Fusion Tests to Focus on Measuring Heat
By Jerry E. Bishop and Amal Kumar Naj in New York And David Stipp in Boston
The Wall Street Journal

April 19, 1989

To follow the uproar surrounding "cold fusion" in coming weeks, watch for experiments giving heat measurements.

That's the advice of scientists sorting out the key questions hanging over the startling, three-week-old claims from the University of Utah. Two chemists say their simple, palladium-platinum electrolysis experiment there is producing, in the form of heat, four times as much energy as it consumes in electricity.

Few scientists doubt that the Utah device does produce a significant amount of heat. Most wonder if the chemists are measuring it correctly and if nuclear reactions are involved.

The pair, B. Stanley Pons of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton in England, say the excess heat energy is coming from previously unrecognized nuclear reactions. But other scientists say that until they know exactly how much heat energy is being liberated by the Utah device, they can't make any meaningful interpretation of the claims of the presence of nuclear reactions, such as hydrogen fusion.

"The energy balance (of the Utah experiment) is the issue. We simply have to verify that the amount of energy coming out of the cell is as great as Pons and Fleischmann say," explains Larry Faulkner, professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

"Chemical processes are known to be limited to a certain (energy) domain," Mr. Faulkner explains. Only after it is proven that the heat coming out of the Utah device does, in fact, exceed the amount that can be accounted for by chemical reactions, does the question of hydrogen fusion and of other nuclear reactions become the paramount issue, he and other scientists say.

That other scientists haven't yet duplicated the Utah experiment isn't too meaningful at this stage, the scientists say.

The experiment seems at first glance to be quite simple. Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann said they encircled a small palladium rod cathode with a platinum wire anode and immersed the apparatus in a beaker of "heavy" water, in which the hydrogen atoms are the heavier type known as deuterium. After they applied a current to the device for several weeks, it began producing large amounts of excess heat and a few neutrons, the latter being indicative of some deuterium atoms fusing.

Much to the chagrin of most researchers, however, Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann, for unknown reasons, haven't yet described their experiment in enough detail for others to duplicate it exactly. "Perhaps there is some obscure experimental detail that's not obvious" that made the Utah experiment work but which others haven't yet discovered, a chemist says. "The magnitude of skepticism would be reduced significantly if Pons and Fleischmann had provided more data."

Mr. Pons himself says, "I have logged 63 or 64 laboratories trying to do the thermal (heat) experiment, and I can say honestly that not one of those labs is doing it the same way we did." Mr. Pons and Mr. Fleischmann, however, are known to be cooperating with a handful of laboratories in the U.S. and England in setting up exact duplicates of the Utah experiment.

Some experiments already are detecting heat production, albeit not as much as in the Utah experiment. Stanford University researchers yesterday said they were getting excess heat from their experiment. But the tricky problem will be accounting for the wide variety of chemical reactions that could produce the heat.

"For example, if you take a palladium rod packed with hydrogen atoms and expose it to the air, it gets red hot," one scientist says. This is because the hydrogen atoms begin reacting with other hydrogen atoms and with oxygen atoms (creating water), chemically generating heat.

Palladium, platinum and lithium, which was added to the heavy water in the Utah experiment, are all highly reactive metals, notes Harmon Garfinkel, vice president of research and development at Englehard Corp., a big speciality metals producer. Palladium, he explains, tends to alloy itself with both of the other metals in heat-producing reactions, he says.

"Until they eliminate the obvious sources of heat, Pons and Fleischmann haven't proven anything," says Richard Muller at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. But proving that all heat-producing chemical reactions have been accounted for "is sort of like trying to prove you aren't a Communist," says Theodore Geballe, a Stanford University physicist.

The heat experiments also are of vital importance to physicists who are trying to determine if any new nuclear physics is involved. Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann said they detected neutrons produced by the fusion of deuterium atoms in their experiment. But such fusion reactions couldn't account for the excess heat. Therefore, they argued, there must be a "hitherto unknown nuclear process or processes" taking place.

The two chemists, in other words, claimed they were getting some of the energy from nuclear reactions that didn't produce neutron or other radiation, contrary to all that is known about nuclear reactions. Thus, experimental physicists have been in the laboratory for three weeks to see if this happens, and theoretical physicists have been at their blackboards to see if it's possible for nonradiating nuclear reactions to produce heat.

If the experiments show the heat is low enough to be explained chemically, the physicists are off the hook, so to speak. But if the experiments prove otherwise, then a whole new physics of nuclear reactions has been opened up, scientists say.

Mr. Pons, in the past few days, has deepened the physics mystery. He has mentioned, almost in passing, that helium-4 is produced in his experiment and that a second experiment -- using ordinary water instead of "heavy" water -- appeared to produce some excess heat, though how much isn't yet certain.

If confirmed, this would lend support to some newborn theories. MIT theorist Keith Johnson has recently proposed that chemical reactions involving either ordinary hydrogen or the heavier deuterium atoms will produce heat in both heavy and ordinary water. And University of Utah chemists, Cheves Walling and Jack Simons, have independently proposed a theory of deuterium fusion that would produce heat in ordinary water as well as heavy water. The Walling-Simons theory, as well as a new one from MIT physicist, Peter Hagelstein, also indicate deuterium fusion reactions will produce atoms of helium-4, a heavy form of helium.

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