Texas Group Reports More Signs Of 'Cold Fusion' at U.S. Meeting
By Jerry E. Bishop
The Wall Street Journal

May 24, 1989

SANTA FE, N.M. -- Researchers at Texas A&M University continue to find indications that "cold fusion" is taking place in palladium rods, supporting the controversial claims of two University of Utah chemists.

The Texas scientists told a cold fusion conference here that as recently as this weekend, their experiments were continuing to produce excess heat or large amounts of tritium, a form of hydrogen that can be produced by the fusing of hydrogen atoms. So far, the scientists have measured either for heat or for tritium, but not for both at the same time, so proof is lacking that hydrogen fusion is occurring. Also, tests have failed to find helium atoms trapped in the palladium rods, as might be expected if hydrogen fusion is taking place.

"We don't yet have any evidence (of cold fusion) that would stand up in court," cautioned A. John Appleby, director of the Center for Electrochemical Systems and Hydrogen Reseach at Texas A&M. Nevertheless, the researcher said, the excess heat and the production of tritium can't be explained by any phenomenon other than hydrogen fusion.

Presentation of the Texas A&M results opened a three-day Workshop on Cold Fusion Phenomena organized by the Energy Department's Los Alamos National Laboratory. Following the Texas reports, other research groups, including those at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the 500 scientists at the conference that they still cannot find evidence of cold fusion in their experiments.

Neither B. Stanley Pons nor Martin Fleischmann, the two chemists who two months ago kicked off a world-wide controversy with their claims of hydrogen fusion at room temperatures, are attending the conference. University of Utah officials said Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann are winding up a series of experiments at their Salt Lake City laboratory and writing up the results for publication this July.

In their initial experiments, Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann claimed their battery-like apparatus was producing four times as much heat energy as it was consuming in electrical energy, after taking into account possible chemical reactions. The heat, they concluded, was coming from the fusion of hydrogen atoms inside the tiny palladium rods that are the core of the apparatus.

In the Texas experiments, as in the Utah tests, the palladium rods are encircled by a platinum wire. The assembly is immersed in flasks of heavy water and subjected to an electric current. The result is electrolysis of the heavy water, breaking the water molecules into their constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The hydrogen atoms are the heavy form of the element known as deuterium.

Kevin L. Wolf of the Cyclotron Institute at Texas A&M said researchers had detected a huge jump in the amount of tritium, a "heavy-heavy" form of hydrogen that is one byproduct of the fusion of two deuterium atoms. Tests showed that normally the electrolytic cells contained about 40 to 60 atoms of tritium per milliliter of heavy water. But several hours after the electric current was turned on, the amount of tritium jumped a hundredfold to a thousandfold above the background level, Mr. Wolf reported, adding that seven out of the 10 electrolytic cells were producing tritium. The presence of excess tritium in the Texas A&M experiment was confirmed by researchers at General Motors Corp. and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Strangely, however, the cells weren't producing any large number of neutrons. When deuterium atoms fuse, they usually produce tritium about half the time and neutrons plus helium the other half of the time. The failure to find as many neutrons as tritium atoms is a key mystery, the scientists said.

Mr. Appleby explained to reporters that the expectation that there should be equal numbers of tritium atoms and neutrons was based on fusion reactions occurring in superhot hydrogen gases. "We're dealing with a different medium" in the solid palladium rods, he noted, and therefore the fusion byproducts might be different.

When the palladium rods from experiments that produced excess heat were analyzed, there wasn't any evidence of helium atoms. Mr. Appleby said he was disappointed but not surprised at this finding, even though other scientists have said that the presence or absence of helium atoms would prove or disprove the claims of fusion. Mr. Appleby said the neutron count was so low that one would expect only a few atoms of helium were being produced, perhaps too few to be detected.

An MIT researcher, Richard Crooks, praised the Texas heat measurements but noted that the heat and tritium outputs were detected in different experiments. He said he would like to see someone report they measured enough fusion byproducts, such as tritium or helium and neutrons, from an experiment where excess heat also was found and measured. Such results haven't yet been reported.

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