'Cold Fusion' Chemists Reiterate Claim; Other Scientists Report Similar Results
By Jerry E. Bishop
Wall Street Journal

March 30, 1990

SALT LAKE CITY -- University of Utah chemists, stung by a scientific journal's attack, reiterated their claim to have produced excess energy from "cold fusion" experiments.

Scientists from other institutions said they also are measuring amounts of heat energy coming from such experiments in excess of the amount of electrical energy put into the devices.

The reports were delivered on the first day of a three-day conference on cold fusion where much of the hallway conversation is focused on a feud that has broken out between cold-fusion researchers and the prestigious British scientific journal, Nature.

The conference began just as copies of this week's issue of Nature arrived in the U.S. with a highly critical scientific report on the original Utah cold-fusion experiments of chemists Martin Fleischmann and B. Stanley Pons. The report was accompanied by a scathing editorial that called "the cold fusion fuss . . . discreditable to the scientific community as a whole."

The Nature report was written by University of Utah physicists who said they moved radiation detectors into Mr. Pons's laboratory a few weeks after Mr. Pons and Mr. Fleischmann startled the world with their report of cold fusion in a simple, table-top apparatus. The Utah physicists said that during five weeks of monitoring Mr. Pons's experiments they failed to detect any nuclear radiation that would indicate fusion of hydrogen atoms or any other nuclear reaction was taking place in Mr. Pons's apparatus.

In its editorial, Nature criticized the manner in which Mr. Pons and Mr. Fleischmann had reported their claims, calling it "a shabby example for the young."

In a meeting with a small group of reporters, Mr. Pons and Mr. Fleischmann charged that the publication of the report on the eve of the conference here was more than a coincidence. The Utah physicists did their radiation-detection experiments last May and submitted a paper to Nature last summer, Mr. Pons said. Yet, Nature chose not to publish the paper until this week. He said Nature had asked him to review the paper but hadn't incorporated any of his criticisms into the paper that was finally published.

"I don't know what their motives are," Mr. Pons said of Nature's editors, "but they've done everything in their power to condemn this work, to trash it." He and Mr. Fleischmann accused the scientific journal of "polarizing" scientists for and against cold-fusion research early in the game. The resulting controversy, they said, kept them away from new research for a year.

As for the failure of the Utah physicists to detect radiation from his experiments, Mr. Pons noted the unpredictable nature of the experiments in which the cold-fusion devices are said to suddenly "turn on" with bursts of energy and then suddenly turn off. None of these unpredictable energy bursts occurred during the five weeks the physicists were trying to detect radiation, he said.

In the formal scientific sessions, Mr. Pons presented new calculations of the original experiments that they announced one year ago. The new calculations, which are to be published this summer in the Journal of Fusion Technology, were designed to answer criticisms of their original report and to nail down the excess energy purportedly produced in their experiments with greater accuracy.

The new calculations, Mr. Pons said, show that the unpredictable bursts of heat energy from the cold-fusion devices produce 17 to 40 times more energy than is being poured into the devices electrically. The excess energy "far exceeds the heat which could be generated by any conceivable chemical process," he said. "We fail to see how such large {productions of energy} could be attributed to anything other than a nuclear process," the two chemists state in the paper to be published this summer.

To the chagrin of some scientists in the audience, Mr. Pons didn't report any results pertaining to radiation from the experiments, saying these results will be the subject of two papers to be published later.

In a statement opening the conference, Fitz G. Will, director of the National Cold Fusion Institute here, noted the positive results obtained by researchers at several laboratories. "The multitude of results obtained by so many different groups can no longer be explained away as experimental artifacts," he said. Nevertheless, he said, "it is also true that the phenomena cannot be reproduced on demand and that an understanding of the underlying mechanisms is not at hand."

In other reports presented here, researchers from Stanford Research Institute said they obtained excess heat on seven occasions from experiments similar to those in Utah. The bursts of heat output lasted as long as 12 hours. However, an analysis of the palladium rods used in the devices failed to find any residues that would indicated a nuclear reaction took place. "I leave you with a dilemma," Michael C.H. McKubre concluded.

Bursts of excess heat from cold-fusion devices also were reported by one of the two groups working at Texas A&M University, by one of two groups at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and by researchers at Stanford University.

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