Pons Has Faith in New 'Cold Fusion' Tests
By Jerry E. Bishop
The Wall Street Journal

April 25, 1989

SALT LAKE CITY -- A new round of "cold fusion" experiments commencing at the University of Utah should provide convincing evidence that a new energy-producing fusion phenomenon has been discovered, Utah chemist B. Stanley Pons claimed.

Mr. Pons said his laboratory at the university has four of the small, battery-like fusion "cells" in operation. Within the next two weeks, he and his students hope to get 19 more cells in operation. The new experiments involve, among other things, larger palladium electrodes and tests of other materials.

Asked at a weekly press briefing about doubts and skepticism that his experiments actually have uncovered a new fusion phenomenon, Mr. Pons said, "The next round of experiments will present a host of new data" in the next two to three months "that will be convincing." He also suggested that fabrication of the palladium appears to be a key factor in whether the experiment works.

Mr. Pons and his British colleague, Martin Fleischmann, have attracted world-wide scientific controversy ever since they announced a month ago that a simple electrolytic device they developed produces more than four times as much energy as it consumes. The device is a small rod of palladium metal encircled by a platinum wire. When the palladium-platinum electrodes are immersed in "heavy" water and subjected to an electric current, it begins to give off more energy as heat than it consumes in electricity, they reported.

The controversy centers on how much excess heat energy the device produces and whether it comes from the fusion of deuterium, or "heavy hydrogen" atoms, as Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann claim. If the two chemists are correct, the discovery could lead to almost unlimited, pollution-free energy, since there is enough deuterium in oceans and lakes to meet the world's energy requirements for millions of years. The only byproducts of the Pons-Fleischmann device are hydrogen, oxygen and small amounts of helium.

Meanwhile, a University of Utah official said 40 companies have signed nondisclosure agreements in order to look at the five patent applications filed on the Pons-Fleischmann discoveries. Norman Brown, director of the school's technology transfer office, said the university hopes in the next couple of weeks to work out licensing details. "We want to see the technology used as widely as possible, so we'll be granting nonexclusive licenses," Mr. Brown said.

Since the value of the technology isn't yet known, he explained, licenses won't be granted immediately. Instead, a method of giving companies options to obtain licenses in the future is being devised. The options would guarantee that the licenses would be granted at a price "no worse than anyone else" is paying, he said. The university must also work out procedures to permit companies to fund its research on fusion technology without hurting the school's policy on nonexclusivity, he said.

Heightening the scientific controversy is the failure of many laboratories to duplicate the Utah experiment. So far, only chemists at Stanford University claim to have confirmed the liberation of heat reported by Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann. Mr. Pons said, however, that "there are a number of people" -- he couldn't say how many -- "coming up with results; they just haven't announced them yet."

The chemist said that he and researchers at the government-owned Los Alamos National Laboratory were working out a collaboration, and that he and Los Alamos scientists have seen each other's experiments. Los Alamos also is inviting 2,000 scientists world-wide to a workshop on cold fusion May 23-25 in Santa Fe, N.M., and the Energy Department said yesterday it has told 10 of its national laboratories to intensify attempts to reproduce the Utah experiment.

A problem possibly plaguing some laboratories, Mr. Pons suggested, might be the way the palladium rods are made. In recent weeks, he explained, he has concluded that rods that are cast rather then extruded are more likely to work. So far, he said, 50% to 70% of the extruded palladium rods he has tried have failed, whereas "only one of 15 or 16 cast rods" has been faulty. "More experiments" are needed to find out why the fabrication makes a difference, he said.

The chemist said he was able to resume his experiments early last week. Already, one cell using a small palladium rod is producing 67 watts of heat energy per cubic centimeter of palladium. This is more than double the 26 watts that he and Mr. Fleischmann reported in the scientific paper that they published in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. The paper was written in early March.

Mr. Pons said he is absolutely convinced the excess energy is coming from the fusion of deuterium atoms rather than from heat-producing chemical reactions. "You couldn't consume (chemically) all the materials in the cell and get the amount of heat that we get," he said. Hydrogen chemical reactions in palladium, at the maximum, would produce only two watts of energy per cubic centimeter of palladium "and we're getting more than 20 watts," he said.

He also responded to criticisms that the Utah experiments didn't have a "control" experiment using ordinary water instead of the deuterium-containing heavy water. Such a control experiment would tell how much heat is generated chemically from ordinary hydrogen and would show whether deuterium fusion was necessary to get as much heat as the Utah experiment produces, the critics assert.

Mr. Pons said he has a plain water experiment producing small, unmeasured amounts of heat, but doesn't "believe a plain water experiment is a good control experiment." Instead, he said, for a control experiment, he is using a "dead" palladium rod, a rod that doesn't react at all. A cell with such a "dead" palladium rod has been in operation since the end of February. With the inactive rod, "you put one watt (of energy) in and you get one watt of energy out," he said.

Mr. Pons said the key evidence that deuterium fusion produces the excess heat is the production of helium-4. His experiments, he said, are continuously producing concentrations of one part helium-4 for every 10,000 atoms of deuterium.

Mr. Pons said the helium-4 production strongly supports a theory by two Utah chemists, Cheves Walling and Jack Simons, that predicts that within the atomic lattice of the palladium, deuterium atoms can fuse, releasing heat and helium-4 atoms, without producing neutrons, helium-3 or tritium, as accepted theories of deuterium fusion have it.

Mr. Pons also denied that he and Mr. Fleischmann have failed to publish all the details that other scientists need to reproduce the Utah experiment. "There's more than enough information in the paper we published" for others to duplicate the experiment, he said. "Every cell I've seen is almost identical to ours," though not everyone is conducting the experiment in quite the same way, he said. He explained, however, that at the time their paper was written, "we had no way of knowing what some of the problems were, such as that of the (extrusion vs. cast) palladium" rods.

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