New Evidence Supports Fusion Finding Made by Less Controversial Utah Group
By Jerry E. Bishop
The Wall Street Journal

May 25, 1989

SANTA FE, N.M. -- New evidence emerged that "cold fusion" can take place, but at levels so low as to be useless for practical power production.

Three more laboratories reported they had detected evidence of extremely low rates of hydrogen fusion taking place in electrolytic devices. The new results tended to confirm claims of low-level cold fusion reported two months ago by researchers at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

But they left unresolved the controversy over the spectacular and more widely doubted "cold fusion" claims, also made two months ago, by researchers at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

The newest low-level cold fusion results were disclosed at a special cold fusion conference here by researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy and Texas A&M University.

Scientists from all three laboratories reported they had detected neutrons being emitted from palladium or titanium rods. In the experiments, the rods are immersed in "heavy" water, in which the hydrogen atoms are the "heavy" form known as deuterium. When the devices are subjected to an electric current, it's thought the deuterium atoms infiltrate the rods, where they undergo fusion. One byproduct of the fusion is neutrons.

All three laboratories reported detecting only a few hundred neutrons per hour coming out of their table-top fusion devices at various times during their experiments. The neutron emission rates are on the same order of magnitude as reported by Steven Earl Jones of Brigham Young. Mr. Jones collaborated with both the Los Alamos and the Italian experimenters.

"Things keep turning up roses," Mr. Jones told the 500 scientists attending the conference, citing the results from the other laboratories, as well as his own continuing detection of fusion neutrons.

The neutron emissions are an indication of fusion occurring at a billionth or a trillionth of the level claimed by B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann at the University of Utah. The two Utah chemists have said that they, too, detect low levels of neutrons from their experiments. But their further claim that their devices are producing a large amount of heat as a result of an extremely high rate of fusion continues to draw widespread skepticism.

The Brigham Young experiments have been largely overshadowed in recent weeks by the controversy over the University of Utah experiments. Mr. Jones noted that his findings are largely of scientific interest rather than for any practical, power-producing possibilities. "You put one watt (of energy) into our cell and you lose one watt," he said. He and a geology-oriented colleague, Paul Palmer, have proposed that their discovery of low-level fusion occurring at ordinary temperatures suggests such fusion could be occurring spontaneously deep in the Earth and might explain the heating of its central core.

The neutron-emission results reported by Mr. Jones and by scientists from the three other laboratories were challenged strongly by physicist Moshe Gai of Yale University. He described an elaborate and careful experiment by scientists at Yale and Brookhaven National Laboratory that failed to detect any neutrons from a Brigham Young-type apparatus. Mr. Gai charged that the various research groups actually were detecting normal "background" neutrons rather than fusion neutrons.

Mr. Jones replied that the Yale-Brookhaven team mightn't have exactly duplicated the Brigham Young experiment and offered to collaborate with Mr. Gai's group. "We did it (obtained fusion) at Los Alamos and I believe we can do it at Yale," he said.

The Brigham Young physicist also repeated his early assertions that Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann are wrong in claiming the heat produced in their experiments is coming from hydrogen fusion.

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