Scientist Sticks to Test-Tube Fusion Claim -- But Pons Says Other Reactions May Also Be Present
By Jerry E. Bishop
The Wall Street Journal

March 27, 1989

Despite extreme skepticism among scientists, a University of Utah chemistry professor stuck to his claim that he and a British colleague have made a breakthrough in the fusing of hydrogen atoms to produce energy.

But the chemist, B. Stanley Pons, disclosed that the energy being produced by the pair's simple fusion apparatus may be coming from other reactions in addition to the fusion of hydrogen atoms.

It was the assertion last Thursday that the Utah fusion device was producing four watts of energy for each watt put into the device that astonished many physicists Friday morning when they read news stories of the claimed breakthrough.

Prof. Pons and Martin Fleischmann, an electrochemist from the University of Southampton in England, had announced at a Salt Lake City news conference that they had achieved a sustained hydrogen fusion reaction at room temperatures. The reaction was producing more energy than it consumed, they said, citing the four watt figure.

The claim is confounding scientists who, for more than three decades, have been trying to ignite a sustained fusion reaction by heating hydrogen gases to millions of degrees to duplicate conditions in the interior of the sun and in the hydrogen bomb. Such a sustained, energy-producing reaction, if it could be achieved, would open up an unlimited source of energy. The hydrogen fuel would be deuterium, a "heavy" form of hydrogen that can be easily extracted from the oceans, which have enough deuterium to meet the world's energy needs for millions of years.

The two chemists claimed they had achieved more than 100 hours of a sustained fusion reaction. The reaction -- the fusing of the nuclei of deuterium atoms -- takes place amidst the crystals that comprise a rod of palladium metal which is immersed in heavy water rich in deuterium. The rod is encircled by wires of platinum and is powered by ordinary auto batteries.

During an interview on Sunday's televised "Wall Street Journal Report," Mr. Pons said that a palladium wire only a quarter-inch in diameter and an inch long reached the boiling point of water within a few minutes. He said the wire produced about 26 watts of energy per cubic centimeter of wire, "about 4 1/2 times what we put into it."

Asked how soon other scientists might confirm this discovery, Mr. Pons said, "If someone really wanted to do it, I expect they could in a couple of weeks after publication of the data." Fusion physicists said colleagues in physical chemistry departments already were jury-rigging experiments based on newspaper stories to see if they could confirm the Utah findings, but as of yesterday there were no reports of success.

Mr. Pons cautioned that others shouldn't attempt to repeat the Utah experiment before they read the scientific paper he and Mr. Fleischmann hope to publish. He said that in an early stage of the experiments the apparatus suddenly heated up to an estimated 5,000 degrees, destroying a laboratory hood and burning a four-inch-deep hole in the concrete floor.

"I'm incredulous that this amount of heat could be generated" by the tiny fusion apparatus, said physicist Stephen Dean, director of Fusion Power Associates in Washington, an industry-supported organization that promotes fusion research. Another physicist made a quick calculation that producing the four watts of energy would require trillions of fusion reactions per second (10 to the 14th power specifically, he estimated). Because each fusion reaction produces a neutron, the laboratory should have been showered with neutrons, he explained. In addition, there would have been large amounts of tritium, another heavy form of hydrogen, produced. Yet, there wasn't any indication from news reports that such quantities of neutrons and tritium had been produced.

Asked about the scientists' questions, Prof. Pons noted that fusion physicists are accustomed to thinking of fusion reactions occurring in fractions of a second at enormously high temperatures and densities of hydrogen atoms. The reactions created by the two chemists takes place over hours inside a solid crystal, he said.

"There's no reason the reaction {in the palladium} has to be the same" as that seen in the physicists' big high-temperature fusion machines, Mr. Pons said.

But, he added, "heat may also be coming from other reactions" going on inside the palladium in addition to fusion. In the scientific paper he and Mr. Fleischmann plan to publish, "there's a small amount of speculation" on what these other reactions might be, he said. The two chemists have submitted their paper to the British journal, Nature. An editor of Nature in Washington said Friday that he hadn't yet seen the paper. Whether the editors of Nature will accept and publish the paper isn't known.

Mr. Pons said the two chemists haven't any doubt that a deuterium fusion reaction is occurring in the palladium. He explained that when two deuterium nuclei fuse they release a neutron with a characteristic amount of energy, 2.5 million electron volts in scientific parlance. Such a neutron plunging into the vat of water surrounding the apparatus would produce a specific type of gamma ray and the Utah scientists were detecting such gamma rays, he said.

"Right now, we're very confused about the whole thing, I don't understand the basic physics involved," said Ronald R. Parker, director of the Plasma Fusion Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. "I've been over with the boys in the physical chemistry department to see what they can make of it," he said. The chemists seemed to be equally mystified, he indicated.

Mr. Pons, responding to other scientists' questions, said the decision to announce the discovery at a news conference instead of waiting for the scientific paper to be published was made by the University of Utah because leaks about the experiments were sparking rumors.

There were hints that the incredulity of many scientists was lessening as they tried to figure out explanations for the Utah claims. "It seems they might have a new discovery, some kind of fusion reaction in a solid," Mr. Dean in Washington noted. But he said he was still skeptical about the amount of energy release claimed. "There must be another explanation," he said.

Edward Teller, the California physicist known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb," was quoted by the Salt Lake City Tribune as saying Thursday "This morning (before the news conference) my opinion was that it could never happen. And I am extremely happy now because I see a very good chance that I was completely wrong."

"It certainly relieves the humdrum of the fusion business," said MIT's Mr. Parker with a chuckle.

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Ken Wells contributed to this article.

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