Fusion Test Matched, but Mystery Persists
By Jerry E. Bishop
The Wall Street Journal

April 11, 1989

Two university laboratories duplicated different portions of the controversial University of Utah experiment that is claimed to produce more energy than it consumes.

But the new experiments further deepened the mystery of exactly what process is at work. The excess energy is produced by running an electric current through palladium rods that are immersed in "heavy" water in which the hydrogen atoms are deuterium -- a "heavy" form of hydrogen.

Researchers at Texas A&M University in College Station said they had measured excess heat coming from tiny palladium rods in a test tube apparatus. The measurements, they said, thereby confirm the Utah scientist's claim that the palladium-heavy water devices will produce more energy, as heat, than they consume as electricity.

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta said they had detected neutrons coming out of a palladium-heavy water apparatus, thereby confirming the Utah claims that the fusion of deuterium atoms does take place inside the palladium rods.

Neither experiment, however, was intended to determine, at this stage, how much of the excess energy in the Utah experiments, if any, was coming from the fusion of deuterium atoms. Although the Utah scientists have claimed nuclear fusion occurred in their experiments, they have also asserted repeatedly that known hydrogen fusion reactions couldn't account for most of the energy coming out of the palladium devices.

Researchers at Texas A&M announced at a news conference that they were getting 60% to 80% more energy, as heat, out of a small palladium rod than was being put into the rod as electricity. They said they began getting heat from the palladium device within 20 minutes after they started the experiment three days ago, and that the device has been consistently producing excess heat ever since.

Texas thermodynamicist Kenneth Marsh and electrochemist Charles Martin said so far they have measured only the heat emitted by the test tube apparatus. Other devices are now in operation in nuclear laboratories on the A&M campus to determine if the palladium devices also emit neutrons, which would be evidence of fusion reactions.

None of the researchers, however, were willing to speculate on whether the heat energy from the devices is coming from unknown nuclear reactions, as suggested by the Utah scientists, or from unknown chemical reactions.

"The likelihood is probably very small, but I cannot entirely dismiss the possibility that it is a chemical reaction," Mr. Marsh declared.

The Texas scientists called their heat measurements highly sensitive and accurate. In the experiment, a bath of water containing the heat measuring devices -- calorimeters -- was warmed by an electric heater to a constant temperature. The electric heater was then turned down and the palladium device turned on, allowing the heat from the palladium device to substitute for the heat from the electric heater. The researchers measured how much energy had to be poured into the palladium device to keep the water at the same constant temperature.

The amount of energy poured into the palladium device was less than would have been required to keep the water warm by electrochemical reactions, explained Mr. Martin. Thus, he said, it was clear "there was another source of heat," some unknown reaction occurring in the palladium device that was producing heat. "We don't know what it is and we can't say because we don't have the data," he added.

By ordinary standards, the temperatures involved were rather tepid, 27 degrees Celsius (80 degrees Fahrenheit) in the water bath and 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit) in the palladium device. The palladium rod used in the experiment was only one millimeter in diameter and five centimeters long, comparable with the ones used in some of the early experiments by B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and his colleague, Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University in England. In their latter experiments, Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann claimed they got four times as much energy out of a four millimeter by 10 centimeter palladium rod as they put into it. Some of their experiments also heated water to the boiling point.

In Atlanta, at another news conference, a five-person research team led by James Mahaffey said it had learned how to treat palladium rods so they began producing neutrons almost immediately after an electric current was fed into the laboratory device. The neutron count jumped to 600 an hour from a normal background count of 40, Mr. Mahaffey said. The team carried out the experiment at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, the contract research arm of the university.

By comparison, Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann said they detected neutron counts about three times higher than normal background levels.

The main purpose of the Georgia experiment, Mr. Mahaffey explained, was to confirm that fusion of deuterium atoms does take place in the palladium device, as Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann had claimed. The Georgia researchers didn't take measurements of heat output and "we don't want to speculate about that," Mr. Mahaffey said.

The Georgia researchers said they were able to get fusion reactions almost immediately because they first baked the palladium rod at about 600 degrees Celsius in a high vacuum. This forced hydrogen contaminates out of the rod and allowed it to absorb the deuterium atoms from the heavy water more efficiently. Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann indicated they had to wait two to three weeks for the palladium rod to soak up deuterium atoms before they began getting fusion reactions.

In all the experiments, the test tube-sized devices have consisted of small rods of palladium metal surrounded by a spiral of platinum wires. The rods are then immersed in a beaker of heavy water and a current applied.

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