Two Graduate Students Add a Piece To Puzzle of Utah 'Fusion' Experiment
By Jerry E. Bishop
The Wall Street Journal

April 14, 1989

Two University of Washington graduate students added another small piece to the puzzle surrounding the controversial University of Utah "fusion" experiment.

The two young physicists, Van L. Eden and Wei Liu, said they had detected indirect hints of tritium, a "heavy-heavy" form of hydrogen, being created in a laboratory device similar to that used by chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in their experiment in Salt Lake City.

Meanwhile, another development in the fusion story cast doubt on one of the reports earlier this week that seemed to support the existence of cold fusion. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology said they have discovered problems with a laboratory instrument they used to detect neutrons coming from a cold-fusion experiment.

The presence of tritium in the Washington experiment, in and of itself, isn't surprising but would lend support to the assertion that hydrogen fusion takes place in the Utah device. The researchers in Seattle, like those in Utah, used heavy water in their device which is rich in deuterium atoms, hydrogen atoms that are twice as heavy as ordinary hydrogen. When the nuclei of deuterium atoms fuse, there is a 50-50 chance they'll produce an atom of tritium, which is three times as heavy as ordinary hydrogen.

Messrs. Pons and Fleischmann say the fusion of deuterium atoms is occurring in their device and cite the presence of tritium as one piece of evidence of such fusion. The more controversial aspect of the Utah experiment is the chemists' assertion that other, still unknown, deuterium reactions must be occurring to account for their finding that the device liberates more energy than it consumes.

Specifically, Messrs. Eden and Liu said that they set up a hollow palladium rod connected to a gold wire electrode and immersed the device in a test tube of heavy water. After three-and-a-half hours of applying an electric current, they said, a mass spectrometer began detecting an element in the heavy water with the same mass as tritium. The spectrometer continued to detect the element for 10 hours. The experiment was then shut off and repeated with ordinary water. The spectrometer failed to detect the same element. The experiment was repeated again with heavy water and the spectrometer again detected a tritium-like mass.

The young scientists said they still have to confirm that the element they detected is, in fact, tritium. They suggested that if it is tritium, the fact they used a hollow palladium rod instead of a solid one, as in the Utah experiment, may have played a role in the fusion. They said they didn't know if their device also produced neutrons, which would indicate fusion, because their instruments weren't particularly sensitive to neutrons.

The boron-fluoride detector used at Georgia Tech apparently registers a rise in neutron emissions when its temperature is raised, researchers there explained. Certain chemical reactions in their apparatus may have raised the detector's temperature, causing the device to give a spurious reading.

"This temperature dependence was unexpected by us and by the manufacturer {of the detector}, and apparently hasn't been observed before," the researchers said in a statement. "We are doing further experiments to clarify the impact of the temperature dependence and will release further information when it is available."

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David Stipp in Boston contributed to this article.

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