "scaling" of the experiment, they said in an interview. Researchers must look only for a small amount of heat from small, quickly run experiments and should expect a larger amount of heat only from experiments that run for weeks or months, Pons and Fleischmann said.

For example, Pons said, he has seen some "beautiful" experiments set up by others to duplicate their results. But they used a thin, one-millimeter-diameter wire to try to heat as much as 17 ounces of heavy water. "They just don't have a chance . . . of doing this," Pons said.

Many other experiments are set up to look for the usual waste products of nuclear fusion reactions, such as neutrons. But Fleischmann said that road leads nowhere.

Instead, he said, researchers must do the experiment at the proper scale, look for the excess heat, and then check for a single, unusual waste product: helium-4. This is because they believe that the fusion reaction is completely new to science, one in which deuterium atoms fuse to yield helium-4 and a huge amount of energy per atom.

Other researchers said they have been frustrated in their attempts because Pons and Fleischmann have so far declined to publish a complete account of their methods and results. They have published only a sketchy report in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry and passed up a chance to publish a more complete paper in the British journal Nature.

The two researchers continued to dodge one criticism of their results -- that control experiments with ordinary water were not done. Physicists generally believe that if the experiments work in heavy water -- in which ordinary hydrogen is replaced by a variant called deuterium -- they should fail when ordinary water is used.

Pons said that experiments testing ordinary water have been done, but that "We did not get the expected baseline results. We got some heat out."

The researchers refused to elaborate, asserting that their answers would cause problems on three grounds: patent priority, national security, and because their experiments were incomplete. Other researchers said their answer "sounds like it is laying the groundwork for claiming fusion with light water as well," which would be a more extraordinary claim.

When Pons and Fleischmann made their original claims in Salt Lake City, Steven E. Jones of Brigham Young University was submitting a paper to the journal Nature, reporting a similar but far smaller effect.

Jones now expresses considerable doubt about the Pons and Fleischmann results. He is scheduled to testify today before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee on the status of the research. Also scheduled are Ron Ballinger, a nuclear engineer from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and fusion expert Harold Furth from Princeton University's huge and conventional fusion laboratory.

On the other side with Pons and Fleischmann will be Robert Huggins of Stanford University, who has reported being able to repeat the Utah experiment.

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