Second Fusion Discovery Comes to Light
By Jerry E. Bishop
The Wall Street Journal

March 29, 1989

Findings at Brigham Young Are Shrouded in Secrecy, Seem Less Controversial

A second discovery of room-temperature hydrogen fusion is being held in tighter secrecy -- and is likely to stir far less controversy -- than the extraordinary claims made by scientists in Salt Lake City last week.

Researchers at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, remain mum about their discovery that the nuclei of deuterium atoms, a heavy form of hydrogen, can fuse together inside a solid crystal unaided by either an external catalyst or the superhot temperatures heretofore thought necessary for hydrogen fusion.

The discovery in Provo, 45 miles south of Salt Lake City, is likely to be more immediately acceptable to scientists than the one announced by the University of Utah. It was learned, for example, that the Brigham Young scientists have directly measured the neutrons characteristically released by a hydrogen fusion reaction. The Salt Lake City scientists, on the other hand, so far have mentioned only an indirect measurement of the neutrons, in which they recorded gamma rays given off when the neutrons plowed through a vat of water surrounding their fusion apparatus. Some physicists noted that a direct measurement of the neutrons would be more convincing of fusion reactions than the indirect measurement.

The Brigham Young scientists, unlike the Salt Lake City researchers, also have previously published speculation about room-temperature fusion reactions. They are understood to be making far more modest claims for the longevity and energy output of their room-temperature fusion reaction. And a University of Arizona theoretical physicist has come up with a theory explaining the Brigham Young discovery whereas a theory has yet to be offered for the Salt Lake City discovery.

The Brigham Young scientists are refusing to talk about their findings until their report is published in a scientific journal, thereby avoiding the anger among researchers that the Salt Lake City scientists stirred up by announcing their discovery at a news conference Thursday.

A paper reporting the discovery in Provo was submitted over the weekend to the British journal, Nature, at the same time as a paper giving details of the Salt Lake City experiment. The editors of Nature immediately relayed both papers to other physicists and chemists for their opinions on whether the conclusions in the papers are justified by the descriptions of the experiments.

Depending on the comments of these reviewers, the editors of Nature could either accept or reject one or both reports. Alternatively, they could require the authors to change their conclusions. If the papers are accepted as submitted, they could be published as early as the April 27 issue.

Controlled fusion of hydrogen atoms in a manner that could make fusion power plants practical has been a goal of physicists since the development of the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s. The deuterium fuel for fusion reactions, the energy source of the sun and the hydrogen bomb, can be easily extracted from sea water. There is enough deuterium in the world's oceans to meet the earth's energy needs for literally millions of years.

Until now, however, it has been thought that practical controlled fusion could be achieved only by heating charged gases of hydrogen nuclei to temperatures of 50 million to 100 million degrees and holding the nuclei in close proximity to each other long enough -- perhaps one second -- for a useful number of fusions to take place. Only under such extreme conditions, it was thought, could the hydrogen nuclei be forced to overcome their normal repulsion. The nuclei have a positive charge and thus repel each other for the same reason that like poles of magnets repel each other.

Both of the Utah groups claim to show that hydrogen fusion can take place at ordinary temperatures and inside a solid. At the University of Utah, chemist B. Stanley Pons and his British colleague, Martin Fleischmann, astonished physicists by claiming that they had achieved more than 100 hours of sustained fusion reactions in a wire made of palladium metal. They claimed that their fusion device produced four times as much energy as it consumed. Since the pair hadn't previously published any hint of their research, such an extraordinary claim came as bolt from the blue to other fusion researchers.

In sharp contrast, the Brigham Young scientists, led by physicist Steven Earl Jones, have been talking and publishing for the past three years on their efforts to achieve "cold" fusion, as it is called. Much of their research has been on the possible use of subatomic particles, muons, to trigger fusion of hydrogen nuclei.

In addition, as early as 1986, Mr. Jones and a colleague, Clint van Siclen, published a paper in a physics journal on "piezonuclear fusion," in which they speculated that deuterium nuclei might be forced to fuse by compression -- "piezo" is the Greek word for squeeze -- rather than by heating them and forcing them to ram into each other.

Mr. Jones's group is believed to have discovered that such squeezing together of hydrogen nuclei has been seen experimentally in an undisclosed solid crystalline material, presumably a metal and possibly palladium.

A key part of the Brigham Young experiment was the development of a neutron detector that confirmed that deuterium fusion could take place under conditions as normal and simple as those that exist in the Earth's rocks. One geology-oriented physicist suggested that the fusion seen at Brigham Young may explain the presence of helium on Earth.

Bolstering the credibility of the Brigham Young experiment is a theory explaining it being developed by Johann Rafelski at the University of Arizona. "The theoretical calculations are being finalized" and a paper soon will be submitted to a scientific journal, Mr. Rafelski said.

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