Science: Fusion Findings in Utah May Take Months to Verify
By Jerry E. Bishop and David Stipp
The Wall Street Journal

April 7, 1989

Even if some laboratory duplicates the controversial University of Utah hydrogen fusion experiment in coming days, it may be weeks or months before scientists can confirm whether a new source of energy has been found.

That's the sobering conclusion of many researchers struggling to set up experiments that will reproduce the spectacular results announced March 23 by chemists B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in England. The two scientists said a small laboratory apparatus they had built was producing about four times as much energy, in the form of heat, as was being put into the device in the form of an electric current. The apparatus is a small rod of palladium metal surrounded by a grid of platinum wires. The device is immersed in a beaker of "heavy" water, and current is supplied by ordinary auto batteries.

Fueling the Utah device is deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen found in almost limitless quantities in the oceans. Thus, unless Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann have made a serious error, their discovery could lead to a non-polluting source of energy that could lift the threat of global warming posed by carbon dioxide released in fossil fuel combustion.

Within hours after the March 23 announcement, chemists and physicists in the U.S. and Europe were jury-rigging experiments, trying to duplicate the results. But many are now concluding that even if they succeed in building a duplicate of the device, it will take weeks of tedious experiments to prove that it is, in fact, producing more energy than it is consuming. It may take even longer to discover whether the Utah researchers made a mistake, if that's the case.

"It's going to take a lot of commitment" by a laboratory that wants to confirm the Utah experiment, says a university chemist in the Midwest, who, like most scientists, asked to remain anonymous. "Things are settling down now to where people are realizing they may be in for the long haul," he says.

As of yesterday, the scientific grapevines were bare of any reports or even rumors that anyone had duplicated the Utah experiment. However, Mr. Pons has cautioned almost from the beginning that even if the experiment is set up correctly, it requires two to three weeks before the mysterious reactions going on inside the palladium rod reach detectable levels.

The fact that the Utah experiment hasn't yet been duplicated "still doesn't mean anything," a chemist says. At most, he explains, it means that no one has set up or conducted the experiment in exactly the same way as Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann.

"In spite of the first descriptions that this is something that could be done in a first-year college chemistry class, it's not that simple; you could very easily make a mistake," says a chemist at a big government laboratory who's trying to repeat the Utah experiment.

Take such a seemingly innocuous detail as whether the beakers of heavy water should be sealed, he explains. Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann say the palladium-platinum cathodes were immersed in beakers filled with a solution consisting of a lithium-oxygen-deuterium salt dissolved in 99.5% heavy water and 0.05% ordinary water, but they don't mention whether the beakers were sealed.

If the beakers are left unsealed, the chemist explains, then moisture from the air could easily dilute the heavy water solution over the many days the experiment has to run. Whether this makes any difference in the success or failure of an experiment isn't known.

Frustrating the attempts to duplicate the Utah experiment is the lack of detail on how the experiments were conducted. The Pons-Fleischmann scientific paper reporting the results "is missing some primary experimental data," says the Midwest chemist. "For example, it doesn't give the {electrical} voltage" that was applied to the palladium device. Without such a figure it's difficult to double check the Utah claims of how much energy went into the device and how much excess energy came out, he explains.

Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann astonished scientists by saying that only a small part of the heat coming from their device was from the fusion of deuterium atoms, a concept familiar to physicists. Most of the heat, they said, was coming from nuclear reactions never seen before.

The paper also fails to mention a "control" experiment, several scientists note. In such a control experiment, the apparatus would be set up using ordinary water instead of heavy water, or deuterium, in which the hydrogen atom has an added neutron in its nucleus. Extremely careful measurements would be made of energy input and output as well as radiation and other detectable effects in the ordinary-water control experiment.

Then the experiment would be run again, this time using heavy water with its deuterium atoms. The difference in energy output -- if any -- would then be measured. "Only then can you show that deuterium has an important role in heat generation in the experiment," one chemist explains. "Only then will I believe the results" of any experiment. "This doesn't mean that they {Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann} didn't do a control experiment -- I hope they did. It's just that they don't say so in their paper," the chemist adds.

It's this kind of exacting procedure that slows verification, scientists say. "If we worry about every detail, it could take six weeks to two months" to replicate the Utah experiment, says Kevin Myles, a researcher at the University of Chicago's Argonne National Laboratory. In addition to running a control experiment with ordinary water, the Argonne researchers are measuring the hydrogen and oxygen given off by the experiment as well as neutrons, heat and other things. Such hydrogen and oxygen measurements aren't mentioned in the Pons-Fleischmann paper.

Physicists say they are equally uncertain about the radiation measurements reported by Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann. The two chemists said that part -- and only part -- of the heat generated in their device was coming from the fusion of deuterium atoms inside the palladium. Such fusion produces neutrons that, in the Utah experiment, flitted through a beaker of water nearby, creating gamma rays that the two chemists measured and reported.

But one physicist says the gamma rays, as described in the paper, also could be produced by cosmic rays bombarding Earth from space. In addition, he and other physicists note, radiation measurements can be affected by extraneous sources such as nearby electronic equipment. To rule out such interferences requires surrounding the experiments with insulating apparatus as well as careful measurements of background radiations.

In sum, says one scientist, "We, to a large extent, are still in a fog" about the validity of the Utah experiment.

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