Physicists Outline Possible Errors That Led to Claims of Cold Fusion
By Jerry E. Bishop
The Wall Street Journal

May 3, 1989

BALTIMORE -- Frustrated and angry physicists cited a half dozen possible errors they said could have misled University of Utah scientists into believing that they had achieved a cold fusion breakthrough.

Their criticisms at a late Monday night session of the annual meeting of the American Physical Society constituted a broad and devastating attack on the credibility of chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. That pair claimed six weeks ago that they had produced huge amounts of energy through fusion in a simple laboratory experiment at room temperature.

But while the attacks left cold fusion proponents on the defensive, they aren't likely to end the controversy. The physicists were less critical of a separate cold fusion experiment at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. In that experiment, physicist Steven Earl Jones and his colleagues also claimed that they produced hydrogen fusion at room temperature, but at a rate a trillion times lower than that claimed at the University of Utah.

Asked during a news conference how they viewed the two cold fusion experiments, eight of nine scientists on a panel here, including Mr. Jones himself, said they felt the University of Utah researchers were wrong. Only three said they felt Mr. Jones's team was wrong.

While neither Mr. Pons nor Mr. Fleischmann were present to respond to the attacks, they are expected to defend their experiment and present new results at a special session of the Electrochemical Society annual meeting next Monday in Los Angeles. A University of Utah spokeswoman said both scientists were in the laboratory yesterday working on experiments that they will describe at that meeting.

The physicists here said possible errors that Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann might have made in their experiment range from putting thermometers in the wrong spots to miscalculating the amount of energy that they fed into their battery-like fusion device. "We have no reason to invoke fusion to explain their (Messrs. Pons's and Fleischmann's) results . . . . We can find no evidence for anything (producing energy) except conventional chemistry," declared chemist Nathan Lewis, one of a three-member team from California Institute of Technology that launched a scathing attack on the Utah experiment.

In Salt Lake City, James Brophy, vice president for research at the University of Utah, said it was impossible to respond to the criticisms voiced at the meeting here without seeing the actual scientific reports. He noted, however, that Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann are excellent chemists, "and it's difficult for me to see how they could have messed up a heat measurement," as several physicists here charged.

A number of scientists focused their attacks on Messrs. Pons's and Fleischmann's crucial claim that their small fusion device was producing four times as much energy in the form of heat as it was consuming in electricity. The device is a small rod of palladium that is encircled by a coil of platinum wire and immersed in water made up of heavy hydrogen atoms, or deuterium. When an electric current is applied to the device, it begins to heat up, producing heat in excess of the electric energy consumed, or so claim Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann. They say the excess heat is coming from the fusion of deuterium atoms inside the rod.

But one mistake, Caltech's Mr. Lewis charged, was that the Utah scientists seriously underestimated the amount of energy going into the device. This made the amount of heat energy coming out seem far larger than could be accounted for by chemical reactions, leading to the conclusion that the extra heat must be coming from fusion reactions.

For example, Mr. Lewis explained, there has to be a difference in electrical voltage between the palladium rod and the platinum wire for the electric current to move from one to the other through the "heavy" water. Experiments at Caltech showed, he said, that this difference has to be maintained, at the very least, at 0.8 of a volt just to keep the electrochemical reaction going -- and probably higher than that. Yet, he said, Messrs. Pons's and Fleischmann's published report shows that they based their calculations on a difference -- a "potential" -- of only 0.5 volt.

This figure of 0.5 volt was obviously a mistake since the device would quit working at that potential, Mr. Lewis charged. The low figure, however, makes it appear that less energy was going into the device than actually was going in, he said. A recalculation using the higher figure would show a higher input of energy and would show that the Utah-type device actually was losing heat instead of producing excess heat, he said.

"The (Utah device) isn't a great fusion heater, it's actually a crude refrigerator," Mr. Lewis charged.

The heat measurements were also criticized by Walter E. Meyerhof, a physicist at Stanford University. He said he believed both the Utah experimenters and a Stanford chemist, Robert Huggins, who also claims to have gotten excess heat from a Utah-like device, erred by placing their thermometers too near the palladium rod and then failing to stir the water to make sure that the water was the same temperature throughout.

Another Caltech scientist, the physicist Steven Kooning, charged that Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann also may have erred in describing the gamma radiation given off by their device. The Utah team apparently mistook radon gamma rays for fusion gamma rays, he said.

Among other potential errors ticked off by Mr. Lewis was the Utah experimenters' report of detecting helium from their experiment. Under certain conditions, particularly those claimed by the Utah scientists, an atom of helium would be produced when two deuterium atoms fuse without emitting any radiation. Mr. Lewis said the Caltech researchers also detected helium in their experiments but then were able to trace all the helium to the ambient air in the laboratory rather than to the experimental device.

Other physicists attacked the Utah experiment on theoretical grounds. They said it was extremely difficult to explain how deuterium atoms could fuse inside the palladium rods without producing far larger amounts of radiation than reported in the Utah experiment. "That takes one leap of faith," said Robert Perry of Ohio State University.

Moreover, Mr. Perry said, it so far was impossible to explain how the fused deuterium atoms could transfer their energy to the palladium rod and have the energy come out as heat. "That takes two leaps of faith," he said.

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