Reactions Differ at 'Cold Fusion' Meeting
By Jerry E. Bishop
The Wall Street Journal

May 26, 1989

More Scientists Agree Heat is Produced,
but Debate Continues Over Its Cause

SANTA FE, N.M. -- "Cold fusion" experiments appear capable of producing excess heat, but only a pair of University of Utah researchers attribute the heat to atomic fusion.

That seems to be the bottom line two months after University of Utah chemist B. Stanley Pons and his English colleague, Martin Fleischmann, astonished the scientific world by claiming they had a tabletop, battery-like apparatus that was producing excess heat by the fusing of hydrogen atoms at room temperature.

The latest results of almost 100 attempts to reproduce Messrs. Pons's and Fleischmann's experiment have been the subject of a three-day special conference here sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. The conference is the fourth scientific meeting since late April in which scientists have reported their "cold fusion" efforts and is expected to be the last until autumn.

As in the previous meetings, most scientists reported continuing frustration in verifying the Utah claims. Most also remain highly skeptical that Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann have made any breakthrough in harnessing hydrogen fusion for practical production of energy.

"There are a number who do believe that nuclear reactions are taking place and that possibility continues to exist until proved otherwise," said Norman Hackerman of the Welch Foundation in Houston and co-chairman of the conference. However "most of the people that I talked with can't believe this (nuclear fusion) is the source of the heat," said J. Robert Schrieffer, director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a conference co-chairman. Mr. Schrieffer added that he personally believes the heat is from a chemical reaction.

Many scientists here indicated they are impressed -- and puzzled -- by at least two carefully done, Utah-like experiments that are producing inexplicable amounts of heat, comparable with that claimed by Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann. The heat-producing experiments are in progress at Texas A&M University in College Station and Stanford University in California.

The Stanford experiment, like all other "cold fusion" experiments, consisted of small pieces of palladium -- a small disk in the Stanford experiment -- encircled by a platinum wire and immersed in "heavy" water. The apparatus is subjected to an electric current that forces the water molecules to break apart into their constituent atoms of oxygen and "heavy" hydrogen, or deuterium. The hydrogen atoms infiltrate the palladium where, according to the controversial claim by Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann, they undergo fusion.

"I don't see any reason to question that we are seeing excess heat output which we don't understand," said Robert A. Huggins, the Stanford materials scientist carrying out the experiment. In his latest experiment, begun only last week and still running, Mr. Huggins said he was measuring 12% to 22% more heat energy coming out than electrical energy going in.

Rather tepid by lay standards, the water is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit and rises only about one to 1.5 degrees in the tiny electrolytic cells, as the experiments are called. Similar increases in heat output were reported by scientists at Texas A&M.

Both Mr. Huggins and electrochemist John Bockris of Texas A&M ran through detailed analyses of possible chemical reactions that might be producing heat in the experiments and both concluded that known chemical reactions couldn't account for the excess amount of heat. But both scientists steadfastly refused to speculate on what is producing the excess heat.

If deuterium atoms fuse, as Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann claim in their experiment, the deuterium atoms produce either neutrons, helium atoms or tritium that consists of triple-heavy hydrogen atoms. Several researchers have reported strong hints of extremely low numbers of neutrons coming from their experiments but only a billionth or a trillionth of the number needed to explain the excess heat output.

A few weeks ago, most of the scientists concluded that if they could find evidence of helium atoms trapped in the palladium rods and disks, they would have conclusive evidence that fusion was taking place. However, Texas A&M scientists reported here that analyses of two rods from their heat-producing cells failed to find any trapped helium. The scientists did find tritium, but not enough to account for the heat output being observed in the other heat-producing experiments.

The detection of low levels of neutrons reported here did, however, convince many researchers that fusion of deuterium atoms is likely to be taking place in the palladium. The neutron detections tended to verify claims of low-level room temperature fusion made by researchers at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Experiments there were independent of but announced at the same time as those at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

"I believe there is a reasonable chance that what is seen at this low level is from fusion or some other nuclear process," California's Mr. Schrieffer said.

As for the excess heat, Mr. Schrieffer said "there is something going on but we don't understand the details."

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