Taming H-Bombs? Two Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Quest For Fusion Energy
By Jerry E. Bishop and Ken Wells
The Wall Street Journal

Friday, March 24, 1989

If Verified, Utah Experiment Promises to Point the Way To a Vast Source of Power—Batteries and Palladium Wire

SALT LAKE CITY -- Scientists working at the University of Utah made an unprecedented claim to have achieved a sustained hydrogen fusion reaction, thereby harnessing in the laboratory the fusion power of the hydrogen bomb.

The two scientists said that with no more equipment than might be used in a freshman chemistry class, they had triggered a fusion reaction in a test tube that continued for more than 100 hours.

The reaction, they asserted, passed the so-called break-even point, producing more energy than was needed to trigger it. An experiment now in operation is producing four watts of power for each watt of input, said James Brophy, vice president of research at the university.

The claim is easily one of the most extraordinary ever made in the 35-year-long effort to produce a controlled, sustained hydrogen fusion reaction -- especially since the scientists say their reaction takes place at room temperature. Since the mid-1950s, physicists throughout the world have been trying to produce controlled fusion, employing huge machines and lasers costing hundreds of millions of dollars. The two men working in Utah say they did it with nothing more than car batteries, a latticework of thin palladium and about $100,000 of their own money.

"The experiment was so simple that at first it was done for the fun of it and to satisfy scientific curiosity," said B. Stanley Pons, a Utah chemistry professor, who did the work here with Martin Fleischmann, professor of electrochemistry at the University of Southampton in England. "It had a one-in-a-billion chance of working, although it made good scientific sense."

In science, an experiment's results aren't accepted until duplicated in a second laboratory. University of Utah officials made that point yesterday, noting that the claims had to be subjected to "the world court of scientific opinion" before being believed. Other scientists generally wouldn't comment on the claim until details are published in a scientific journal. Many, however, expressed a gut reaction of incredulity.

"When you teach plasma physics to students, you always cite a lot of examples of processes that lead to fusion," noted John Soures, deputy head of the Laser Energetics Laboratory at the University of Rochester, where a major fusion experiment is going on. "They are all very interesting, but I haven't seen one yet that could lead to a practical fusion reactor." At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scientist said the claim of a sustainable "cold" fusion reaction "would sound very suspicious to me."

Brigham Young University researchers in Provo, Utah, are carrying out experiments similar to those in Salt Lake City. The head of that team, Steven Earl Jones, wouldn't discuss his work prior to scientific publication but indicated that it doesn't confirm the Salt Lake City claims. "We cannot verify their results," he said.

A hydrogen fusion fire that sustained itself and released more energy than it consumed, if achieved, would open the way to a vast energy source. The main fuel for such a fire would be a "heavy" form of hydrogen, deuterium. Deuterium can be extracted easily from sea water, where it exists naturally.

A fusion reaction is nonpolluting and doesn't produce carbon dioxide, the main culprit in the feared global warning called the "greenhouse effect." In a power plant, the deuterium from a single cubic foot of sea water could produce as much energy as 10 tons of coal, the scientists in Utah said. The oceans' deuterium theoretically could meet the earth's energy needs for millions of years.

But even if the Utah experiments are confirmed by others, it would be years before scientists would know if this fusion method could be converted to practical use. Still more years would be required to design and build an experimental power plant. And, while not polluting the air, fusion does give off neutrons, which could make surrounding materials radioactive and create a disposal problem.

The realization that fusing hydrogen nuclei could release energy dates to 1942 and the early days of the atomic-bomb project. It eventually led, in the early 1950s, to the hydrogen bomb. The effort to "tame the H-bomb" and gain a controlled release of hydrogen fusion energy began in the late 1950s under President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program. It has since grown into an international effort, with American, Soviet, Japanese and European scientists openly trading information.

Hydrogen fusion is difficult because the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, whether they be ordinary hydrogen, deuterium or tritium, are positively charged. Since like charges repel each other, just like poles on magnets, the nuclei ordinarily can't get close enough to each other to fuse. But if they can be forced to overcome this mutual repulsion, a nucleus of deuterium will fuse with a nucleus of deuterium or tritium, another form of "heavy" hydrogen, to create a nucleus of a helium atom. The fusion releases a free neutron -- and a burst of energy.

Until recently, physicists have believed the only way to a practical, controlled fusion power plant is to recreate the extraordinarily high temperatures and pressures that exist in the interior of the sun (and, for a fraction of a second, in an exploding hydrogen bomb). In this process, the hydrogen nuclei are heated to such tremendous energies -- equivalent to hundreds of millions of degrees -- that they ram into each other with enough force to overcome their mutual repulsion.

To ignite a fusion fire, however, enough hydrogen atoms must be confined into a small enough space so that energy released by a few fusions will trigger other nuclei to fuse. If this happens, the hydrogen fire becomes self-sustaining. If enough fusion reactions are thus ignited, the fire will give off more energy than it took to ignite it, somewhat analogous to a log fire giving off more energy than did the match used to start it.

False hopes of sustained fusion reactions have been raised in the past. In the late 1950s, a British experiment appeared to have reached the break-even point as measured by the number of neutrons that came flying out of the experiment. After several weeks of excitement, it was discovered that the neutrons were spurious. Since then, physicists have been extremely skeptical of any claims of sustained fusion reactions.

The Utah experiment -- at ordinary temperatures rather than in the millions of degrees previously thought necessary -- is being done at the university's Henry Eyring chemistry building in a small, utilitarian laboratory. It is littered with test tubes, car batteries and other paraphernalia, including a plastic dishpan.

The fusion equipment consists of a pencil-thin rod of palladium metal wrapped by a spiral of thin platinum wire. This simple assembly is stuck into a test tube of heavy water, or water rich in deuterium, to create an energy cell, as the researchers call it. As well as could be determined from remarks at a press conference yesterday, an electric current through the platinum wires forces deuterium nuclei -- deuterons -- into the palladium. Trapped within the latticelike network of the palladium crystals, the deuterium nuclei are brought close enough together to overcome their mutual repulsion and thus fuse.

The two chemists said the evidence that fusion was taking place was the fact that in addition to heat they detected the production of neutrons, tritium and helium -- the expected byproducts of fusion reactions. The helium was so-called helium-3, which is produced only by the fusion of two deuterium nuclei.

Prof. Pons said the idea for the new fusion phenomenon arose when he noticed some unusual results of an experiment in separating isotopes of various elements by electrochemical means. He and Prof. Fleischmann pondered the strange results during a drive across Texas and later during a hike up Millcreek Canyon outside of Salt Lake City, Prof. Pons said. Later, sitting in the Pons family kitchen, the pair finally conceived a strategy for the fusion experiment.

Prof. Pons, a bespectacled, soft-spoken man of 46 with a slight North Carolinian drawl, has been at the University of Utah about six years. Prof. Fleischmann is a 61-year-old who speaks with a classic Germanic accent and is known for his sharp wit. When asked why he and Mr. Pons never sought outside funding for the experiments, he said: "We thought it was so stupid, we decided to finance it ourselves."

Although they shelled out their own money for the work done so far, the U.S. Energy Department says it recently approved a $322,000 grant to investigate their idea. It says it has also given grants to Brigham Young and the University of Arizona to study "cold" fusion.

There have been previous hints that sustained fusion might be possible without heat. Mr. Jones of Brigham Young has proposed using subatomic particles called "muons" from big atom smashers to trigger the fusion of deuterium and tritium atoms. Recent experiments had indicated this "muon-catalyzed" fusion might be feasible if the muons could be produced cheaply and if they could catalyze a sufficient number of fusions.

Mr. Jones and his colleagues now are believed to have moved a step further and found evidence fusion reactions can be triggered at room temperature without muons. An abstract of a talk he is to give in May, for instance, says, "We have also accumulated considerable evidence for a new form of cold nuclear fusion which occurs when hydrogen isotopes are loaded into crystalline solids without muons."

This hints that the Brigham Young scientists are seeing the same kind of fusion phenomenon as in Salt Lake City. Mr. Jones declines to give further details until the experiments are described in the British journal Nature, probably in the same issue in which the experiments at the University of Utah are to be published.

Until now, all bets on practical fusion have been laid on two techniques. The oldest is known as "magnetic confinement." The hydrogen atoms are heated to millions of degrees, creating a gas of charged particles as the electrons break loose from the hydrogen nuclei. Because it is electrically charged, this super-hot gas can be contained in a magnetic "bottle." (With a solid container, the nuclei would ram into the walls and lose the energy required for fusion.)

Physicists say that if a hydrogen gas only a hundred-thousandths the density of air could be heated to 100 million degrees and confined for only one second, it would ignite a fusion fire. So far, physicists have gotten about a third of the way to a sustained fusion fire with these magnetic confinement machines. Several experiments, using huge machines that create doughnut-shaped magnetic bottles, have heated up the hydrogen gases to the right temperatures, up to 300 million degrees.

Other experiments have achieved the right density of hydrogen nuclei into the magnetic bottles. Still others have held them there for the right length of time. But no single machine has achieved all three conditions at the same time.

Hopes for achieving "break-even" fusion by magnetic confinement in the U.S. are being concentrated on a machine called the Compact Ignition Tokamak. This $445 million device is proposed for construction at Princeton University. But the Bush administration hasn't proposed to finance construction at the rate scientists hope for.

Also racing toward a break-even fusion reaction are a host of experiments in which powerful laser beams are focused on a tiny plastic sphere filled with deuterium and tritium atoms. If the laser beams come blasting into the pellet from all sides simultaneously, they will both heat the atoms to fusion temperatures and compress them to the densities needed to get a fusion fire going.

This laser-based fusion, called inertial confinement, is costing about $150 million to $160 million a year in federal funds. Researchers say they now are quite close to lighting a fusion fire with lasers. "In the last couple of years the field has mushroomed; we've one spate of good results after another," says Mr. Soures of the University of Rochester.

Given the funds to upgrade the arrays of lasers to higher powers, this form of fusion could ignite a hydrogen pellet within three to four years, he says.

(In accordance with Title 17, Section 107, of the U.S. Code, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. New Energy Times has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of the original text in this article; nor is New Energy Times endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

"Go to Original" links are provided as a convenience to our readers and allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted on New Energy Times may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the "Go to Original" links.